True Stories of the Great War, Volume 5 (of 6): Tales of Adventure--Heroic Deeds--Exploits Told by the Soldiers, Officers, Nurses, Diplomats, Eye Witnesses
History
True Stories of the Great War, Volume 5 (of 6): Tales of Adventure--Heroic Deeds--Exploits Told by the Soldiers, Officers, Nurses, Diplomats, Eye Witnesses
World War, 1914-1918 -- Personal narratives
Sir William Nelson is a great railroad magnate, having large
enterprises of this character in the colonies and other parts of the
world. He is probably one of the wealthiest men in the United Kingdom.
He has two sons in the army, and four daughters married to army
officers. His only unmarried daughter, Miss Gladys, determined that she
would not do less for her country than any of her family.
Miss Nelson is the purest and most refined type of English beauty.
She is tall, lithe and athletic, with beautiful golden hair and a
very delicate, fair complexion. This exquisite daughter of millions
is actually running a motor ambulance from the trenches in the North
of France to the base hospital. She helps to carry the poor wounded
soldiers in her car back of the firing line and then drives them to
the base hospital. She has been repeatedly under fire and runs the
risk of being killed almost daily. She was within the firing zone when
the Germans first began their use of poisonous gases, and it was only
because she had a full load of wounded in her car that she moved to the
rear before the deadly fumes reached her.
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.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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