Читать книгу A Woman and the War - Frances Evelyn Maynard Greville Countess of Warwick - Страница 8

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Abuses cling to a crisis as barnacles to a ship, and every aspect of war has its own peculiar abuses. While millions do their duty with quiet heroism, there is always a minority that takes advantage, that corrupts others—or itself. Some believe that fraud and foolishness stay at home, that they cannot approach the field of arms, but this is far from being the case.

My thoughts turn back to the South African war, when certain scandals were supposed to have reached their zenith; I look around me to-day, listen to the well-authenticated stories brought to me by relatives and friends, and know that South Africa did not tithe the possibilities of folly and excess. For once I am not pleading for my own sex, I plead for one part of it against the other, for a majority against a minority, for those who are doing what they are paid to do, against those who are voluntary workers. The position comes a little strangely to me when I look at it in this light, but the highly trained, conscientious, painstaking hospital nurse, whose patient heroism proclaims her a true follower of Florence Nightingale, has been exposed to scandalous annoyance for no good purpose and to no useful end, and I feel that I must plead her cause, since she is in the last degree unlikely to plead it for herself.

Society women of a certain class made themselves so notorious in the military hospitals and elsewhere during the South African war that at least one General threatened to send them home and another refused to allow any more to come out. As soon as the greatest struggle of our history started in August, 1914, certain women of means and position proceeded as silently and unostentatiously as was possible under the circumstances to equip hospitals and to set about their self-appointed work. They laboured conscientiously and sought no more publicity than was necessary to enable them to collect money from philanthropists and friends. They did their best, some were already qualified by previous experience, others acquired their knowledge under the most trying conditions possible. They have worked since war began, well content to "scorn delights and live laborious days," some who are near and dear to me have said that they have well-nigh forgotten the old life and the comforts they deemed indispensable only a little while ago. I think it may be claimed for them that they have played a good part, and that in helping others they have not sought to draw attention to themselves or minimise the credit due to the trained sisterhood of love and pity that cheers the wounded and comforts the dying as "The Lady with the Lamp" taught them to do in the far-off days of the great Crimean struggle. They have made many friends and no enemies; the hero of the trenches and the assaulting party has not given more to his country, for both have given their all, the man his strength, the woman her practical sympathy, and both a high degree of physical and moral courage.

Unfortunately there is in London to-day a very large company of young women to whom war was little more than a new sensation. They are not old enough to understand or young enough to be restrained. In normal times they must be "in the movement," however foolish that movement may be, and a war that staggers the old world and the new leaves them very much where they were before. Under the rose they have not diminished their aforetime gaiety, dances and dinner-parties have been the order of the hour. They have not been trumpeted by the section of the Press that delights in recording vain things, but those who view the currents of London's social life know that I am writing the simple truth. There is nothing to be said; let those laugh who may and can at such a season, their laughter proclaims them what they are.

Unfortunately the people I have in mind have not been content to devote themselves to brainless frivolity because they must sample every sensation that the seasons provide, they invaded the sanctuary of the hospital nurse. Scores found their way to the great London hospitals in town to face what they were pleased to regard as training; I have known some who have danced till 3 a.m. and have presented themselves at the hospital at 8 o'clock! Everybody knows that the training of a real hospital nurse is a very serious matter, that it makes full demand upon physical and mental capacity, and that a long period is required to bring the seed of efficiency to flower or fruit. The social butterflies made no such sacrifices; they acquired a trifling and superficial knowledge of a nurse's work, and then set their social influence to work in order to reach some one of the base hospitals where they might sample fresh experience. If they were really useful there it would be unkind to offer a protest, but the general opinion is that they did more harm than good. They subverted discipline, they were a law to themselves, they were too highly placed or protected to be called to order promptly, they showed neither the inclination nor the capacity for sustained usefulness. To sit at the end of a bed and smoke cigarettes with a wounded officer does not develop the efficiency of a hospital.

