initial commit of ebook 33906HEADmain

1 files changed, 3068 insertions, 0 deletions

diff --git a/33906-8.txt b/33906-8.txt
new file mode 100644
index 0000000..4837f5f
--- /dev/null
+++ b/33906-8.txt
@@ -0,0 +1,3068 @@
+The Project Gutenberg EBook of The Sword of Deborah, by F. Tennyson Jesse
+
+This eBook is for the use of anyone anywhere at no cost and with
+almost no restrictions whatsoever.  You may copy it, give it away or
+re-use it under the terms of the Project Gutenberg License included
+with this eBook or online at www.gutenberg.org
+
+
+Title: The Sword of Deborah
+       First-hand impressions of the British Women's Army in France
+
+Author: F. Tennyson Jesse
+
+Release Date: October 25, 2010 [EBook #33906]
+
+Language: English
+
+Character set encoding: ISO-8859-1
+
+*** START OF THIS PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK THE SWORD OF DEBORAH ***
+
+
+
+
+Produced by Julia Neufeld, Suzanne Shell and the Online
+Distributed Proofreading Team at http://www.pgdp.net (This
+file was produced from images generously made available
+by The Internet Archive/American Libraries.)
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+                 THE SWORD OF DEBORAH
+
+                  F. TENNYSON JESSE
+
+
+
+
+    "Women are timid, cower and shrink
+    At show of danger, some folk think;
+    But men there are who for their lives
+    Dare not so far asperse their wives.
+    We let that pass--so much is clear,
+    Though little dangers they may fear,
+    When greater dangers men environ,
+    Then women show a front of iron;
+    And, gentle in their manner, they
+    Do bold things in a quiet way."
+
+                     THOMAS DUNN ENGLISH.
+
+[Illustration: A "FANY" WITH THE AERIAL TORPEDO DROPPED INTO THE CAMP]
+
+
+
+
+                       THE SWORD
+                      OF DEBORAH
+
+            _FIRST-HAND IMPRESSIONS OF THE
+            BRITISH WOMEN'S ARMY IN FRANCE_
+
+                          BY
+                   F. TENNYSON JESSE
+    AUTHOR OF "SECRET BREAD," "THE MILKY WAY," ETC.
+
+               NEW [Illustration] YORK
+
+               GEORGE H. DORAN COMPANY
+
+
+
+
+                  _Copyright, 1919,
+             By George H. Doran Company_
+
+      _Printed in the United States of America_
+
+
+
+
+FOREWORD
+
+
+This little book was written at the request of the Ministry of
+Information in March of 1918; it was only released for publication--in
+spite of the need for haste in its compiling which had been impressed on
+me, and with which I had complied--shortly before Christmas. Hence it
+may seem somewhat after the fair. But it appears to me that people
+should still be told about the workers of the war and what they did,
+even now when we are all struggling back into our chiffons--perhaps more
+now than ever. For we should not forget, and how should we remember if
+we have never known?
+
+
+
+
+                       CONTENTS
+
+
+    CHAPTER                                PAGE
+
+        I A.B.C.                            13
+
+       II THE FEVER CHART OF WAR            17
+
+      III BACKGROUNDS                       26
+
+       IV MY FIRST CONVOY                   34
+
+        V OUTPOSTS                          41
+
+       VI WAACS: RUMOURS AND REALITIES      48
+
+      VII THE BROWN GRAVES                  58
+
+     VIII VIGNETTES                         65
+
+       IX EVENING                           74
+
+        X NIGHT                             84
+
+       XI "AND THE BRIGHT EYES OF DANGER"   93
+
+      XII REST                             102
+
+     XIII GENERAL SERVANTS AND A GENERAL
+            QUESTION                       111
+
+     XIV NOTES AND QUERIES                 123
+
+
+
+
+                      ILLUSTRATIONS
+
+
+    A "FANNY" WITH THE AERIAL TORPEDO
+    DROPPED INTO THE CAMP      _Frontispiece_
+
+    H. M. THE QUEEN INSPECTING A VAD DOMESTIC
+    STAFF                                   48
+
+    A VAD MOTOR CONVOY                      48
+
+    WAAC GARDENERS AT WORK IN THE CEMETERY  48
+
+    WREATHS FROM MOTHERS OF THE FALLEN      48
+
+    WAACS IN THE BAKERY                     80
+
+    WAAC COOKS PREPARING VEGETABLES         80
+
+    WAAC ENCAMPMENT PROTECTED BY SAND BAGS  80
+
+
+
+
+                 THE SWORD OF DEBORAH
+
+"_Thou art an Amazon, and fightest with the sword of Deborah._"
+                             --1 HENRY VI. 1. ii.
+
+
+
+
+THE SWORD OF DEBORAH
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER I
+
+A.B.C.
+
+
+This world of initials ... in which the members of the British
+Expeditionary Force live and move--it is a bewildering place for the
+outsider. Particularly to one who, like the writer, has never been able
+to think in initials, any more than in dates or figures. The members of
+the B.E.F.--and that at least is a set of letters that conveys something
+to all of us--not only live amidst initials, but are themselves embodied
+initials. To them the string of letters they reel off is no meaningless
+form, no mere abracadabra to impress the supplicant, but each is a
+living thing, coloured, definitely patterned, standing for something in
+flesh and blood, or stone and mortar; something concrete and present to
+the mind's eye at the mere mention.
+
+Just as, to anyone who does not know New York, it seems as though all
+the streets must sound exactly alike, being merely numbered, while, to
+anyone who knows them, the words East Sixty First, say, are as distinct
+from East Twenty First, distinct with a whole vivid personality of their
+own, as Half Moon Street from Threadneedle Street--so, to the initiate
+in the game, the letters so lightly rattled off to designate this or
+that official or institution stand for vivid, real, colourable things.
+
+But at first one is reminded forcibly of that scene in "Anna Karenina"
+where Levin proposes to Kitty for the second time by means of writing in
+chalk on a table the letters "W, y, t, m, i, c, n, b, d, t, m, n, o, t,"
+and Kitty, with great intelligence, guesses that they mean "When you
+told me it could never be, did that mean never, or then?" Kitty, if you
+remember, replies in initials at almost equal length, and Levin displays
+an intelligence equal to hers. I had always found that scene hard of
+credence, but I have come to the conclusion that Levin and Kitty would
+have been invaluable at H.Q.B.R.C.S., A.P.O. 3, B.E.F.
+
+And the fog of initials is symbolic in a double manner; for not only do
+the initials stand for what they represent to those who know, but in
+their very lack of meaning for those who do not, they typify with a
+peculiar aptness the fact that after all we at home in England,
+particularly we ladies of England who live at home in ease, know very
+little indeed of even what the letters B.E.F. stand for. We have hazy
+ideas on the subject. Vaguely we know, for instance, that there are
+women, lots of women, working out in France, though quite at what,
+beyond nursing, we don't seem to know. Motor drivers ... of course, yes,
+we have heard of them. There is a vague impression that they are having
+the time of their lives, probably being quite useful too ... but of the
+technique of the thing, so to speak, what do we know? About as much as
+we know when we first hear the clouds of initials rattling like shrapnel
+about our heads if we go over to France.
+
+And if we at home know so little, how can other countries know, who have
+no inner working knowledge of English temperaments and training to go
+upon as a rough guide to at least the probable trend of things? How can
+we expect them to know? And yet knowledge of what every section of the
+working community is doing was never so vital as at the present moment,
+because never before has so much of the world been working together on
+the same job--and the biggest job in history.
+
+It is always a good thing to know what other folk are doing, even when
+they are not your sort, and what they are doing does not affect you,
+because it teaches proportion and widens vision--how much more
+important, then, when what they are doing is what you are doing too, or
+what you may yet come to do?
+
+Gentle reader--and even more especially ungentle reader--if in these
+pages I occasionally ask you to listen to my own personal confession
+both of faith and of unfaith--please realise that it is not because I
+imagine there is any particular interest in my way of seeing things, but
+simply because it is only so that I can make you see them too. You are
+looking through my window, that is all, and it is not even a window that
+I opened for myself, but that had to be opened for me. If you will
+realise that I went and saw all I did see, not as myself, but as you, it
+will give you the idea I am wishful to convey to you. Anything I feel is
+only valuable because my feeling of it may mean your feeling of it too.
+Therefore, when you read "I" in these pages, don't say "Here's this
+person talking of herself again ..." say "Here am I, myself. This person
+only saw these things so that I should see them."
+
+If you don't it will be nine-tenths my fault and one-tenth your own.
+
+Just as all the apparently endless combinations of initials in France
+are symbols of living realities to those who understand them, and of
+their ignorance to those who don't just as the very heading of "A.B.C."
+which I have given this chapter typifies both those combinations of
+initials and the fact that you and I are beginning at the very
+beginning--for no one could have been more blankly ignorant than I when
+I went over to France--so the letter "I" whenever it occurs in this book
+is a symbol for You.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER II
+
+THE FEVER CHART OF WAR
+
+
+"The women are splendid...." How tired we are of hearing that, so tired
+that we begin to doubt it, and the least hostile emotion that it evokes
+is the sense that after all the men are so much more splendid, so far
+beyond praise, that the less one says of anyone else the better. That
+sentence is dead, let us hope, fallen into the same limbo as "Business
+as Usual" and the rest of the early war-gags, but the prejudices it
+aroused, the feeling of boredom, have not all died with it. Words have
+at least this in common with men, that the evil that they do lives after
+them.
+
+Let me admit that when those in authority sent for me to go to France
+and see what certain sections of the women there were doing, I didn't
+want to go. I told them rather ungraciously that if they wanted the
+"sunny-haired-lassies-in-khaki-touch" they had better send somebody
+else. I am not, and never have been, a feminist or any other sort of an
+'ist, never having been able to divide humanity into two different
+classes labelled "men" and "women." Also, to tell the truth, the idea
+of going so far behind the lines did not appeal. For this there is the
+excuse that in England one grows so sick of the people who talk of
+"going to the Front" when they mean going to some safe château as a base
+for a personally conducted tour, or--Conscientious objectors are the
+worst sinners in this latter class--when they are going to sit at
+canteens or paint huts a hundred miles or so behind the last line of
+trenches. The reaction from this sort of thing is very apt to make one
+say: "Oh, France? There's no more in being in France behind the lines
+than in working in England." A point of view in which I was utterly and
+completely wrong. There is a great deal of difference, not in any
+increased danger, but in quite other ways, as I shall show in the place
+and order in which it was gradually made apparent to me.
+
+Also, no one who has not been at the war knows the hideous boredom of it
+... a boredom that the soul dreads like a fatal miasma. And if I had
+felt it in Belgium in those terrible grey first weeks of her pain, when
+at least one was in the midst of war, as it was then, still fluid and
+mobile, still full of alarums and excursions, with all the suffering and
+death immediately under one's eyes still a new thing; if I had felt it
+again, even more strongly, when I went right up to the very back of the
+front in the French war zone for the Croix Rouge, in those poor little
+hospitals where the stretchers are always ready in the wards to hustle
+the wounded away, and where, in devastated land only lately vacated by
+the Germans, I sat and ate with peasants who were painfully and sadly
+beginning to return to their ruined homes and cultivate again a soil
+that might have been expected to redden the ploughshare, how much the
+more then might I dread it, caught in the web of Lines of
+Communication.... I feared that boredom.
