When women stood at the threshold listening breathlessly that August day, there was one costume ready and laid out by the nations for their wear in every land. Coronets and shimmering ball gowns, cap and gown in university corridors and plain little home made dresses in rose bowered cottages were alike exchanged for the new uniform and insignia. And the woman who set the sign of the red cross in the centre of her forehead appeared in her white gown and her flowing white head dress all over Europe as instantaneously as a new skirt ever flashed out in the pages of a fashion magazine. To her, every country called as naturally, as spontaneously as a hurt child might turn to its mother. She it is who has worn the red cross to her transfiguration in this new Woman Movement with one of the largest detachments in hospital service. See her on the sinking hospital ships in the Channel or the Dardanelles, insisting on “wounded soldiers first” as she passes her charges to safety, and waiting behind herself goes quietly under the water. And with bandaged eyes she has even walked unflinchingly to death before the levelled guns of the enemy soldiery, as did Edith Cavell in Belgium who went with her red cross to immortality. All the world has been breathless before the figure of the woman who dies to-day for her country like a soldier. No one knew that the Red Cross would be carried to these heights of Calvary. But from the day that the great slaughter began, it was accepted as a matter of course that woman’s place was going to be at the bedside of the wounded soldier. Even as the troops buckled on sword and pistol and the departing regiments began to move, it was made sure that she should be waiting for them on their return. In Germany in the first month of the war, no less than 70,000 women of the Vaterlandischer Frauenverein, trained in first aid to the injured, had arrived at the doors of the Reichstag to offer themselves for Red Cross service.