Part 27 (1/2)

[Page Heading: VOLUNTARY RATIONING]

Miss Macnaughtan must surely have been one of the first people to begin voluntary rationing. We had the simplest possible meals during my visit, and although she was proud of her housekeeping, and usually gave one rather perfect food, on this occasion she said how impossible it was for her to indulge in anything but necessaries, when our soldiers would so soon have to endure hards.h.i.+ps of every kind. She said that we ought to be particularly careful to eat very little meat, because there would certainly be a shortage of it later on.

I recollect that there was some hitch about my departure from Norfolk Street on August 8th. It did not seem clear whether my Voluntary Aid Detachment was going to provide billets for all recalled members, and I remember my aunt's absolute scorn of difficulties at such a time.

”Of course, go straight to Kent and obey orders,” she cried. ”If you can't get a bed, come back here; but at least go and see what you can do.”

That was typical of Miss Macnaughtan. Difficulties did not exist for her. When quite a young girl she made up her mind that no lack of money, time, or strength should ever prevent her doing anything she wanted to do. It certainly never prevented her doing anything she felt she _ought_ to do.

The war provided her with a supreme opportunity for service, and she did not fail to take advantage of it. Of her work in Belgium, especially at the soup-kitchen, I believe it is impossible to say too much. According to _The Times_, ”The lady with the soup was everything to thousands of stricken men, who would otherwise have gone on their way fasting.”

Among individual cases, too, there were many men who benefited by some special care bestowed on them by her. There was one wounded Belgian to whom my aunt gave my address before she left for Russia that he might have someone with whom he might correspond. I used to hear from him regularly, and every letter breathed grat.i.tude to ”la dame ecossaise.”

He said she had saved his life.

Miss Macnaughtan's lectures to munition-workers were, perhaps, the best work that she did during the war. She was a charming speaker, and I never heard one who got more quickly into touch with an audience. As I saw it expressed in one of the papers ”Stiffness and depression vanished from any company when she took the platform.” Her enunciation was extraordinarily distinct, and she had an arresting delivery which compelled attention from the first word to the last.

She never minced the truth about the war, but showed people at home how far removed it was from being a ”merry picnic.”

”They say recruiting will stop if people know what is going on at the Front,” she used to tell them. ”I am a woman, but I know what I would do if I were a man when I heard of these things. _I would do my durndest._”

All through her life the idea of personal service appealed to Miss Macnaughtan. She never sent a message of sympathy or a gift of help unless it was quite impossible to go herself to the sufferer.

She was only a girl when she heard of what proved to be the fatal accident to her eldest brother in the Argentine. She went to him by the next s.h.i.+p, alone, save for the escort of his old yacht's skipper, and a journey to the Argentine in those days was a big undertaking for a delicate young girl. On another occasion she was in Switzerland when she heard of the death, in Northamptons.h.i.+re, of a little niece. She left for England the same day, to go and offer her sympathy, and try to comfort the child's mother.

”When I hear of trouble I always go at once,” she used to say.

I have known her drive in her brougham to the most horrible slum in the East End to see what she could do for a woman who had begged from her in the street--yes, and go there again and again until she had done all that was possible to help the sad case.

[Page Heading: ZEAL TO HELP OTHERS]

It was this burning zeal to help which sent her to Belgium and carried her through the long dark winter there, and it was, perhaps, the same feeling which obscured her judgment when her expedition to Russia was contemplated. She was a delicate woman, and there did not seem to be much scope for her services in Russia. She was not a qualified nurse, and the distance from home, and the handicap of her ignorance of the Russian language, would probably have prevented her organising anything like comforts for the soldiers there as she had done in Belgium. To those of us who loved her the very uselessness of her efforts in Russia adds to the poignancy of the tragedy of the death which resulted from them.

The old question arises: ”To what purpose is this waste?” And the old answer comes still to teach us the underlying meaning and beauty of what seems to be unnecessary sacrifice: ”She hath done what she could.”

Indeed, that epitaph might fitly describe Miss Macnaughtan's war work.