“First consignment,” I cabled across the Atlantic, “coming on the St. Louis, if it doesn’t strike a mine.” I follow it with a registered letter to the editor: “I hope God and you will always be good to Gilbert Parker. And now if I don’t get back—” And I give him exact directions about the material on the way. For it is no idle imagining that I may not reach home.
I am facing France and the Channel crossing. Here in London it is so long since the Zeppelins have been heard from that we are almost lulled into a sense of security that they will not come again. If they do high government circles usually hear in advance. A friend whose cousin’s brother-in-law is in the Admiralty will let me know as soon as he finds out. But now all of these neatly arranged life and death plans must go into the discard. For you see I am changing my danger back again from Zeppelins to submarines.
Let us see about the sinkings. Rumour reports now that about four out of six boats are getting across. I may get one of the four. On the night train from London, I wrap myself in my steamer-rug in the unheated compartment. Travelling is not what you might say encouraged. This journey to Paris, accomplished ordinarily in four hours, will now take twenty-four. No two time-tables will anywhere connect. There are as many difficulties as can possibly be arranged. Governments don’t want you doing this every day in the week. And there is always a question whether you will be permitted to do it at all. At Southampton I must meet the steel line with the challenge, “Who goes there?”
Again I tell all my life to the man with a pistol at his belt and a sword at his side. He looks a second time at my passport: “You want to go all sorts of places you’ve no business to,” he says sharply.
“Not all of them now,” I answer humbly, “only France.” “Well, why even France?” he persists testily. I try to tell him. I present for a second consideration one of my “most important credentials.” It is a personal letter from the French consul in New York specially and cordially recommending me to the “care and protection of all the civil and military authorities in France.” At last he tosses the letter inquiringly down his khaki line as much as to say, “Oh, well, if they want her over there?” It comes back with a nod of acquiescence from the last man, and a visé in purple ink lets me through to the boat.
Shall I remember the Sussex? You don’t so much after you’ve lived daily with death for a while. Some time during the night I am drowsily conscious that the boat begins to move. A skilled pilot has taken the wheel to guide us in and out among mines placed perilously as a protection against German submarines. Our lives are coming through dangerous narrows. In the morning we are safe in Havre. The next steel line, here, is French. And with the letter from the consul at New York in my hand I am literally and cordially and politely bowed into France.
At my hotel in the Rue de Rivoli, the American man opposite me at the dinner table the next day is just about to sail, “going back to God’s country, as far away home as I can get, to the tall pine trees on the Pacific Coast,” he tells me. He had come to Europe on an assignment that was to have been accomplished in three months. It has taken him a year to get to the front. My knife and fork drop in despair on my plate as he says it. “Cheer up,” he urges. “You just have to remember to take a Frenchman’s promises as lightly as they’re made. They always aim to please. And your hopes rise so that you order two cocktails for dinner to-night. Then to-morrow and to-morrow and to-morrow there will be only more promises. But you’re an American woman. You’ll dig through. Good luck,” he says. And a taxicab takes him.
WAR AS YOU FIRST SEE IT
Here in Paris I stand in the boulevards as I stood in the Strand and Oxford Street, and watch the new woman movement going by. Every time a man drops dead in the trenches, a woman steps permanently into the niche he used to hold in industry, in commerce, in the professions, in world affairs. It is the woman movement for which the ages have waited in ghastly truth. But, O God in Heaven, the price we pay! The price we pay! There is Madelaine La Fontaine, whom I saw yesterday in the Rue Renouard. Her black dress outlined her figure against the yellow garden wall where she stood in a little doorway. She leaned and kissed her child on his way to school. As she lifted her head, I saw the grief in her eyes and the dead man’s picture in the locket at her throat.
They are everywhere through England and France, these women with the locket at their throats. Yet not for these would your heart ache most. There are the others, the clear-eyed girls in their ’teens just now coming up into long dresses. And life may not offer them so much as the pictured locket! There will be no man’s face to fill it! Love that would have been, you see, lies slain there with all the bright boyhood that’s falling on the battlefields. O God, the price we pay!