WOMEN WHO WEAR WAR JEWELRY
There is a new kind of jewelry that will be coming out soon. We shall
see it probably this season or at least within the next few months.
It will take precedence of all college fraternity pins and suffrage
buttons and society insignia and even of the costliest jewels. For it
will be unique. Since no American woman has ever before worn it.
As a _Mayflower_ descendant or a Colonial Dame or a Daughter of the
Revolution, you may have proudly pinned on the front of your dress the
badge that establishes your title perhaps to heroic ancestry. In the
gilt cabinet in the front parlour you may even cherish among curios
of the wide, wide world a medal of honour as your choicest family
heirloom. Who was it who won it, grandfather or great-grandfather or
great-great-grandfather? Anyway, it was that soldier lad of brave
uniformed figure whose photograph you will find in the old album that
disappeared from the centre-table something like a generation ago. We
are getting them out from the attics now, the dusty, musty albums,
and turning their pages reverently to look into the pictured eyes of
the long ago. Some one who still recalls it must tell us again this
soldier-boy’s story. Somewhere he did a deed of daring. Somehow he
risked his life for his country. And a grateful government gave him
this, his badge of courage. It’s fine to have in the family, there in
the parlour cabinet. You are proud, are you not, to be of a brave man’s
race? But blood, they say, will always tell. Heroism and daring may be
pulsing in your veins to-day as once in his.
Have you ever thought how it might be to have your own badge of
courage? Ah, yes, even though you are a woman. No, it is true, there
are no such decorations that have been handed down from grandmother or
great-grandmother or great-great-grandmother. It is not that they did
not deserve them. But their deeds were done too far behind the front
for that recognition. To-day, as it happens, the new woman movement has
advanced right up to the firing line, and it’s different. Every nation
fighting over in Europe is bestowing honours of war on women. There
is no reason to doubt that special acts of gallantry and service on
the part of American women now in action with the hospitals and relief
agencies that have accompanied our troops abroad, shall be similarly
recognised by the War Department. To earn a decoration, you see—not
merely to inherit one—that can be done to-day.
She was the first war heroine I had ever seen, Eleanor Warrender. Over
in London I gazed at her with bated breath—and to my surprise and
astonishment found her just like other women.
Among those called to the colours in England in 1914, she is one of
the specially distinguished who have followed the battle flags to
within sight of the trenches, within sound of the guns. And, somehow,
one will inadvertently think of these as some sort of super-woman.
Before this there have been those who did what they could for their
men under arms. There was one woman who risked her life heroically for
British soldiers. And Florence Nightingale’s statue has been set along
with those of great men in a London public square. In this war many
women are risking their lives. They are receiving all the crosses of
iron and silver and gold. And to the lady of the decoration who wears
this war jewelry, it is a souvenir of sights such as women’s eyes have
seldom or never looked on before since the world began.
I have said that Eleanor Warrender seemed to me just like other women.
And she is at first; other war heroines are. Until you catch the
expression in their eyes, which affords you suddenly, swiftly, the
fleeting glimpse of the soul of a woman who knows. There is that about
all real experience that does not fail to leave its mark. You may get
it in the quality of the voice, in a chance gesture that is merely
the sweep of the hand, or in the subtle emanation of the personality
that we call atmosphere. But wherever else it may register, there are
unveiled moments when you may read it in the eyes of these women who
know—that they have seen such agony and suffering and horror as have
only been approximated before in imaginative writing. The ancient
pagans mentioned in their books that have come down to us, a place
they called Hades, where everything conceivable that was frightful and
awful should happen. The Christians called it Hell.
But nobody had been there. And there were those in very modern days who
said in their superior wisdom that it could not be, that it did not
exist. Now how are we all confounded! For it is here and now. The Lady
with the Decoration has seen it. Look, I say, in her eyes.
For that is where you will find out. She does not talk of what she has
been through.
“My friend Eleanor Warrender,” Lady Randolph Churchill told me, “has
been under shell-fire for three years, nursing at hospitals all along
the front from Furnes to the Vosges Mountains. Sometimes she has spent
days with her wounded in dark cellars where they had to take refuge
from the bombs that came like hail—and the cellars were infested with
rats.”
Eleanor Warrender, when I saw her, came into the Ladies’ Empire Club at
67 Grosvenor Street, London.
High-bred, tall, and slender, she wore the severe tailor-made suit
in which you expect an Englishwoman to be attired. In the buttonhole
of her left coat lapel there was a dark silk ribbon striped in a
contrasting colour from which hung a small bronze Maltese cross. It
is the _Croix de Guerre_ bestowed on her by the French Government
for “conspicuous bravery and gallant service at the front.” She
dropped easily on a chintz-covered lounge before the grate fire in
the smoking-room. A club-member caught sight of the ribbon in the
coat lapel. “I say, Eleanor,” she said eagerly, coming over to examine
it.
