The latest and perhaps the most vivid of the flashes as of lightning which have revealed the drama of the past 365 days has shown us the part played by woman. What a part that has been! Nearly always in the histories of the great world-wars of the past the sympathy of the spectator has been more or less diverted from the unrecorded martyrdom of the myriads of forgotten women who have lost sons and husbands by the machinations of the few vain and selfish women who have governed continents by playing upon the passions of men. Thank God, there has been nothing of that kind in this case. On the contrary, woman’s part in this red year of the war has been one of purity, sacrifice, and undivided glory.
Towards the end of it we saw a procession through the streets of London of 30,000 women who had come out to ask for the right to serve the State. I do not envy the man who, having eyes to see, a heart to feel, and a mind to comprehend, was able to look on that sight unmoved. Every class of woman was represented there, the gently-born, the educated, and the tenderly-nurtured, as well as the humbly-born, the uneducated, and the heavily-burdened, the woman with the delicate, spiritual face, as well as the woman with the face hardened by toil. And they were marching together, side by side, with all the barriers broken down. It was not so much a procession of British women as a demonstration of British womanhood, and it seemed to say, “We hate war as no man can ever hate it, but it has been forced upon us all, so we, too, want to take our share in it.”
THE WORD OF WOMAN
But long before July 17, 1915, woman’s part in this war began. It began on August 5, 1914, when the first hundred thousand of our voluntary army sprang into being as by a miracle. The miracle (if I am asked to account for it) had its origin in the word of woman. Without that word we should have had no Kitchener’s Army, for “on the decision of the women, above everything else, lay the issues of the men’s choice.” {*}
* The Times.
It needs little imagination to lift, as it were, the roofs off a hundred homes, and see and hear what was going on there in those early days of the war, after the clear call went out over England, “Your King and Country need you.”
In the little house of a City clerk, married only a year before, the young wife is saying, “Yes, I think you ought to go, dear. It’s rather a pity, so soon after the boy was born... just as you were expecting a rise, too, and we were going to move into that nice cottage in the garden suburb. But, then, it will be all for the best, and you mustn’t think of me.”
Or perhaps it is early morning in the flat of a young lawyer on the day he has to leave for the front. He is dressed in his khaki, and his wife, who is busying about his breakfast, is rising to a sublime but heartbreaking cheerfulness for the last farewell. “Nearly time for you to go, Robert, if you are to get to the barracks by six.... Betty? Oh, no, pity to waken her. I’ll kiss her for you when she awakes and say daddy promised to bring her a dolly from France.... Crying? Of course not I Why should I be crying?... Good-bye then I Good-bye!...”
Or perhaps it is evening in a great house in Belgravia, and Lady Somebody is saying adieu to her son. How well she remembers the day he was born! It was in May. The blossom was out on the lilacs in the square, and all the windows were open. How happy she had been! He had a long fever, too, when he was a child, and for three days Death had hovered over their house. How she had prayed that the dread shadow would pass away! It did, and now that her boy has grown to be a man he comes to her in his officer’s uniform to say,... Ah, these partings! They are really the death-hours of their dear ones, and the women know it, although, like Andromache, they go on “smiling through their tears.”