+
+And there was another reason, both for my disinclination and my lack of
+interest. We in England grew so tired, in the early days of the war, of
+the fancy uniforms that burst out upon women. Every other girl one met
+had an attack of khaki-itis, was spotted as the pard with badges and
+striped as the zebra. Almost simultaneously with this eruption came, for
+the other section of the feminine community, reaction from it. We others
+became rather self-consciously proud of our femininity, of being
+"fluffy"--in much the same way that anti-suffragists used to be fluffy
+when they said they preferred to influence a man's vote, and that they
+thought more was done by charm....
+
+With official recognition of bodies such as the V.A.D.'s and the even
+more epoch-making official founding of the W.A.A.C.'s, the point of view
+of the un-uniformed changed. The thing was no longer a game at which
+women were making silly asses of themselves and pretending to be men; it
+had become regular, ordered, disciplined and worthy of respect. In
+short, uniform was no longer fancy dress.
+
+But the feeling of boredom that had been engendered stayed on, as these
+things do. It is yet to be found, partly because there still are women
+who have their photographs taken in a new uniform every week, but more
+because of our ignorance as to what the real workers are doing. And like
+most ignorant people, I was happy in my ignorance.
+
+Well, I went, and am most thankful for my prejudice, my disinclination,
+my prevision of boredom. For without all those, what would my conversion
+be worth? Who, already convinced of religion, is amazed at attaining
+salvation? It is to the mocker that the miracle is a miracle, and no
+mere expected sequence of nature, divine or human.
+
+I was often depressed, the wherefore of which you will see, but bored,
+never. Thrilled, ashamed for oneself that one does so little--admiring,
+critical, amused, depressed, elated, all this gamut and its gradations
+were touched, but the string of boredom, never. And the only thing that
+worries anyone sent on such a quest as mine, and with the inevitable
+message to deliver at the end of it, is that terrible feeling that no
+matter how really one feels enthusiasm, how genuine one's conversion,
+there will always be the murmur of--"Oh, yes.... Of course she has to
+say all that ... it's all part of the propaganda. She was sent to do it
+and she has to do it, whether she really believes in it or not...."
+
+What can one say? I can only tell you, O Superior Person, that no matter
+what I had been sent to do and told to write I not only wouldn't but
+couldn't have, unless I meant it. I can only tell you so, I can't make
+you believe it. But let me also assure you that I too am--or shall I say
+was?--Superior, that I too have laughed the laugh of sophistication at
+enthusiasm, that I too know enough to consider vehemence amusing and
+strenuous effort ill-bred, that doubtless I shall do so again. But there
+is one thing that seems to me more ill-bred, and that is lack of
+appreciation of those who are doing better than oneself.
+
+Lest you should misunderstand me when I say that I didn't want to go to
+France this time, and feared boredom, and felt no particular interest in
+the work of the women over there, let me add that I was careful to
+sponge my mind free of all preconceived notions, either for or against,
+when once it was settled that I should go. I went without enthusiasm, it
+is true, but at least I went with a mind rigorously swept and garnished,
+so that there might enter into it visitants of either kind, angelic or
+otherwise.
+
+For this has always seemed to me in common honesty a necessary part of
+equipment to anyone going on a special mission, charged with finding
+out things as they are--to be free not only of prejudice against, but
+predisposition for; and just as a juryman, when he is empanelled, should
+try and sweep his mind bare of everything he has heard about the case
+before, so should the Special Missioner--to coin a most horrible
+phrase--make his mind at once blank and sensitised, like a photographic
+plate, for events to strike as truly as they may, with as little help or
+hindrance from former knowledge as possible.
+
+Human nature being what it is, it is probably almost impossible for the
+original attitude to be completely erased, however conscientious one is,
+and that is why I am glad that my former attitude was, if not inimical,
+at least very unenthusiastic, so that I am clear of the charge of seeing
+things as I or the authorities might have wished me to see them.
+
+And, for the first few days, as always when the mind is plunged headlong
+into a new world, though I saw facts, listened to them, was impressed,
+very impressed, by their outward show, it still remained outward show,
+the soul that informed the whole evaded me, and for many days I saw
+things that I only understood later in view of subsequent knowledge,
+when I could look back and see more clearly with the mind's eye what I
+before had seen with the physical. Yet even the first evening I saw
+something which, though only dimly, showed me a hint of the spirit of
+the whole.
+
+I was at the Headquarters of the British Red Cross--which is what the
+letters H.Q.B.R.C.S. stand for--and I was being shown some very peculiar
+and wonderful charts. They are secret charts, the figures on which, if a
+man is shown them, he must never disclose, and those figures, when you
+read them, bring a contraction at once of pity and of pride to the
+heart. For, on these great charts, that are mapped out into squares and
+look exactly like temperature charts at a hospital, are drawn curves,
+like the curves that show the fever of a patient. Up in jagged
+mountains, down into merciful valleys, goes the line, and at every point
+there is a number, and that number is the number of the wounded who were
+brought down from the trenches on such a day. Here, on these charts, is
+a complete record, in curves, of the rate of the war. Every peak is an
+offensive, every valley a comparative lull.
+
+Sheet after sheet, all with those carefully-drawn numbered curves
+zigzagging across them, all showing the very temperature of War....
+
+With this difference--that on these sheets there is no "normal." War is
+abnormal, and there is not a point of these charts where, when the line
+touches it, you can say--"It is well."
+
+As I looked at these records I began to get a different vision of that
+tract of country called "Lines of Communication" which I had come to
+see. This, where War's very pulse was noted day by day, was the
+stronghold of War himself. Here he is nursed, rested, fed with food for
+the mouths of flesh and blood, and food for the mouths of iron; here,
+the whole time, night and day, as ceaselessly as in the trenches, the
+work goes on, the work of strengthening his hands, and so every man and
+woman working for that end in "L. of C." is fighting on our side most
+surely. Something of the hugeness and the importance of it began to show
+itself.
+
+And, as regards that particular portion which I had come out to see, I
+began to get a glimmering of that also, when it was told me, that of
+those thousands of wounded I saw marked on the charts, a great
+proportion was convoyed entirely by women. There are whole districts,
+such as the Calais district, which includes many towns and stations,
+where every ambulance running is driven by a woman. Not only the fever
+rate of War is shown on those charts, but just as to the seeing eye,
+behind any temperature-chart in a hospital, is the whole construction of
+the great scheme--doctors, surgeons, nurses, food, drugs, money,
+devotion, everything that finds its expression in that simple sheet of
+paper filled in daily as a matter of routine, so behind these charts of
+War's temperature kept at H.Q. is the whole of the complex organisation
+known as the British Red Cross. And outstanding even amongst so much
+that is splendid are certain bands of girls behind the lines, who, not
+for a month or two, but year in, year out, during nights and days when
+they have known no rest, have they, also, had their fingers on the pulse
+of war.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER III
+
+BACKGROUNDS
+
+
+At H.Q.B.R.C.S. the D. of T. told me the first things for me to see were
+the F.A.N.Y.'s and the G.S.V.A.D.'s. That is the sort of sentence that
+was shot at me on my first day. I have told you what H.Q.B.R.C.S. means;
+the D. of T. means Director of Transport; the F.A.N.Y. is the First Aid
+Nursing Yeomanry, and the G.S.V.A.D. is the General Service Voluntary
+Aid Detachment. Now the V.A.D. I had heard of, and of its members,
+always called V.A.D.'s, but G.S.V.A.D. was something new to me. Yet the
+importance of the distinction, I soon learned, was great.
+
+Four sets of initials represented my chief objectives in France, the
+F.A.N.Y.'s, the V.A.D.'s, the G.S.V.A.D.'s, and the W.A.A.C.'s. Of these
+the former are known as the Fannies, and the last named as the Waacs,
+owing to the tendency of the eye to make out of any possible combination
+of letters a word that appeals to the ear. Of these four bodies, the
+Fannies and the V.A.D.'s were in existence before the war, being amongst
+those who listened to the voice of Lord Roberts crying in the
+wilderness. They are all unpaid, voluntary workers, and they rank
+officially as officers. Among themselves, of course, they have their own
+officers, but socially, so to speak, every Fanny and V.A.D. is ranked
+with the officers of the Army. But with the G.S.V.A.D.'s and the Waacs
+it is not so. They are paid, and are to replace men; G.S.V.A.D.'s work
+in motor convoys and at the hospitals, as cooks, dispensers, clerks,
+etc., and the Waacs work for the combatant service. Except for their
+officers, who rank with officers of the Army, the members of these two
+bodies are considered as privates.
+
+And as both the Fannies and the Waacs go in khaki, and both the V.A.D.'s
+and the G.S.V.A.D.'s in dark blue, it will be seen that confusion is
+very easy to the uninitiate. That is my only excuse for perpetrating the
+worst blunder that has probably ever been committed in France. Taken to
+tea at a Fanny convoy I committed the unspeakable sin of asking whether
+they were Waacs....
+
+They were very kind to me about it, but when I eventually grasped the
+system, I saw it was as though I had asked a Brass Hat whether he
+belonged to the Salvation Army. Yet when I told the sad tale of my
+_gaffe_ to the members of a V.A.D. convoy, they only seemed to think it
+must have been quite good for the Fannies ... but somehow it wasn't
+equally good for them when I timidly asked whether they were
+G.S.V.A.D.'s ... though they were also very kind to me about it.
+
+The D. of T. motored me over to the Fannies' convoy, on a pale day of
+difficult sunlight. Is there anywhere in the world, I wondered, more
+depressing--more morbid--landscape, than that round Calais? It weighs on
+the soul as a fog upon the senses, and it seemed to me that only people
+of such a tenacious gaiety as the French or such an independence from
+environment as the British could survive there for long. I have seen
+country far flatter that was yet more wholesome, and I loathe flat
+country. There is something in the perpetual repetition of form in the
+country round Calais, the endless sameness of its differences, that is
+peculiarly oppressive. Pearly skies blotted with paler clouds, endless
+rows of bare poplars, like the skeletons of dead flames, yellowish roads
+unwinding for ever, acres of unbroken and sickly green, of new-turned
+earth of an equally sad brown ... and over all the trail of war, whose
+footprint is desolation. The occupation even of an army of defence means
+camp after camp; tin huts, wooden huts, zinc roofs; hospitals; barbed
+wire; mud. And, amidst all this, and the sudden reminders of more active
+warfare in houses crumpled to a scatter of rubble by a bomb, there are
+people working, year in, year out, undismayed by the sordid litter of
+it....
+
+The saving of it all to the newcomer, though even that must pall on
+anyone too accustomed, is that, like Pater's Monna Lisa, upon this part
+of France "the ends of the world are come" ... (and who shall wonder if
+in consequence "her eyelids are a little weary"?). Inscrutable Chinamen,
+silent as shadows, flashing their sudden smiles, even more mysterious
+than their immobility, turned from their labour to watch the passing of
+the car; Kaffirs from South Africa, each with a white man's vote,
+voluntarily enlisted for the Empire, swung along; vividly dark
+Portuguese, clad in grey, came down to their rest camps; Belgians
+trotted past with their little tassels bobbing from their jaunty caps.
+And, in great droves along the roads, or, sometimes, more solitary in
+the fields, the German prisoners stood at gaze, their English escort
+shepherding.
+
+The first time my companion told me we were coming on German prisoners,
+I shut my eyes, determined to open them unprejudiced, with a vision
+clear of all preconceptions; really, at the bottom of my heart,
+expecting that I should find them extraordinarily like anyone else....
