As if in a dream, the immobilized soldiers lie in the sun, recuperating from their wounds, while four nurses in long white dresses carry an injured man toward the operating theatre. The Scottish Women's Hospitals Service established their field hospital in the delapidated Abbaye de Royaumont, close to the front lines, and managed, incredibly, to get even the fountain running.

Photo: Imperial War Museum »

IF THEIR WOMEN ARE LIKE THAT"

Women insist on going to the battlefields to nurse wounded

At first British authorities try to keep women off World War One battlefields, but they ignored the government and kept on coming, thousands of them, often under their own steam. The First Aid Nursing Yeomanry (FANYs), the Scottish Women, and over 2,5000 Voluntary Aid Detachments (VADs) travel to Europe. Undeterred by blasts of artillery shells and the ruined landscape of trenches, barbed wire and mud, they set about saving men.

Running a gauntlet of shellfire outside Brussels, Elsie Knocker (later Baroness T’Serclaes) and 18-year old Mari Chisholm drag wounded Brits to their automobile-turned-ambulance, give them first-aid, and drive them to a base hospital 15 miles away. Thirty-year-old nurse Kate Carruthers, stationed on the Western Front in 1917, is working in her field hospital when it comes under attack, and she is wounded. Ignoring her pain, she continues treating injured men, and displays such bravery in the face of the enemy that she is later awarded the Military Medal created by King George V.

Turning ruins into a field hospital

Women doctors and nurses established the Abbaye de Royaumont close to the front lines. The abbey had been uninhabited for 30 years, and they faced staggering logistical problems, including food supplies and sanitation. Defying difficulties, they manage to turn it into a 600-bed field hospital, and save thousands of wounded men. Some women, such as Dr Elsie Dalyell, travel from as far away as Australia to help.

Women doctors and nurses operate at a World War One hospital.

Photo: Imperial War Museum »

Scottish Service

Winter in Serbia

Mabel Marion (“Jane”) Ingram volunteers to go to Serbia with James Berry and his wife Frances, who is also a doctor. There they find thousands of wounded soldiers and a typhoid epidemic which has killed a third of Serbia's doctors. They manage to bring the typhoid under control. “That autumn Serbia was again invaded by the Central Powers and the Berry unit accompanied the Serbian Army’s fighting retreat to the Adriatic coast, treating casualties while trekking through the snowy passes of Albania in the depths of winter. ‘The bearing of these British women was beyond all praise,’ a Serbian medical liaison officer wrote later. ‘Equalling the soldiers in endurance, they outdid them in morale, giving to others most of the little they had, putting their last wraps on the exhausted soldiers.’”

Their next mission was to treat 1,000 wounded Serbians in Odessa. They worked ceaselessly. “It is extraordinary how these women endure hardships,” a local official told war correspondent Arthur Ransom. “They carry the wounded themselves. They work like navvies. No wonder England is a great nation if the women are like that.” As a Brit remarked matter-of-factly, “They just got on with it.” (The description of the Berrys is taken from the Telegraph’s Second Book of Obituaries, and includes a happy ending for Jane.)

Edith Cavell

Before the war, when she was a girl, Edith Cavell painted flowers, played tennis, ice skated and danced. She helped her mother, a vicar's wife, to visit the ill in the parish, and taught children. Edith was almost thirty, and unmarried because she loved a man who did not think marriage suited him, when she decided she would like to become a nurse, and entered school.

British women were able to work as doctors and nurses because schools funded by Brits offered medical education to women. During her professional training, Edith was often in trouble for her lack of punctuality but so brilliant at nursing she saved hundreds of patients in a typhoid epidemic.

Edith was invited to Belgium to help set up nursing schools there. She found she had a knack for administration, and became surprisingly punctual. She pioneers the importance of follow-up care, and through her school provides trained nurses for three hospitals, 24 communal schools, and 13 kindergartens. She is well-liked, lives with two dogs, and takes time out of her busy schedule to nurse the morphine-addicted daughter of an old friend.

She is on vacation at home in Norfolk in August, 1914, when she learns that Germany has invaded Belgium. Without a thought for herself, she catches the train to London and a boat across the Channel, heading straight into the war zone, where she organises her students and establishes a Red Cross Hospital where every wounded soldier receives attention no matter his nationality. When Brussels falls, and British troops retreat, Edith remains.

Two stranded British soldiers find their way to her, and she shelters them, then spirits them away to the neutral Netherlands with the help of an underground lifeline masterminded by the Prince and Princess de Croy. Other Allied soldiers follow. Philippe Baucq, an architect in his mid-30s, organises guides for them. They all know they can be shot for harbouring Allied soldiers, but they continue to help them escape. "Had I not helped", Edith says simply, "they would have been shot".

Someone betrays the underground lifeline. Edith is arrested by the Germans and interrogated. She remains calm, and silent.

The Germans tell her that other members of her team have confessed. Believing them, she makes a clean breast of her involvement. For her, the protection and smuggling out of hunted men is the moral equivalent of caring for the sick and wounded.

The Germans sentence her to death by firing squad. The American and Spanish ambassadors to Belgium make frantic efforts to save her, but the Germans refuse to alter their decision.

Dressed in his German uniform, Le Seur, a chaplain, visits her on 11 October, the day before she is to die. Her cell is filled with roses sent by her nurses. LeSeur offers to find the local Anglican clergyman who can bring her Holy Communion. Unable to locate the Rev. Gahan at home, Le Seur leaves him a note to come as fast as possible because a member of his parish is dying.

At eight o'clock in the evening, the Rev. Gahan, an Irishman, arrives. LeSeur explains to him that Edith is to be shot, and Gahan collapses. Recovering, he goes to the prison, to give Edith her Holy Communion. Together they recite 'Abide with me'.

Gahan later tells LeSeur that just before she takes Holy Communion she says, "Patriotism is not enough. I must have no hatred or bitterness toward anyone."

These, however, were not her last words.

On the morning of 12 October, Edith and the architect Philippe Baucq were led from their cells to the yard where the firing squads waited. Le Seur, the German chaplain, was with her. He took her hand and said, "The Grace of our Lord Jesus Christ and the love of God and the Communion of the Holy Ghost be with you for ever. Amen."

Pressing his hand in return, Edith said, "Ask Mr. Gahan to tell my loved ones later on that my soul, as I believe, is safe, and that I am glad to die for my country."

Le Seur walked with her the few steps to the pole, where she was loosely bound. A bandage was put over her eyes. Sixteen soldiers at a distance of six paces shot her and Baucq. Later, the soldier who covered her eyes told Le Seur they were full of tears.

Edith Cavell

"I am glad to die for my country."

We believe that there is no no contradiction between being willing to die for one's country and feeling 'patriotism is not enough', for no true Christian believes patriotism is everything.
To die for a country that protects freedom of action and charity is to die for a Christian ideal.
It is interesting that Edith's last words, spoken to an enemy chaplain, are not those inscribed in the statue standing across from the National Portrait Gallery in London.

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