They were summoned from the hillside

They were called in from the glen

But the country found them willing

In its stirring call for . . . women.

No, it doesn't scan now and it didn't in 1914 when the notion of females taking an active role in running field surgical hospitals jarred sufficiently for the War Office to turn down the offer flat. The Great War started as a man's game. Women were there as mother figures, propagandist music-hall whores, and, when necessity demanded, munitions workers or bus drivers. For the duration only. But this did not stop the women whose courage at least equalled that of their male counterparts. The suffragette movement had made its point. The ''old Insuffrables'' were now more than a match for the Old Contemptibles.

Dr Elsie Inglis, honorary secretary of the Scottish Federation of Women's Suffrage Societies, voiced the idea to staff and equip field hospitals with all-female doctors, nurses, ambulance drivers, and mechanics. It was a bold and novel extension of the suffrage movement. In the wake of Britain's rejection, the offer was eagerly taken up by France and Serbia and a great and terrible adventure was born.

The Scottish Women's Hospitals triggered an immediate response from volunteers and money poured in from supporters around the world.

Within two months it had dispatched a team to help with a typhoid epidemic in Belgium and then loaded the first fully-equipped hospital on a train at Waverley bound for France. Over the next four years, more than 1000 volunteers, mainly from Scotland but also from across Britain and overseas, were to serve on every major European front.

Inglis, born in India of Scottish descent, was clear about what she wanted to do and well able to inspire others: ''We need to get expert women doctors, nurses and ambulance workers. We send out units wherever they are wanted. The need is there, and too terrible to allow any haggling about who does what work . . . So much of women's work is done where it cannot be seen. They'll see every bit of this.''

Inglis was one of a new generation of women doctors, having studied under Sophia Jex-Blake, with whom she later fell out, and Elizabeth Garrett Anderson.

The brunt of the work was borne by nurses, whose military emancipation came in the Crimean War. The key dynamic was working together - sisters doing it for themselves, keeping up with relentless waves of casualties, driving and maintaining a fleet of ambulances, as well as enduring war's routine horrors.

''The newly arrived doctors and nurses, inured to all manner of human suffering and more or less prepared for working under bad conditions, were struck dumb by the horror of it all,'' reported Dr Eleanor Soltau, head of the Serbian unit at Kragujevac who herself went down with diphtheria.

Men did have token supporting roles: Inglis's father was her great inspiration, their offices in St Andrew Square were given by the Man from the Pru and a few like administrator and artist William Smith of Aberdeen had actual jobs with SWH.

Three of the initial group lost their lives in the early months to typhus and other diseases. The first victim was an orderly, Madge Neil Fraser, captain of the Scottish ladies' golf team.

Ishobel Ross, a volunteer cook from Skye, whose father is credited with creating Drambuie from the original recipe, lost one of her colleagues, Olive Smith, in October 1916: ''Smithy died of malignant malaria last night. It is awful - we can't realise it yet. We had a short funeral service in the reception tent this morning and then we all lined up and saluted as she was carried into an ambulance.''

Inglis herself went out first to Serbia and stayed with her patients when the hospital was overrun by the enemy.

The Scottish women, nicknamed the Little Grey Partridges because of their distinctive uniforms, were released in Austria and, curiously, left to make their own way to Switzerland.

Dr Anne Shepherd, whose aunt, Helen McDougall, was one of the first to join up, said: '' She said to my father that they had been released in enemy territory without a safe conduct. They then had to climb their way through the Alps in winter.''

Dr McDougall later served at Royaumont, the hospital on the Western Front, which did its job as well as, if not better than, any of the regular RAMC units.

The indefatigable Inglis then embarked with another unit for Russia to join a Serb division, earning this praise from its medical chief: ''During the regular fighting and during the terrible retreat when her hospitals were ceaselessly bombed by the enemy aeroplanes, she worked without a day's rest, not shrinking from even the most arduous and loathsome tasks. We shall never forget those days when we saw the Scottish women collecting our wounded from the firing line in their own automobiles.''

Inglis never made it back, dying from cancer just after her ship docked at Newcastle in November 1917.

Posthumous plaudits for her work arrived aplenty after the war, including a memorial fund to build the Edinburgh maternity hospital which carried her name. Of the volunteers who served in France, 23 were awarded the Croix de Guerre.

Eighty years on and memories have faded. None of the original volunteers are left. But their descendants live on and a commemorative service at St Giles Cathedral in Edinburgh at 5.30 on Armistice Day next Wednesday is intended to bridge the gap before such a remarkable international achievement becomes simply dry history.

The poet Lawrence Binyon whose For the Fallen provides the standard ''We Will Remember Them'' refrain on Armistice Day, visited Royaumont as an ambulance driver.

''If there had been difficulties at first, it was amply made up for by the warmth of recognition when it was seen how admirably these women of Scotland could administrate, organise, operate, and nurse.''

Winston Churchill went further: ''The record of their work, lit up by the fame of Dr Inglis, will shine in history''.

Which is why we should never forget.