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
In that other world we used to have before the war, Mrs. Harley
was known as one of England’s most distinguished constitutional
suffragists, not quite so radical as Mrs. Despard, her sister, who is
the leader of the Woman’s Freedom League. One of her most notable
pieces of work in behalf of votes for women was the great demonstration
she organised a few years ago in that pilgrimage of women who marched
from all parts of England, addressing vast concourses of people along
the highways and arriving by diverse routes for a great mass meeting
in Hyde Park. You see, Katherine Harley was an organiser of tried
capacity. And she, too, comes of a family of soldiers. She was the
daughter of Captain French, of Kent. Her husband, who died from the
effects of the Boer War, was Colonel Harley, chief of staff to General
Sir Leslie Rindle in South Africa. Her brother is Viscount Sir John
French, former field marshal of the English forces in France. And her
son is now fighting at the front. With all of this brilliant array of
military men belonging to her, it is a curious fact, as her friends in
London told me, that Mrs. Harley did not believe in war. “Katherine was
a pacifist,” one of them said at the International Franchise Club the
night that the announcement of her death was received there in a hushed
and sorrowful silence. But she believed if there must be war, some one
must bind up the wounds of war. And it was with high patriotic zeal
and with the fearless spirit of youth, albeit she was 62 years of age,
that Mrs. Harley in 1914 enlisted with the Scottish Women, taking her
two daughters with her into the service. She went out as administrator
of the hospital at Royaumont. And when that was in successful
operation, she was transferred to Troyes to set up the tent hospital
there. Then she was called to Salonica. It was at Salonica that she
commanded the famous transport flying column of motor ambulances that
went over precipitous mountain roads right up to the fighting line
to get the wounded. She was in charge of a motor ambulance unit with
the Serbian army at Monastir when in March, 1917, at the time of the
regular evening bombardment by the enemy, she was struck by a shell.
They buried her like a soldier and she lies at rest with the _Croix
de Guerre_ for bravery on her breast out there at the front of the
conflict.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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