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.