Perhaps you can see my grandmother rushing to her store-cupboards, filling boxes with pots of home-made jam, pound-cakes, bottles of calf’s-foot jelly, potted meats, and pickled shalots. Imagine how my Aunts—typifying the younger generation of Britain’s daughters—pitched The Ladies’ Mentor—always gracefully reticent about the War—behind the fire—tore up their Berlin-woolwork patterns—threw the green baize cover over the canary’s cage—boxed the King Charles spaniel’s ears—had hysterics—came out of them—and set to scraping lint with a vengeance. The most rigorous spinster knitted waistcoats and socks and undervests. Professed man-haters compromised on helmet-caps and muffetees.
My Aunt Julietta bottled broth, scraped lint, cut out and made Hospital shirts in a kind of sacred frenzy. Her Captain Goliath was not amongst the wounded, but any day—who knew?... Her round face grew puckered, and her pretty eyes dim by dint of searching through War Office Casualty Lists. She pictured her hero on outpost-duty on the snowy plains, knee-deep in the freezing slush of the muddy trenches—many a time when he was sheltered by a roof of ragged canvas, and warmed by a scanty fire of grubbed up-roots. She dreamed of him as starving when he had cleared his tin platter-full of hot fried biscuit and scraps of salt pork, it may be. And how often she saw him brought back dead and bloody from a sortie, when he was roaring some stave of an Irish song over the punch-bowl, I leave you to guess. Yet for all that, the Captain took his manly share of peril, privation, suffering and hardship with the best of them; and a day dawned when—oh! with what tears of anguish, and delight, and rapture—my Aunt got him back again....
You have heard how the call came to the less heroic daughters of England.... To Ada Merling, dreaming one gold October noon under her Wraye Rest cedars, it came, as of old, to the virgin Joan of Arc. If Tussell of the roaring bull-voice and the pronounced Hibernian brogue was her St. Michael, who shall wonder?... God chooses His Messengers when and where He wills.
For as the Sainted Maid was chosen, consecrated, inspired, and sped, nearly five hundred years before upon the errand that was to end in the deliverance of her dear land of France; so certainly the path this woman was to tread was pointed by a Hand from Heaven; so surely the words she was to utter, the deeds that were to be done by her—were prompted and helped by the Angelic Messengers of God.
One wonders whether any foreknowledge of her high fate, her great and wonderful destiny, the sufferings she was to alleviate and soothe; the sorrows she was to pity and console; the crying wrongs she was to redress; the prim and mean and narrow Officialism her generosity was to put to shame,—may have been vouchsafed her, ere that sunset hour?
I do not think she ever dreamed of what was coming. Her path was set about with homely duties; her mild, beneficent influence was exercised in a comparatively narrow sphere. She would have smiled if it had been told her that a time was at hand when the demands upon her trained skill, her fertile brain, her vast genius for organization were to be varied and innumerable; when the road before her was to widen out into a vast Field of Battle where nations strove with nations in bloody combat; where the smoke of cannon blotted out Heaven, and Earth shook with the roll of iron-shod wheels and the trampling of iron-shod hoofs, and was furrowed deep with trenches and honeycombed with mines, and mines yet more; though the picks and shovels of the haggard men who dug them tunneled their dreadful way through the festering bodies of the buried dead, whom Famine and Pestilence—no less than steel and shot and shell—had slain.
With her to decide was to act, swiftly and certainly. To Bertham, once again in divided, incomplete authority at the War Office, the quivering butt for every shaft launched at Officialdom, she wrote in words like these:
“It is asked whether there is not at least one woman in England who is fitted by knowledge, training, character, and experience to organize and take a Staff of nurses to the East, in aid of these suffering soldiers? I know that I am capable of undertaking the leadership. If you think me worthy, say so, and I will go!”