These men are not going to be interested in women who never read anything but novels and the cheap magazines, who know nothing about geography or history or politics. They will want to talk over their experiences with their mothers and sisters and wives, and if they can not listen intelligently the men are going to be disappointed.
Hundreds of soldiers with whom I talked showed me pictures of their women at home. They said loving things, proud things, but the women they were proudest of were those who were doing some kind of real war service. “My sister Elizabeth is the head of the Red Cross canteen at the union station in my town. They feed hundreds of men every time a troop train goes through.”
“My wife is pretty busy these days, with the children and her surgical dressings classes.”
These are the things the men like to think of their women doing while they are away. They see the women workers in the canteens of the Red Cross and the Y. M. C. A. in France. They see nurses and women ambulance drivers working regardless of weariness, careless of danger. They see all around them unselfish, courageous service. The spirit is in the air over there, and the men like to feel that their women at home are like that, too.
When the boys come home they want to come back to women who have been born again into high and noble patriotism. “Not only hats off to the flag. Sleeves up for the flag.” That slogan, adopted by the men in the steel industries who are speeding up the building of ships, ships, and more ships, is the patriotism our men are living every day in France, and it is the kind they have a right to expect of the women at home.
CHAPTER XXVII
WHAT KIND OF WAR WORK
Mrs. Rothschild, of Kensington Palace Green, a street in an exclusive residence district of West London, is president of a society for the distribution of Jewish literature among English Jews serving at the front, or wounded in hospitals. Not long ago the society held a large mass meeting in a seaside resort where many wealthy Jewish people go in summer.
The object of the meeting was to raise money, and Mrs. Rothschild made a special journey from her country home, a distance of twenty or thirty miles, to the resort. She did this in her zeal to make her pet war work a success, but—in so doing she broke a law of Great Britain, got herself arrested and was fined sixty shillings, about fourteen dollars and fifty cents.
For Mrs. Rothschild, ignoring the fact that gasoline is so scarce in England that most pleasure motor-cars have been retired and automobiling, except for war purposes, has been practically eliminated, deliberately hired a car to take her from her home to the meeting.
The zealous Mrs. Rothschild knew the law. She could not help knowing it, because every private car in Great Britain and almost all taxi-cabs have huge gas bags on top, and are driven by gas instead of petrol, as they call it there. But all she thought of was her war work and her mass meeting.