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
Eleanor Warrender and others have gone out into the great experience
on the borderland with death from quiet and uneventful lives of peace
such as ours in America up to the present have also been. The call
is coming now to us in pleasant cities and nice little villages all
over the United States, and the time is here when we too are summoned
from the even tenor of our ways because the high white flashing moment
of service is come. Eleanor Warrender was called quite suddenly from
a stately career as an English gentlewoman. She kept house for her
brother, Sir George Warrender, afterward in the war Admiral Warrender.
It was a lovely old country house, High Grove, at Pinnar, in Middlesex
County, of which she was the chatelaine. There had been a delightful
week-end party there for which she was the hostess. She stood on a
porch embowered in roses to bid her guests good-bye on an afternoon in
August. And she had no more idea than perhaps you have who have touched
lightly the hand of friends who have gone out from your dinner table
to-night, that the farewell was final. But two days later in a Red
Cross uniform she was on her way to her place by the bedside of the war
wounded. There has been no more entertaining since, and one cannot say
when Eleanor Warrender shall ever again see English roses in bloom.
THE DEMAND DEVELOPS THE CAPACITY
The Viscountess Elizabeth D’Azy had been with her young son passing a
summer holiday at a watering-place in France.
She had just sent the boy back to boarding-school and herself had
returned to her apartment in Paris overlooking the Esplanade des
Invalides. At the moment she had no more intention of becoming a war
heroine than of becoming a haloed plaster saint set in a niche in the
Madeleine. Yet before she had ordered her trunks to be unpacked, the
nation’s call for Red Cross women had reached her.
“It was so sudden,” she has told me, “and I was so dazed, I couldn’t
even remember where I had put my Red Cross insignia. At last my maid
found it in my jewel case beneath my diamond necklace. I hadn’t even
seen it since I had received it at the end of my Red Cross first-aid
course of lectures.” The maid packed a suitcase of most necessary
clothing. Carrying this suitcase, the Viscountess Elizabeth Benoit
D’Azy, daughter of the Marquis de Vogue of the old French aristocracy,
in August, 1914, walked with high head and firm tread out of a
life of luxury and ease into the place of toil and privation and
self-sacrifice at the Vosges front where her country had need of her.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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