HEROINES OF THE WAR.

New Zealand Tablet, Volume XXVIII, Issue 47, 22 November 1900, Page 17

HEROINES OF THE WAR.

BRIEF cable message in last week's daily papers announced that two of the Catholic nuns who had been through the inferno of the siege of Mafeking were received in audience by the Queen on the eve of their return to the scene of their gallant labors in the battered little border town of Bechuanaland. The honors of this squalid and sordid war fall chiefly and by right to the noble bands of ministering angels that weni, forth, weak in frame but giantesses in charity, to heal the wounds that were inflicted in the interests of v knot of British Company promoters and (Jerman capitalists. * The blood of men and the tears of women' — Buch is the tax of war upon the sexes. But when the front of battle lowers, women stand the brunt of the onset in other and more serviceable ways than in the wild regrets that blot out the sunlight of life in cottage and cabin when the band has begun to play. Woman's best work in war-time as in plague was happily expressed by the graceful answer made by the Empress Eugenic when visiting the hospital of Amiens during the cholera epidemic in 18(56 : ' It is our manner of going under fire.' The courage required, the strain endured by delicately natured women who face the agonies of siege or battle field may be gauged from the

experiences of Mademoiselle Constance Teichmann. She is still living— the daughter of a former Governor of the province of Antwerp ; and during the cholera epidemic of 1866 she passed her heroic days and nights by the bedside ot the sick and dying. Four years later the FrancoGerman war broke out. The brave little woman went out to nurse the wounded on the battle-field of Sarrebourg. When she returned her dark tresses had become white from the racking agony that her gentle spirit had endured.

in rtouth Africa nuns have been literally as well as metaphorically many a time and oft under fire during the past few years. During the Matabele campaign the Dominican nuns were nurses, cooks, and what-not behind the laagers and the sandbag redoubts of Buluwayo and Fort Salisbury : they gave soldier and settler and miner alike stirring evidence of the height and depth of the cheerful courage and charity and self-sacrifice of Catholic Sisterhoods Ihe defender of Mafeking pays a well-merited tribute to the heroines of the flowing black and white robes in his rugged but picturesque story of that curious campaign against the dark-skinned warriors of Lo Bengula. During the miserable Boer war that—like the fatuous American campaign in the Philippines— is ever about to end but never ending, the Sisters of Nazareth and the Sisters of the Holy Family tended the sick and wounded within the battered lines of Mafeking and Kimberley and Ladysmith. On the eve of the war train after. train was bringing packed loads of scared refugees in open trucks from Johannesburg to places of greater safety at the Cape or Durban or Lorenzo Marquez. The Sisters of Nazareth kept reason and cool judgment upon its throne amidst the universal panic and hurry-scurry. They took the chances of war in cold blood and remained at their post in the half-deserted city to tend the sick in the hospital and to find food for the seven hundred orphans and old people (mostly British subjects) who were leg-ironed to the place by sickness, poverty, helplessness, or old age, and who had none but the wearers of the white gimp and the blue-bordered veil to stand between them and the pangs of absolute starvation. • m

About the time that the first shot of the war echoed against the boulders of the Natal hills, Mgr. Gaughran Vicar-Apostolic of the Orange Free State, sent a telegraphic message to the Sisters of Nazareth at Maf eking. He left them free to remain at their posts and face the music of the Boer bullets or to leave the threatened frontier t»wn for safer quarters further south. Hundreds of others who might have oimi a helpful hand to sick and wounded crammed their most portable valuables into sundry receptacles, scrambled into the overcrowded passenger trains, and steamed to safer quarters to await the time when Mausers should cease from troubling and * Long Toms ' should be at rest. Among the fugitives were the Salvation Army 'lasses.' But without exception or a moment's hesitation the Sisters of Nazareth decided to remain at their post and face the worst that war and siege might bring. And they gave to the wounded and the victims of dysentery and campfever the tender and skilful services which their dark-clad companions in the Transvaal were giving with equal charity and devotion to the Boers. A Protestant writer in a South African paper wrote of the besieged nun-nurses of Mafeking • Whilst the Sisters would very probably be the very last persons in the world to desire any public commendation of their course, it seems only fair that attention should be called to their conduct. In this age of money-getting and phice-hnntimr, such deeds as these confirm our faith in the beauty of self -sacrifice and humanity.' Under the heading • splendid Example of the Nuns,' the London Times of December 2, 1891), pays a high tribute to the bravery of the Sisters at Mafeking and their unflinching devotion to duty. The news was from its Mafeking correspondent and was dated November ih. ' The convent,' he writes, < has been hit eight times. The nuns refuse to leave their post beyond taking refuge in the bomb-proof shelter adjoining the convent. These heroic Sisters take their share in the hard work, making and distributing coffee and tea to the neighboring redans. Their gallant conduct has set a magnificent example.'