Miss Warrender was home on leave. In a few days she would be returning
again to her unit in France. She has been living where one does not
get a bath every day and there are not always clean sheets. One sleeps
on the floor if necessary, and what water there is available sometimes
must be carefully saved for dying men to drink. The Red Cross flag
that floats over the hospital is of no protection whatever. Sometimes
it seems only a menace, as if it were a sign to indicate to the enemy
where they may drop bombs on the most helpless.
There is a slight soft patter at the window-pane and it isn’t rain.
It’s shrapnel. The warning whistle has just sounded. There is the cry
in the streets—“_Gardez vous!_” The taubes are here. A Zeppelin bomb
explodes on contact, so you seek safety in the cellar, which it may
not reach. But a taube bomb, small and pointed, pierces a floor and
explodes at the lowest level reached. So you may not flee from a taube
bomb to anywhere. You just stay with your wounded and wait. Ah, there
is the explosion which makes the cots here in the ward rock and the
men shake as with palsy and turn pale. But, thank God, this time the
explosion is outside and in the garden. Beyond the window there, what
was a flower-bed three minutes ago is an upturned heap of earth and
stone. They are bringing in now four more patients for whom room must
be made besides these from the battlefield that have been operated on,
twenty of them, since nine o’clock this morning. These four who are now
being laid tenderly on the white cots have two of them had their legs
blown off, and two others are already dying from wounds more mortal.
Eleanor Warrender a little later closes their eyes in the last sleep.
She has watched beside hundreds of men like that as they have gone out
into the Great Beyond. And just now she walks into the Ladies’ Empire
Club as calmly as if she had but come from a shopping tour in Oxford
Street. Ah, well, but one can suffer just so much, as on a musical
instrument you may strike the highest key and you may strike it again
and again until it flats a little on the ear because you have become
so accustomed to it. But it is the limit. It is the highest key. There
is nothing more beyond, at least. And that is what you feel ultimately
about these women who have come through the experience that leads to
the decoration. It is one in the most constant danger who arrives at
length at the most constant calm.
[Illustration:
THE VISCOUNTESS ELIZABETH BENOIT D’AZY
Of the old French aristocracy, one of the most conspicuous examples
that the war affords of noblesse oblige in the Red Cross Service.
]
“I don’t know really why it should be called bravery,” says Eleanor
Warrender’s quiet voice. “You see, a bomb has never dropped on me, so
I have no actual personal experience of what it would be like. Now in
that old convent in Flanders turned into a hospital, Sister Gertrude at
the third cot from where I stood had a leg blown off, and Sister Felice
had lost an arm, and I think it was very brave of them to go right
on nursing in the danger zone afterward. But I—as I have said—no bomb
has ever hit me. And having no experience of what the sensation would
be like, it isn’t particularly brave of me to go about my business
without special attention to a danger of which I have no experience of
pain to remember. As for death,” and Eleanor Warrender looked out in
Grosvenor Street into the yellow grey London fog, “as for death, it is,
after all, only an episode. And what does it matter whether one is here
or there?”
Eleanor Warrender and others have gone out into the great experience
on the borderland with death from quiet and uneventful lives of peace
such as ours in America up to the present have also been. The call
is coming now to us in pleasant cities and nice little villages all
over the United States, and the time is here when we too are summoned
from the even tenor of our ways because the high white flashing moment
of service is come. Eleanor Warrender was called quite suddenly from
a stately career as an English gentlewoman. She kept house for her
brother, Sir George Warrender, afterward in the war Admiral Warrender.
It was a lovely old country house, High Grove, at Pinnar, in Middlesex
County, of which she was the chatelaine. There had been a delightful
week-end party there for which she was the hostess. She stood on a
porch embowered in roses to bid her guests good-bye on an afternoon in
August. And she had no more idea than perhaps you have who have touched
lightly the hand of friends who have gone out from your dinner table
to-night, that the farewell was final. But two days later in a Red
Cross uniform she was on her way to her place by the bedside of the war
wounded. There has been no more entertaining since, and one cannot say
when Eleanor Warrender shall ever again see English roses in bloom.
THE DEMAND DEVELOPS THE CAPACITY
The Viscountess Elizabeth D’Azy had been with her young son passing a
summer holiday at a watering-place in France.
She had just sent the boy back to boarding-school and herself had
returned to her apartment in Paris overlooking the Esplanade des
Invalides. At the moment she had no more intention of becoming a war
heroine than of becoming a haloed plaster saint set in a niche in the
Madeleine. Yet before she had ordered her trunks to be unpacked, the
nation’s call for Red Cross women had reached her.
“It was so sudden,” she has told me, “and I was so dazed, I couldn’t
even remember where I had put my Red Cross insignia. At last my maid
found it in my jewel case beneath my diamond necklace. I hadn’t even
seen it since I had received it at the end of my Red Cross first-aid
course of lectures.” The maid packed a suitcase of most necessary
clothing. Carrying this suitcase, the Viscountess Elizabeth Benoit
D’Azy, daughter of the Marquis de Vogue of the old French aristocracy,
in August, 1914, walked with high head and firm tread out of a
life of luxury and ease into the place of toil and privation and
self-sacrifice at the Vosges front where her country had need of her.