One heard repeatedly in the early months of the war that this girl or that had gone to the front, and one imagined devotion, self-sacrifice, self-restraint, and a dozen kindred virtues. Unfortunately it is chiefly in the realm of imagination that these virtues existed. For the rest the interlopers wanted limelight, and plenty of it, their pictures flooded the illustrated papers, and to read what was written of them the inexperienced person might imagine that they were bearing the heat and burden of the day, the solitude and anxiety of the night, while in very truth they did no more than search for fresh sensation in an area that should be sacred.

The type of mind that can seek refuge from self and boredom in such surroundings cannot be stricken into seriousness; tragedy cannot reach it. To do a very minimum of work, to attach themselves to the most "attractive" cases, to carry small talk, gabble and gossip into places where so many come to die, these were the main efforts of the young society nurses, and all these outrages were carried on for months on end. The real nurses and sisters were, I am told, bitterly indignant. They asked no more than to be left alone to do their best; but they knew how hard it is to make an effective protest, and they had little or no time to do so. They recognised by reason of their training, the full motive of the excursion into the region of suffering; that craving for excitement, or, in bad cases, erotomania was the motive power. They found their work impeded by the sisterhood of impostors that responds so readily to a fashion of its own making, and their chief hope was that this sensation might pass as so many others have passed, and that the brainless, chattering, thoughtless, empty company, tired of blood and wounds, would find some paramount attraction nearer home.

If there are any who are prepared to think I have overstated the case or have traduced the young women who were lately "somewhere in France," let them find out from their particular heroine how much time she gave to training, how she received her appointment, and how much real hard work she did day by day. That a few have striven hard and nobly I would be the last to deny, but these are not enough either to leaven or purify the mass or to elevate the action of a class that might have been better employed. Let us remember, too, that suffering is always with us, and that even when war is over there will be far too much in all the great centres of our own country. Are these butterfly nurses prepared to remember in the future the profession they invaded? Will they respond to the calls that are made to help, not young, attractive and valiant men, but men, women, and children in every phase of helplessness and hopelessness? I do not think so. There is neither notoriety nor limelight in the sober, serious life of the hospital nurse and sister. Above all there is a hard and necessary discipline that calls for much moral courage to render it tolerable. Physical courage is seldom lacking either in men or women who are well-bred, and it may be freely granted that a certain measure was demanded even of the butterfly nurses; but there is no redemption in this. To savour the full sense of life without courage is impossible. One might as readily make an omelette without breaking eggs. In this case it is courage misdirected, energy misspent.

I feel very strongly about this scandal—so strongly that I have not hesitated to write what is bound to offend some of my own friends; but there are times when it is impossible to be silent if one would live on tolerable terms with one's self. I feel that in these days woman is called upon to make supreme sacrifices, that what she is giving even now is less than will be required of her later on, that her war record and her record when peace is about to return will be scanned closely and critically by generations of really free women yet unborn. To know of a blot upon woman's war-time service record and to make no attempt to erase it is impossible. The record of the real nursing sisterhood is brilliant in the extreme. Why should it be obscured for the sake of a few highly placed and foolish young women who sought with the minimum of labour to make the maximum of effect? It is unjust, ungenerous, and altogether unworthy of the representatives of families that in many cases have earned their ample honours legitimately enough.

Great Britain owes more than it can ever repay to the nursing sisterhood; and it is intolerable that while their silent heroism passes with so little recognition, any girl of good family who assumes a uniform she has not won the right to wear should pose as the representative of a sisterhood she is not worthy to associate with, of whose tradition she is ignorant, of whose high discipline and complete restraint she is intolerant. There are three classes of women in our midst. The first earns reward and claims it, the second earns reward and does not claim it, the last claims reward and does not earn it. Of these classes the real nurse belongs to the second, and the butterfly sisterhood to the third. At such a season as this there is no room in our midst for the last, and it would be well for us all if authority could spare a moment from manifold activities firmly and ruthlessly to suppress its future activities. The hardship involved would be of the slightest and the benefit serious and lasting.