CHAPTER IV
Women Who Wear War Jewelry
There is a new kind of jewelry that will be coming out soon. We shall see it probably this season or at least within the next few months. It will take precedence of all college fraternity pins and suffrage buttons and society insignia and even of the costliest jewels. For it will be unique. Since no American woman has ever before worn it.
As a Mayflower descendant or a Colonial Dame or a Daughter of the Revolution, you may have proudly pinned on the front of your dress the badge that establishes your title perhaps to heroic ancestry. In the gilt cabinet in the front parlour you may even cherish among curios of the wide, wide world a medal of honour as your choicest family heirloom. Who was it who won it, grandfather or great-grandfather or great-great-grandfather? Anyway, it was that soldier lad of brave uniformed figure whose photograph you will find in the old album that disappeared from the centre-table something like a generation ago. We are getting them out from the attics now, the dusty, musty albums, and turning their pages reverently to look into the pictured eyes of the long ago. Some one who still recalls it must tell us again this soldier-boy’s story. Somewhere he did a deed of daring. Somehow he risked his life for his country. And a grateful government gave him this, his badge of courage. It’s fine to have in the family, there in the parlour cabinet. You are proud, are you not, to be of a brave man’s race? But blood, they say, will always tell. Heroism and daring may be pulsing in your veins to-day as once in his.
Have you ever thought how it might be to have your own badge of courage? Ah, yes, even though you are a woman. No, it is true, there are no such decorations that have been handed down from grandmother or great-grandmother or great-great-grandmother. It is not that they did not deserve them. But their deeds were done too far behind the front for that recognition. To-day, as it happens, the new woman movement has advanced right up to the firing line, and it’s different. Every nation fighting over in Europe is bestowing honours of war on women. There is no reason to doubt that special acts of gallantry and service on the part of American women now in action with the hospitals and relief agencies that have accompanied our troops abroad, shall be similarly recognised by the War Department. To earn a decoration, you see—not merely to inherit one—that can be done to-day.
She was the first war heroine I had ever seen, Eleanor Warrender. Over in London I gazed at her with bated breath—and to my surprise and astonishment found her just like other women.
Among those called to the colours in England in 1914, she is one of the specially distinguished who have followed the battle flags to within sight of the trenches, within sound of the guns. And, somehow, one will inadvertently think of these as some sort of super-woman. Before this there have been those who did what they could for their men under arms. There was one woman who risked her life heroically for British soldiers. And Florence Nightingale’s statue has been set along with those of great men in a London public square. In this war many women are risking their lives. They are receiving all the crosses of iron and silver and gold. And to the lady of the decoration who wears this war jewelry, it is a souvenir of sights such as women’s eyes have seldom or never looked on before since the world began.
I have said that Eleanor Warrender seemed to me just like other women. And she is at first; other war heroines are. Until you catch the expression in their eyes, which affords you suddenly, swiftly, the fleeting glimpse of the soul of a woman who knows. There is that about all real experience that does not fail to leave its mark. You may get it in the quality of the voice, in a chance gesture that is merely the sweep of the hand, or in the subtle emanation of the personality that we call atmosphere. But wherever else it may register, there are unveiled moments when you may read it in the eyes of these women who know—that they have seen such agony and suffering and horror as have only been approximated before in imaginative writing. The ancient pagans mentioned in their books that have come down to us, a place they called Hades, where everything conceivable that was frightful and awful should happen. The Christians called it Hell.
But nobody had been there. And there were those in very modern days who said in their superior wisdom that it could not be, that it did not exist. Now how are we all confounded! For it is here and now. The Lady with the Decoration has seen it. Look, I say, in her eyes.
For that is where you will find out. She does not talk of what she has been through.