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 ship, 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 Northamptonshire, 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.  She grudged nothing, she gave her strength, her money, her very life.  The precious ointment was poured out in the service of her King and Country and for the Master she served so faithfully.