# Women Wanted/Chapter 4

CHAPTER IV
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.
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.
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 attache 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.
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.
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 cccur 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."
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.
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 Poincairé 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 Exoudon 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.