For the amazing figure that has emerged by magic directly out of the battle smoke of this war, see the woman in khaki! Khaki, I explain to My Suffragette, is one of the most popular of government offerings for women’s wear. The material has been found most serviceable in a war zone either to die in or to live in, while you save others from dying. It is sometimes varied with woollen cloth preferred for warmth. But the essential features of the costume are preserved: the short skirt, the leather leggings, the military hat and the shoulder straps with the insignia of special service. When governments have called for unusual duty that is difficult or disagreeable or dangerous, it is the woman in khaki who responds: “Take me. I am here.” She will, in fact, do anything that there’s no one else to do.
Stick-at-nothings, the London newspapers have nicknamed the women’s Reserve Ambulance Corps of 400 women who wear a khaki uniform with a green cross armlet. With white tunics over these khaki suits, a detachment of green cross girls at Peel House, the soldiers’ club in Westminster, does house-maid duty from seven in the morning until eight at night. They are making beds and waiting on table, these young women, who, many of them, in stately English homes have all their lives been served by butlers and footmen. I saw a Green Cross girl at the military headquarters of the corps in Piccadilly making to Commandant Mabel Beatty her report of another phase of war work. She was such a young thing, I should say perhaps eighteen, and delicately bred. I know I noticed the slender aristocratic hand that she lifted to her hat in salute to her superior officer: “I have,” she said, “this morning burned three amputated arms, two legs and a section of a jaw bone. And I have carried my end of five heavy coffins to the dead wagon.” That’s all in her day’s work. She’s a hospital orderly. And it’s one of the things an orderly is for, to dispose of the by-products of a great war hospital.
See also, these ambulances that bring the wounded from Charing Cross. They are “manned” by a woman outside as well as the nurse within. There is a girl at the wheel in the driver’s seat. The Motor Transport Section of the Green Cross Society accomplishes an average weekly mileage of 2,000 miles transporting wounded and munitions. Like this they respond for any service to which the exigencies of war may call. There was the time of the first serious Zeppelin raid on London when amid the crash of falling bombs and the horror of fire flaming suddenly in the darkness, the shrieks of the maimed and dying filled the night with terror and the populace seemed to stand frozen to inaction at the scene about them. Right up to the centre of the worst carnage rolled a Green Cross ambulance from which leaped out eight khaki clad women. They were, mind you, women of the carefully sheltered class, who sit in dinner gowns under soft candle light in beautifully appointed English houses. And they never before in all their lives had witnessed an evil sight. But they set to work promptly by the side of the police to pick up the dead and the dying, putting the highway to order as calmly as they might have gone about adjusting the curtains and the pillows to set a drawing-room to rights. “Thanks,” said the police, when sometime later an ambulance arrived from the nearest headquarters, “the ladies have done this job.” Since then the Woman’s Reserve Ambulance Corps is officially attached to the “D” Division of the Metropolitan Police for air raid relief.
That girl in khaki who is serving as a hospital orderly, you notice, wears shoulder straps of blue. She comes from the great military hospital in High Holborn that is staffed entirely by women. We may walk through the wards there where we shall see many of her. Above her in authority are women with shoulder straps of red. These are they who wear the surgeon’s white tunic in the operating theatre, who issue the physician’s orders at the patient’s bedside. Now the door at the end of the ward opens. A woman with red shoulder straps stands there, whom every wounded patient able to lift his right arm, salutes as if his own military commander had appeared. “But it’s my doctor, my doctor,” exclaims the Suffragette of yesterday.
And it is. The doctor, you see, used to hold in fact the unofficial post of first aid physician to the Women’s Social and Political Union. Frequently she was wont to hurry out on an emergency call to attend some militant picked up cut and bleeding from the missiles of the mobs or released faint and dying from a hunger strike. And the doctor herself did her bit in the old days. The Government had her in Holloway jail for six weeks. Well, to-day they have her as surgeon in command of this war hospital with the rank of major. She’s so well fitted for the place, you see, by her earlier experience.
But, visibly agitated, My Suffragette again plucks at my sleeve: “Are you quite sure,” she asks, “that Scotland Yard won’t take her?”
Poor dear lady of yesterday. They’re not doing that to-day. Your woman movement was militant against the Government. This woman movement is militant with the Government. There’s all the difference in the world. And the woman in khaki has found it. Militancy of the popular kind has come to be most exalted in woman. Besides a woman doctor is too valuable in these days to be interfered with. She is no longer sent as a missionary physician to the heathen or limited to a practice exclusively among women and children. She is good enough for anywhere. One issue of the Lancet advertises: “Women doctors wanted for forty municipal appointments.” Women doctors wanted, is the call of every country. This military hospital in London of which Dr. Louisa Garrett Anderson, major, is in command, is entirely staffed with women. Paris has its war hospital with Dr. Nicole Gerard-Mangin, major in command. Dr. Clelia Lollini, sub-lieutenant, is operating surgeon at a war hospital in Venice. In Russia one of the most celebrated war doctors is the Princess Gurdrovitz, surgeon in charge of the Imperial Hospital at Tsarkoe Selo.
Oh, the khaki costume I think we may say is admired of every war office. It has found a vogue among all the allies. It has appeared the past year in America, where it has been most recently adopted. But the model for whom it was particularly made to measure was the militant suffragette of England. Nearly everybody who used to be in Holloway jail is wearing it. It’s the best fit that any of them find to-day in the shop windows of government styles. And it’s so well adapted to women to whom all early Victorian qualities are as foreign as hoop skirts. You would not expect one inured to hardship by alternate periods of starvation and forcible feeding to be either a fearsome or a delicate creature. And the courage that could horsewhip a prime minister or set off a bomb beneath a bishop’s chair, is just the kind that every nation’s calling for in these strenuous times. It’s the kind that up close to the firing line gets mentioned in army orders and decorated with all crosses of iron and gold and silver.
You will find the woman who has put on khaki at the front in all the warring countries. The Duchess of Aosta is doing ambulance work in Italy. The Countess Elizabeth Shouvaleff of Petrograd commanded her own hospital train that brought in the wounded. But it is the British woman in khaki who has gone farthest afield. The National Union’s “Scottish Women’s Hospitals,” as they are known, are right behind the armies. Staffed from the surgeons to the ambulance corps entirely by women, they go out to any part of the war zone where the need is greatest.
See the latest “unit” that is leaving Paddington Station. The equipment they are taking with them includes every appliance that will be required, from a bed to a bandage, and numbers just 1,051 bales and cases of freight. The entire unit, forty-five women, have had their hair cut short. For sanitary reasons, is the euphemistic way of explaining it. For protection against the vermin with which patients from the trenches will be infested, if you ask for war facts as they are. Units like this have gone out to settle wherever by army orders a place has been made for them, in a deserted monastery in France that they must first scrub and clean, in a refugee barracks in Russia, in a tent in Serbia where they themselves must dig the drainage trenches.