That was, I think, the last time a maid has done anything for her for
whom up to that day in August there had been servants to answer her
least request. Ever since then the Viscountess D’Azy has been doing
things with her own hands for the soldiers of France. It was in the
second year of the war that a gentleman of France, General Joffre,
bent to kiss her small hand, now toil-hardened and not so white as it
used to be. There is a military group in front of a hospital that she
commands and they stand directly before a great jagged hole in the wall
torn there by a German bomb, which, as it fell, missed her by a few
metres. The General is giving her the “accolade,” and on the front of
her white uniform he has pinned the _Croix de Guerre_ of France for
distinguished service. Last year, on behalf of her grateful country,
the Minister of War conferred on her another decoration, the _Médaille
de Vermeil des Epidémies_. I do not know what others may have been
added since to these with which the front of her white blouse sagged
last spring in Paris.
But the woman thus cited for military honours had before this
Armageddon as little expectation of playing any such rôle as have you
to-day who are, say, the social leader of the four hundred in Los
Angeles or the president of a foreign missionary society in Bangor,
Maine. Her one preparation was that two months’ course of Red Cross
lectures. Many women of the leisure class were taking it in 1910.
“I think I will, too,” she had said to her husband. “Some elemental
knowledge of the scientific facts of nursing I really ought to have
when the children are ill.” There were five children, four little
daughters and a son. And the Viscount thought of them and reluctantly
gave his consent.
“Very well, Elizabeth,” he had said. “I think I am willing that you
should hear the lectures. But on this I shall insist, my dear: I cannot
permit you to take the practical bedside demonstration work. I don’t
wish to think of my wife doing that kind of menial service even for
instruction purposes, and I simply could not have you so exposed to all
sorts of infection.”
Like that it happened when Elizabeth, the Viscountess D’Azy, arrived at
the battle front to which she was first called at Gérardmer; she had
had no practical nursing experience. Oh, she got it right away. She
had quite some within twenty-four hours. But up to now, this flashing
white moment of life which she faced so suddenly, she had not so much
as filled a hot-water bag for any one. And she had never seen a man die.
At this military barracks where she took off her hat to don the flowing
white headdress with the red cross in the centre of the forehead, one
hundred and fifty men, some of them delirious with agony, some of them
just moaning with pain, all of them wounded and waiting most necessary
attention, lay on the straw on the floor ranged against the wall.
There weren’t even cots. And there was only herself with one other
woman to assist her in doing all that must be done for these one
hundred and fifty helpless men.
The first that she remembers, a surgeon was calling out orders to
her like a pistol exploding at her head. She got him a basin of
water and some absorbent cotton and she managed to find the ether.
Oh, his shining instruments were flashing horribly in the light from
the window. He was going to cut off a man’s leg. “But, Doctor,” she
exclaimed, “I never had that in my Red Cross training. I don’t know
how.” She went so white that he looked at her and he hesitated. “Go out
in the garden outside,” he commanded, “and walk in the air.” He looked
at his watch. “I’ll give you just three minutes. Come back then and
we’ll do this job.”
They did this job, the Viscountess D’Azy holding the patient’s leg
while they did it. “After that,” she has told me, “I was never nervous.
I was never afraid. There wasn’t anything I couldn’t do.”
And there wasn’t anything she didn’t do. There were always the one
hundred and fifty men to be cared for: as fast as a cot was vacated
for the grave, it was filled again from the battle-line. For six weeks
the Viscountess was on her feet for seventeen hours out of every
twenty-four, carrying water, preparing food, dressing wounds, closing
the eyes of dying men. It took from eight in the morning until five in
the afternoon just to do the dressings alone. Twelve men on an average
died every night and they wrapped them in white sheets for the burial,
the Viscountess D’Azy did, daughter of one of the proudest houses of
France.
One day the message came that the Germans, sweeping through the nearby
village of St. Dié, had denuded the hospital there of all supplies.
Would the Viscountess with her influence, the commandant begged, carry
a report of their need to Paris. She went to Paris and brought back
a truck-load of supplies. She and the driver were three days on the
return journey. German shells were again falling on the road to St. Dié
as they approached. The chauffeur stopped in terror. “Go on!” commanded
the Viscountess. “Go on!” As the car shot forward by her order, a bomb
dropped behind them, tearing up in a cloud of dust the exact spot in
the road where the car had halted.
Word reached military headquarters of Elizabeth D’Azy’s skill in
nursing, of her unflinching coolness in the face of all danger. It
was decided that the war department had need of her at Dunkirk. The
town was under heavy bombardment, receiving between three hundred and
four hundred bombs daily. At the barracks hospital, arranged at the
railway station, there were cots for two hundred wounded. Sometimes a
thousand men were laid out on the floors. One night there were three
thousand. And there was only the Viscountess, who was the commandant,
one trained nurse, and some voluntary untrained assistants. For a
protection against the Zeppelins it was necessary that there should be
only the dimmest candle light even for the performing of operations.
