Now wouldn’t it take your breath away? Here she was doing nothing at all of the kind. A very well gowned lady stood directly between the British lions, her slender figure outlined against the statue of Nelson. Her clear, ringing tones carried over the listening throng to Jones and his comrades in the Women’s Reserve Ambulance car. One small hand frequently came down into the palm of the other in the emphatic gesture that in times past brought two continents to attention. It is the hand that hurled the stone that cracked the windows of houses of government around the world.
To-day, as England’s most active recruiting agent, the greatest leader of the woman’s cause is calling men to the colours to win the war. Had she once a slogan, Votes for Women? ’Tis a phrase forgot. In the public squares of London since the war, her countrymen have heard from Mrs. Pankhurst only “Work for Women.” Round and round, you see, the world has turned.
A puzzled Sergeant Jones asked the next day for a book about the woman movement. It was Olive Schreiner’s “Woman and Labour” the librarian in khaki brought him. “But I wanted to know about the suffragettes, the suffragettes. Did you ever hear of them?” he questioned. So Rip Van Winkle might have asked, I suppose, why, say, for women who once wore hoop skirts.
The woman beside the hospital bed smiled inscrutably for an instant. “Sergeant,” she said with a level glance, “I was one, a militant, Sergeant,” she added evenly. “And the doctor was in Holloway jail, and your nurse. And the girl who drove your car yesterday was a hunger striker and—” She stopped. The truce! By the pact that was signed in Kingsway, the most radical suffragists in the world, along with all the others, were war workers now in their country’s cause and not their own.
The woman in khaki was still. Jones stared. She was dropping no bombs. Only the armies were smashing. Nothing about here was broken but men—and women were mending them!
At length they had the sergeant patched up as well as they could. He would never again work at his skilled trade. But they pinned a medal for valour on his coat lapel. And they sent him back to his wife in the north of England. The woman who met him at the door fell on her knees: “My dear, my dear!” She gathered him from a wheel chair into her arms with a sob. The man who had gone out in khaki was home again.
“Mustered out of the service,” his papers read. But his wife will never be!
Mustered out of service. So was the man with the twisted face, who never again can smile. And so was the man with the blinded eyes, whose little daughter on sunny days leads him to the Green Park where he sits on a bench and talks to the squirrels. Just so I have seen him sitting in the Gardens of the Tuileries. Just so he sits in the Tiergarten by the side of the River Spree. He is going to be “re-educated” to keep chickens. And Sergeant Jones shall learn basket weaving for a living! Oh, and there are thousands of others!
After each great drive on the front, they are passing through the hospitals to the cottage rose bowered and red roofed, to the blue trimmed cottage and the ikon blessed cottage. And now they are waited for in plain little white houses where a woman on the front porch shades her eyes with her hand to look down Main Street as far as she can see. And it isn’t the woman who can fall on her knees and gather her burden to a hungry heart whose shoulders will bear the heaviest load. It is the woman whose arms are empty never again to be filled!
These are the women whom not even the peace treaty will discharge from their “national service.” Every Great Push makes more of them. And the rest must always watch fearfully, furtively looking down Main Street as the years of strife wear on. Who shall say whether she too may be conscripted to “carry on” for life. For this is the way of war with women.