+But they were not. They were all so like each other, that by the time
+you had seen several hundreds you were still wondering confusedly
+whether they were all relations ... even my Western eye detected more
+difference between the types of Chinamen I met upon the road than in
+these Teutons. Of course, the round brimless cap has something to do
+with it, as has the close hair-crop, but when all is said, how much of a
+type they are, how amazingly so, as though they had all been bred to one
+purpose through generations! The outstanding ear, placed very low on the
+wide neck, the great development of cheekbones and of the jaw on a level
+with the ears, and then the sudden narrowing at the short chin ... and
+the florid bulkiness of them. A detachment of _poilus_ swung past in
+their horizon blue, and what a different type was flashed up against
+that background of square jowls, what a thin, nervous, wiry type, all
+animation....
+
+The Germans were so exactly like all the photographs of prisoners one
+has seen in the daily papers that it was quite satisfying; I remember
+the same feeling of satisfaction when on first going to New England I
+saw a frame house and an old man with a goatee beard driving a
+spider-wheeled buggy, exactly like an illustration out of _Harper's_....
+
+All of which--with the exception of the old man out of _Harper's_--is
+not as irrelevant as it may appear, in fact, is not irrelevant at all,
+for it is these things, this landscape, these varied races, this whole
+atmosphere, which goes to make life's background for everyone quartered
+hereabouts, and it is the background which, especially to memory in
+after years, makes so great a part of the whole.
+
+As we went, remember, I still knew nothing about the work I had come out
+to see or the lives of those employed in it, I could only watch flashing
+past me the outward setting of those lives, and try, from the remarks of
+my companion, to build up something else. Yet what I built up from him,
+as what I had built up from the talk at my hotel the night before, was
+more the attitude of the men towards the women than the attitude of the
+women towards their life, though it was none the less interesting for
+that. And here I may as well record, what I found at the beginning--and
+I saw no reason to reverse my judgment later on--and that was no trace
+of sex-jealousy in any department whatsoever. I only met genuine
+unemotional, level-headed admiration on the part of the men towards the
+women working amongst them. The D. of T. was no exception, and opined
+that if the war hadn't done anything else, at least it had killed that
+irritating masculine "gag" that women couldn't work together. For that,
+after all, will always be to some minds the surprise of the thing--not
+that women can work with men, but that they can work together.
+
+"People talk a lot," he said reflectively, "about what's to happen after
+the war ... when it's all over and there's nothing left but to go home.
+What's going to happen to all these girls, how will they settle down?"
+
+"And how do you think...?"
+
+"I don't think there'll be any trouble whether they marry or not. They
+will have had their adventure."
+
+I looked at him and thought what a penetrating remark that was. Later,
+in view of what I came to think and be told, I wondered whether it were
+true after all; later still came to what seems to me the solution of it,
+or as much of a solution as that can be which still leaves one with an
+"I wonder...."
+
+He told me tales of the Fannies who, being now under the Red Cross, came
+directly under his jurisdiction. He told me of a lonely outpost at the
+beginning of the war where there was only one surgeon and two Fannies,
+and how for twenty-four hours they all three worked, "up to the knees in
+blood," amputating, tying up, bandaging, without rest or relief. How the
+whole of the work of the convoying of wounded for the enormous Calais
+district was done entirely by the girls, of how, at this particular
+Fanny convoy to which we were going, they were raided practically every
+fine night, and that their camp was in about the "unhealthiest spot," as
+regarded raids, in the district. How during the last raid nine aerial
+torpedoes fell around the camp, and exploded, and one fell right in the
+middle and did not explode, or there would have been very little Fanny
+Convoy left ... but how it made a hole seven feet deep and weighed a
+hundred and ten pounds and stood higher than a stock-size Fanny. And,
+crowning touch of jubilation to the Convoy, of how the French
+authorities had promised to present it to them after it was cleaned out
+and rendered innocuous, to their no small contentment. As well-earned a
+trophy as ever decorated a mess-room....
+
+He talked very like a nice father about to show off his girls and back
+them against the world.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER IV
+
+MY FIRST CONVOY
+
+
+We arrived on a great day for the Fannies--the famous Aerial Torpedo had
+preceded us by a bare hour. There it lay, on the floor of the mess-room,
+reminding me, with its great steel fins and long rounded nose, of a dead
+shark. The Commandant showed it us with pride, and every successive
+Fanny entering was greeted with the two words--"It's come." The D. of T.
+swore he would have it mounted on a brass and mahogany stand with an
+engraved plate to tell its history. Two strong Fannies reared it up, for
+even empty its weight was noteworthy, and it stood on its murderous nose
+with its wicked fins, the solid steel of one of them bent and crumpled
+like a sheet of paper, above my head. A great trophy, and a hard-earned
+one.
+
+This was the first camp I saw, and a very good one as camps go. (I
+merely add that latter sentence because personally I think any form of
+community life the most terrible of hardships.) It is rather pathetic to
+see how, in all the camps in France, the girls have managed to get not
+only as individual but as feminine touches as possible. I never saw a
+woman's office anywhere in France that was not a mass of flowers; and
+window-boxes, flower-beds, basins of bulbs, are cultivated everywhere.
+Every office, too, though strictly businesslike, has chintz curtains of
+lovely colours. You can always tell a woman's office from a man's, which
+is a good sign, and should hearten the pessimists who cry that this
+doing of men's work will de-feminise the women.
+
+The Commandant at this Fannies' camp took me into her office, and she
+and the D. of T.--who chimed in whenever he thought she was not saying
+enough in praise of his admired Fannies--told me the rough outlines of
+the history of the body since the beginning of the war. Though now
+affiliated to the Red Cross, they were an independent body before the
+war, and when hostilities broke out were a mounted corps, with horse
+ambulances. They offered themselves to the English authorities, were
+refused, and came out to the war-zone and worked for the Belgians for
+fourteen months. They ran a hospital in Calais staffed by themselves for
+nurses and with Belgian doctors and orderlies. Then, in the beginning of
+1916 they offered to drive motor ambulances and thus release Red Cross
+men drivers, and now they are running, with the exception of two
+ambulances for Chinese, the whole of the Calais district, and have
+released many A.S.C. men as well. It is a big area, with many outlying
+camps where there are detached units. As a rule, there is only one girl
+to each ambulance, but in very lonely spots the allowance is three girls
+to two cars. At St. Omer the authorities at first objected to having
+them, but now they have taken over the whole of the Red Cross and A.S.C.
+ambulances there.
+
+At this camp that I saw, they have no day or night shifts, as there is
+not much night work except during a push, when everyone works night and
+day without more than a couple of hours' sleep snatched with clothes
+on--indeed, I heard of a convoy where for a fortnight the girls never
+took off their clothes, but just kept on with fragmentary rests. The
+other occasion when there is night work is when there is a raid. As I
+have said, the camp is in a peculiarly unhealthy spot for bombs, and
+until just lately the girls had no raid-shelter. Now one has been dug
+for them, roofed with concrete and sandbags and earth, which would stand
+anything short of a direct hit from some such pleasant little missile as
+is now the pride of the camp.
+
+But at first, even when the raid-shelter was built, there was no
+telephone extension to it from the office, and therefore the Commandant
+had to stay in the office with one other to take the telephone calls,
+then had to cross the open, in full raid, and going to the mouth of the
+shelter call out the names of the girls whose turn it was to drive the
+ambulances. She told it me as exemplifying the spirit of the girls, that
+never once, through all the noise and danger, did a girl falter, always
+answered to her name and came coolly and unconcernedly up the steps and
+went across to her car. But it seemed to me that it was as good to sit
+quietly in a matchboard office and await the messages, to say nothing of
+taking them across that danger zone. Now an order has gone forth that
+the ambulances are not to start till the raid is over, as they are too
+precious to be risked.
+
+It is not a bad record, this continuous service of the Fannies since the
+outbreak of war, is it?
+
+For remember it is not work that can be taken up and dropped. You sign
+on for six months at a time, and only have two fortnights of leave in
+the year. And the girls sign on, again and again; they are nearly all
+veterans at it. And, comfortable as the camp has been made--all the
+necessities of life are provided by the War Office and the "frills" by
+the Red Cross--and in spite of the tiny separate cubicles--greatest
+blessing of all--decorated to taste by the owner, in spite of everything
+that can be done to make the girls happy and keep them well--it is still
+a picnic. And a picnic may be all very well for a week or even a
+fortnight, but a picnic carried on over the years is not at all the same
+thing....
+
+Certainly they all seemed very happy, and are all very well. Girls who
+go out rather delicate soon become strong in the hard open air life,
+and there has not been a single case of strain from working the heavy
+ambulances. The girls do all cleaning and oiling of the cars themselves,
+and all repairs with the exception of the very complicated cases, for
+which they are allowed to call on the help of two mechanics, but only
+after the request has gone through those in authority.
+
+The domestic staff, with the exception of one Frenchwoman in the
+kitchen, is supplied by the girls themselves, and on this subject of
+domestic staffs in France I shall say more later. Their food is Army
+rations, which are excellent, as I can testify after straitened
+England--supplemented by milk and fresh vegetables, while the Red Cross
+gives the extras of life such as custard, cornflower, etc.
+
+When at tea I saw butter brought forth in a lordly dish and was told to
+take as much as I liked on hot toast, I felt it was a solemn moment.
+There seemed a very care-free atmosphere about the Fannies, and at this
+camp the Commandant was known as "Boss," a respectful familiarity I did
+not meet anywhere else. Some irreverent soul had even inscribed it on
+the door of her cubicle. The Fannies "break out," so to speak, all over
+the place; even the bath-room is not sacred to them. It is a pathetic
+sight, that bath-room of the Fannies, more pathetic, I thought it, after
+I had seen the rows of big baths in other camps. The Fannies have a
+limited and capricious water supply, and their bath is so small as to
+remove forcibly the temptation for one person to use it all up. Perched
+on two stalks of stone stands a long bath in miniature, long enough to
+sit in with the knees up, but of no known human size. Inscribed above
+it--(under a fresco in black and white of cats in the moonlight)--are
+these touching words: "Do not turn on the hot water when the cold is off
+or the Boiler will Bust."
+
+Everything I have been saying and describing is external, I know, but
+you see I was still grasping at externals, though underneath certain
+things were beginning to worry me. But I couldn't bring myself to voice
+anything I was wondering to these splendid strangers; later, though I
+never was with any one convoy more than a night, still I got the feeling
+that seeing so many of them had made me more familiar with the ones I
+happened to be with at the time, and so I screwed myself up to the point
+and was richly rewarded. But that, as Mr. Kipling would say, is another
+story.
+
+We drove away in the windy evening, past the parked rows of great glossy
+ambulances, and I bore with me chiefly an impression of gaiety, of a set
+purpose, of a certain schoolgirlish humour and that knack of making the
+best of everything which community life engenders when it does not do
+exactly the reverse; of long wooden huts that might have been bare but
+were decked with pictures, patterned chintzes, bookshelves, cushions;
+and above all, I took an impression of a certain quality that I can only
+describe as "stark" in the girls, though that is too bleak a word for
+what I mean. It is a sort of splendid austerity, that pervades their
+look and their outlook, that spiritually works itself out in this
+determined sticking at the job, this avoidance of any emotion that
+interferes with it, and in their bodies expresses itself in a disregard
+for appearances that one would never have thought to find in human
+woman. It leaves you gasping. They come in, windblown, reddened, hot
+with exertion, after recklessly abandoning their hands to all the harsh
+treatment of a car--the sacrifice of the hands is no small one, and
+every girl driving a car makes it--they come in, toss their caps down,
+brush their hair back from their brow in the one gesture that no woman
+has ever permitted to herself or liked in a lover--and they don't mind.