As rapidly as possible patients were evacuated to base hospitals. The
commandant one night was tenderly supervising the lifting into an
American ambulance of an officer whose wounds she had just bandaged.
She leaned over the wheel to admonish “Drive slowly or he cannot live.”
And as she touched the driver’s arm there was an exclamation of mutual
surprise. The driver was A. Piatt Andrews, under secretary of the
treasury in President Taft’s administration. And the last time he had
seen the Viscountess D’Azy he had taken her in to dinner at the White
House in Washington when her husband was an attaché there of the French
Embassy. How long ago was all the gaiety of diplomatic social life at
Washington! A siren sounded shrilly now the cry of danger and death in
an approaching taube raid. And the greeting ended hastily, the hospital
commandant and the ambulance driver hurrying in the darkness to their
respective posts of duty.
The Viscountess has been in charge of a number of hospitals, having
been transferred from place to place at the front. When I saw her, she
was temporarily in command for a few weeks at the hospital which had
been opened at Claridge’s Hotel in Les Champs Elysées in Paris. She
didn’t care about her medals or her own magnificent record. It wasn’t
even the achievements of her husband, the Viscount D’Azy, in command of
the naval battleship _Jauré-guiberry_, of which she spoke most often.
The Viscountess D’Azy’s one theme is her boy. Before the war he was her
little son. Now he is a tall and handsome officer in uniform, at the
age of nineteen, Sub-lieutenant Charles Benoit D’Azy.
He wanted to enlist when she did. But she insisted that he remain at
school until he had finished his examinations in the spring of 1915.
He got into action in time for the great push on the Somme. Here
at the hospital in Les Champs Elysées the Viscountess shows me his
photograph, snapshots that she has taken with her kodak. Last night she
walked unattended and alone three miles through the streets of Paris
at midnight after seeing him off at the Gare de l’Est. He had started
again for the front after his furlough at home. Her one request to the
war department is to be detailed to hospital duty where she may be near
her boy’s regiment. Her pride in the boy is beautiful. When she speaks
his name that look of experience is gone for the moment, and in the
eyes of Elizabeth D’Azy there is only the soft luminous mother-love,
even as it may be reflected in your eyes that have never yet seen
bloodshed.
[Illustration:
LADY RALPH PAGET OF ENGLAND
Descendant of American forefathers. She is a war heroine worshipped by
the entire Serbian nation for her consecrated devotion to their people.
]
“Up to the time of the war,” the Viscountess said in her pretty broken
English as she looked reminiscently out on the broad avenue of Paris,
“I was doing nothing but going to fêtes all day and dancing most of the
nights. But I think there is no reason why a woman who has danced well
should not be able to do her duty as well as she did her pleasure.
_N’est ce pas_?” And from the records of the European war offices, I
think so, too.
THE WOMAN WHOM A NATION ADORES
Among the English war heroines is Lady Ralph Paget, whose name has gone
round the world for her splendid service in Serbia. In that defenceless
little land, exposed so cruelly to the ravages of this terrible war,
she commanded with as efficient executive skill as any of the generals
who have been leading armies, one of the best-managed hospitals that
have faced the enemy’s fire.
Leila Paget had lived all her life in the environment where ladies have
their breakfast in bed and some one does their hair and hands them even
so much as a pocket handkerchief. “Leila going to command a hospital?”
questioned some of her friends, “Leila who has always been so dependent
on her mother?”
She is the daughter, you see, of the Lady Arthur Paget, the beautiful
Mary Paran Stevens of New York, who, ever since her marriage into the
British aristocracy, has been one of the leaders in the Buckingham
Palace set. Leila Paget was, of course, brought up as is the most
carefully shielded and protected English girl in high life. She grew up
in a stately mansion in Belgrave Square. She was introduced to society
in the crowded drawing-room there which has been the scene of her
brilliant mother’s so many social triumphs. But she had no ambition
to be a social butterfly. She was a débutante who did not care for a
cotillion. You see, it was not yet her hour. She was a tall, rather
delicate girl who continued to be known as the beautiful Lady Paget’s
“quiet” daughter. A few seasons passed and she married her cousin, the
British diplomat, Sir Ralph Paget, many years her senior.
