Part 16

"Let me tell you," said the youth eagerly, "I have a preparation--I'm a chemist, you know--I've worked out a powder that kills flies."

Watts looked up from his pillow. His face was weary.

"It's sweet, you know, and attracts them," went on the boy, "then the least sniff of it finishes them. They trail away, and die in a few minutes. You can clear a room in half an hour. Then all you have to do is to sweep up."

"See here," he said, "I'll show you. Sister," he called. The nurse hurried to his side.

"Sister? You were kind enough to save my kit. May I have it a moment?"

He took out a tin flask, and squeezed it--a brown powder puffed through the pin-point holes at the mouth. It settled in a dust on the white coverlet.

"Please be very quiet," he said. He settled back, as if for sleep, but his half-shut eyes were watchful. A couple of minutes passed, then a fly circled his head, and made for the spot on the spread. It nosed its way in, crawled heavily a few inches up the coverlet, and turned its legs up. Two more came, alighted, sniffed and died.

"You see," he said.

* * * * *

Next day, the head of the Coxyde Poste motored over to Furnes for a call on his wounded helper.

"Where does all that chatter come from?" he asked.

Sister Teresa smiled.

"It's your silent friend," she said. "He is the noisiest old thing in the ward."

"Talking to himself?" inquired the doctor.

"Have a look for yourself," urged the nurse. They stepped into the ward, and down the stone floor, till they came to the supply table. Here they pretended to busy themselves with lint.

"Most interesting," Watts was saying. "That is a new idea to me. Here they've been telling me for a year that there's no way but the slow push, trench after trench--"

"Let me say to you," interrupted the Saxon lad.

"You will pardon me, if I finish what I am saying," went on Watts in full tidal flow. "What was it I was saying? Oh, yes, I remember--that slow hard push is not the only way, after all. You tell me--"

"That's the way it is all day long," explained the sister. "Chatter, chatter, chatter. They are telling each other all they know. You would think they would get fed up. But as fast as one of them says something, that seems to be a new idea to the other. Mr. Watts acts like a man who has been starved."

Watts caught sight of his friend.

"We've killed all the flies," he shouted.

WOMEN UNDER FIRE

This war has been a revelation of womanhood. To see one of these cool, friendly creatures, American and English, shove her motor car into shell-fire, make her rescue of helpless crippled men, and steam back to safety, is to watch a resourceful and disciplined being. They may be, they are, "ministering angels," but there is nothing meek in their demeanor. They have stepped to a vantage from which nothing in man's contemptuous philosophy will ever dislodge them. They have always existed to astonish those who knew them best, and have turned life into a surprise party from Eden to the era of forcible feeding. But assuredly it would make the dogmatists on the essentially feminine nature, like Kipling, rub their eyes, to watch modern women at work under fire. They haven't the slightest fear of being killed. Give them a job under bombardment, and they unfold the stretcher, place the pillow and tuck in the blanket, without a quiver of apprehension. That, too, when some of the men are scampering for cover, and ducking chance pellets from the woolly white cloud that breaks overhead. The women will eat their luncheon with relish within three hundred feet of a French battery in full blaze. Is there a test left to the pride of man that the modern woman does not take lightly and skilfully? Gone are the Victorian nerves and the eighteenth-century fainting. All the old false delicacies have been swamped. She has been held back like a hound from the hunting, till we really believed we had a harmless household pet, who loved security. We had forgotten the pioneer women who struck across frontiers with a hardihood that matched that of their mates. And now the modern woman emerges from her protected home, and pushes forward, careless and curious.

"What are women going to do about this war?" That question my wife and I asked each other at the outbreak of the present conflict. There were several attitudes that they might take. They could deplore war, because it destroyed their own best products. They could form peace leagues and pass resolutions against war. They could return to their ancient job of humble service, and resume their familiar location in the background. They did all these things and did them fervently; but they did something else in this war--they stepped out into the foreground, where the air was thick with danger, and demonstrated their courage. The mother no longer says: "Return, my gallant one, with your shield or on it," and goes back to her baking. She packs her kit and jumps into a motor ambulance headed for the dressing station.

We have had an excellent chance to watch women in this war. Our corps have had access to every line from Nieuport on the sea, down for twenty miles. We were able to run out to skirmishes, to reach the wounded where they had fallen. We have gone where the fighting had been at such close range that in one barnyard in Ramscappelle lay thirteen dead--Germans, French and Belgians. We brought back three wounded Germans from the stable. We were in Dixmude on the afternoon when the Germans destroyed the town by artillery fire. We were in Ypres on November first, the day after the most terrible battle in history, when fifty thousand English out of a hundred and twenty thousand fell. For three months my wife lived in Pervyse, with two British women. Not one house in the town itself is left untouched by shell-fire. The women lived in a cellar for the first weeks. Then they moved into a partially demolished house, and a little later a shell exploded in the kitchen. The women were at work in the next room. We have had opportunity for observing women in war, for we have seen several hundred of them--nurses, helpers, chauffeurs, writers--under varying degrees of strain and danger.

The women whom I met in Belgium were all alike. They refused to take "their place." They were not interested in their personal welfare. There have been individual men, a few of them--English, French and Belgian, soldiers, chauffeurs and civilians--who have turned tail when the danger was acute. But the women we have watched are strangely lacking in fear. I asked a famous war writer, whose breast was gay with the ribbons of half a dozen campaigns, what was the matter with all these women, that they did not tremble and go green under fire, as some of us did. He said:

"They don't belong out here. They have no business to be under fire. They ought to be back at the hospitals down at Dunkirk. They don't appreciate danger. That's the trouble with them; they have no imagination."

That's an easy way out. But the real reasons lie deeper than a mental inferiority. These women certainly had quite as good an equipment in mentality as the drivers and stretcher bearers. They could not bear to let immense numbers of men lie in pain. They wished to bring their instinct for help to the place where it was needed.