You risk yourself for individual
men, for men in whose cause you believe. Surely, the loyal brave German
women feel as we felt. Red Cross work is not only a service to suffering
flesh. It is work to remake a soldier, who will make right prevail. The
Red Cross worker is aiming her rifle at the enemy by every bandage she
ties on wounded Belgians. She is rebuilding the army. She is as
efficient and as deadly as the workman that makes the powder, the
chauffeur that drives it to the trench in transports, and the gunner
that shoots it into the hostile line. The mother does not extend her
motherliness to the destroyer of her family. There is no hater like the
mother when she faces that which violates her brood. The same mother
instinct makes you take care of your own, and fight for your own. We all
of us would go for a Belgian first, and tend to a Belgian first. We
would take one of our own by the roadside in preference, if there was
room only for one. But if you brought in a German, wounded, he became an
individual in need of help. There was a high pride in doing well by him.
We would show them of what stuff the Allies were made. Clear of hate and
bitterness, we had nothing but good will for the gallant little German
boys, who smiled at us from their cots in Furnes hospital. And who could
be anything but kindly for the patient German fathers of middle age, who
lay in pain and showed pictures of "Frau" and the home country, where
some of them would never return.
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