Surely after this lesson the Bill for the State Registration of Trained Nurses cannot be ignored or held up much longer.  Even now in this twentieth century, girls of twenty-one, nurses so-called with six months’ hospital training, somehow manage to get out to the front, blithely undertaking to do work that taxes to its very utmost the skill, endurance, and resource of the most highly trained women who have given up the best years of their life to learning the principles that underlie this most exacting of professions.  For it is not only medical and surgical nursing that is learnt in a hospital ward, it is discipline, endurance, making the best of adverse circumstances, and above all the knowledge of mankind.  These are the qualities that are needed at the front, and they cannot be imparted in a few bandaging classes or instructions in First Aid.

This is not a diatribe against members of Voluntary Aid Detachments.  They do not, as a rule, pretend to be what they are not, and I have found them splendid workers in their own department.  They are not half-trained nurses but fully trained ambulance workers, ready to do probationer’s work under the fully trained sisters, or if necessary to be wardmaid, laundress, charwoman, or cook, as the case may be.  The difficulty does not lie with them, but with the women who have a few weeks’ or months’ training, who blossom out into full uniform and call themselves Sister Rose, or Sister Mabel, and are taken at their own valuation by a large section of the public, and manage through influence or bluff to get posts that should only be held by trained nurses, and generally end by bringing shame and disrepute upon the profession.

* * * * *

The work in the office was diversified by a trip to Faversham with some very keen and capable Voluntary Aid Detachment members, to help improvise a temporary hospital for some Territorials who had gone sick.  And then my turn came for more active service.  I was invited by the St. John Ambulance to take out a party of nurses to Belgium for service under the Belgian Red Cross Society.

Very little notice was possible, everything was arranged on Saturday afternoon of all impossible afternoons to arrange anything in London, and we were to start for Brussels at eight o’clock on Tuesday morning.

On Monday afternoon I was interviewing my nurses, saying good-bye to friends—­shopping in between—­wildly trying to get everything I wanted at the eleventh hour, when suddenly a message came to say that the start would not be to-morrow after all.  Great excitement—­telephones—­wires—­interviews.  It seemed that there was some hitch in the arrangements at Brussels, but at last it was decided by the St. John’s Committee that I should go over alone the next day to see the Belgian Red Cross authorities before the rest of the party were sent off.  The nurses were to follow the day after if it could be arranged, as having been all collected in London, it was very inconvenient for them to be kept waiting long.