She had never known responsibility at all when one day she sat down
in the great red drawing-room in Belgrave Square to make out a list
of the staff personnel and the supplies that would be required for
running a war hospital in Serbia. Her heart at once turned to this
land in its time of trouble because she had for three years lived in
Serbia when Sir Ralph was the British Minister there. They had but
recently returned to England on his appointment as under secretary of
foreign affairs. And now she had determined to go to the relief of
Serbia with a hospital unit. I suppose British society has never been
more surprised and excited about any of the women who have done things
in this war than they were about Leila Paget. This day in the great
red drawing-room Leila Paget found her _metier_. She is the daughter
of a soldier, General Sir Arthur Paget, and what has developed as her
amazing organising and administrative ability is an inheritance from
a line of American ancestors through her beautiful mother. But from
her reserved, retiring manner none of her friends had suspected that
she was of the stuff of which heroines are made. Now, as she laid
her plans for war relief, she did it with an expeditious directness
and a mastery of detail with which some Yankee forefather in Boston
might have managed his business affairs. With a comprehensive glance
she seemed to see the equipment that would be needed. Here in the red
drawing-room she sat, with long foolscap sheets before her on the
antique carved writing desk. She listed the requirements, item by item,
a staff of so many surgeons, so many physicians, so many nurses. Then
she estimated the supplies, so many surgeon’s knives, so many bottles
of quinine, everything from bandages and sheets down to the last box
of pins. And she planned to a pound the quantity of rice and tapioca.
Her hospital ultimately did have jam and tea when all the others were
scouring Serbia in a frantic search to supplement diminishing supplies.
Without any excitement, with an utter absence of hysteria as a woman
ordering gowns for a gay season in Mayfair, Leila Paget gave her
instructions and assembled her equipment. It was, you see, her hour.
She arrived at Uskub in October, 1914, with the first English hospital
on the scene to stem the tide of the frightful conditions that
prevailed toward the end of 1914. After the retreat of the Austrians,
Serbia had been left a charnel house of the dead and dying. Every
large building of any kind—schools, inns, stables—was filled with the
wounded, among whom now raged also typhus, typhoid, and smallpox.
There were few doctors and no nurses, only orderlies who were Austrian
prisoners. At one huge barracks fifteen hundred cases lay on the cots
and under them; at another three thousand fever patients overflowed
the building and lay on the ground outside in their uniforms,
absolutely unattended. Facing conditions like these, Lady Paget opened
her hospital in a former school building. And here in the war zone
she instituted for herself such a régime as probably was never before
arranged for an Englishwoman of title.
She arose at four o’clock in the morning, and when she slipped from
her cot, no one handed her a silk kimono. The regulation “germ
proof” uniform worn by women relief workers in Serbia consisted of a
white cotton combination affair, the legs of which tucked tight into
high Serbian boots. Over this went an overall tunic with a collar
tight about the neck and bands tight about the wrists. There was a
tight-fitting cap to go over the hair. And beneath this uniform, about
neck and arms, you wore bandages soaked in vaseline and petroleum. It
was the protection against the attacking vermin that swarmed everywhere
as thick as common flies. Wounded men from the trenches arrived
infested with lice, and typhus is spread by lice. Lady Paget stood
heroically at her post by their bedsides, with her own hands attending
to their needs. What there was to be done in the way of every personal
service, she did not shrink from. And she unpacked bales of goods. And
she scrubbed floors. And she assisted with the rites for the dying.
There had to be a lighted candle in a dying Serbian soldier’s hand,
and often her own hand closed firmly about the hand too weak to hold
the candle alone. Her wonderful nerve never failed, but there came a
time when her frail physical strength gave out. She still held on,
working for two days with a high fever temperature before she finally
succumbed, herself the victim of typhus. Her husband was telegraphed
for. She was unconscious when he arrived and it was three or four days
before he could be permitted to see her. Her life hung in the balance
for weeks. But finally recovery began and it was planned for her to
return to England for convalescence. She and Sir Ralph were attended
to the railroad station by the military governor of Macedonia, the
archbishop of the Serbian Church, and a guard of honour of Serbian
officers. The Serbian people in their devotion lined the street and
threw flowers beneath her feet and kissed the hem of her dress. At the
station the Crown Prince presented her with the highest decoration
within his gift and the Order No. 1 of St. Sava, a cross of diamonds.
Never before had it been bestowed on any other woman save royalty.
Seldom has any woman in history been so conspicuously the object of an
entire country’s gratitude. The street on which the hospital stood was
renamed with her name. On the Plain of Kossova there stands a very old
and historic church, on the walls of which from time to time through
the centuries, have been inscribed the names of queens and saints.
Leila Paget’s name also has been written there. A nation feels even as
does that common Serbian soldier whom she had nursed back from death,
who afterwards wrote her: “For me only two people exist, you on earth
and God in Heaven.”
Well, Leila Paget stayed with Serbia to the end. After two months’
rest in England, she was back in July at her hospital in Uskub. Sir
Ralph had returned with her, having been made general director of
the British medical and relief work in Serbia, with his headquarters
at Nish. In October the Bulgarians took Uskub. When the city was
under bombardment during the battle that preceded its fall, Sir Ralph
arrived in a motor car to rescue his wife. But four hours later he
had to leave without her on his way in his official capacity to warn
the other hospitals which were in his charge. “Leila, Leila,” he
expostulated in vain. She only shook her head. “My place is here,” she
said, glancing backward where 600 wounded soldiers lay. Lady Paget and
her hospital were of course detained by the enemy when they occupied
the town. She remained to nurse Bulgarians, Austrians and Serbians
alike. And she organised relief work for the refugees, of whom she fed
sometimes as many as 4,000 a day. For weeks and months, it was only by
dint of the utmost exertion that it was possible to extract from the
exhausted town sufficient wood and petrol just to keep fires going in
the hospital kitchen and sterilisers in the operating rooms. “These,”
says Lady Paget, “were strange times and in the common struggle for
mere existence it did not occur very much to any one to consider who
were friends and who were enemies.” In the spring of 1916, in March,
arrangements were made by the German Government permitting the return
to England of Lady Paget and her unit. Her war record reaching America,
the New York City Federation of Women’s Clubs selected her as the
recipient of their jewelled medal. It is awarded each year to the woman
of all the world who has performed the most courageous act beyond the
call of duty.
