Women wanted: The story written in blood red letters on the horizon of the Great World WarDaggett, Mabel Potter
History
Women wanted: The story written in blood red letters on the horizon of the Great World War
Daggett, Mabel Potter
Women -- Employment; World War, 1914-1918 -- Women
See also, these ambulances that bring the wounded from Charing Cross.
They are “manned” by a woman outside as well as the nurse within.
There is a girl at the wheel in the driver’s seat. The Motor Transport
Section of the Green Cross Society accomplishes an average weekly
mileage of 2,000 miles transporting wounded and munitions. Like this
they respond for any service to which the exigencies of war may call.
There was the time of the first serious Zeppelin raid on London when
amid the crash of falling bombs and the horror of fire flaming suddenly
in the darkness, the shrieks of the maimed and dying filled the night
with terror and the populace seemed to stand frozen to inaction at the
scene about them. Right up to the centre of the worst carnage rolled
a Green Cross ambulance from which leaped out eight khaki clad women.
They were, mind you, women of the carefully sheltered class, who sit in
dinner gowns under soft candle light in beautifully appointed English
houses. And they never before in all their lives had witnessed an evil
sight. But they set to work promptly by the side of the police to pick
up the dead and the dying, putting the highway to order as calmly as
they might have gone about adjusting the curtains and the pillows to
set a drawing-room to rights. “Thanks,” said the police, when sometime
later an ambulance arrived from the nearest headquarters, “the ladies
have done this job.” Since then the Woman’s Reserve Ambulance Corps is
officially attached to the “D” Division of the Metropolitan Police for
air raid relief.
That girl in khaki who is serving as a hospital orderly, you notice,
wears shoulder straps of blue. She comes from the great military
hospital in High Holborn that is staffed entirely by women. We may walk
through the wards there where we shall see many of her. Above her in
authority are women with shoulder straps of red. These are they who
wear the surgeon’s white tunic in the operating theatre, who issue the
physician’s orders at the patient’s bedside. Now the door at the end
of the ward opens. A woman with red shoulder straps stands there, whom
every wounded patient able to lift his right arm, salutes as if his
own military commander had appeared. “But it’s my doctor, my doctor,”
exclaims the Suffragette of yesterday.
And it is. The doctor, you see, used to hold in fact the unofficial
post of first aid physician to the Women’s Social and Political Union.
Frequently she was wont to hurry out on an emergency call to attend
some militant picked up cut and bleeding from the missiles of the
mobs or released faint and dying from a hunger strike. And the doctor
herself did her bit in the old days. The Government had her in Holloway
jail for six weeks. Well, to-day they have her as surgeon in command of
this war hospital with the rank of major. She’s so well fitted for the
place, you see, by her earlier experience.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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