“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.
“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.