Some time ago a correspondent stated in the columns of the Hospital that in a time of need the devoted Sisters

deliberately deprived themselves of the necessaries of life in order to give them to the sick and wounded soldiers under their care, and actually died of starvation as a consequence of noble self-sacrifice. 'At Estcourt,' says he, 'it was so. The Superior herself died of starvation, though it was supposed to be enteric fever.' The Edinburgh Catholic Herald quotes a sergeant who writes as follows from the Jewish School Hospital at Johannesburg : 'It is largely due to the untiring energy anH splMpvnHon nf f,hr> Sisrprs that not only has a very great deal of suffering been alleviated, bub many lives saved.' Many others have wiilleu to the Superiors of Nazareth House, Johannesburg and Hammersmith, words of grateful recognition of the kindness of the Sißters. ♦ They never seemed,' says one, ' to tire in their endeavors to relieve some poor sufferer. They worked hard for all alike and had a smile and a kind word for everybody.' The Diamond Fields Advertiser, of September 1, in its report of the proceedings of the Hospital CommisBiQH at Capetown, tells how the chorus of warm approbation of the Sisters' work was swelled by the evidence of Rev. Mr. McClelland, Presbyterian chaplain to the Forces. In the course of his evidence he said : 'He went to Kimberley on March 9. Here there was also a large number of sick, and every available building seemed to have been taken up for hospital purposes. The Nazareth House, managed by the Sisters, was especially good, and witness was very much struck by the care, skill, and attention shown by the Sisters. This hospital seemed to him to be one of the best he had ever seen.'

It was only when lying wounded and dying upon the battle-field — ' his battered casque and plumage gone ' — that Marmion found a good woman to be 'a ministering angel.' A like lesson was learned by many a non -Catholic soldier regarding the Sisters of Mercy ia the bungling campaign of the Crimea, in the American Civil War, and more recently still in the brief struggle between the United States and Spain. The wretched war which still sputters and flares in South Africa has, in like manner, probably resulted in tearing up by the roots many a deep and long-standing prejudice from the minds of non-Catholic soldiers regarding the religious Orders and the life and teaching of the Church. The beautiful story of the self-immolation of the Catholic Sisterhoods — without earthly fee or reward — in the days of pestilence and war recalls the lines in Gerald GkikfinV 'Sister of Charity:— Unshrinking where pestilence scatters his breath, Like an angel she moves, 'mid the vapor of death , Where rings the loud musket, and flashes the swonl, TJnfearing she walks, for she follows the Lord. How sweetly she bends o'er each plague-tainted face. With looks that are lighted with holiest grace ; How kindly she dresses each suffering limb. For she sees in the wounded the image of Him. Behold her, ye worldly ! behold her, ye vain ! Who shrink from the pathway of virtue and pain, Who yield up to pleasure your nights and your days. Forgetful of service, forgetful of praise. Ye lazy philosophers — self-seeking men — Ye fireside philanthropists, great at the pen , How stands in the balance your eloquence weighed With the life and the deeds of that high-born maid '

To learn is often slow. To unlearn is generally hard, especially when it is a question of parting with ingrained and long-standing prejudice. But the plague camp and the battle-field and the military hospital arc stern schook and the lessons learned in them are not soon forgotten.