+
+It is amazing, that disregard for appearances, but of course it is
+partly explained by the fact that the natural tendency in young things
+would be to accentuate anything of that kind once it was discovered ...
+and for the rest--I really think they are too intent on what they are
+doing and care too little about themselves or what anyone may be
+thinking of them. What a blessed freedom!... This at last is what it is
+to be as free as a man.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER V
+
+OUTPOSTS
+
+
+It is a matter of temperament whether community life, with its enforced
+lack of individualism, or the intense refraction engendered by the fact
+of two people only living together in a solitude, is the more trying. In
+the former state one may hope to attain isolation from the very
+superabundance of personalities all around, but for the latter there is
+at least this to be said, that if the two feel like leaving each other
+alone there is no distraction of noise and presences. Either is a test
+to persons who are sensitive about their right to solitude, a greater
+one than to those who mix happily with their fellow humans. Both are to
+be found in their best expression among the English girls in France.
+From the Fanny convoy to a lonely rest station was a change that set me
+thinking over the problem, a problem in which I was a mere observer, but
+which all these girls had solved each in her different way, doubtless,
+but as far as I could tell, to the nicest hair-fine edge of success.
+
+My first rest station was in an out-of-the-way little place, bleak and
+treeless, and consisted of a wooden hut built alongside the railway
+line. In this hut lived the two V.A.D.'s who ran the show--which means
+that they do the cooking for themselves and for the trains which they
+supplied with food, that they dispense medicines for the patients who
+appear daily at sick parade, and give first aid to accidents, change
+dressings if any cases on a hospital train need it, feed
+stretcher-bearers and ambulance drivers, whose hours often prevent them
+getting back to billets for regular meals, take in nurses who are either
+arriving or leaving by a night train and would otherwise have nowhere to
+go, and in their spare time--if you can imagine them having any--grow
+their own vegetables, and make bandages, pillows, and other supplies for
+the troops. Just two girls, voluntary unpaid workers, who are nurses,
+needle-women, doctors, chemists, gardeners and general servants, and
+whose work can never be done, or, when done, has to begin at once all
+over again. No recreation except what they find in books and themselves,
+nowhere to go, and that perpetual silhouette of railway trucks and the
+hard edge of station roof out of the window, of shabby houses and their
+own tiny yard at the back, the noise of shunting and train whistling in
+their ears night and day, and with it all--worst touch of the lot--to
+have to do their own work for themselves.
+
+To slave for others all day as long as you can come in and find things
+ready for you at night--your hot cocoa in its cup and your hot-water
+bag--that great consolation of the women members of the B.E.F.--in your
+bed, is endurable. But to come in and have no cocoa if you don't make it
+yourself, no bag if you don't see to it--that is a different affair, and
+that is where these two girls seemed to me to touch a point that of
+necessity the others I had seen did not. And now that women are doing
+men's work it is to be supposed they have found out the value of meals
+and no longer look on an egg with one's tea as the greatest height to
+which nourishment need rise, and hence have honourably to set about
+cooking for themselves--and there is no woman but will understand the
+boredom of that--the rations that a paternal army insists on showering
+upon them. Under such circumstances to work is human, but to eat divine.
+
+As I stepped out of the car at the door, feeling terribly impertinent at
+this rolling round in luxury to gaze at the work of my betters, one of
+the V.A.D.'s came to the door of the shanty to greet us. She was a fair
+creature, with windblown yellow hair and a smut which kindly accident
+had placed exactly like an old-time patch upon the curve of one flushed
+cheek. She was wrapped in a big pinafore of butcher blue, and explained
+that she was "cleaning up."
+
+It all looked very clean to me, certainly the little dispensary, the
+room into which you first walked, was spotless, everything ranged ready
+for Sick Parade, glass, white enamel, metal, shining in the shaft of
+sunlight which came palely in at the open doorway. To the left was the
+kitchen, stone-floored, fitted with an English stove, to the right the
+tiny slip of sitting-room from which opened the two still narrower
+little bedrooms. That was all.
+
+This is the atmosphere in which the two girls live, but, as usual, they
+have done everything that is possible with it. Brilliant curtains,
+pictures, rows of books--the rest stations keep up a sort of circulating
+library, exchanging their books from time to time amongst themselves by
+way of the ambulance trains, which are thus supplied with a library
+also--and charming pottery ranged along the shelves. The rest stations
+rather make a point of their pottery. It is their tradition always to
+drink out of bowls instead of cups, and their plates have the triumphant
+Gallic cock, in bravery of prismatic plumage, striding across them.
+
+After I had said good-bye to the golden girl of the inspired smut, I
+went on to a bigger rest station at a terminus and was in time to lunch
+there. It was a more sophisticated affair than that which I had left,
+yet when this rest station was started, at the beginning of the war, its
+habitation was a railway truck--for the romance of which some of those
+who were there in that first rush, when you were never off your feet
+for twenty-four hours at a time, sometimes sigh....
+
+Now part of the station buildings has been partitioned off for them, and
+there is a fairly big dispensary, with a bed for dressings and accident
+cases, of which quite a number are brought in, a kitchen, a little
+dining-room where all the furniture is home-made--deep chairs out of
+barrels and the like--and behind that a big storeroom, crammed from
+floor to ceiling with stores. The girls do not sleep here, but in
+billets at the town, but they have to provide meals at any hour and meet
+all the ambulance trains with food and extra comforts.
+
+We had a very good lunch, of stew and onions and potatoes, big bowls of
+steaming coffee, and a pudding with raisins, all cooked by one of the
+V.A.D. domestic staff, who always had to slip into her place last to eat
+it, and get out of it first to serve the next course. I saw only these
+two rest stations, each typical in its way, the one of the isolated and
+the other of the central kind, but they are scattered up and down the
+line, varying in character according to the needs of the particular
+place.
+
+At one, for instance, there is a small ward attached, where slight
+cases, not bad enough to be admitted to the hospital, and yet requiring
+some attention, can be kept for a day or two, thus possibly avoiding
+serious illness. Near to this same one is a Labour Battalion, many of
+the men from which are out-patients whose medical inspection is held at
+the rest station. Near another is a large convalescent camp, the O.C. of
+which looks to the V.A.D.'s of the rest station for help in various
+ways.
+
+At them all there is always the work of feeding the stretcher-bearers
+and ambulance drivers, who in times of pressure have to spend many hours
+at their work of unloading the trains without any chance of getting a
+regular meal. In the early days of the rest stations, when the ambulance
+trains were often merely improvised, food and dressings had to be
+provided for all the wounded on board, but now, when the working of the
+British Red Cross is as near perfection as any human organisation well
+can be, the men have every care taken of them on the perfectly-fitted
+trains. Yet there is much attention given to the sick and wounded of
+every nation who come in on the trains, attention chiefly consisting of
+the giving of extra comforts--cocoa, lemons, shirts, slippers,
+cigarettes, cushions--and the re-dressing of wounds, while a great deal
+as well as feeding them is done for the staffs of the trains, for whom,
+besides the lending library, an exchange of gramophone records and of
+laundry has been arranged.
+
+Perhaps the most interesting thing to note about the rest stations is
+that they are one of the few points of contact between the members of
+the B.E.F. and the French population. Our camps, our hospitals, our
+motor convoys, are all little Englands in themselves, but every morning
+to the sick parade of these rest stations come not only the local
+V.A.D.'s and ambulance drivers, but the French civilian population as
+well, and in greater and greater numbers. Accidents are brought to a
+rest station very often in preference to being taken anywhere else, and
+anxious mothers bring Jean or Marie when a mysterious ailment shows
+itself in untoward spot or sneeze. The Gallic cock is more than a
+decoration as he strides across the pottery of the rest stations--he is
+become a symbol as well.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER VI
+
+WAACS: RUMOURS AND REALITIES
+
+
+When I spoke at H.Q. of the depression I found in all the landscape
+around and of its peculiar morbid quality, nearly everyone assured me
+that I should find the country round E----, whither I was going, far
+more depressing. "There is nothing but sand dunes and huts, miles of
+huts, hospitals and camps and so on...." It did not sound very
+delightful.
+
+But to differing vision, differing effects, and personally, I loved
+E----; terrible as cities of huts generally are, here they seemed to me
+to have lost much of their terror. I loved the long rippling lines of
+dunes, the decoration of hundreds of tall pines that came partly against
+the sandy pallor, partly against the vivid steely blue of the river
+beyond, I loved the bare woods we passed all along the road, the trees
+still not perceptibly misted with buds but giving, with their myriads of
+fine massed twigs, an effect of clouded wine-colour. And was there ever
+such a countryside for magpies? Superstition dies before their numbers,
+helpless to count them, so far are they beyond the range of sorrow,
+mirth, marriage and birth, at any one glance. Everywhere through those
+winey woods there went up the fanlike flutter of black-and-white, the only
+positive notes in all the delicate universe, compact of pearly skies, dim
+purples of earth, and pale irradiation of the sun.
+
+[Illustration: H. M. THE QUEEN INSPECTING A "VAD" DOMESTIC STAFF]
+
+[Illustration: A V. A. D. MOTOR CONVOY]
+
+[Illustration: WAAC GARDENERS AT WORK IN THE CEMETERY]
+
+[Illustration: WREATHS FROM MOTHERS OF THE FALLEN]
+
+On the roads there was the usual medley of the races of the world, added
+to as we neared E---- by Canadian nurses in streaming white veils and
+uniforms of brilliant blue, and also--for surely the most delightful of
+created blessings may rank as a race of the world--by the glossy golden
+war-dogs, who also have their training camp near here, and take their
+walks abroad, waving their plumy tails and jumping up on their masters,
+like any leisured dog at home.
+
+But--to my sorrow--I was not sent to look at war-dogs, and so had to
+pass by and leave the wagging plumes behind. I had several ends in view
+at E----; I had to see the large Waac camp there, its outflung
+ramifications, and the work that the Waacs did in the men's camps; and I
+had to see the V.A.D. Motor Convoy, at which I was to spend a night.
+Incidentally, I had high hopes of getting permission to go out in an
+ambulance with the latter, though it is against the most sacred Army
+Orders for anyone not in uniform to be seen upon an ambulance. Here I
+may say that the permission was granted by a powerful individual known
+as the D.D.M.S., though he mentioned that being shot at dawn was the
+least painful thing that ought to happen to me for doing it.
+
+I was going first to the Waac headquarters, to see the Area Controller,
+who corresponds to an Area Commandant in the V.A.D.'s and whose rank
+approximates to that of a Major. She is supreme in her area and only the
+Chief Controller of the Waacs is above her. Below her are her Unit
+Administrators, who are in charge of units and approximate to captains,
+and have their Deputy and Assistant Administrators whom for convenience'
+sake we can classify as lieutenants and second lieutenants.
+
+This is the place to say frankly that I had heard--as had we all--"the
+rumors" that were flying round about the Women's Army. They "weren't a
+success," ... "it had been found to be unworkable ..." and, as reason, a
+more specific charge. Need I say what that specific charge was? What is
+it that always jumps to the mind of the average materialist? The most
+innocent thing in the world--in itself--and the cause of most of the
+scandal since the dawn of civilisation. A Baby.
