The Green Bough

by E. Temple Thurston

She bent her head.

"You've made that plain," she muttered. "I didn't care asking him at the time. Seemed he just wanted to go talking on with no questions. There'll be hundreds like him, I suppose, thousands perhaps and some as like fighting. 'Twill be an adventure to them, but hell it'll be to him. P'r'aps that's as it must be. The world's all sorts. But I can't help thinking the world's wrong for us women. Be they the fighting kind or not, we didn't bring 'em into the world for this wasting. They say that thousands of our boys were lost during that first retreat from 'Mons' I think they call it. If you saw the thousands of mothers they belong to all come together in a crowd like the boys marching and they had some one to lead 'em, what would they do to them as have made this war? They'd tear them limb from limb. That's what they'd do. I used to think the world was a fair and sweet enough place once. They told us there, those people up in London in the Government there could be no war. The papers said it. Up to the last they said it. Every man said it to you, too. There can't be no war, they said, not a big European war, they said, the world 'd stop still in a month, they said, there'd be no trade. Seems to me men go sweating in labor and toiling with work and half the time they don't know what they're making."

Mary let her talk on. So plain it was to be seen that it gave her ease; so plain that this was the accumulation of her thoughts, flowing over from the full vessel of her heart that could hold no more.

"What's all this," she continued, "all this they've been saying about treaties and what they call International Law? Seems to me we've let men make the world long enough. They've made hell of it. How could there be peace with them making all those guns and ships and weapons which was only invented to destroy peace? I don't believe nothing's made to waste in this world. If you make a thing it'll get itself used somehow and if it don't and goes to rust, then something's wrong in the minds of them as wasted their time on it. If my man had told me before we married I'd got to give him a son as one day would be crying in my lap because he found life horrible, do you think I'd have married him? No--he told me the little home we was going to have and all the things he'd give me to put in it and how when I was going to have a child he'd work so hard as we could afford to get a girl in to help. That's what he told me those evenings we walked up and down the lanes courting, and that's what it seems to me men in high places who make the Government have been telling those thousands of mothers that have their hearts broken now this very hour. Men want to get hold of things in this world. Grasping always they are. And nations are like men, because men have had the making of them. And the nation that has the most men has the most power to grasp, and the more they grasp, the more will others get jealous of them, and the more they get jealous, the more they'll need to fight. But who gives them the power they have? Who gives them the sons they ask for? And what I want to know is why do we go on giving for them to spoil?"

Mary watched her as the last rush of her words lit up her eyes to a sullen anger.

"Countless women will think like you," she said quietly, "when this war's over. They won't listen any more when men tell them there's honor in their slavery or pride in the service that they give. We shall bring children into the world on our own conditions, not on theirs. To our own ideals we shall train them; not to the ideals of men. You're not the first who's thought these things. I've thought them too and hundreds of others are thinking them and we shan't be the last."

She stretched out her hand.

"There's a new world to be made," she said with a thrill in her voice. "Men have had their vision. We can't deny they've had that. Without their vision would they ever have been able to persuade us as they have? They've had their vision while we've had none. They've had their vision and it's brought us so far. When women find a vision of their own; when once they see in a clear picture the thoughts that are aching in their hearts now, nothing will stop them. You see and I see, but we are powerless by ourselves. I know just how powerless we are, even to have faith in our own sight. I thought I had faith once--enough faith to carry me right through--but I hadn't. At the crucial moment that faith failed me. I had trained my son so far in the light of the vision I had and then they came and with all the threats they made of the good things he was losing in life, my courage failed me. I let them have him for their own and little by little I've watched him drift away from me."

"Do you know," she added, coming to a swift realization as she spoke, "do you know I'm almost glad of this War. He volunteered at once, though he's only eighteen. He volunteered against his father's wishes. This war's going to stop him drifting. It's going to stop thousands from drifting as they were. They'll see there's something wrong with the civilization they have built up, that it's an earthquake, a volcano, a state of being which any moment may tumble or burst into flame about their heads. For that, I'm not sorry for the War. We couldn't have shown men how wrong they were without it. It'll be to their mothers they'll go--these boys--when they come back."

She took her hand away and climbed over the stile.