One sunny morning as I turned from the wide Champs Elysees into a side street, I found waiting near the back entrance of a large hotel hospital a small company of gendarmes with bowed heads, their banner bearing the crêpe ribbons of mourning. Near them a few passers-by were standing reverently looking on. I waited. The hearse drove closer to the door, and later bore away the coffin. No military pomp or display! A splendid hero had given his life for his country, and this was his simple funeral. Above, on the window balconies, some maids stood looking down, crying, and wiping their tears away with their aprons. This “colonel” had lain only four days in the house of suffering, but in so short a time had been beloved enough to be missed. The gendarmes followed slowly, and in the rear a motor car bore a military official. That was all!
The sun seemed to cease shining, and the world looked cold and gray. A taxi cab hovered in sight. I hailed it, and, entering, bade the driver accompany the solemn cortage slowly. I had a sudden wish to follow this soldier to his last resting place, and as I did so, my thoughts were sad ones. How many thousands of such deaths could this war already account for, and how many thousands of hearts had it broken?
Russian Women in Time of War
By Sarah Kropotkin-Lebedeff
(In “The Outlook” for October 21, 1914. Madame Lebedeff is the daughter of the Russian Prince, Peter Kropotkin, known the world over for his brilliant books, and his revolutionary ideas.)
It is not for nothing that the Russian peasant woman is respected by her men and counted as their equal in all labor. She plows and sows and reaps with them, rising before the sun and ceasing work only when the day fades. And the work she has to undertake when her men have gone to war is no light one. Each family has at least five or six acres to cultivate. The pasture land the village holds is common. It is usually the custom in time of stress for the workers to do all the field work in common. At three in the morning the women, and even the children, turn out to work; at eleven they have a meal of dry black bread and perhaps a small cucumber. Then, while the sun is high, they sleep; and from four o’clock they work again, till sunset.... There is other work for the women to do—shoeing horses, mending plows, scythes, wheels, and so on. The blacksmith has gone to the war, the wheelwright also; so the peasant woman wields the hammer and sends the chips flying with the ax. In the summer she fells the trees and shears the sheep. And all the winter she spins and weaves, waiting for her men to come back, hoping always, and teaching her children to love their country and their father, who has gone to defend them against a strange foe.
Red Easter
By Marion Brown
(In “Femina.”)
This is a spring that has no Easter Day.