No special glee betrayed,
And even Mr. Bernard Shaw
Failed to commend the raid.”
The Lusitania children, lying in pitiful rows to await identification in Queenstown, little meek and sodden corpses buffeted out of comeliness by the waves, awoke in the hearts of the men who looked at them a passion of anger and hate which life is too short to appease. The brutal shooting of an English nurse was followed by an illogical rush of young Englishmen to the colours. And the mere fact that scores of writers, commenting on Edith Cavell’s death, harkened back to the beheading of Alice Lisle, proves the imperishable nature of the infamy attached to a deed, which to Judge Jeffreys, as to General Baron von Bissing, seemed the most reasonable thing in the world.
The outbreak of the war was seized upon as a strong argument for diametrically opposite views. A small and hardy minority kicked up its heels and shouted, “Women cannot fight. Why should they control a land they are powerless to defend?” A large and sentimental majority lifted up its eyes to Heaven, and answered, “If women had possessed their rights, all would now be smiling and at peace.” And neither of these contending factions took any trouble to ascertain and understand the rights and wrongs of the conflict. People who pin their faith to a catchword never feel the necessity of understanding anything.
Here, for example, is a violent pacifist in the “Woman’s Journal,” who, to the oft-repeated assertion that women, when they have the vote, “will compel governments to settle their disputes before an international court of arbitration,” adds this unwarranted statement: “The women of the world have no quarrel with one another. They do not care whether or not Austria maintains its power over the Balkan States; whether or not France obtains revenge for the defeats of 1870; whether Germany or England gains supremacy in the world market.”
This good lady does not seem to know what happened in August, 1914. France did not proclaim war upon Germany. Germany proclaimed war upon France. France did not attack,—for revenge, or for any other motive. She was attacked, and has been fighting ever since with her back to the wall in defence of her own soil.
It is possible for an American woman to have no quarrel with any one, no knowledge of what Europe is quarrelling about, and no human concern as to which nations win. But she should not think, and she certainly should not say, that the women of the warring lands are equally ignorant, and equally unconcerned. To the Serbian woman the freedom of Serbia is a precious thing. The French woman cares with her whole soul for the preservation of France. The Belgian woman can hardly be indifferent to the ultimate fate of Belgium. It is even possible that the English and German women are not prepared to clasp one another’s hands and say, “We are sisters, and it matters nothing to us whether England or Germany wins.” The pitfall of the feminist is the belief that the interests of men and women can ever be severed; that what brings suffering to the one can leave the other unscathed.
What are the qualities demanded of women in every great national crisis? First of all, intelligence. They should have some accurate knowledge of what has happened, some clear understanding of the events they so glibly discuss. There are documents in plenty to enlighten them. Those tense summer months in which the war was nursed in secrecy, are now no longer secret. We know where the bantling was cradled, we know what ambitions speeded it on its evil way, and we have watched every step of its progress. To condemn all Europe in terms of easy reprobation, to clamour for peace without recognition of justice, is but inconsequent chatter. It leaves vital issues untouched, and rational minds unmoved. The sternest words uttered since the beginning of the war were spoken by the London “Tablet,” in reprobation of those American peace-mongers who could not be brought to understand that the hope of the Englishwoman’s heart is that the man whom she has lost,—husband, son, or brother,—should not have died in vain.
Next to intelligence, a woman’s most valuable asset is a reasonable modesty. She is terribly hampered by a conviction of her own goodness. It gets in her way at every step, clouding her naturally clear perceptions, and clogging her naturally keen conscientiousness. She is wrong in assuming with Miss Addams that she feels a “peculiar moral passion of revolt against both the cruelty and the waste of war.” She is wrong in assuming with Madame Schwimmer that she “supplants physical courage with moral courage,” when she calls noisily for peace. There are men in plenty who feel the moral passion of revolt quite as keenly as do the most sensitive of women; but who also feel the moral responsibility of defending the safety of their country, the sacredness of their homes. The moral courage demanded of every soldier is fully as great as the physical courage, at which women dare to sneer. It is not a light thing to give up life,—“Greater love hath no man than this, that he lay down his life for his friends;”—yet death is the least of the horrors which soldiers daily face.