+
+There is a certain type of mind which always jumps to babies, apparently
+looking on them as the Churchmen of the Middle Ages looked on women--as
+the crowning touch of evil in an evil world. If you remember, there was
+great agitation in certain quarters at the beginning of the war, over
+"War-Babies." They were going to inundate the country, they were going
+to be a very serious proposition indeed. The Irish question,
+Conscription, Conscientious Objectors, were going to be as nothing to
+the matter of the War-Babies. It is perhaps from some points of view a
+pity that the War-Babies didn't materialize, but that of course is
+another question altogether. "Passons oultre," as the great Master of
+delicate--and indelicate--situations used to say.
+
+The point as regards the Women's Army is that the whole of the agitation
+against it is a libel, and one which decent people should be ashamed to
+circulate even as supposititious. Quite apart from the evidence of my
+own ears and eyes, at various camps I was supplied with the official
+statistics for the Women's Army from March of 1917 to February of 1918.
+And of these women who "have not been a success," as the mischievous
+gossip has had it, how many do you think have proved failures out of six
+thousand? In the time mentioned fourteen have been sent home for
+incompetence, without any slur on their characters; twenty-three for
+lack of discipline, mostly in the early days when the girls did not
+realise what being in the Army meant and thought if they wanted to go to
+any particular place there was no reason why they shouldn't; and fifteen
+who were already _enceinte_ before leaving England and which even the
+most censorious can hardly lay to the charge of the B.E.F. And of all
+that six thousand what percentage do you suppose has had to be sent back
+for what is euphemistically known, I believe, as "getting into trouble,"
+since landing in France? No percentage at all, if I may express myself
+thus unmathematically, but exactly five cases. Five, out of six
+thousand. Compare that with the morality of any village in England, or
+anywhere else in the world, and then say, if you dare to be so obviously
+dishonest, that there is any reason why the Women's Army should be
+aspersed.
+
+These statistics were given to me at the office of the Area Controller,
+and later repeated at the Women's Army H.Q. by the Controller in Chief,
+but on that first sunny morning amongst the pines and pale golden
+sand-dunes it was naturally the human and individual side rather than
+any of figures, however startling, that claimed the mind the most. For
+one thing, I had the actual organisation and attributes of the Women's
+Army to learn. I knew nothing. The actual working knowledge, apart from
+impressions and things learnt only by seeing them, that I gathered
+during the days I spent at various Waac centres is as follows:
+
+The Women's Army differs from the F.A.N.Y. and the V.A.D. in being a
+paid instead of a voluntary body, in being directly under the Army, not
+the Red Cross, and in its members being ranked as privates. But it also
+differs from the G.S.V.A.D., though that too is paid and its members
+rank as privates. The G.S.V.A.D. is far more "mixed"; its members are of
+all classes and educations, and are drafted off for work accordingly,
+but the bulk of the Waacs are working girls and do manual labour, such
+as gardening, cooking, baking, scrubbing, etc., though there are amongst
+them girls of a more specialised education who are signallers and
+clerks. The officers, of course, are women of education who have
+undergone a stiff training and been carefully selected for the posts
+they fill. For, as will be seen, nearly everything depends upon the Waac
+officers; they have certainly a greater power for good or harm than the
+officers in the Regular Army, and never were both the force and danger
+of personality more acutely illustrated than in the position of the Waac
+leaders.
+
+A Unit Administrator has to know individually every girl in her camp,
+though there may be several hundreds. She has to blend with her absolute
+authority a maternal interest and supervision. While she has no power to
+say whom a girl shall or shall not "walk out" with, she yet makes it her
+business to know what choice of men friends the girl makes and to
+influence, as far as she can, that choice towards discretion. She must
+not nag but must inculcate by subtle methods a realisation of what is
+due to the uniform, a sense of the "idea," the "symbol," of it. She
+does not actually say to a girl that she is not to walk arm in arm with
+a Tommy or pin her collar with her paste brooch, but she conveys to her
+that these things are not done in the best uniforms.... And the girl
+learns with incredible rapidity. A thing is Not Done--what a potency in
+those words; in that attitude of mind! It probably influenced the
+earliest savages in the manner of wearing their cowries.
+
+After all, the whole idea of uniform, of distinguishing one caste from
+another by bits of different coloured cloth, is based on the instinct
+for being superior. Was it not John Selden who said something to the
+effect that our rulers have always tried to make themselves as different
+from us as possible? Of course they have, and it is exactly the same
+thing which the wise Pope Gregory VII had in mind when he definitely
+crystallised the measures for celibacy of the priesthood, and it is
+exactly the same thing which puts the policeman into a dark blue uniform
+and a helmet before he can so much as stop a milkcart. A policeman in
+plain clothes is a dethroned monarch. Nothing in the nature of
+controlling others was ever done without dressing up. The marvel is that
+for so many centuries the principle should have been confined to the
+masculine sex, when it has such an obvious appeal to the feminine.
+
+This principle when carried a step further and applied to those
+controlled, by giving them also the sensation of being different from
+the rest of the world, results in that spirit called _esprit de corps_,
+which is really _esprit de l'uniforme_. Towards the rest of the world
+the uniformed are proud of being different, amongst themselves proud of
+being alike, and the more alike, so to speak, the aliker. It is not a
+thing to treat scornfully, for it has the whole of symbolism behind it.
+That which makes a man cheerfully die for a piece of bunting which,
+prosaically speaking, _is_ only a piece of bunting that happens to be
+dyed red, white, and blue, is part of this same spirit. Dull of soul
+indeed must he be who can look without a profound emotion on the
+tattered "colours" of a regiment, and yet it is only the idea, the
+symbol, that makes these things what they are....
+
+And for most of these girls, remember, it is the first time they have
+had a symbol held before them.... We of the upper classes are brought up
+with many reverences--for our superiors, our elders, for traditions, but
+the classes which for want of a better word I must call "lower"--so
+please do not cavil at me for doing so or attribute false meanings--are
+for the most part brought up to think themselves as good as anyone else,
+and their "rights" the chief thing in life; while owing to the
+unfortunate curriculum of our Board Schools, which does not insist
+nearly enough on history as the fount of the present and of all that is
+great and good in the past, they are left without those standards of
+impersonal enthusiasms and imaginative daring--which should be the
+rightful inheritance of us all.
+
+These girls are now given an abstract idea to live up to, no mere
+standard of expediency, but an idea that appeals to the imagination. And
+how magnificently they are responding those statistics show, but more
+still does the attitude of all the officers and men who have to do with
+them. I talked with all ranks on the subject, and never once did I meet
+with anything but admiration and enthusiasm. The men are touchingly
+grateful to them and value their work and their companionship. For, very
+wisely, the girls are encouraged to be friends with the men, are allowed
+to walk out with them, to give teas and dances for them in the Y.W.C.A.
+huts, and to go to return parties given by the men in the Y.M.C.A. huts.
+It is, of course, easy to sneer at the ideal which is held before the
+men, of treating these girls as they would their sisters, but the fact
+remains that they very beautifully do so.
+
+Another point to be remembered is, that, far from these girls being
+exposed to undue temptation, the great majority of them have never been
+so well looked after as now. They are mostly girls of a class that knows
+few restrictions, who, with the exception of those previously in
+domestic service, have always had what they call their "evenings," when
+they roamed the streets or went to the cinemas with their "boys."
+
+Now every Waac has to be in by eight, can go nowhere without permission,
+is carefully though unostentatiously shepherded, and is provided with
+healthy recreation, such as Swedish exercises, Morris dancing, hockey,
+and the like. In short, she is now looked after and guarded as young
+girls of the educated classes are normally.
+
+And these are the girls, good, honest, hard-working creatures, who have
+been maligned in whispers and giggles up and down the country. It is
+perhaps needless to say that they are naturally very indignant over it,
+that the parents of many write to them agitatedly to demand if it's all
+true and to beg them to come back, and that sometimes, when they are
+home on leave, instead of their uniforms bringing them the respect and
+honour they deserve and which every man overseas accords to them, they
+are subjected to insult from people who have nothing better to do than
+to betray to the world the pitiable condition of their own nasty minds.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER VII
+
+THE BROWN GRAVES
+
+
+When first one has dealings with the Waacs and their officers, one
+imagines distractedly that one has fallen among Royalty. This is because
+the word "Ma'am" is always used by a Waac when speaking to another of
+superior rank, till you very nearly find yourself bobbing. Later this
+impression is strengthened by the memory for faces which every Waac
+officer displays in a manner one has always been taught to consider
+truly royal. It is only among themselves that any titles exist; to the
+outside world, even the Army officers, each Waac officer is mere "Mrs."
+or "Miss," whichever she may chance to be. The "putting on of frills"
+has been avoided with extraordinary dexterity; there is just enough
+ritual to make the girls feel they belong to an organised body, without
+the enemy being given occasion to blaspheme by saying that women like
+playing at being men. In France, though not in England, the girls salute
+their officers, as this helps them to get at the "idea" of the
+thing--that feeling of being part of an ordered whole, which is so
+valuable.
+
+In the matter of uniforms, someone at the War Office, or wherever these
+things are thought out, has really had a rather charming series of
+inspirations. At first the women wore the same badges as denote the
+ranks of soldiers, but a paternal--or should one not almost say
+maternal?--Government evidently thought that not feminine enough, and
+now the badges of varying rank are roses, fleur-de-lys and laurel
+leaves, a touch which would have delighted old Andrew Marvell.
+
+One of the chief activities of the Waacs is cooking, and when, escorted
+by the D.D.M.S., whom I have before mentioned, I arrived at the little
+wooden office amidst the pines, it was to hear a one-sided conversation
+on the telephone between the Area Controller and various great ones of
+the earth who were frantically ringing up for cooks. Also a new
+Officers' Club for senior officers wanting a rest from the firing line
+is just being opened near E----, and it is to be staffed by Waacs and
+the cook is to be of the very best. Punch's immortal advice as to the
+treatment of husbands is not forgotten by the Waac controllers when
+questions of this kind arise.
+
+After talk of cooks came the seeing of cooks, in a big camp and Small
+Arms school near. Kitchens are kitchens and mess-rooms mess-rooms
+everywhere you go, and beyond a general impression of extreme
+cleanliness, an extraordinarily appealing smell of stew, and the sight
+of great branches of mimosa set about the long mess tables, there is
+nothing of particular interest to describe. The point is that all the
+preparing and the serving of food in this great camp for officers and
+men is done by women and that all the male creatures are unreservedly
+jubilant at the change. The C.O. expressed his hope that after the war
+the W.A.A.C. would continue as a permanent part of the Army, while a
+sergeant gave it as his opinion that the women managed to introduce so
+much more variety into the preparation of the food than the men had
+done. Also, he added that they wasted much less.
+
+In every kitchen there is a forewoman cook--there are these forewomen in
+every department of the work of the women, and they correspond rather to
+the "noncoms" among the men. At present they are distinguished by a
+bronze laurel leaf and always have their own mess-room and sitting-room
+as distinct from the rest of the girls, but it is rather an influence
+than an authority which is vested in them, though the advisability of
+definitely endowing them with more of the latter is being considered.
+They "answer," as the rest of the Waac machinery does, extremely well.
+
+An interesting point about army kitchens, as they are run nowadays, is
+that after the amount of fats necessary to the cooking has been put
+aside, the rest is poured into great tins, graded according to its
+quality, and sent home for munitions. We are getting things down to the
+fine edge of no-waste at last, and the women are helping to do it.
