Part 17

The other reason is a product of their changed thinking under modern conditions. "I want to see the shells," said a discontented lady at Dunkirk. She was weary of the peace and safety of a town twenty miles back from the front. Women suddenly saw their time had come to strip man of one more of his monopolies. For some thousand years he had been bragging of his carriage and bearing in battle. He had told the women folks at home how admirable he had been under strain, and he went on to claim special privileges as the reward for his gallant behavior. He posed as their protector. He assumed the right to tax them because they did not lend a hand when invasion came. Now women are campaigning in France and Belgium to show that man's much-advertised quality of courage is a race possession.

They had already shown it while peace was still in the land, but their demonstration met with disfavor. Just before the war broke out I saw a woman suffragist thrown into a pond of water at Denmark Hill. I saw another mauled and bruised by a crowd of men in Hyde Park. They were the same sort of women as these hundreds at the front, who are affirming a new value. The argument is hotly contended whether women belong in the war zone. Conservative Englishmen deem them a nuisance, and wish them back in London. Meanwhile, they come and stay. English officials tried to send home the three of our women who had been nursing within thirty yards of the trenches at Pervyse. But the King of the Belgians, and Baron de Broqueville, Prime minister of Belgium, had been watching their work, and refused to move them.

One morning we came into the dining-room of our Convent Hospital at Furnes, and there on a stretcher on the floor was a girl sleeping profoundly. We thought at first we had one more of our innumerable wounded who overflowed the beds and wards during those crowded days. She rested through the morning and through the noon meal. The noise about did not disturb her. She did not stir in her heavy sleep, lying under the window, her face of olive skin, with a touch of red in the right cheek, turned away from the light. She awoke after twenty hours. Silently, she had come in the evening before, wearied to exhaustion after a week of nursing in the Belgian trenches.

That was the thing you were confronted with--woman after woman hurling herself at the war till spent. They wished to share with men the hardship and peril. If risks were right for the men, then they were right for women. If the time had come for nations to risk death, these women refused to claim the exemptions of sex difference. If war was unavoidable, then it was equally proper for women to be present and carry on the work of salvage.

Of a desire to kill they have none. A certain type of man under excitement likes to shoot and reach his mark. I have had soldiers tell me with pride of the number of enemies they have potted. It sounds very much like an Indian score-card of scalps or a grouse hunter's bag of game. Our women did not talk in these terms, nor did they act so. They gave the same care to German wounded as to Belgian, French and English wounded, and that though they knew they would not receive mercy if the enemy came across the fields and stormed the trenches. A couple of machine guns placed on the trench at Pervyse could have raked the ruined village and killed our three nurses. They shared the terms of peril with the soldiers; but they had no desire for retaliation, no wish to wreak their will on human life. Their instinct is to help. The danger does not excite them to a nervous explosion where they grab for a gun and shoot the other fellow.

I was with an English physician one day before he was seasoned. We were under the bank at Grembergen, just across the river from Termonde. The enemy were putting over shells about one hundred yards from where we were crawling toward a machine-shop sheltering wounded men. The obus were noisy and the dirt flew high. Scattered bits of metal struck the bank. As we heard the shell moaning for that second of time when it draws close, we would crawl into one of the trenches scooped out in the green bank, an earthen cave with a roof of boughs.

"Let's get out of this," said the doctor. "It's too hot for our kind of work. If I had a rifle and could shoot back I shouldn't mind it. But this waiting round and doing nothing in return till you are hit, I don't like it."

But that is the very power that women possess. They can wait round without wishing to strike back. Saving life gives them sufficient spiritual resource to stand up to artillery. They have no wish to relieve their nervousness by sighting an alien head and cracking it.

One of our corps was the daughter of an earl. She had all the characteristics of what we like to think is the typical American girl. She had a bonhomie that swept class distinctions aside. Her talk was swift and direct. She was pretty and executive, swift to act and always on the go.

One day, as we were on the road to the dressing stations, the noise of guns broke out. The young Belgian soldier who was driving her stopped his motor and jumped out.

"I do not care to go farther," he said.

Lady ----, who is a skilful driver, climbed to the front seat, drove the car to the dressing station and brought back the wounded. I have seen her drive a touring car, carrying six wounded men, from Nieuport to Furnes at eight o'clock on a pitch-dark night, no lights allowed, over a narrow, muddy road on which the car skidded. She had to thread her way through silent marching troops, turn out for artillery wagons, follow after tired horses.

She was not a trained nurse, but when Dr. Hector Munro was working over a man with a broken leg she prepared a splint and held the leg while he set it and bound it. She drove a motor into Nieuport when the troops were marching out of it. Her guest for the afternoon was a war correspondent.

"This is a retreat," he said. "It is never safe to enter a place when the troops are leaving it. I have had experience."

"We are going in to get the wounded," she replied. They went in.

