Violetta Thurston, you might think, if you met her, a little English schoolgirl who has just seen London for the first time. Then by her eyes you would know that she is more, by the wide, almost startled look in what were meant to be calm, peaceful, English eyes. Violetta Thurston is the little English nurse decorated by both Russia and Belgium who in these last years has lived a life that thrills with the adventures of war. She went out at the head of twenty-six nurses from the National Union of Trained Nurses who were at work in Brussels when the Germans arrived. They improvised their hospital in the fire-station. At last the English nurses were all expelled by German order and sent to Dunkirk. There Miss Thurston connected with the Russian Red Cross. She has written a book, “Field Hospital and Flying Column,” on her experiences in Russia. There were four days at Lodz that she neither washed nor had her clothes off. And once she was wounded by shrapnel and once nearly killed by a German bomb. The last record I have of her she was matron in charge of a hospital at La Panne in Belgium. HEROINES OF FRANCE No girl has, I suppose, lived a more uneventful life than did Emilienne Moreau up to the time that she became one of the most celebrated heroines of France. You haven’t if your home is, say, down in some little mining village of West Virginia or in the coal-fields of Pennsylvania, where you are going back and forth to school on week days and to Sunday school every Sunday. Emilienne was like that in Loos. She was sixteen and so near the end of school that she was about to get out the necessary papers for taking the examination for _institutrice_, which is a school teacher in France. Loos was a mining village. The inhabitants lived in houses painted in the bright colours that you always used to see in this gay and happy land. It was in one of the most pretentious houses situated in the Place de la Republique, and opposite the church, that the Moreau family lived. The large front room of the house was M. Moreau’s store. He had worked all his life in the mines and now at middle age, only the past summer, had removed here with his family from a neighbouring village and he had purchased the general store. It was with great pride that the family looked forward to an easier life and a comfortable career for the father as a “bonneted merchant.” Emilienne was his favourite child, his darling and his pride, and she in turn adored her father. Often they took long walks in the woods together. They had just come back from one of these walks, Emilienne with her arms filled with bluets and marguerites, when on August 1 a long shriek of the siren at the mines called the miners from the shafts and the farmers round about from their fields. Assembling at the Mairie for mobilisation all the men of military age marched away from Loos.