"The women of Pervyse" are known
alike to generals, colonels and privates who held steady at Liege and
who have struggled on ever since. For many months these nurses have
endured the noise of shell fire and the smells of the dead and the
stricken. The King of the Belgians has with his own hands pinned upon
them the Order of Leopold II. The King himself wears the Order of
Leopold I. They have eased and saved many hundreds of his men.
"No place for a woman," remarked a distinguished Englishman after a
flying visit to their home.
"By the law of probabilities, your corps will be wiped out sooner or
later," said a war correspondent.
Meantime the women will go on with their cool, expert work. The only way
to stop them is to stop the war.
HOW WAR SEEMS TO A WOMAN
(BY MRS. ARTHUR GLEASON)
Life at the front is not organized like a business office, with sharply
defined duties for each worker. War is raw and chaotic, and you take
hold wherever you can lock your grip. We women that joined the Belgian
army and spent a year at the front, did duty as ambulance riders, "dirty
nurses," in a Red Cross rescue station at the Yser trenches, in relief
work for refugees, and in the commissariat department. We tended wounded
soldiers, sick soldiers, sick peasants, wounded peasants, mothers,
babies, and colonies of refugees.
This war gave women one more chance to prove themselves.
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