HEROIC SERVICE OF SCOTTISH WOMEN
Woman’s war record in Europe is now starred with courageous acts. That
day in Serbia Sir Ralph, riding on while the people sprinkled their
mountain roads with white powder in token of surrender, came to the
Scottish Women’s Hospitals. These had not even men doctors, as at
Uskub. They were “manned” wholly by women sent out by the National
Union of Women Suffragists in Great Britain. And there was not a man
about the place except the wounded men in the beds. But Dr. Alice
Hutchinson, at Valjevo, and Dr. Elsie Inglis, at Krushevats, with
their staffs, also refused to leave their patients. All three of these
women made the decision to face the enemy rather than desert their
posts of duty. They were all three taken prisoners and required to
nurse the German wounded along with their own. Months afterward they
were released to be returned to England. Dr. Hutchinson, who has been
decorated by the Serbian Government with the order of St. Sava, when
she evacuated her hospital at the order of the Austrians, wrapped the
British flag about her waist beneath her uniform that it might not be
insulted by the invaders. Dr. Inglis had all her hospital equipment
confiscated by the Germans. When she protested that this was in
violation of Red Cross rules, the German commander only smiled: “You
have made your hospital so perfect,” he said, “we must have it.” Dr.
Inglis has been decorated with the Serbian order of the White Eagle.
Since then, at the Russian front with another Scottish hospital, Dr.
Inglis and her entire staff have again been decorated by the Russian
Government.
In London I heard the women of the Scottish hospitals spoken of at
historic St. Margaret’s Chapel as “that glorious regiment of Great
Britain called the Scottish Women’s Hospitals.” And the clergyman who
said it, spoke reverently in eulogy of one of the most distinguished
members of that regiment, “the very gallant lady who in behalf of her
country has just laid down her life.” In the historic chapel, the wall
at the back of the altar behind the great gold cross was hung with
battle flags. Men in khaki and women in khaki listened with bowed
heads. It was the memorial service for Katherine Mary Harley, of whom
the London papers of the day before had announced in large headlines,
“Killed at her post of duty in Monastir.”
[Illustration:
MRS. KATHERINE M. HARLEY OF LONDON
One of England’s famous suffragists, a number of whom have died at the
front in their country’s cause. Mrs. Harley was buried like a soldier
with her war decoration on the coat lapel of her uniform.
]
In that other world we used to have before the war, Mrs. Harley
was known as one of England’s most distinguished constitutional
suffragists, not quite so radical as Mrs. Despard, her sister, who is
the leader of the Woman’s Freedom League. One of her most notable
pieces of work in behalf of votes for women was the great demonstration
she organised a few years ago in that pilgrimage of women who marched
from all parts of England, addressing vast concourses of people along
the highways and arriving by diverse routes for a great mass meeting
in Hyde Park. You see, Katherine Harley was an organiser of tried
capacity. And she, too, comes of a family of soldiers. She was the
daughter of Captain French, of Kent. Her husband, who died from the
effects of the Boer War, was Colonel Harley, chief of staff to General
Sir Leslie Rindle in South Africa. Her brother is Viscount Sir John
French, former field marshal of the English forces in France. And her
son is now fighting at the front. With all of this brilliant array of
military men belonging to her, it is a curious fact, as her friends in
London told me, that Mrs. Harley did not believe in war. “Katherine was
a pacifist,” one of them said at the International Franchise Club the
night that the announcement of her death was received there in a hushed
and sorrowful silence. But she believed if there must be war, some one
must bind up the wounds of war. And it was with high patriotic zeal
and with the fearless spirit of youth, albeit she was 62 years of age,
that Mrs. Harley in 1914 enlisted with the Scottish Women, taking her
two daughters with her into the service. She went out as administrator
of the hospital at Royaumont. And when that was in successful
operation, she was transferred to Troyes to set up the tent hospital
there. Then she was called to Salonica. It was at Salonica that she
commanded the famous transport flying column of motor ambulances that
went over precipitous mountain roads right up to the fighting line
to get the wounded. She was in charge of a motor ambulance unit with
the Serbian army at Monastir when in March, 1917, at the time of the
regular evening bombardment by the enemy, she was struck by a shell.
They buried her like a soldier and she lies at rest with the _Croix
de Guerre_ for bravery on her breast out there at the front of the
conflict.