+
+At another camp I found the C.O. most anxious for the women to start a
+Mending Factory--it would be such a help to the men, who, unlike
+sailors, are not adept at the repairing of their clothes. Also a
+laundry, he intimated, would be necessary really to round off the scheme
+satisfactorily. Both these are thoroughly sound suggestions that may
+yet, let us hope, come to something, though they would be in a sense
+breaking new ground, as the idea of the Waacs is that they actually
+replace men. Each cook releases one man, while among the clerks at
+present the ratio is four women to three men. And there are already six
+thousand Waacs in France.... Does not this give the obvious reason why
+slanders, started by enemy agents, have been busy trying to drive the
+Women's Army out of France?
+
+Every Waac who goes to France is like the pawn who attains the top of
+the chessboard and is exchanged for a more valuable piece. She sends a
+fighting man to his job by taking on the jobs that are really a woman's
+after all. For is it not woman's earliest job to look after man?
+
+She looks after him to keep him well and strong, she looks after him
+when he is ill--and now, in France, she looks after the gallant dead,
+who are lying in the soil for which they fought. Between the pines and
+the gleaming river with its sandy shoals are the rows of crosses,
+sparkling, the ash grey wood of them, in the effulgence of the spring
+light, making hundreds of points of brightness above the earth still
+brown and bare, that soon, under the gardeners' care, will blossom like
+the rose. Not a desert even now--for no place where fighters rest is a
+desert--but a place expectant, full of the promise of beauty to come, an
+outward beauty which is what it calls for as its right, because it is
+holy ground. Not only in the merely technical sense as the consecrated
+earth of quiet English cemeteries, where lie all, both those who lived
+well and those who lived basely, but holy as a place can only be when it
+is held by those who all died perfectly....
+
+Here and there, among the earth-brown graves, stooping above them, are
+the earth-brown figures of the gardeners. Every grave is freshly raked,
+moulded between wooden frames to a flat, high surface where the flowers
+are to overflow, and above every raised daïs of earth the bleached wood
+of the cross spreads its arms, throwing a shadow soft and blue like a
+dove's feather, a shadow that curves over the mound and laps down its
+edge lightly as a benison. On each cross is the little white metal plate
+giving the name and regiment of the man who lies beneath and the letters
+R.I.P. Here and there is an ugly stiff wreath of artificial immortelles
+beneath a glass frame, the pathetic offering of those who came from
+England to lay it there.
+
+Sometimes a wreath fresh and green shows that someone who loves the dead
+man has sent money with a request that flowers shall be bought and put
+upon his grave on the anniversary of his death. Sometimes, when they
+come over from England, these poor people break down and turn blindly,
+as people will for comfort, to the nearest sympathy, to the women
+gardeners who are showing them the grave they came to see. And a sudden
+note of that deep undercurrent which at times of stress always turns the
+members of either sex to their own sex for comfort sends the women
+mourners to the arms of the women who are working beside them.
+Sentiment, if you will--but a sentiment that is stirred up from the deep
+and which would scorn the apologies of the critical.
+
+And what of the girls who work daily on that sacred earth, who see
+before their eyes, bright in the sun, inexpressibly grey and dauntless
+in the rain, those serried rows of crosses, all so alike and each
+standing for a different individuality, a different heartbreak--Do you
+suppose that they will ever again forget the aspect of those silent
+witnesses to the splendour and the unselfishness and the utter release
+from pettiness of the men who lie there? This is what it is to make good
+citizens, and that is what the members of the Women's Army are doing
+daily. They are not only doing great things for the men--but they are
+making of themselves, come what conditions may after the war, efficient,
+big-minded citizens who will be able to meet with them.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER VIII
+
+VIGNETTES
+
+
+The interesting thing about the various places where Waacs are housed,
+which I saw, is that no two of them were alike in atmosphere. I had
+rather dreaded much seeing of camps, but, as a matter of fact, though I
+saw two, they were totally unlike each other, while the other three
+places that I saw each had an aspect, a character, unlike the others.
+One was a convalescent home for Waacs, set amidst pine-trees, a house of
+deep wide stairs, airy rooms, long cushioned chairs, and flowers, where
+one might well be content to be just-not-well for a long time; the
+others were houses where those Waacs lived who were not in camps.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+Four jaunty châlets, chalk-white in the sun, hung with painted
+galleries, face the rolling sand-dunes, behind them the sea, a darker
+blue than any of the shadows of land on such a high-keyed day. They are
+little pleasure-villas, these châlets, fancy erections for summer
+visitors, built in the days when this little Plage was a resort for
+Parisians playing at rusticity. Delicious artificial useless-looking
+creations, bearing apparently about as much relation to a normal house
+as a boudoir-cap does to a bowler. Yet they are charming as only little
+French pleasure-villas can be, and to the receptive mind it is their
+artificiality that makes such a delightful note of--well, not decadence,
+but dilettantism--in this rolling sandy place, where only the hand of
+Nature is to be seen all around, no town, no village even, impinging on
+the curving skylines, the very road up to their doors but a track in the
+sand.
+
+In these villas live incongruous Waacs, their khaki-clad forms swing up
+the wooden stairs to the galleries, and lean from the windows, always
+open their widest, night and day. Less incongruous the stout boots and
+khaki inside, as, though the chintzes are bright and gay, there is an
+aspect of stern utility, combined with an austerity that somehow suits
+the blank sandiness of the surroundings. In each little scrubbed room
+are two beds, each--for the Waacs live in true Army fashion--with its
+dark grey blankets folded up at the head of the bare mattress; in the
+sick bay alone the beds are covered with bright blue counterpanes. In
+the recreation room and the Forewomen's Mess are easy chairs of wicker
+and flowers and pictures. It is all done as charmingly as it can be with
+a strict eye to suitability; it is community life, of course, but
+brought as nearly as possible to that feeling of individuality which
+makes a home with a small "h" instead of with the dreaded capital.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+This other house was as great a contrast to the bare little châlets as
+it well could be. It also was at a Plage, it too had been built for
+pleasure, but for pleasure _de luxe_, not of simple bourgeois families.
+The wide hall with its polished floor, its great carved mantels, its
+dining-room with gleaming woods and glossy table and sparkling glass,
+its big lounge with tall windows, where the girls dance and play the
+piano--all was as different from the bleached scrubbed wood of the
+châlets as it well could be. Yet the spirit informing the whole was the
+same, the bedrooms as austere in essence even if they boasted carved
+marble-topped chests, and even here the Army had found things to
+improve, such as the making of paths at the back of the house of round
+tins sunk in the earth, and steps of tin biscuit boxes, ingenious
+arrangements to save getting your feet wet on a muddy day as you go in
+and out on the endless errands of domesticity. And, as I sat at lunch in
+the gleaming dining-room, where the wood fire burned on the wide stone
+hearth, I heard the girls practising for a musical play they were
+shortly to produce.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+A camp is, of course, a camp, but there is a certain satisfaction in
+seeing how well even a necessary evil can be done. Where all was
+excellent, the chief thing that really thrilled me was the bath-rooms.
+The Waacs' bath-rooms are the envy and despair of the Army, who rage
+vainly in small canvas tubs. The Engineers are by way of spoiling the
+Waacs whenever possible, and bath-rooms, electric bells, electric light
+and fancy paths of tin, spring up before them. There are in every Waac
+camp rows of bath-rooms containing each its full-length bath, and
+besides that, each girl has her own private wash-place, in a cubicle for
+the purpose. For, as the Chief Controller said to me, "After all, it
+does not matter the girls having to sleep together in dormitories if
+each has absolute privacy for washing, that is so much more important."
+To which it is quite possible to retort that there are those of us who
+would not mind bathing in front of the whole world if only we are
+allowed to sleep by ourselves. But that is just a different point of
+view, and as a matter of fact, for the class from which the greater part
+of the Waacs are drawn, privacy in ablutions ranks as a greater thing
+than privacy in slumber, so the psychological instinct which planned the
+camps is justified.
+
+Besides the bath-rooms and the ablution cubicles, there is in every camp
+one or more drying-rooms, which are always heated, and where the wet
+clothes of the girls, who of course have to be out in all weathers, are
+hung to dry. Laundry, kitchens, recreation rooms, mess-rooms, long
+Nissen huts for sleeping, I went the round of them all, and, while
+genuinely admiring them, admired still more those who lived in them.
+
+Personally, I don't like a Nissen hut nearly as much as the ordinary
+straight-walled sort. I know they are wonderfully easy to erect and to
+move, but when it comes to trying to tack a picture on those curved
+walls.... And the girls depend so on their little bits of things, such
+as pictures and photographs from home. You will always see in every
+cubicle, above every bed in a long hut, the girl's own private gallery,
+the _lares and penates_ which make of her, in her bed at least, an
+individual. In a Nissen hut you have to turn your head upside down to
+get a view of the picture gallery at all, though it has its advantages
+to the girl herself as she lies in bed and can look at the faces of her
+parents, absolutely concave, curving over her nose.
+
+As I was leaving this camp I heard sounds of music and the stamping of
+feet, and going to the Y.W.C.A. hut the Unit Administrator and I looked
+in. There, to a vigorously pounded piano, an instructress from the
+Y.M.C.A. was teaching a dozen or so girls Morris dancing. They beamed at
+us from hot glowing faces, these mighty daughters of the plough, and
+continued to foot it as merrily, if as heavily, as any Elizabethan
+villagers dancing in their Sunday smocks around a Maypole.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+One more camp I saw, on a later day, and though it was a camp, yet it
+had that about it which distinguished it from all others. For it was
+built round about a hoary castle, grey with years and lichen, from whose
+walls they say Anne Boleyn looked down, standing beside her robust and
+rufous lover on that honeymoon which was almost all of happiness she was
+to know.
+
+Now it is an Army School, and within its grey walls and towers the
+officers are billeted and in its great kitchens the Waacs cook for them
+and do all the rest of the domestic work, waiting on the officers' mess
+and the sergeants' mess, serving at the canteen, doing all the cleaning,
+everything that there is to be done for a whole army school of hungry
+men down on a five-weeks' course, to say nothing of all the work for
+themselves in their camp at the castle's gates, and there are sixty-six
+of them, not counting the three officers who are at every Waac camp--the
+Unit Administrator, and the Deputy and Assistant Administrators. It is
+hard work, and endless work, and though every Waac gets a few hours off
+every day, and though, as you have seen, everything is done for their
+healthy recreation that can be done, yet the life is one of work and not
+of fun, and though the girls flourish under it, we at home should not
+forget that fact when we give them their due meed of appreciation.
+
+But, hard as the life is, it seemed to me that at that camp which has
+the happiness to be at this castle, its duress must be assuaged by the
+beauty of what is always before the eyes. Buried in woods it is, still
+bare when I saw them, but with the greenish yellow buds of daffodils
+already beginning to unfold in great clumps through the purple-brown
+alleys, and with primroses making drifts of honey-pallor and
+honey-sweetness beside the slopes of ground ivy, while from beyond the
+curving ramparts of the castle shows the steely-quiet glimmer of a lake.
