I remember in the spring of 1914 to have stood at Cecilienhaus in Charlottenburg. Cecilienhaus with its crèche and its maternity care and its folks kitchens and its workingmen’s gardens, was devoted to the welfare work in which the Vaterlandischer Frauenverein of the nation was engaged. Frau Oberin Hanna Kruger showed me with pride all these social activities. Then she looked away down the Berliner Strasse and said: “But when war comes—” Had I heard aright? That you know was in May, 1914. But she repeated: “When war comes we are going to be able to take care of seventy-five soldiers in this dining-room and in that maternity ward we shall be able to have beds for a dozen officers.” All over Germany the half million women of the Vaterlandischer Frauenverein planning like that, “when war comes,” had taken a first aid nurse’s training course. They were as ready for mobilisation as were their men. France, viewing with alarm these preparations across the border, had her women also in training. The Association des Dames Français, the Union des Femmes de France and the Société Secours aux Blessés Militaires, at once put on the Red Cross uniform and brought to their country’s service 59,500 nurses. In England the Voluntary Aid Detachments of the Red Cross had 60,000 members ready to serve under the 3,000 trained nurses who were registered for duty within a fortnight of the outbreak of war. Similarly every country engaged in the conflict, taking inventory of its resources, eagerly accepted the services of the war nurse. The same policy of state actuated every nation as was expressed by the Italian Minister of War who announced: “By utilising the services of women to replace men in the military hospitals, we shall release 20,000 soldiers for active duty at the front.” The Red Cross of service to the soldier is the most conspicuous decoration worn by women in all warring countries. Everywhere you meet the nurses’ uniform almost as universally adopted a garb as was the shirt waist of yesterday. We are here at Charing Cross station where nightly under cover of the soft darkness the procession of grim grey motor ambulances rolls out bearing the wounded. They are coming like this too at the Gare du Nord in Paris, at the Potsdam station in Berlin, and up in Petrograd. In each ambulance between the tiers of stretchers on which the soldiers lie, you may see the figure of a woman silhouetted faintly against the dim light of the railroad station as she bends to smooth a pillow, to adjust a bandage, or now to light a cigarette for a maimed man who never can do that least service for himself again. She may be a peeress of the realm, or she may be a militant on parole granted the amnesty of her government that needs her more these days for saving life than for serving jail sentence. But look, and you shall see the Red Cross on her forehead!