Violetta Thurston, you might think, if you met her, a little English
schoolgirl who has just seen London for the first time. Then by her
eyes you would know that she is more, by the wide, almost startled
look in what were meant to be calm, peaceful, English eyes. Violetta
Thurston is the little English nurse decorated by both Russia and
Belgium who in these last years has lived a life that thrills with
the adventures of war. She went out at the head of twenty-six nurses
from the National Union of Trained Nurses who were at work in Brussels
when the Germans arrived. They improvised their hospital in the
fire-station. At last the English nurses were all expelled by German
order and sent to Dunkirk. There Miss Thurston connected with the
Russian Red Cross.
She has written a book, “Field Hospital and Flying Column,” on her
experiences in Russia. There were four days at Lodz that she neither
washed nor had her clothes off. And once she was wounded by shrapnel
and once nearly killed by a German bomb. The last record I have of her
she was matron in charge of a hospital at La Panne in Belgium.
HEROINES OF FRANCE
No girl has, I suppose, lived a more uneventful life than did Emilienne
Moreau up to the time that she became one of the most celebrated
heroines of France. You haven’t if your home is, say, down in some
little mining village of West Virginia or in the coal-fields of
Pennsylvania, where you are going back and forth to school on week days
and to Sunday school every Sunday. Emilienne was like that in Loos. She
was sixteen and so near the end of school that she was about to get out
the necessary papers for taking the examination for _institutrice_,
which is a school teacher in France. Loos was a mining village. The
inhabitants lived in houses painted in the bright colours that you
always used to see in this gay and happy land. It was in one of the
most pretentious houses situated in the Place de la Republique, and
opposite the church, that the Moreau family lived. The large front
room of the house was M. Moreau’s store. He had worked all his life
in the mines and now at middle age, only the past summer, had removed
here with his family from a neighbouring village and he had purchased
the general store. It was with great pride that the family looked
forward to an easier life and a comfortable career for the father as a
“bonneted merchant.” Emilienne was his favourite child, his darling
and his pride, and she in turn adored her father. Often they took long
walks in the woods together. They had just come back from one of these
walks, Emilienne with her arms filled with bluets and marguerites,
when on August 1 a long shriek of the siren at the mines called the
miners from the shafts and the farmers round about from their fields.
Assembling at the Mairie for mobilisation all the men of military age
marched away from Loos.
That night the sun went down in a blood-red glory. All the houses
of Loos were bathed in blood-red. “Bad sign,” muttered an old woman
purchasing chocolate at the store. And it was. Soon the refugees from
surrounding burning villages came flocking by in streams, telling
of the terrible Germans from whom they had escaped. Most of the
inhabitants of Loos joined the fleeing throngs. Of five thousand
people, ultimately only two hundred remained in the village. Among
these were the Moreau family, who, possessing in marked degree that
national trait of love for their home and their belongings, refused to
leave. “But,” said her father to Emilienne, “little daughter, it will,
I fear, be a long time before you will gather flowers again.”
And it was. The Germans were in possession of Loos by October. They
poured petrol on the houses and burned many of them. At the store in
the Place de la Republique, Emilienne, with quick wit, set a bottle of
wine out on the counter and they drank and went away without burning,
although they looted the store of everything of value. During the
year that followed, Loos remained in the hands of the enemy. In the
effort of the French to retake it, it was often fired upon from the
surrounding hills. From the windows in the sloping garret roof,
Emilienne and her father watched many a battle until the bombs began
falling on the garret itself. They were exposed to constant danger.
They had to live on the vegetables they could gather from the deserted
neighbouring gardens. By December her father was ill from privation and
hunger and anxiety, and one night he died. Emilienne, girl as she was,
seems to have been the main reliance of the family, her mother, her
little sister Marguerite, and her little brother Leonard, aged nine.
The morning after her father’s death, Emilienne went to the German
commandant to ask for assistance. How should she get a coffin? How
should it be possible to bury her father? And the German laughed: “One
can get along very well without a coffin!” He finally permitted her
four French prisoners to dig the grave and the curé of Loos, he said,
could say a prayer. But Emilienne was heart-broken at the thought of
putting her father into the ground without a coffin. She and her little
brother made one with their own hands from boards she found at the
deserted carpenter-shop down the street.
By the spring of 1915 the bombardment of Loos increased in violence.
There were days at a time when the whole family, with their black
dog Sultan, did not dare venture out of the cellar. In September,
Emilienne, ascending to the demolished garret, where she lay flat on
her stomach on the rafters, watched a battle in which the strangest
beings she ever saw took part, fantastic creatures of a grey colour who
were throwing themselves on the German trenches. As they advanced, she
noticed that they wore “little petticoats,” and she hurried to tell
her mother that these must be the English suffragettes of whom she had
heard, coming to the rescue of Loos. What they actually were was the
Scottish troops in kilts, the famous “Black Watch,” who a few days
later had driven the Germans from Loos. As they came into the village,
Emilienne, braving a cyclone of shells, and rallying her French
neighbours, ran to meet them, waving the French flag and singing the
“Marseillaise.” Thus, it is said, by her fearless courage, was averted
a retreat that might have meant disaster along the whole front.
