sinking hospital ships in the Channel or the Dardanelles, insisting on "wounded soldiers first" as she passes her charges to safety, and waiting behind herself goes quietly under the water. And with bandaged eyes she has even walked unflinchingly to death before the levelled guns of the enemy soldiery, as did Edith Cavell in Belgium who went with her red cross to immortality. All the world has been breathless before the figure of the woman who dies to-day for her country like a soldier. No one knew that the Red Cross would be carried to these heights of Calvary. But from the day that the great slaughter began, it was accepted as a matter of course that woman's place was going to be at the bedside of the wounded soldier. Even as the troops buckled on sword and pistol and the departing regiments began to move, it was made sure that she should be waiting for them on their return.
In Germany in the first month of the war, no less than 70,000 women of the Vaterlandischer Frauenverein, trained in first aid to the injured, had arrived at the doors of the Reichstag to offer themselves for Red Cross service.
I remember in the spring of 1914 to have stood at Cecilienhaus in Charlottenburg. Cecilienhaus with its crèche and its maternity care and its folks kitchens and its workingmen's gardens, was devoted to the welfare work in which the Vaterlandischer Frauenverein of the nation was engaged. Frau Oberin Hanna Kruger showed me with pride all these social activities. Then she looked away down
