In Germany in the first month of the war, no less than 70,000 women of the Vaterlandischer Frauenverein, trained in first aid to the injured, had arrived at the doors of the Reichstag to offer themselves for Red Cross service.
I remember in the spring of 1914 to have stood at Cecilienhaus in Charlottenburg. Cecilienhaus with its crèche and its maternity care and its folks kitchens and its workingmen’s gardens, was devoted to the welfare work in which the Vaterlandischer Frauenverein of the nation was engaged. Frau Oberin Hanna Kruger showed me with pride all these social activities. Then she looked away down the Berliner Strasse and said: “But when war comes—” Had I heard aright? That you know was in May, 1914. But she repeated: “When war comes we are going to be able to take care of seventy-five soldiers in this dining-room and in that maternity ward we shall be able to have beds for a dozen officers.” All over Germany the half million women of the Vaterlandischer Frauenverein planning like that, “when war comes,” had taken a first aid nurse’s training course. They were as ready for mobilisation as were their men. France, viewing with alarm these preparations across the border, had her women also in training. The Association des Dames Français, the Union des Femmes de France and the Société Secours aux Blessés Militaires, at once put on the Red Cross uniform and brought to their country’s service 59,500 nurses. In England the Voluntary Aid Detachments of the Red Cross had 60,000 members ready to serve under the 3,000 trained nurses who were registered for duty within a fortnight of the outbreak of war. Similarly every country engaged in the conflict, taking inventory of its resources, eagerly accepted the services of the war nurse. The same policy of state actuated every nation as was expressed by the Italian Minister of War who announced: “By utilising the services of women to replace men in the military hospitals, we shall release 20,000 soldiers for active duty at the front.”
The Red Cross of service to the soldier is the most conspicuous decoration worn by women in all warring countries. Everywhere you meet the nurses’ uniform almost as universally adopted a garb as was the shirt waist of yesterday. We are here at Charing Cross station where nightly under cover of the soft darkness the procession of grim grey motor ambulances rolls out bearing the wounded. They are coming like this too at the Gare du Nord in Paris, at the Potsdam station in Berlin, and up in Petrograd. In each ambulance between the tiers of stretchers on which the soldiers lie, you may see the figure of a woman silhouetted faintly against the dim light of the railroad station as she bends to smooth a pillow, to adjust a bandage, or now to light a cigarette for a maimed man who never can do that least service for himself again. She may be a peeress of the realm, or she may be a militant on parole granted the amnesty of her government that needs her more these days for saving life than for serving jail sentence. But look, and you shall see the Red Cross on her forehead!
The grey ambulances like this coming from the railroad stations long ago in every land filled up the regular military hospitals through which the patients are passed by the thousands every month. And other women taking the Red Cross set it above the doorways of historic mansions opened to receive the wounded. In Italy, Queen Margherita and Queen Elena gave their royal residences. In Paris Baroness Rothschild has made her beautiful house with its great garden behind a high yellow wall a Hôpital Militaire Auxiliaire. And many private residences like this are among the eight hundred hospitals in France which are being operated under the direction of one woman’s organisation alone, the Société de Secours aux Blessés Militaires.
MRS. H. J. TENNANT
Director of the Woman’s Department of National Service in England. Like this in all lands, women have been called to government councils.
Here in London, in Piccadilly, at Devonshire House, desks and filing cabinets fill the rooms once gay with social functions. And hospital messengers go and come up and down the marvellous gold and crystal staircase. The Duchess of Devonshire has turned over the great mansion as the official headquarters for the Red Cross. Nearby, in Mayfair, Madame Moravieff, whose husband is connected with the Russian diplomatic service, is serving as commandant for the hospital she has opened for English soldiers. Lady Londonderry’s house in Park Lane is a hospital. By the end of the first year of war, like this, no less than 850 private residences in England had been transformed into Voluntary Aid Detachment Red Cross Hospitals.
In hospital financiering the American woman in Europe has led all the rest. Margaret Cox Benet, the wife of Lawrence V. Benet in Paris, braved the perils of the Atlantic crossing to appeal to America for contributions to the American Ambulance Hospital at Neuilly. It is equalled by only one other war hospital in Europe, the splendidly equipped hospital of the American women at Paignton, England, initiated by Lady Arthur Paget, formerly Mary Paran Stevens of New York. Lady Paget, who is president of the American Women’s War Relief Fund, has just rounded out the first million dollars of the fund which she has personally raised for war work.
You see how these also serve who are doing the executive and organisation work that makes it possible for the woman in the front lines to wear her red cross even to her transfiguration. Accelerated by the activities of women like these behind the lines, the Red Cross battalions are leading the Great Push of the new woman movement. The woman in the nurse’s uniform is not exciting the most comment, however. It is by reason of her numbers, the thousands and thousands of her that she commands the most attention. But she was really expected.
WHERE YOU FIND THE MILITANTS TO-DAY