None of us is apt to forget, or cease to remember with pride, the flood of patriotic sacrifice that swept our country in the spring of 1917. No other self-governing people ever adopted a universal draft before their shores had been invaded and before any of their manhood had fallen in battle. No other self-governing people ever accepted the restrictions of a food-rationing scheme before any of the actual provisions concerning that food-rationing scheme had been embodied into the written laws. Other countries did it under compulsion, after their resources showed signs of exhaustion. We did it voluntarily; and it was all the more wonderful that we should have done it voluntarily when all about us was human provender in a prodigal fullness. There was plenty for our own tables.
By self-imposed regulations we cut down our supplies so that our allies might be fed with the surplus thus made available. Outside of a few sorry creatures there was scarcely to be found in America an individual, great or small, who did not give, and give freely, of the work of his or her heart and hands to this or that phase of the mighty undertaking upon which our Government had embarked and to which our President, speaking for us all, had solemnly dedicated all that we were or had been or ever should be.
All sorts of commissions, some useful and important beyond telling, some unutterably unuseful and incredibly unimportant, sprang into being. And to and fro in the land, in numbers amounting to a vast multitude, went the woman who wanted to do her part, without having the least idea of what that part would be or how she would go about doing it. She knew nothing of nursing; kitchen work, a vulgar thing, was abhorrent to her nature and to her manicured nails; she could not cook, neither could she sew or sweep—but she must do her part.
She was not satisfied to stay on at home and by hard endeavour to fit herself for helping in the task confronting every rational and willing being between the two oceans. No, sir-ree, that would be too prosaic, too commonplace an employment for her. Besides, the working classes could attend to that job. She must do her part abroad—either in France within sound of the guns or in racked and desolated Belgium. Of course her intentions were good. The intentions of such persons are nearly always good, because they change them before they have a chance to go stale.
I think the average woman of this type had a mental conception of herself wearing a wimple and a coif of purest white, in a frock that was all crisp blue linen and big pearl buttons, with one red cross blazing upon her sleeve and another on her cap, sitting at the side of a spotless bed in a model hospital that was fragrant with flowers, and ministering daintily to a splendid wounded hero with the face of a demigod and the figure of a model for an underwear ad. Preferably this youth would be a gallant aviator, and his wound would be in the head so that from time to time she might adjust the spotless bandage about his brow.
I used to wish sometimes when I met such a lady that I might have drawn for her the picture of reality as I had seen it more times than once—tired, earnest, competent women who slept, what sleep they got, in lousy billets that were barren of the simplest comforts, sleeping with gas masks under their pillows, and who for ten or twelve or fifteen or eighteen hours on a stretch performed the most nauseating and the most necessary offices for poor suffering befouled men lying on blankets upon straw pallets in wrecked dirty houses or in half-ruined stables from which the dung had hurriedly been shoveled out in order to make room for suffering soldiers—stables that reeked with the smells of carbolic and iodoform and with much worse smells. It is an extreme case that I am describing, but then the picture is a true picture, whereas the idealistic fancy painted by the lady who just must do her part at the Front had no existence except in the movies or in her own imagination.
It never occurred to her that there would be slop jars to be emptied or filthy bodies, alive with crawling vermin, to be cleansed. It never occurred to her that she would take up room aboard ship that might better be filled with horse collars or hardtack or insect powder; nor that while over here she would consume food that otherwise would stay the stomach of a fighting man or a working woman; nor that if ever she reached the battle zone she would encounter living conditions appallingly bare and primitive beyond anything she could conceive; nor that she could not care for herself, and was fitted neither by training nor instinct to help care for any one else.
When I left America last winter a great flow of national sanity had already begun to rise above the remaining scourings of national hysteria; and the lady whose portrait I have tried in the foregoing paragraphs to sketch was not quite so numerous or so vociferous as she had been in those first few exalted weeks and months following our entrance into the war as a full partner in the greatest of enterprises. My surprise was all the greater therefore to find that she had beaten me across the water. She had pretty well disappeared at home.
One typical example of this strange species crossed in the same ship with me. Heaven alone knows what political or social influence had availed to secure her passport for her. But she had it, and with it credentials from an organisation that should have known better. She was a woman of independent wealth seemingly, and her motives undoubtedly were of the best; but as somebody might have said: Good motives butter no parsnips, and hell is paved with buttered parsnips. Her notion was to drive a car at the Front—an ambulance or a motor truck or a general's automobile or something. She had owned cars, but she had never driven one, as she confessed; but that was a mere detail. She would learn how, some day after she got to Europe, and then somebody or other would provide her with a car and she would start driving it; such was her intention. Unaided she could no more have wrested a busted tire off of a rusted rim than she could have marcelled her own back hair; and so far as her knowledge of practical mechanics went, I am sure no reasonably prudent person would have trusted her with a nutpick; but she had the serene confidence of an inspired and magnificent ignorance.
She had her uniform too. She had brought it with her and she wore it constantly. She said she designed it herself, but I think she fibbed there. No one but a Fifth Avenue mantuamaker of the sex which used to be the gentler sex before it got the vote could have thought up a vestment so ornate, so swagger and so complicated.