WHAT IS A GIRL SCOUT?
This is a Girl Scout.
She is in her uniform, wearing her badges of rank and awards for proficiency.
A Girl Scout.
The stripes on her left breast and the badge in her hat show that she is a Patrol Leader—that is, she commands a group of seven other Scouts who form the “Patrol.” She carries in her hand the flag of the Patrol. The badge on her right breast is that for “War Service”—meaning that she has done public service during the war.
What Do Girl Scouts Do?
Look on the cover and you will see that they are jolly people who enjoy themselves, they are a happy sisterhood who do good turns to other people.
As a Munition Worker.
In Europe Girl Scouts are called Girl Guides and this is what they have done abroad during the Great War.
In the towns they have helped at the Military Hospitals as assistants to the ward-maids, cooks, and laundry women. In the Government offices, such as the War Office, the Admiralty, and other great departments of the State, they have acted as orderlies and messengers. They have taken up work in factories, or as motor-drivers, or on farms, in order to release men to go to the front.
At home and in their club-rooms they have made bandages for the wounded, and warm clothing for the men at the Front and in the Fleet.
(S.T. stands for “Stand tall and Sit tall”)
In the country they have collected eggs for the sick, and on the moors have gathered sphagnum moss for the hospitals.
Over in France a great Recreation and Rest Hut for the soldiers has been supplied by the Guides with funds earned through their work. It is managed by Guide officers, or ex-Guides. Among the older Guides there are many who have done noble work with the Hospitals at home and overseas; there was one in particular who went through great adventures in Serbia during the invasion of that country.
A Hostel Scout.
At home in many of the great cities the Scouts have turned their Headquarters’ Club-Rooms into “Hostels.” That is, they have made them into small hospitals ready for taking in people injured in air-raids by the enemy.
So altogether the Scouts have shown themselves to be a pretty useful lot in many different kinds of works during the war, and, mind you, they are only girls between the ages of 11 and 18. But they have done their bit in the Great War as far as they were able, and have done it well.
There are 64,000 of them, and they are very smart, and ready for any job that may be demanded of them.
They were not raised for this special work during the war, for they began some years before it, but their motto is “Be Prepared,” and it was their business to train themselves to be ready for anything that might happen, even the most unlikely thing.
Scout Orderly.
So even when war came they were “all there” and ready for it.
It is not only in Great Britain that they have been doing this, but—in Canada and Australia, West, East, and South Africa, New Zealand, the Falkland Islands, West Indies, and India. The Scouts are a vast sisterhood of girls, ready to do anything they can for their country and Empire.
In this book I will show you as briefly as possible how you become a Scout, and what you have to do to make yourself fit for service. And I can tell you right off now that one thing you’ve got to do is to laugh and enjoy it all; you can’t help doing so when you get into it.
What the Guides Do
As a Guide your first duty is to be helpful to other people, both in small everyday matters and also under the worst of circumstances. You have to imagine to yourself what sort of things might possibly happen, and how you should deal with them when they occur. Then you will know what to do.
Finding the Wounded.
I was present when a German aeroplane dropped a bomb on to a railway station in London. There was the usual busy scene of people seeing to their luggage, saying good-bye and going off by train, when with a sudden bang a whole car was blown to bits, and the adjoining ones were in a blaze; seven or eight of those active in getting into the train were flung down—mangled and dead; while some thirty more were smashed, broken, and bleeding, but still alive. The suddenness of it made it all the more horrifying. But one of the first people I noticed as keeping their heads was a smartly dressed young lady kneeling by an injured working-man; his thigh was smashed and bleeding terribly; she had ripped up his trouser with her knife, and with strips of it had bound a pad to the wound; she found a cup somehow and filled it with water for him from the overhead hose for filling engines. Instead of being hysterical and useless, she was as cool and ready to do the right thing as if she had been in bomb-raids every day of her life. Well, that is what any girl can do if she only prepares herself for it.
Binding up Injuries.
Long before there was any idea of the war the Scouts had been taught to think out and to practise what they should do supposing such a thing as war happened in their own country, or that people should get injured by bombs or by accidents in their neighbourhood.