At Ypres she dodged round the corner because she saw a captain who doesn't believe in women at the front. A shell fell in the place where she had been standing a moment before. It blew the arm from a soldier. Her nerve was unbroken, and she continued her work through the morning.

Her notion of courage is that people have a right to feel frightened, but that they have no right to fail to do the job even if they are frightened. They are entitled to their feelings, but they are not entitled to shirk the necessary work of war. She believes that cowardice is not like other failings of weakness, which are pretty much man's own business. Cowardice is dangerous to the group.

Lady ----'s attitude at a bombardment was that of a child seeing a hailstorm--open-eyed wonder. She was the purest exhibit of careless fearlessness, carrying a buoyancy in danger. Generations of riding to hounds and of big game shooting had educated fear out of her stock. Her ancestors had always faced uncertainty as one of the ingredients of life: they accepted danger in accepting life. The savage accepted fear because he had to. With the English upper class, danger is a fine art, a cult. It is an element in the family honor. One cannot possibly shrink from the test. The English have expressed themselves in sport. People who are good sportsmen are, of course, honorable fighters. The Germans have allowed their craving for adventure to seethe inside themselves, and then have aimed it seriously at human life. But the English have taken off their excess vitality by outdoor contests.

What Lady ---- is the rest of the women are. Miss Smith, an English girl nurse, jumped down from the ambulance that was retreating before the Germans, and walked back into Ghent, held by the Germans, to nurse an English officer till he died. A few days later she escaped, by going in a peasant's cart full of market vegetables, and rejoined us at Furnes.

Sally Macnaughtan is a gray-haired gentlewoman of independent means who writes admirable fiction. She has laid aside her art and for months conducted a soup kitchen in the railway station at Furnes. She has fed thousands of weakened wounded men, working till midnight night after night. She remained until the town was thoroughly shelled.

The order is strict that no officer's wife must be near the front. The idea is that she will divert her husband's mind from the work in hand. He will worry about her safety. But Mrs. B----, a Belgian, joined our women in Pervyse, and did useful work, while her husband, a doctor with the rank of officer, continued his work along the front. She is a girl of twenty-one years.

Recently the Queen of the Belgians went into the trenches at a time when there was danger of artillery and rifle fire breaking loose from the enemy. She had to be besought to keep back where the air was quieter, as her life was of more value to the Belgian troops and the nation than even a gallant death.

One afternoon most of the corps were out on the road searching for wounded. Mairi Chisholm, a Scotch girl eighteen years old, and a young American woman had been left behind in the Furnes Hospital. With them was a stretcher bearer, a man of twenty-eight. A few shells fell into Furnes. The civilian population began running in dismay. The girls climbed up into the tower of the convent to watch the work of the shells. The man ordered the women to leave the town with him and go to Poperinghe. The two girls refused to go.

For weeks Furnes was under artillery fire from beyond Nieuport. One of our hospital nurses was killed as she was walking in the Grand Place.

I saw an American girl covered by the pistol of an Uhlan officer. She did not change color, but regarded the incident as a lark. I happened to be watching her when she was sitting on the front seat of an ambulance at Oudecappelle, eating luncheon. A shell fell thirty yards from her in the road. The roar was loud. The dirt flew high. The metal fragments tinkled on the house walls. The hole it dug was three feet deep. She laughed and continued with her luncheon.

I saw the same girl stand out in a field while this little drama took place: The French artillery in the field were well covered by shrubbery. They had been pounding away from their covert till the Germans grew irritated. A German Taube flew into sight, hovered high overhead and spied the hidden guns. It dropped three smoke bombs. These puffed out their little clouds into the air, and gave the far-away marksmen the location for firing. Their guns broke out and shrapnel shells came overhead, burst into trailing smoke and scattered their hundreds of bullets. The girl stood on the arena itself. Of concern for her personal safety she had none. It was all like a play on the stage to her. You watch the blow and flash but you are not a part of the action.

Each night the Furnes Hospital was full with one hundred wounded. In the morning we carried out one or two or one-half dozen dead. The wounds were severe, the air of the whole countryside was septic from the sour dead in the fields, who kept working to the surface from their shallow burial. There was a morning when we had gone early to the front on a hurry call. In our absence two girl nurses carried out ten dead from the wards into the convent lot, to the edge of the hasty graves made ready for their coming.

There is one woman whom we have watched at work for twelve months. She is a trained nurse, a certified midwife, a licensed motor-car driver, a veterinarian and a woman of property. Her name is Mrs. Elsie Knocker, a widow with one son. She helped to organize our corps. I was with her one evening when a corporal ordered her to go up a difficult road. He was the driver of a high-power touring car which could rise on occasion to seventy miles an hour. He carried a rifle in his car, and told us he had killed over fifty Germans since Liege. He dressed in bottle green, the uniform of a cyclist, and he looked like a rollicking woodlander of the Robin Hood band. It was seven o'clock of the evening. The night was dark. He pitched a bag of bandages into the motor ambulance.