Perhaps some of them, before they came here, saw the Allied prisoners in Germany—starved, robbed, beaten, and forced to work in salt-mines or shell-areas until death made an end of their afflictions. These languishing grass-green captives must bless the Geneva Convention, and marvel at the uncultured folk who still stand by its provisions.
A camp of German prisoners practically runs itself. Fritz knows when he is well off. There is no insubordination. Men come rigidly to attention when an officer passes. The routine work is supervised by German sergeants. In this particular camp you may enter one large hut and behold some fifty German prisoners engaged upon clerical work connected with camp administration—ration indents, card-indexes, and the like. It is a task after the German heart. Each prisoner is absorbed in his occupation. He can hardly bring himself to rise to his feet when the door is thrown open for the Officer of the Day, and Achtung! is called. His pig’s eyes gleam contentedly behind his spectacles. And well they may! A German delivered from the German Army and permitted to sit all day and make a card index of himself may be excused for imagining that he has got as near Heaven as a German is ever likely to get.
“When this War is over,” observes Mr. Joe McCarthy, gazing meditatively through the barbed wire, “I guess someb’dy will have to chase these ducks back to Germany with a gun!”
Frenchwomen are not the only representatives of their sex in the American Expeditionary Force. There are hundreds of American women too, from every walk of American life. There are the hospital nurses, the stenographers, the telephone operators, the motor-drivers—all duly enrolled members of the Regular Service. Then there are the women of the Auxiliary Forces—the Red Cross, and its sister organizations—all doing a man’s share, and something over. Their work is not supposed, of course, to take them up into the battle zone. They serve at the Base, or on Lines of Communication. But in these days of Big Berthas and promiscuous bombing raids, no one is safe. The battle zone is the extent of ground which an aeroplane can cover, as the inhabitants of London know to their cost. Some of the worst devastation in France may be witnessed at certain British hospital bases on the French coast, miles from any battle-line.
Still, women have been known to find their way into the Line. As some student of nature has told us, “It is hard to keep a squirrel off the ground.”
One summer morning an old acquaintance of ours, Miss Frances Lane, and her crony, or accomplice, Miss Helen Ryker, came off night duty at their hospital and sniffed the fresh air luxuriously. They had twelve hours of complete freedom from responsibility before them—a circumstance not in itself calculated to correct Miss Lane’s natural lightness of ballast.
In most hospitals nurses coming off night duty are not unreasonably expected to spend at least some portion of the following day in bed. But youthful vitality, abetted by summer sunshine and a martial atmosphere, make a formidable combination against the forces of common sense. This particular hospital was only thirty miles from the Line. On still days the turmoil of the guns could be heard quite plainly.
After breakfasting, Miss Lane took her friend by the elbow and led her to the great military map on the wall, with the position of the battle-line clearly defined upon it by an irregular frontier of red worsted, and said:
“Helen, listen! Just where are we on this little old map?”
Miss Ryker, who possessed the unusual feminine accomplishment of being able to read maps and railroad time-tables, laid a slender finger-tip upon the blue chalk-mark which designated the geographical position of the hospital.