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
There weren’t even cots. And there was only herself with one other
woman to assist her in doing all that must be done for these one
hundred and fifty helpless men.
The first that she remembers, a surgeon was calling out orders to
her like a pistol exploding at her head. She got him a basin of
water and some absorbent cotton and she managed to find the ether.
Oh, his shining instruments were flashing horribly in the light from
the window. He was going to cut off a man’s leg. “But, Doctor,” she
exclaimed, “I never had that in my Red Cross training. I don’t know
how.” She went so white that he looked at her and he hesitated. “Go out
in the garden outside,” he commanded, “and walk in the air.” He looked
at his watch. “I’ll give you just three minutes. Come back then and
we’ll do this job.”
They did this job, the Viscountess D’Azy holding the patient’s leg
while they did it. “After that,” she has told me, “I was never nervous.
I was never afraid. There wasn’t anything I couldn’t do.”
And there wasn’t anything she didn’t do. There were always the one
hundred and fifty men to be cared for: as fast as a cot was vacated
for the grave, it was filled again from the battle-line. For six weeks
the Viscountess was on her feet for seventeen hours out of every
twenty-four, carrying water, preparing food, dressing wounds, closing
the eyes of dying men. It took from eight in the morning until five in
the afternoon just to do the dressings alone. Twelve men on an average
died every night and they wrapped them in white sheets for the burial,
the Viscountess D’Azy did, daughter of one of the proudest houses of
France.
One day the message came that the Germans, sweeping through the nearby
village of St. Dié, had denuded the hospital there of all supplies.
Would the Viscountess with her influence, the commandant begged, carry
a report of their need to Paris. She went to Paris and brought back
a truck-load of supplies. She and the driver were three days on the
return journey. German shells were again falling on the road to St. Dié
as they approached. The chauffeur stopped in terror. “Go on!” commanded
the Viscountess. “Go on!” As the car shot forward by her order, a bomb
dropped behind them, tearing up in a cloud of dust the exact spot in
the road where the car had halted.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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