+
+For war this castle was built, and war she now sees once again, for the
+arts of war are taught within her walls. And how Anne Boleyn's roving
+eyes would have brightened at the sight of so much youth, at the sound
+of so many spurs! Let us hope her sore spirit can still find pleasure in
+wandering again over the scenes where she once was happy, and if she has
+kept enough of innocent wantonness to love a straight man when she sees
+one, ghost though she be, and if her nose turn up ever so daintily at
+the clumsily-clad members of her own sex, whose toils she would so
+little understand ... why, she is but a ghost, and the modern mind must
+contrive to forgive her.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+These slight vignettes have all been of vision; let me add one of a less
+pictorial nature. The Unit Administrators, as I have said, have to act
+not only as commanding officers, but very often as mother-confessors as
+well. Parents write to them about their daughters, would-be suitors
+write to them for permission to marry their charges, and amongst the
+letter-bag are often epistles that are not without their unconscious
+humour. One day a mother writes to point out that she and the rest of
+the family are changing houses, and so may Flossie please come home for
+a few days ... another mentions that Gladys's letters of late have been
+despondent, and please could she be put to something else that will not
+depress her? Then Gladys is had up in front of the Unit Administrator,
+and perhaps turns out to be one of the born whiners found everywhere,
+perhaps to be merely suffering from a passing fit of what our
+ancestresses would have called the megrims. If her work is found to be
+really unfitted to her and it is possible to give her a change, then it
+is done, but as a rule that is seldom the case, as, rather differently
+from what we used to hear was the way in the Army, every Waac Controller
+finds out what the girl is best at and what she likes doing most, and
+then, as far as possible, arranges her work accordingly.
+
+Perhaps a letter comes from a Tommy in His Majesty's forces, and begins
+something like this:--
+
+     "DEAR MADAM,
+
+     "I beg to ask your permission to marry Miss D. Robinson, at
+     present under your command...."
+
+The Unit Administrator writes back that she will endeavour to arrange
+leave for the marriage; and perhaps all goes well, or perhaps some such
+lugubrious letter as this will follow:--
+
+     "DEAR MADAM,
+
+     "_Re_ Miss D. Robinson, at present under your command, take no
+     notice of my former letter, as Miss D. Robinson has broken off
+     the engagement...."
+
+Human nature will be inhuman, in camps and out of them, and because Miss
+D. Robinson is doing a man's work is no reason why she should shed the
+privileges of her sex.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER IX
+
+EVENING
+
+
+Grey rain was falling in straight thin lines upon the landscape,
+suddenly changed from its splendour of sun-bright sands and blue
+gleaming river to a blotted greyness. The rain danced over the trampled
+earth at the V.A.D. Motor Convoy Camp, filling the hollows with wrinkled
+water and making the great ambulances shine darkly. It was not a
+pleasant evening, being very cold withal, and snow fell amid the rain,
+but the Commandant took me out in her car to give me as comprehensive a
+view of E---- as could be seen in the gathering dusk.
+
+When I say E---- I don't mean the little French fishing village, near
+which we did not go, but the whole vast town of huts set up by the
+B.E.F. For E---- is become a town of hospitals. We swung round corners,
+down long intersecting roads, about and about, and always there were
+hospitals, long rows of hospitals, each a little town in itself. I was
+reminded of nothing so much as the great temporary townships in the
+Canal Zone at Panama. There is just the same look of permanence
+combined with the feeling of it all being but temporary, while
+materially there is an air about board and tin buildings which is the
+same the world over. I almost expected to see a negro slouch along with
+his tools slung on his back, or to catch sight of the dark film of a
+mosquito-proof screen over doors and windows.
+
+And the Motor Convoy do all of the ambulance work of the whole big
+district, which spreads considerably beyond even this great hospital
+town. There are about one hundred and thirty members in the camp and
+about eighty of the big Buick ambulances. Unlike the Fanny convoy I had
+seen, there are at E---- always day and night shifts, a girl being on
+night duty for one fortnight and on day duty for the next, except in
+times of stress, when everyone works day and night too.
+
+We came in from our drive in the dark and I was shown to the room I was
+to have for as much of the night as there would be, considering I was
+going out on a convoy at one o'clock. It belonged to a V.A.D. at the
+moment home on leave, but she had left a nice selection of bed-books
+behind her, for which I was grateful, and there was a little electric
+reading lamp perched on the shelf above the bed. It was a tiny place,
+but it was all to myself.
+
+At supper in the mess-room, with Mr. Leps, the Great Dane, lying by the
+stove and the cat curled between his outflung paws, we were waited on
+by a very pretty V.A.D. with dark eyes and a deeply moulded face
+compact of soft curves and pallor. Afterwards, the Commandant, a few of
+the girls, and I went into her room, which was a trifle larger than the
+ordinary run, and could be called a sitting-room at one end, for coffee
+and cigarettes. There was a concert on, and I was asked whether I would
+like to go to it, and, at the risk of seeming ungracious, I said if they
+didn't mind I would rather not. They said that they would rather not,
+too. I had seen the camp before dinner, had marvelled again how people
+ever got used to living in match-boxes and having to cross a strip of
+out-of-doors world to meals, and I was only wanting to sit still,
+and--if the Fates were kind--listen.
+
+For all the time, as during the preceding days, I had felt the
+depression growing over me, the terror of this communal life which took
+all you had and left you--what? What corner of the soul is any refuge
+when solitude cannot be yours in which to expand it? What vagrant
+impulse can be cherished when liberty is not yours to indulge it?
+
+These girls, these strong, clear-eyed creatures whom I had seen, day
+after day, who had at first impressed me only with their youth, their
+school-girl gaiety, their--_horribile dictu_--their "brightness"--was it
+possible that this life should really content them? I am not talking
+now, remember, of Waacs, girls mostly of the working class, or of those
+used to the sedentary occupation of clerkships, to whom this life is the
+biggest freedom, the greatest adventure, they have known. I am talking
+about girls of a class who, in the nature of things, lived their own
+lives, before the war, did the usual social round, went hither and
+thither with no man to say them nay--except a father, who doesn't count.
+Young _femmes du monde_, there is no adequate English for it,
+sophisticated human beings.
+
+For women, even the apparently merely out-of-door hunting games-playing
+women, have arrived at a high state of sophistication; and this life
+they now lead is a community life reduced to its essentials. And a
+community life, though the building up of it marked the first stages of
+civilisation, is, to the perfected product of civilisation, anathema.
+Individuals had to combine to make the world, but now that it is made,
+all the instincts of the most highly developed in it are towards
+complete liberty as regards the amount of social intercourse in which he
+or she wishes to indulge. We have fought through thousands of years for
+a state of society so civilised that it is safe to withdraw from it and
+be alone without one's enemy tracking one down and hitting one over the
+head with an axe.
+
+This right, fought for through the ascending ages, these girls have
+deliberately forgone, as every man in the Army has to forgo it also.
+Were they aware of this? Or did they, after all, like it, unthinkingly,
+without analysis?
+
+I had wondered as I saw my previous convoys and camps, and I had
+wondered again as I saw over this convoy--saw the usual tiny cubicles,
+with gay chintz curtains and photographs from home, and the shelf of
+books, saw the great bare mess-rooms, the sitting-room, bright with
+cushions, cosy with screens and long chairs, saw the admirable
+bath-rooms, with big enamelled baths and an unlimited supply of hot
+water, saw the two parks where the great ambulances were ranged, shadowy
+and huge in the growing gloom and thick downpour of rain. Everywhere
+smiling faces, uplifted voices, quick steps--yet I wondered.
+
+Was it possible this malaise of community life never weighed on their
+souls? And, if possible--was it good that it should be so?
+
+I managed, stumblingly, to convey something of my thought, of the
+depression which had been eating at me--not, as I tried to explain, that
+I didn't admire them all, Heaven knew, rather that I must be,
+personally, such a weak-kneed, backboneless creature to feel I couldn't,
+for any cause on earth, have stood it. And I wanted--how I wanted--to
+know how it was they did ... whether they really and actually could like
+it...? "Of course, I know," I ended apologetically, "some people like a
+community life----"
+
+"They must be in love with it to like community life carried to this
+extent, then," said one swiftly, and a small, fair creature, with a
+ribbon bound round her hair, agreed with her. She interested me, that
+fair girl, because she was one of those people who feel round for the
+right word until they have found it, however long it takes; impervious
+to cries of "Go on, get it off your chest," she still sat quietly and
+wrestled until the word came which exactly expressed the fine edge of
+her meaning. She knew so well what she wanted to say that she didn't
+want to say it any differently.
+
+They all talked, each throwing in a sentence to the discussion now and
+again, but not one of them grumbled. Yet they all showed plainly that it
+was not a blind enjoyment--or, indeed, much enjoyment at all--that they
+found in the life. They were reasoning, critical, analytic, and
+extraordinarily dispassionate.
+
+I can't put that conversation down for two reasons, the first being that
+one doesn't print the talk of one's hostesses, and the second that it
+would be too difficult to catch all those little half-uttered sentences,
+those little alleys of argument that led to understanding, but led
+elliptically, as is the way of either sex when it is unencumbered by the
+necessity of dotting its i's for the comprehension of the other. But out
+of that hour emerged, shining, several things which we in England ought
+to realise better, and which lifted for me that cloud of depression
+which had lowered over me all the days in France.
+
+These are not bouncing school-girls, "good fellows" having the time of
+their lives, as vaguely those in England consider them, they are, thank
+goodness, finely-evolved human beings who no more enjoy "brightness"
+than you or I would. And it was the terrible feeling that everyone was
+so "bright" which had oppressed me more than anything else. The joy of
+finding that it wasn't so, that what I had feared I should be forced to
+take as the unreflecting school-girl humour of overgrown school-girls
+was only a protective aspect, that behind it the eyes of not only sane
+but subtle young women looked out with amusement and patience upon a
+world determined to see in them, first and last, "brightness"!
+
+Perhaps five per cent.--such was the estimate flung out into the
+talk--of the girls really do enjoy it, the ghastly, prolonged,
+cold-blooded picnic of it, perhaps five per cent. really are having the
+"time of their lives," but the rest of them have moments when it hardly
+seems possible to stick it. Yet they stick it, and stick it in good
+comradeship, which is the greatest test of the lot. Their salvation lies
+in the separate rooms--small, cold, but a retreat from the octopus of
+community life....
+
+[Illustration: WAACS IN THE BAKERY]
+
+[Illustration: WAAC COOKS PREPARING VEGETABLES]
+
+[Illustration: WAAC ENCAMPMENT PROTECTED BY SANDBAGS]
+
+That concert which I had felt so apologetic not to attend--what a relief
+it had been to them that I didn't want to, didn't want to get "local
+colour" and write of them as being so jolly, so gay! For this again is
+typical--there are perhaps five girls out of every hundred who enjoy
+being amused, to whom it is all part of the life which they actually
+love, but from the greater part goes up the cry, "Work us as hard as you
+like, but for Heaven's sake don't try and amuse us!"
+
+For, of course, it takes differing temperaments differently. To some
+community life is little short of a nightmare, but to all there come
+moments when it is exceedingly maddening. In those moments your own room
+or a big hot bath are wonderful ways of salvation.
+
+As we talked, from A. came the theory that she was only afraid it would
+prevent her ever loving motors again; and she had always adored motors
+as the chief pleasure of life, before they became the chief business. B.
+could not agree to that. C., who did agree, pointed out that it was on
+the same principle as never wanting to go back to a place, no matter how
+beautiful it was, if you had been very unhappy there. Even after your
+unhappiness was dead and buried it would always spoil that place for
+you.... B. said "Yes" to that, but argued that it would not spoil the
+beauty of other places for you, which would be the equivalent of this
+life spoiling all motors for A., after the war.
+
+The flaws in the analogy were not pursued, for D. advanced an
+interesting theory that the hardest part of it was that you were so
+afraid of what you might be missing all the time somewhere else. She
+argued that the difficulty with her had always been to make up her mind
+to any one course of action, because it shut off all the others, and,
+like so many of us, she wanted everything....
