A Woman and the War

by Countess of Frances Evelyn Maynard Greville Warwick

It seems almost too ridiculous to be true that the Government has more concern for lambs or calves than for boys on the threshold of manhood, but the facts convict them.

For myself I would rather see a thousand of the bloodthirsty old gentlemen who preached conscription sent to the front from their club smoke-rooms and editorial chairs, than five hundred lads from whom their country has something to expect!

I do not think I am a sentimentalist, certainly I do not plead for the exemption of mere boys from the battlefield in order that they may have what is called a good time, though I hold that they should not be deprived deliberately of the few halcyon years that are in one fashion or another the reward of one and all. I would work them to the last ounce of their capacity in seasons like these. They should have long hours, Spartan fare, and spells of physical drill, they should put in eight hours of labour for the Government in the factory, in the munition works, wherever their services could be best employed.

They might be under military rule, amenable to the same discipline as the soldier, but they should not go into the firing line, because they belong to the next generation.

They are to sire it; no nation can afford to leave that responsibility to the physically unfit, and to those who have passed fighting age.

This duty done, they would be free to join the fighting forces for which their drill, their labour and their self-denial would have prepared them. My soldier relatives and friends tell me that the lad in his teens is of little value in a prolonged campaign. He may have all the necessary courage, but he lacks the essential stamina. He is fitter to march and endure when he is twenty-five than when he is nineteen, fitter still at thirty.

But, asks my critic, where will you recruit your fighting men? I look round at my men friends, and I find them, up to the age of fifty, taking their chance in the forefront of things. The outcry against the married man as combatant is valid only in so far as his family depends upon him for support. My friends chance for the greater part to belong to the comfortable classes. They have enjoyed the best that England has to offer; they are prepared to pay the price, with their lives if need be. Above all they are articulate, they have the franchise, they can speak their mind. Collectively they support in one form and another the conditions that make war possible. They are conscious of a certain responsibility.

Where, for example, on the other hand, is the responsibility of the midshipman on the torpedoed battleship? I take his bravery for granted. I am quite convinced that could he read my plea he would disavow any shadow of sympathy with it, but I am concerned for the country and not for him. He has a duty toward civilisation, he is well-bred, highly trained, efficient. I say that the State owes him at least a few years of manhood and should see that he is allowed to reach maturity, although he is neither veal nor lamb!

It is false economy that raises the outcry against married men as soldiers. They alone in the community can be spared, they have fulfilled, or partly fulfilled, the function upon which civilisation depends. Potentially, if not always actually, they are fathers. Economists insist that pensions and allowances are an extravagance that the nation cannot afford. I reply that war is a still greater extravagance, the wickedest form of indulgence known to mankind, and that worse than war is the destruction of the fairest hopes of the future, the race to come. Again, if those who light the fire were compelled to feed the flames I believe there would be fewer conflagrations.

I feel that I do but set down facts that are known to thinkers, who, as a rule, prefer to keep silence at times like these lest their patriotism be suspect. After the war they will deplore the ruin; trustees for the generation to come, they will see that they have failed in their trust. They will shift the responsibility on to the nature of things, they will declare that war was inevitable and that destruction of all we hold most dear must follow in its wake.