13-YEAR-OLD HEROINE.

Wanganui Herald, Volume LI, Issue 15127, 23 January 1917, Page 5

13-YEAR-OLD HEROINE.

SAVED A BABY IN ZEPPELIN RAID. A moving story of the heroism during a Zeppelin raid of a little girl of 13 was told at the London Mansion House, when the Lord Mayor presented her with a gold wristlet watch, the gift of the Carnegie Hero Trust Fund. The facts were related by Sir William Treloar. On the night of the raid the child’s parents were out, and she was sitting up with her grandmother awaiting their return. The baby was in bed on the top floor of the house.

When a bomb fell close to the house the little girl’s first thought was for the baby. She rushed upstairs and took it in her arms. But the stairs were rocking, and some of the steps had disappeared, and she could not walk down. JOURNEY TO THE HOSPITAL. With the baby in her arms she slid down somehow and got into the street. There in the darkness, all lights having been extinguished, she knelt down and prayed. She then made her way to a hospital, where the baby was taken into safe custody. The little girl herself was examined by a surgeon and found to be wounded and bleeding. Later a piece of glass was taken from her ear. The Lord Mayor (Sir William Dunn), in making the presentation, said that such pluck by a girl,of tender years must arouse a thrill of unde throughout the country. By saving the baby she had displayed the spirit of Britain in its determination to defeat the power of might against right, and by her immediate and tender thought she had shown all those qualities which had produced in England the Florence Nightingales of the present war. Her action would be the admiration of the motherhood of tho country.