Woman’s war record in Europe is now starred with courageous acts. That day in Serbia Sir Ralph, riding on while the people sprinkled their mountain roads with white powder in token of surrender, came to the Scottish Women’s Hospitals. These had not even men doctors, as at Uskub. They were “manned” wholly by women sent out by the National Union of Women Suffragists in Great Britain. And there was not a man about the place except the wounded men in the beds. But Dr. Alice Hutchinson, at Valjevo, and Dr. Elsie Inglis, at Krushevats, with their staffs, also refused to leave their patients. All three of these women made the decision to face the enemy rather than desert their posts of duty. They were all three taken prisoners and required to nurse the German wounded along with their own. Months afterward they were released to be returned to England. Dr. Hutchinson, who has been decorated by the Serbian Government with the order of St. Sava, when she evacuated her hospital at the order of the Austrians, wrapped the British flag about her waist beneath her uniform that it might not be insulted by the invaders. Dr. Inglis had all her hospital equipment confiscated by the Germans. When she protested that this was in violation of Red Cross rules, the German commander only smiled: “You have made your hospital so perfect,” he said, “we must have it.” Dr. Inglis has been decorated with the Serbian order of the White Eagle. Since then, at the Russian front with another Scottish hospital, Dr. Inglis and her entire staff have again been decorated by the Russian Government.
In London I heard the women of the Scottish hospitals spoken of at historic St. Margaret’s Chapel as “that glorious regiment of Great Britain called the Scottish Women’s Hospitals.” And the clergyman who said it, spoke reverently in eulogy of one of the most distinguished members of that regiment, “the very gallant lady who in behalf of her country has just laid down her life.” In the historic chapel, the wall at the back of the altar behind the great gold cross was hung with battle flags. Men in khaki and women in khaki listened with bowed heads. It was the memorial service for Katherine Mary Harley, of whom the London papers of the day before had announced in large headlines, “Killed at her post of duty in Monastir.”
MRS. KATHERINE M. HARLEY OF LONDON
One of England’s famous suffragists, a number of whom have died at the front in their country’s cause. Mrs. Harley was buried like a soldier with her war decoration on the coat lapel of her uniform.
In that other world we used to have before the war, Mrs. Harley was known as one of England’s most distinguished constitutional suffragists, not quite so radical as Mrs. Despard, her sister, who is the leader of the Woman’s Freedom League. One of her most notable pieces of work in behalf of votes for women was the great demonstration she organised a few years ago in that pilgrimage of women who marched from all parts of England, addressing vast concourses of people along the highways and arriving by diverse routes for a great mass meeting in Hyde Park. You see, Katherine Harley was an organiser of tried capacity. And she, too, comes of a family of soldiers. She was the daughter of Captain French, of Kent. Her husband, who died from the effects of the Boer War, was Colonel Harley, chief of staff to General Sir Leslie Rindle in South Africa. Her brother is Viscount Sir John French, former field marshal of the English forces in France. And her son is now fighting at the front. With all of this brilliant array of military men belonging to her, it is a curious fact, as her friends in London told me, that Mrs. Harley did not believe in war. “Katherine was a pacifist,” one of them said at the International Franchise Club the night that the announcement of her death was received there in a hushed and sorrowful silence. But she believed if there must be war, some one must bind up the wounds of war. And it was with high patriotic zeal and with the fearless spirit of youth, albeit she was 62 years of age, that Mrs. Harley in 1914 enlisted with the Scottish Women, taking her two daughters with her into the service. She went out as administrator of the hospital at Royaumont. And when that was in successful operation, she was transferred to Troyes to set up the tent hospital there. Then she was called to Salonica. It was at Salonica that she commanded the famous transport flying column of motor ambulances that went over precipitous mountain roads right up to the fighting line to get the wounded. She was in charge of a motor ambulance unit with the Serbian army at Monastir when in March, 1917, at the time of the regular evening bombardment by the enemy, she was struck by a shell. They buried her like a soldier and she lies at rest with the Croix de Guerre for bravery on her breast out there at the front of the conflict.
Violetta Thurston, you might think, if you met her, a little English schoolgirl who has just seen London for the first time. Then by her eyes you would know that she is more, by the wide, almost startled look in what were meant to be calm, peaceful, English eyes. Violetta Thurston is the little English nurse decorated by both Russia and Belgium who in these last years has lived a life that thrills with the adventures of war. She went out at the head of twenty-six nurses from the National Union of Trained Nurses who were at work in Brussels when the Germans arrived. They improvised their hospital in the fire-station. At last the English nurses were all expelled by German order and sent to Dunkirk. There Miss Thurston connected with the Russian Red Cross.
She has written a book, “Field Hospital and Flying Column,” on her experiences in Russia. There were four days at Lodz that she neither washed nor had her clothes off. And once she was wounded by shrapnel and once nearly killed by a German bomb. The last record I have of her she was matron in charge of a hospital at La Panne in Belgium.
HEROINES OF FRANCE
No girl has, I suppose, lived a more uneventful life than did Emilienne Moreau up to the time that she became one of the most celebrated heroines of France. You haven’t if your home is, say, down in some little mining village of West Virginia or in the coal-fields of Pennsylvania, where you are going back and forth to school on week days and to Sunday school every Sunday. Emilienne was like that in Loos. She was sixteen and so near the end of school that she was about to get out the necessary papers for taking the examination for institutrice, which is a school teacher in France. Loos was a mining village. The inhabitants lived in houses painted in the bright colours that you always used to see in this gay and happy land. It was in one of the most pretentious houses situated in the Place de la Republique, and opposite the church, that the Moreau family lived. The large front room of the house was M. Moreau’s store. He had worked all his life in the mines and now at middle age, only the past summer, had removed here with his family from a neighbouring village and he had purchased the general store. It was with great pride that the family looked forward to an easier life and a comfortable career for the father as a “bonneted merchant.” Emilienne was his favourite child, his darling and his pride, and she in turn adored her father. Often they took long walks in the woods together. They had just come back from one of these walks, Emilienne with her arms filled with bluets and marguerites, when on August 1 a long shriek of the siren at the mines called the miners from the shafts and the farmers round about from their fields. Assembling at the Mairie for mobilisation all the men of military age marched away from Loos.
That night the sun went down in a blood-red glory. All the houses of Loos were bathed in blood-red. “Bad sign,” muttered an old woman purchasing chocolate at the store. And it was. Soon the refugees from surrounding burning villages came flocking by in streams, telling of the terrible Germans from whom they had escaped. Most of the inhabitants of Loos joined the fleeing throngs. Of five thousand people, ultimately only two hundred remained in the village. Among these were the Moreau family, who, possessing in marked degree that national trait of love for their home and their belongings, refused to leave. “But,” said her father to Emilienne, “little daughter, it will, I fear, be a long time before you will gather flowers again.”