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.
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 carriage 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 her head was a smartly dressed young lady kneeling by an injured working-man; his thigh was smashed and bleeding terribly; she had ripped up his trousers 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.
These are things which have to be learnt in peace-time, and because they were learnt by the Guides beforehand, these girls were able to do their bit so well when war came.
FIRST AID.
When you see an accident in the street or people injured in an air raid, the sight of the torn limbs, the blood, the broken bones, and the sound of the groans and sobbing all make you feel sick and horrified and anxious to get away from it—if you're not a Girl Guide. But that is cowardice: your business as a Guide is to steel yourself to face it and to help the poor victim. As a matter of fact, after a trial or two you really get to like such jobs, because with coolheadedness and knowledge of what to do you feel you give the much-needed help.
The Value of Nursing.—In this war hundreds and hundreds of women have gone to act as nurses in the hospitals for the wounded and have done splendid work. They will no doubt be thankful all their lives that while they were yet girls they learnt how to nurse and how to do hospital work, so that they were useful when the call came for them. But there are thousands and thousands of others who wanted to do the work when the time came, but they had not like Guides, Been Prepared, and they had never learnt how to nurse, and so they were perfectly useless and their services were not required in the different hospitals. So carry out your motto and Be Prepared and learn all you can about hospital and child nursing, sick nursing, and every kind, while you are yet a Guide and have people ready to instruct you and to help you in learning.
In countries not so settled and protected as England and America, where the women and girls are taught to count upon their men to protect them in the field, the Girl Scouts have sometimes had to display a courage like that of the early settlers. A Roumanian Scout, Ecaterina Teodorroiu actually fought in the war and was taken prisoner. She escaped, traced her way back to her company, and brought valuable information as to the enemy's movements. For these services she was decorated "as a reward for devotion and conspicuous bravery" with the Order of Merit and a special gold medal of the Scouts, only given for services during the war. At the same time she was promoted to the rank of Honorary Second Lieutenant.
Can we wonder that she is known as the Joan of Arc of Roumania?
During the Russian Revolution the Girl Scouts were used by the Government in many practical ways, as may be seen from the following letter from one of them:
"The Scouts assisted from the beginning, from seven in the morning until twelve at night, carrying messages, sometimes containing state secrets, letters, etc., from the Duma to the different branches of it called commissariats, and back again. They also fed the soldiers that were on guard. The Scout uniform was our protection, and everywhere that uniform commanded the respect of the soldiers, peasants and workingmen.