Just before the war broke out I saw a
woman suffragist thrown into a pond of water at Denmark Hill. I saw
another mauled and bruised by a crowd of men in Hyde Park. They were the
same sort of women as these hundreds at the front, who are affirming a
new value. The argument is hotly contended whether women belong in the
war zone. Conservative Englishmen deem them a nuisance, and wish them
back in London. Meanwhile, they come and stay. English officials tried
to send home the three of our women who had been nursing within thirty
yards of the trenches at Pervyse. But the King of the Belgians, and
Baron de Broqueville, Prime minister of Belgium, had been watching
their work, and refused to move them.
One morning we came into the dining-room of our Convent Hospital at
Furnes, and there on a stretcher on the floor was a girl sleeping
profoundly. We thought at first we had one more of our innumerable
wounded who overflowed the beds and wards during those crowded days. She
rested through the morning and through the noon meal. The noise about
did not disturb her. She did not stir in her heavy sleep, lying under
the window, her face of olive skin, with a touch of red in the right
cheek, turned away from the light. She awoke after twenty hours.
Silently, she had come in the evening before, wearied to exhaustion
after a week of nursing in the Belgian trenches.
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