All the risks of death and injury, however, would seem to be less of an ordeal to a woman of sensitive nerves than the sights she must constantly witness. The bodies of dead and wounded have been turned black, green and yellow, so that they become in many instances a caricature of humanity.
Then so furious is the fighting and so difficult the work of attending to the wounded that the dead have often been left unburied for days. The wounded are often terribly mangled and sometimes left to lie in the dirt for hours or even days before the ambulances can find them. Before they can be relieved at all their clothes and boots may have to be cut from them, and in this process very often large masses of flesh come away with the garments. These and other services are rendered by the women ambulance workers.
The exquisite Miss Gladys Nelson has been doing her share in this terrible work, and, according to last accounts, doing it very creditably. Will she come through the ordeal a stronger and nobler character or will she break down under it?
One of the bravest English nurses is Miss Muriel Thompson, of the First Aid Yeomanry Corps. She belongs to a well-known English family. She is a pretty girl of robust physique. She has been right up to the trenches in one of the worst centres of carnage in the whole field of war. Many badly wounded Belgians, who had no hope of medical attention from their own forces, were carried by Miss Thompson from the firing line. King Albert of Belgium presented to her on the battlefield a medal for bravery.
The beautiful Marchioness of Drogheda, a young matron of the highest aristocracy, is nursing the wounded in a houseboat on the Yser River, in Belgium, where some of the most terrible fighting of the whole war has occurred. This is the spot where the Germans put forth their greatest force in the West last October to break down the allied lines and reach the English Channel.
The Germans in their advance either killed the Belgian inhabitants or at least drove them out and destroyed their homes. The allies in their anxiety to stop the Germans flooded the country and destroyed hundreds more Belgian homes. The world has never seen a more pitiful and death-strewn waste than this once very populous and prosperous region.
The Marchioness of Drogheda and some other English women are laboring among the wounded and starving on the Yser, within sound of the guns to relieve some little part of the unspeakable misery.
Two of the most noted beauties of the British aristocracy are in training to act as war nurses. One of them is Lady Diana Manners, daughter of the Duke of Rutland and sister of the former Lady Marjorie Manners, whose heart affairs have been of so much interest to the world.
Lady Diana is one of the most charming, dainty and sprightly girls in the liveliest set of fashionable society. To think of such a girl amid the blood, dirt and horrors of trench warfare gives one the greatest shock of all. It has not yet been decided where Lady Diana will take up her duties in the war area, but her friends say that her spirit is so great that she will go to the most dangerous places that any woman has yet ventured to.
Another beautiful girl of equal social prominence who has been training as a war nurse is Miss Monica Grenfell, daughter of Lord Desborough, one of the most noted sportsmen in England.