Page:Our Girls.pdf/133

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THE NIGHT OF WAR
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tions for the war, another vast army of them, their sisters in the hospitals, are nursing its sick and wounded. We know that the women in the factories and the women in the hospitals are working under the same general impulse, and that in spite of the war, Britain, with all her faults, is still Christian to the core. We know that what some of us saw on the Christmas Eves of 1914 and 1915 we may see again in 1916—the night nurses in the great houses of pain, as the clock strikes twelve, walking in slow procession with lanterns and candles, down the long corridors and through the darkened wards, singing the simple old ballads "Christ was born in Bethlehem," and "When shepherds watched their flocks by night," which come back to some of us who are growing old in the accents of an infant's prayer. We know that our soldiers, straight out of that hell across the sea, and bearing on their bodies the scars of it, being awakened in the peaceful half-darkness of their wards (such of them as

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