Our men move in thousands to and from the front, going and on leave,
moving from one camp to another, and Victoria Station, Charing Cross
and Waterloo are names written deep in our hearts these days. We have
free buffets for our fighting men at all of these, and at all our
London stations and ports, and these are open night and day. All the
money needed is found by voluntary subscriptions.
Our men come in on the leave train straight from the trenches, loaded
up with equipment, with their rifles canvas-covered to keep them dry
and clean, with Flanders mud caked upon them to the waist, very tired,
with that look they all bring home from the trenches in their eyes,
but in Blighty and trying to forget how soon they have to go back. The
buffets are there for them, and those who have no one to meet them in
London and who have to travel north or west or east to go home, are
met by men and women who direct them where to go by day and motor them
across London to their station at night. The leave trains that get
in on Sunday morning brings Scottish soldiers that cannot leave till
evening, and St. Columba's, Church of Scotland, has stepped into the
breach. The women meet the train, carry off the soldier for breakfast
in the Hall, which is ready, and they entertain them all day.
Thousands have been entertained in this way, and "It's just home,"
said one Gordon Highlander.
The soldier is in France and there he finds we have sent him Blighty,
too--canteens and Y.M.C.A. Huts. Our books and our magazines,
everything we can think of and send, goes to every field of war.
He is followed where he can be by amusement and entertainment. Concert
parties are arranged by our actors and actresses, and they go out
and sing and act and amuse our men behind the lines. Lena Ashwell has
organized Concert parties and done a great work in this way.
Such work as Miss McNaughton's, recorded in her "Diary of the War,"
and for which she was decorated before her death, largely caused by
overwork, as Lady Dorothie Fielding's ambulance work, for which she
also was decorated, and the work of the "Women of Pervyse" stand out,
even among the wonderful things done by individual women in this war.
The "Women of Pervyse," Mrs. Knocker, now the Baronnes de T'Serclas,
and Miss Mairi Chisholm, went out with the Field Ambulance Committee,
and were quartered with others at Ghent before and during and after
the siege of Antwerp. When the ambulance trains started to come in
from Antwerp they worked day and night moving the wounded from the
station to the hospitals--they worked for hours under fire moving
wounded, unperturbed and unshaken.
After the battle of Dixmude and the armies had settled on the
Neuport-Ypres line, Mrs. Knocker started the Pervyse Poste de Secours
Anglis, a dressing station so close to the firing line that the
wounded could literally be lifted to it from the trenches.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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