In order to be able to deal with such cases the first thing that you have to know is how to go out in the country and find the wounded by following their tracks to where they have crawled away to hide themselves or get water; you must know how to bind up their wounds temporarily; how to light a fire and boil up some hot soup, or fomentations for their injuries; you must be able to signal to other Scouts in the distance in order to call up help; you must be able to make a shelter out of the brush-wood around you, or to rig up a stretcher or means of carrying the injured on carts or barrows and so to get them in to hospital.
Then you have to know how to turn a room or a cellar into a ward, how to make up beds and apparatus for the use of the sick and wounded; how to nurse them; how to change their bandages; how to cook their food; what sort of ventilation is necessary; how to wash the linen and so on.
Convalescent Nursing
Finally there comes the convalescent stage when your patients are getting better, and you have to give them more nourishing food, cooked in a tempting manner, and you have to keep their minds active and cheerful by being able to read or sing to them, and so to cheer them back to life.
These are things which have to be learnt in peace-time, and because they were learnt by the Scouts beforehand, these girls were able to do their bit so well when war came.
Cheering them back to life.
Frontier Life
But they have to Be Prepared for many other things besides sickness. It falls to the lot of very many girls to take up life Overseas, and very often it is a rough life, and one full of adventures and romance.
But although this sounds nice in books and stories it is no fun for a girl who has had everything done for her at home, to find herself stranded in an outlandish place with no one available to help her, no water or gas laid on, no shops, or bakers, no cooks, no doctors.
She has to do everything for herself. This is where so many women, who had charge of ambulances in Serbia and other countries during the war, came out so splendidly, doing everything for themselves, and showing the greatest possible courage and handiness in the difficulties and dangers of active service.
S.T.
A story which should appeal with special force to Girl Scouts is that of Emilienne Moreau.
She is a French girl, and was living at Loos where the heavy fighting took place in October, 1915.
When the Germans took the place and held it, after their retreat from the Marne a year before, she, with her family, remained there and made the best of things under the German occupation.
She lived with her aged father and invalid mother, a sister, and a small brother of ten.
The father, broken in health and spirits by the presence of the hated Germans, died. Loos was practically empty of inhabitants, business was at a standstill—it was impossible to get a coffin even in which to bury the poor man.
So this girl, with the help of her young brother, got hold of some planks and themselves made one for their father’s body.
In September she noticed that the German garrison of the place were getting disturbed. More men were put into the town, and more defensive works were made. Shells began to fall, and the firing to become more intense day by day.
Instead of hiding in the cellar she climbed into the roof, where through a hole in the tiles, she was able to see the fighting that went on between the German defenders and the Highlanders who were attacking.
For several days it continued, but the Scotsmen finally got into the town and drove the Germans out from street to street with hand-to-hand fightings.
In a hidden corner five Germans kept fighting our troops unseen until this girl discovered their position.
She got hold of some hand-grenades and threw them in among them, killing three of them. The two survivors attacked her with bayonets, but she had armed herself with the revolver belonging to a dead British officer, and as they came at her she turned it on them with quick and steady aim and shot them both.
Then she went to work, regardless of the danger of rifle fire and shrapnel, tending the wounded, rendering first-aid, bringing water and blankets to them, thereby saving their lives and easing the pain of a number of British soldiers.
Our officers found her doing these things. She was personally thanked and congratulated by the British general for her valuable assistance to the medical staff, and for her courage and gallant help against the enemy, and she was later on awarded the French Military Cross “for valour on the field of battle.” Later we heard that Emilienne Moreau was a French Girl Scout, and what this gallant French girl did, her sister Girl Scouts in Britain would, I hope, also do in similar circumstances.
But it could only be done when a girl has trained herself as the Scouts do to be plucky, to be handy, to keep cool, to know what is the right thing to do—and to do it at no matter what risk to herself.
Frontierswomen
I have met many fine frontierswomen in my time. In Matabeleland, when the natives rose against us, Mrs. Selous, the wife of the great elephant hunter, was alone in her home, thirty miles away from the nearest town. Some natives living close by came and asked her for the loan of as many axes as she could spare, as they wanted to chop firewood. Shortly afterwards her husband, who had been away shooting, came galloping in, and told her to saddle and mount her horse at once and to get away as the natives were “up” and murdering the white inhabitants.
