She was not a trained nurse, but when Dr. Hector Munro was working over
a man with a broken leg she prepared a splint and held the leg while he
set it and bound it. She drove a motor into Nieuport when the troops
were marching out of it. Her guest for the afternoon was a war
correspondent.
"This is a retreat," he said. "It is never safe to enter a place when
the troops are leaving it. I have had experience."
"We are going in to get the wounded," she replied. They went in.
At Ypres she dodged round the corner because she saw a captain who
doesn't believe in women at the front. A shell fell in the place where
she had been standing a moment before. It blew the arm from a soldier.
Her nerve was unbroken, and she continued her work through the morning.
Her notion of courage is that people have a right to feel frightened,
but that they have no right to fail to do the job even if they are
frightened. They are entitled to their feelings, but they are not
entitled to shirk the necessary work of war. She believes that cowardice
is not like other failings of weakness, which are pretty much man's own
business. Cowardice is dangerous to the group.
Lady ----'s attitude at a bombardment was that of a child seeing a
hailstorm--open-eyed wonder. She was the purest exhibit of careless
fearlessness, carrying a buoyancy in danger. Generations of riding to
hounds and of big game shooting had educated fear out of her stock. Her
ancestors had always faced uncertainty as one of the ingredients of
life: they accepted danger in accepting life. The savage accepted fear
because he had to. With the English upper class, danger is a fine art, a
cult. It is an element in the family honor. One cannot possibly shrink
from the test. The English have expressed themselves in sport. People
who are good sportsmen are, of course, honorable fighters. The Germans
have allowed their craving for adventure to seethe inside themselves,
and then have aimed it seriously at human life. But the English have
taken off their excess vitality by outdoor contests.
What Lady ---- is the rest of the women are. Miss Smith, an English girl
nurse, jumped down from the ambulance that was retreating before the
Germans, and walked back into Ghent, held by the Germans, to nurse an
English officer till he died. A few days later she escaped, by going in
a peasant's cart full of market vegetables, and rejoined us at Furnes.
Sally Macnaughtan is a gray-haired gentlewoman of independent means who
writes admirable fiction. She has laid aside her art and for months
conducted a soup kitchen in the railway station at Furnes. She has fed
thousands of weakened wounded men, working till midnight night after
night. She remained until the town was thoroughly shelled.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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