So in land after land she took up the trust and the burden that the man who marched away had left her, to “carry on” civilisation. It was the woman movement that was to be under the flags of all nations. Ours too now flies behind the battle smoke. A little while since and our men commenced to stand in khaki on our front porches, then went down the front walk to join the long brown lines passing along Main Street on their way to France. At Washington they told us why it had to be. “They were going,” the President himself explained, “to fight for Democracy, for the right of those who submit to authority, to have a voice in their own government.” In the name of liberty, we too pass under the rod. But we fall in line to catch step with the women’s battalions of the world. We shall see them moving triumphantly even on the very strongholds against which the woman’s cause of yesterday dashed itself most vainly.
The tasks of the world were one by one being handed over to women by men who were taking up arms instead. By solemn proclamation of church and state, the patriotic duty of thus releasing every possible citizen for military service was profoundly impressed on the women of every nation. Only there was still one function that no country was asking them to assume. In England a thoughtful woman filling in her registration paper stating the national service that she could render, wrote down her qualifications like this: “Possessed of a perfectly good mentality and a University training, prepared to relieve a member of Parliament who wishes to go to the front.”
But the lady wasn’t called. Whole brigades of women swung out across the threshold of the home into industry. Regiment after regiment went by into commerce. Companies passed into the professions. Cohorts even crossed the danger zone for duty right up to the firing line. But government was still reserved for men. Could a woman vote? O, my lords, the legislative hall was not woman’s place!
Then the armies of Europe got into action. Even as their primitive forefathers had done, the men of the modern world came together to put liberty to the test of the sword. They fight for the freedoms their leaders have formulated—and for another they did not know and did not understand. A freedom that was enunciated from Holloway jail and turbulently contested in London streets is also being fought to a finish in front line trenches even along the Somme and the Aisne and the Yser.
Sergeant Jones of Company C of the 14th regiment of the Cold Stream Guards was a combatant. He was a British soldier bravely defending his flag against the Huns. And he found himself up against a great deal more that his enemies also equally face, the most revolutionary force that the world has ever known in this Great War that is overturning the destinies and opinions of individuals and the decrees of the social order as lightly and as easily as the dynasties of kings.
Sergeant Jones was bowled completely over. A German bullet hit him, and another and another. For weeks thereafter he was wandering on the borderlands of death. At length he was drifting back to earth in a roseate blur of warmth and soft comfort. Slowly his mind began to establish again the realities of existence. The roseate blur straightened away and away from beneath his chin: it was the cherry red comforter that covered his bed at Endell Street Hospital, London. Rip Van Winkle himself came back with no more wonderment. The sergeant awoke, a soldier literally in the hands of women.
He couldn’t so much as bathe his own face. A woman in a white headdress, with a red cross in the centre of her forehead, was doing it for him. When he opened his eyes again, a girl orderly in a blue tunic was saying, “You can smoke if you want to.” And she began propping pillows softly about his shoulders. There was a queer numb feeling along his side. He couldn’t find his right hand. “Never mind,” the girl said hastily. She placed the cigarette between his lips and held the lighted match. He smoked and began to remember that he had gone over the top. He pulled gently again for his right hand. He tried to draw up his left leg. At the least movement, somewhere outside the numb, tight bound area of him, there were answering stabs and twinges of pain. He wanted to flick the ashes from his cigarette. As he turned his head and his left hand found the tray on the little bedside stand, he glimpsed a long row of cherry red comforters that undulated in irregular lines. From where he lay, he could see still, white faces, bandaged heads, an arm in a sling, a man in a convalescent uniform clumsily trying out crutches. The man in the very next bed to his own lay moaning with face upturned to the light, hollow, empty, staring sockets where the eyes had been. In the bed beyond was a man with his face sewed up in an awful twisted seam that was the writhing caricature of the agony that had slashed it. A sickening sensation of nausea swept over the sergeant. God in heaven, he thought, then how much was the matter with him?
A woman was coming down the room, pausing now and then by the side of a cherry red comforter. By the waving mass of her red brown hair, she was a woman, but not such as the sergeant had seen before. His mother wore a black dress and his wife’s, he remembered, was a blue silk for Sundays and at home, why he supposed it was calico beneath their gingham aprons. But this woman was in khaki as surely as ever he had been.
Now she reached his bed. She stood looking down on him with an air of proprietorship, almost of possession. “How are you, this morning, Sergeant Jones?” she asked, with firm professional fingers reaching authoritatively for the pulse in his left wrist. Without waiting for a reply, she was proceeding calmly to turn back the covers. “We have a little work to do here, I think,” she said, gently grasping—could the sergeant be sure—it seemed to be his left leg. “The dressings, you know,” she was saying easily.
“But, but, ’er—the doctor,” he gasped in protest.