From the moment the war began, British women played a noble part. Not only did thousands of them qualify as nurses, and offer their services in the hospitals at home and abroad, but many of them became munition workers, ticket collectors, tram conductors, motor-car drivers, farm servants, and letter carriers. In every town and village there were work parties busily engaged in making socks, mufflers, mittens, etc., for the men in the trenches or for the wounded in the hospitals. The neglected art of knitting wonderfully revived, and women were seen plying the needles everywhere, in trams and trains, or at lectures and concerts. When the Germans first used poison gas against our troops, and the War Office asked for half a million respirators, wagon-loads of them arrived the next day. Girls' schools, women's societies, groups of friends and families buckled to, and in a remarkably short time the War Office was able to announce that no more respirators were needed. Thousands of charitable societies made appeals for almost every war purpose imaginable. There were flag days in every town, and singers, actors, and lecturers gave their services in every good cause. The British Red Cross Society received the most generous support, while the many Belgian refugees in Britain were carefully tended, and, wherever possible, provided with work. Money was freely given by the public in every part of the Empire to set up hospitals and send nurses, doctors, and ambulances to France, Belgium, Russia, and Serbia; and even wounded horses were not neglected. One notable gift announced towards the end of November was the sum of £10,000 sent by the Canadian Government to assist in the upkeep of the Anglo-Russian hospital. In Great Britain many country houses were offered as hospitals and convalescent homes, and on the great sporting estates game was shot for the sick and wounded. Children gathered apples for the men of the Fleet, worked in the fields for short-handed farmers, and collected eggs and sphagnum moss[2] for the hospitals. There was no lack of ready and willing helpers for every good cause. At this time of stress and anxiety the British nation learned the noble art of giving. There was scarcely a British household in the world which did not practise some self-denial in order to be able to send small luxuries and comforts to the men at the front, or much-needed help to the prisoners in Germany. Remote cottages in the Highlands of Scotland, lonely farms in the North-West of Canada, outlying homesteads in Australia, New Zealand, and South Africa were thus linked together by the same generous impulse. [Illustration: Queen Elizabeth of Belgium visiting a Hospital. (_Photo, Newspaper Illustrations, Ltd._) Queen Elizabeth is patron of the Belgian Field Hospital, to which the readers and friends of _The Children's Story of the War_ have presented a motor ambulance.]