But the fighting was not yet over. During the next few days, Emilienne,
with the Red Cross doctor’s assistance, turned her house into a
first-aid station. Some seven of the stalwart Scotsmen in the “little
petticoats,” she herself dragged in to safe shelter when they had been
wounded. Two Germans taking aim at French soldiers she killed with a
revolver she had just snatched from the belt of a dead man. When the
enemy had been finally repulsed, Emilienne Moreau was summoned by the
Government to be given the _Croix de Guerre_.
A little later, her pictured face was placarded all over Paris by the
French newspapers. They wanted her to write her personal story. At
first she shrank from it: “It would be presumption on the part of a
girl. What would my commune think?” But finally she was prevailed upon,
and for two months daily “_Mes Mémoires_” appeared on the front page of
_Le Petit Parisien_ with a double-column headline. Even more honours
have come to Emilienne. Great Britain bestowed on her its order of St.
John of Jerusalem and the King has sent her a personal invitation to
visit Buckingham Palace as soon as the Channel crossing shall be safe.
With it all, you would think Emilienne, if you met her, quite a
normal girl. You see, she is young enough to forget. And it is only
occasionally that in the clear blue eyes you catch a glimpse of
tragedy. Her smooth brown hair she is as interested in having in the
latest mode as are you who to-day consulted the fashion-pages of a
magazine for coiffures. I have seen her on the sands at Trouville with
a group of girls at play at blind man’s buff in the moonlight. And by
her silvery laughter you would not know her from the rest as a heroine.
The next day, when they were in bathing and the body of a drowned man
was washed ashore, one of the other girls fainted. Afterward Emilienne
said, and there was in her eyes a far-away look of old horrors as she
spoke, “Marie, Marie, if your eyes had looked on what mine have, you
would not faint so easily.”
There is another French girl, the youngest war heroine I know who has
been decorated by any government. And the case of Madeleine Danau is
perhaps of special interest, because any girl in the United States
can even now begin to be a heroine as she was. They say in France that
“_la petite Danau_” has served her country even though it was not
while exposed to shot and shell. She lives in the village of Corbeil
and she was only fourteen years old at the time her father, the baker,
was mobilised. A baker in France, it must be remembered, is a most
necessary functionary in the community, for as everybody has for years
bought bread, nobody even knows how to make it at home any more. The
whole neighbouring countryside, therefore, you see, was most dependent
on the baker, and the baker was gone away to war. It was then that
Madeleine proved equal to doing the duty that was nearest to her. She
promptly stepped into her father’s place before the bread-trough and
the oven. She gets up each morning at four o’clock and with the aid of
her little brother, a year younger than herself, she makes each day
eight hundred pounds of bread, which is delivered in a cart by another
brother and sister. The radius of the district is some ten miles, and
no household since war began has missed its daily supply of bread.
One day Madeleine was summoned to a public meeting for which the
citizens of Corbeil assembled at the Mairie. She went in her
champagne-coloured dress of _toile de laine_ and her Sunday hat of
leghorn trimmed with black velvet and white roses. And there before
this public assemblage the _Préfet des Deux-Sèvres_ pinned on Madeleine
the Cross of Lorraine and read a letter from President Poincaré of
France. In it the President presented to Madeleine Danau his sincere
compliments and begged her to accept “this little jewel,” this Cross
of Lorraine, which shall proclaim that the valiant child of the
Deux-Sèvres through her own labour assuring for the inhabitants of the
Commune of Exoudun their daily bread, has performed as patriotic a
service and is as good a Frenchwoman as are any of her sisters of the
Meuse.
The ever-lengthening list of heroic women who have distinguished
themselves in this war in Europe is now so many that it is quite
impossible even to mention any considerable number of them in less than
a very large book. You find their names now in every country quite
casually listed along with those of soldiers in the Roll of Honour
published in the daily newspapers. And it is no surprise to come on
women’s names in any of the lists, “Dead,” “Wounded,” or “Decorated.”
The French Academy out of seventy prizes in 1916 awarded no less than
forty-seven to women “as most distinguished examples of military
courage.” Among these the _Croix de Guerre_ has been given to Madame
Macherez, capable citizeness of Soissons, who has been daily at the
Mairie in an executive capacity, and to Mlle. Sellier who has been in
charge of the Red Cross hospital there during the long months of the
bombardment. The Cross of the Legion of Honor along with the cross of
Christ decorates the front of the black habit of Sister Julie, the nun
of Gerbéviller who held the invading Germans at bay while she stood
guard over the wounded French soldiers at her improvised hospital.
It’s like this in all of the warring countries. And all of these women
with their war jewelery for splendid service, are women like you and
me. But yesterday, and they might have been pleased with a string of
beads to wind about a white throat. Out of every-day feminine stuff
like this shall our war heroines too be made.