A PEACE PROPAGANDIST.

Wairarapa Age, Volume XXV, Issue 10713, 17 October 1913, Page 2

A PEACE PROPAGANDIST.

i The most poetic exponent of peace doctrines is now touring Russia as a lecturer. She is Irina Schischmanoff, !. a Bulgarian girl who; at four-And-twenty, is not only a fascinating little person, but also a Doctor of Philoisophy and pS Medicine. Grand Duke Constantme has declared her the most effective peace propagandist he ever heard, and' it was he who first referred to her as the "Jeanne d'Arc of peace." Like Jeanne d'Arc, she ascribes her enthusiastic energy to a "call." The daxighter of an unlettered farmer at Tirnova, she pieferred books and schooling to "staying at home ta plough the rye-fields." She was a student of sixteen when the Russo-Japanese war broke out; and it -was then that the "call" came, in a vision of a bittle-field over which there rose a cross. From behind the cross a hand beckoned imperatively, while the Bulgarian words came to her ears: "Voana protiv Voina," or "War against War." As a penniless student, she saw little hope for a criiisade,* but always bearing it in mind; she took her degrees, and when war with Turkey began, was ready to join the Bulgariaa forces as a nursing sister, in order to see the worst of her opponent before the platform fight began. The dressing of wounds, and sight of Avar suffering, confirmed her passion for peace. ''l felt impelled to rush to the front, to dash in between the combating armies. And I vowed that as soon as I was freed from toy nursing work, I wduld travel all over the earth, and fulfil the commandment to make war upon war." She is now preaching the horrors of war as she saw them on Thracian battle-fields. She has platform stories of individual soldiers, which are todd with pathos that moves whole ■ audiences to t£ars, Moscow highschool'girls were so torched by Irina's words that they formed a Universal I Peace League, each member binding herself by that very hard promise for a School girl, "to marry noi man who ,'has been a soldier or approves of war." A rich sugar-refiner was convinced enough to. offer two thousand pounds towards helping the peace movement witji pamphlets ; but this the fair propagandist refused. / "Only the voice-of the sufferer," she holds, "can drive war from the world." Only Maklakoff, Minister of the Interior, regards Irina with a severe political eye Otherwise Russia is being highly tolerant and kind to this | fiery little "Jeanne d'Arc of Peace,." f