Page:Women Wanted.djvu/104

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96
WOMEN WANTED

ring countries. Everywhere you meet the nurses' uniform almost as universally adopted a garb as was the shirt waist of yesterday. We are here at Charing Cross station where nightly under cover of the soft darkness the procession of grim grey motor ambulances rolls out bearing the wounded. They are coming like this too at the Gare du Nord in Paris, at the Potsdam station in Berlin, and up in Petrograd. In each ambulance between the tiers of stretchers on which the soldiers lie, you may see the figure of a woman silhouetted faintly against the dim light of the railroad station as she bends to smooth a pillow, to adjust a bandage, or now to light a cigarette for a maimed man who never can do that least service for himself again. She may be a peeress of the realm, or she may be a militant on parole granted the amnesty of her government that needs her more these days for saving life than for serving jail sentence. But look, and you shall see the Red Cross on her forehead!

The grey ambulances like this coming from the railroad stations long ago in every land filled up the regular military hospitals through which the patients are passed by the thousands every month. And other women taking the Red Cross set it above the doorways of historic mansions opened to receive the wounded. In Italy, Queen Margherita and Queen Elena gave their royal residences. In Paris Baroness Rothschild has made her beautiful house with its great garden behind a high yellow wall a Hôpital Militaire Auxiliaire. And many private residences