A Frontier-woman’s Ride for Life.
Being a frontierswoman it did not take her long to catch and saddle up her horse, and in a few minutes she and her husband had left their home, and were riding for their lives towards Bulawayo. Before they were out of sight of their house they could see smoke and flames already issuing from it. The natives who had borrowed the axes had done so with the object of murdering them, and finding that they had escaped, were now wreaking their vengeance on their property. It was just Mrs. Selous’ promptness, cool-headedness, and ability to ride that saved her life.
Another woman at that time was similarly out on her farm, while her husband was away in some other part of the country. The natives surrounded her house in the night and attacked her faithful native servants. Knowing her danger, she slept in her clothes, and realising what was the matter when she heard the noise of the attack, she seized her revolver and, slipping out of the house through a back window, she escaped into the garden and hid herself behind a tombstone there. In the early dawn the marauders departed, and she came out of her hiding-place to find her home wrecked and her faithful servants all killed. A relief party of white men soon after arrived from the nearest township, and found her quite self-possessed and calm. The only excitement she showed was her intense relief at the fact that one of the attackers had seized her sewing machine and was making off with it when he was killed by one of her men, and had dropped the machine at a spot where it just escaped falling down the well. So she rode back to Salisbury in triumph with her rescuers, clutching her beloved sewing machine. She had no sooner reached safety than she discovered that she had dropped her revolver, and she insisted on going back again to find it. You might think that she could have got a new revolver in the town, but that was not the question. The revolver was a favourite of hers, because, although old and rather out of gear, she had once killed a lion with it.
She had many other exciting adventures in Rhodesia which I have not space to tell here, but she was a splendid type of what a London girl can do when put to it in places of difficulty and danger, if only she has trained herself.
S.T.
The story of Laura Secord, the heroine of Canada, shows what a frontierswoman may be called upon to do, and what she can do if only she has Been Preparing herself in strength of mind and body like a Scout.
Canada was at war with the United States over a hundred years ago. Battles between the Americans and the English were being fought on all sides in that unhappy year 1812. After the engagement on Queenstown Heights a terror-stricken woman went tramping over the field where the slain were lying in search of her husband. Laura Secord had heard that her husband had been wounded and left there for dead; but on finding him, to her joy she discovered that he was still alive, though badly injured.
It was during his long illness that a report was brought to Laura Secord that the Americans were again coming to surprise the English, unknown to the general.
Owing to her pluck and determination, Laura achieved a famous deed of heroism and saved her country by taking the information of the advance of the enemy right away to the commanding officer of the British troops. Through difficulties and dangers she sped without a fear for her own safety; she trudged on through forests and bogs, going twenty miles round out of the beaten track so as to avoid being traced. In the dusk of the evening her path was checked by a deep stream. Here she felt almost hopeless, until she found a tree-trunk fallen across the water, and by this she managed to scramble to the opposite bank. Whilst dreading what might happen at home to her invalid husband and her little children left behind, Laura Secord still pressed forward through the darkness, tired and weak, till she at length reached the British camp, and was able to unburden her mind and give the news of the danger to the officer in command. All present were struck with admiration for her gallant effort, and with the knowledge of the impending danger thus gained, the British were able to BE PREPARED.
Now, did not this Laura Secord, though quite untrained, do every part of the duty of a Girl Scout? She showed SENSE OF DUTY in leaving all that was dearest to her to go off to the commander.
She showed cleverness and RESOURCE in getting through the American outposts by driving her cow in front of her, pretending that she was merely taking her out to graze.
She showed ENDURANCE going such a long journey rapidly and well, being healthy and fit for hard work.
Also CAMPAIGNING in being able to find her way by a circuitous route through forests and by night, and yet not seen by the enemy—SAVING LIFE, too, not only of the soldiers in the force, but eventually of all her nation, by freeing her country of the enemy.
She showed PATRIOTISM by sacrificing her own wishes for the good of her country, and risking her life for the good of her nation.