+
+A. said that shilly-shalliers never got anywhere, but I maintained with
+D. that it wasn't shilly-shallying, which is another sort of thing
+altogether, it was the passionate desire to get the most out of life, to
+discover what was most worth while. "I want to spend ten years in the
+heart of China more than to do any one thing," I pointed out, "but I
+sha'n't do it because when I came out I shouldn't be young any more.
+Therefore the ten years in China will have to go to a man, because it
+doesn't matter so much to a man." This life in the B.E.F. was D.'s ten
+years in China, not because--heaven forbid--it is going to last ten
+actual years, or even that, as far as I could see, it was ageing her at
+all, but simply because while she was doing it she couldn't be doing
+anything else. She had had to burn her boats.
+
+Now that, to a certain temperament, means a great deal, and it is one of
+the things, if not the chief thing, that marks service in France off
+from equally hard work at home, and makes it, for reasons outside the
+work, so much harder.
+
+All natures are not the same as D.'s, of course. To one girl a certain
+thing is the hardship, to another a different thing. But the point is
+that the hardship is there, not physical, but mental, and to me it was
+the most exquisite discovery I could have made in the whole of France.
+For the finer the instrument, the more fine it is of it to perform the
+work, and the more finely will that work, in the long run, be done.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER X
+
+NIGHT
+
+
+Not being among the lucky creatures who can fall happily to sleep when
+they know they are to be called at one o'clock, I lay in my tiny bed and
+revelled in that wonderful story of "The Bridge Builders" out of "The
+Day's Work," till the sound of the storm without became the voice of
+Mother Gunga. Then I turned out the light and lay and listened to the
+truly fiendish train whistles which no reading could have transmuted,
+and wondered why it is that French engine drivers apparently pay no
+attention to signals, but just go on whistling till they are answered,
+like someone who goes on ringing a bell till at length the door is
+opened. The rain was turning to snow, so there was less of that steady
+tinkling from without with which running water fills the world. I lay
+and listened; and the whistles and the bellying of the chintz curtain
+and the occasional swish of a heavy gust against the side of the hut
+were at last beginning to blend in one blur in my mind when a girl came
+softly into my room and whispered that it was time to dress.
+
+That utter quietness of the girls was a thing that had impressed me
+after staying in hotels full of the British Army, which goes to bed at
+midnight, bangs its doors, throws its boots outside, shouts from room to
+room, and begins the whole process, reversed, at about six o'clock the
+next morning. Here the girls wore soundless slippers, so that those who
+had to be about should not disturb those who slept, and doors were
+opened and shut with a cotton-wool care which appealed to me, or would
+have, if I hadn't had to get up.
+
+When I was dressed I found my way down endless blowy corridors, for the
+doors at the ends are always kept open, to the room of the girl who had
+called me. She looked at my fur coat and said it would get spoilt. I
+replied with great truth that it was past spoiling, but she took it off
+me, whipped my cap from my head, and the girls proceeded to dress me.
+They pulled a leather cap with ear-pieces down on my head and stuffed me
+into woolly jackets and wound my neck up in a comforter and finished up
+with a huge leather coat and a pair of fur gloves like bear's paws, so
+that when all was done I couldn't bend and had to be hoisted quite stiff
+up to the front of the ambulance.
+
+But first we all went into the kitchen, where part of the domestic staff
+sits up all night to prepare food for the night drivers. There we drank
+the loveliest cocoa I ever met, the sort the spoon would stand up in,
+piping hot, out of huge bowls. Then my driver and the section leader for
+the night led me across the soaking park to where, in almost total
+darkness, girls were busy with their ambulances. I was hoisted up beside
+my driver and endeavoured clumsily with my bear's paws to fasten the
+canvas flap back across the side as I was bidden. I may say that I felt
+extraordinarily clumsy amongst these girls, most of whom could have put
+me in their pockets. They knew so exactly what to do, their movements
+were all so perfectly adjusted to their needs, they knew where
+everything was, while I fumbled for steps and hoped for the best....
+They made me feel, in the beautiful way they shepherded me, that I was a
+silly useless female and that they were grave chivalrous young men; they
+watched over me with just that matter-of-fact care.
+
+To me it was all wonderful, that experience. To the girls, who do it
+every night, every alternate fortnight, year in, year out, the thrill of
+it has naturally gone long since; the wonder is that to them all remains
+the pity of it. We swung out of the park into the road. There was no
+moon, the stars were mostly hidden by the heavy clouds, the sleet blew
+in gusts against the wind screen. We went at a good pace, bound for a
+Canadian hospital, and then for a station beyond E----, where the train
+was waiting, for this was what is called an "evacuation" that I was
+going to see. No train of wounded was due in that night, and the
+Convoy's business was to take men who were being sent elsewhere from the
+hospitals to the train.
+
+We stopped in front of a shadow hospital, set in a town of shadow-huts,
+and a door opened to show an oblong of orange light, and send a paler
+shaft widening out into the night towards the sleek side of our
+ambulance.
+
+We heard the men being placed in the ambulance, the word was given, and
+again we set off through the night, this time so slowly, so carefully,
+for we carried that which must not be jarred one hair's breadth more
+than could be helped. We crept along the roads, past the pines that
+showed as patches of denser blackness against the sky, past the
+sand-dunes that glimmered ghostly, past the blots of shadow made by
+every shrub and tree-trunk, and behind and before us crawled other
+ambulances, laden even as we.
+
+The station was wrapped in darkness, save for a hanging light here and
+there, and an occasional uncurtained window in the waiting train. We
+drew up under a light, where a sergeant was waiting.
+
+"Four from No. 7 Canadian," said my driver crisply. The sergeant
+repeated, looked at a list he carried and marked our cases off it duly,
+then told us the number of the compartment where we should stop. The
+ambulance slid on, very slowly, beside the train and slowly came to
+rest.
+
+I could see into the white-painted interior of the train, could see the
+shelves running along its sides, and on the shelves, making oblong
+shapes of darkness against all the white, men laid straightly ... in
+front of us the Red Cross orderlies were sliding men down on stretchers
+from the shelves of an ambulance, slipping them out, carrying them up
+into the train and packing them on the shelves like fragile and precious
+parcels.
+
+And suddenly it seemed to me there was something profoundly touching
+about the sight of a man lying flat and helpless, shoved here and there,
+in spite of all the care and kindness with which it was accomplished. It
+is a thing wrong in essence, it seems an outrage on Nature--I got an odd
+feeling that there was something wrong and unnatural about the mere
+posture of lying-down that I never thought of before. The world seemed
+suddenly to have become deformed, as a monster is deformed who is born
+distorted. It shouldn't be possible to slide men on to shelves like
+this....
+
+The girl at the wheel pushed back the little shutter set in the front of
+the ambulance and we looked into the dimly-lit interior. I could see the
+crowns of four heads, the jut of brow beyond them, the upward peak of
+the feet under the grey blankets, pale hands, one pair thin as a
+child's, that lay limply along the edge of the stretchers.
+
+The orderlies came to the open door, one man mounted within, and the top
+stretcher from one side was slipped along its grooves and disappeared,
+tilted into the night. The boy on the top stretcher the other side
+turned his head languidly and watched--I could see a pale cheek,
+foreshortened from where I sat, a sweep of long dark eyelashes, the
+curve of the drooping upper lip. His turn came, and, passive, he too was
+slid out, then the two men below were carried away and up into the
+train. The ambulance was empty.
+
+We turned in a circle over the muddy yard and started off again,
+stopping again by the sergeant to get our orders.
+
+"Number 4," said the sergeant, and we swung, once more at a good pace,
+along the heavy roads, took fresh turnings about and about in the city
+of hospital huts, and drew up at Number 4.
+
+Again we were loaded, and again we crept back along the roads where we
+had a few minutes before gone so swiftly, meeting empty cars, keeping in
+line behind those laden like ourselves. Again we slowed down by the
+waiting sergeant to say, "Two stretchers and two sitters from Four." He
+echoed us, and we crept on to the appointed carriage and stopped. So it
+went on through a couple of hours, ambulance after ambulance swiftly
+leaving the station, slowly coming back, all drawing up gently by the
+train, each, opened, making a faint square of light in the velvet
+darkness. And then, at last, when it was all over, the return, swift
+again, towards the camp.
+
+We bumped along the road, the dim pines falling away into the shadows
+behind, a very mild funnel of light showing us a scrap of the way before
+us and of hedge on either side, the twigs of it perpetually springing
+out palely to die away once more. The wind was behind us and the screen
+clear; far ahead of us on the road was an empty ambulance with its
+curtains drawn back, bare but for its empty stretchers and dark
+blankets, which made, in the pale glow of the white-painted interior, a
+sinister Face--two hollow eyes and a wide mouth--that fled through the
+night, always keeping the same distance ahead, grimacing at me, like an
+image of the Death's Head of War.... I was glad when it swung round a
+turning and was lost to us.
+
+We drove into the unrelieved darkness of the convoy park and drew up
+with precision in our place, I wrestled again with the flap, and we got
+out into the wet sleet, half-snow, half-rain. My driver covered up the
+bonnet with tarpaulin, turned off the lights, and we went across to the
+kitchen. It was half-past three, and we were the first to come back; we
+asked for bowls of soup and stood sipping them and munching sandwiches
+that lay ready cut in piles upon the table.
+
+Then, one after another, the drivers entered ... pulling off their great
+gloves as they came, stamping the snow from their boots. They stood
+about, drinking from their steaming bowls, bright-eyed, apparently
+untired, throwing little quick scraps of talk to each other--about the
+slowness of "St. John's" on this particular night, who hadn't their
+cases ready and kept one or two ambulances "simply ages"; or the engine
+trouble developed by one car which still kept it out somewhere on the
+road. And I stood and listened and watched them, and I received an
+impression of extraordinary beauty.
+
+These girls, with their leather caps coming down to their brows and over
+their ears, looked like splendid young airmen, their clear, bold faces
+coming out from between the leather flaps. They were not pretty, they
+were touched with something finer, some quality of radiance only
+increased by their utter unconsciousness of it. Each girl, with her
+clear face, her round, close head, her stamping feet and strong, cold
+hands, seemed so intensely alive within the dark globe of the night,
+that her life was heightened to a point not earthly, as though she were
+a visitant from the snows or fields I had not seen, fields Olympian....
+And as each came swinging in--"_vera incessu patuit dea_...."
+
+I could have wished them there for ever, like some sculptured frieze, so
+lovely was the rightness and the inspiration of it.
+
+But I went to my bed, and one of the goddesses insisted on refilling my
+hot-water bag, though I assured her it would be quite well as it was,
+and I was unwound from my swaddling clothes and left to dream.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XI
+
+"AND THE BRIGHT EYES OF DANGER"
+
+
+Since the beginning of things women have been mixed up in war, and it is
+only as the world has become more civilised (if in view of the present
+one can make that assertion) that their place in it has been questioned.
+The whole question of the civilian population has taken on a different
+aspect since the outbreak of this war, owing to the extraordinary and
+unprecedented penalties attached to the civilian status by Germany, but
+the sub-division labelled "Women" has perhaps undergone more revision
+than any. It has undergone so much revision, in fact, that women have,
+in large masses, ceased to be civilians and are ranked as the Army.
+
+If it be frankly conceded that it is as natural for women to want to get
+to the war as men, one clears the way for profitable discussion without
+wasting time while the outworn epithets of "unwomanly" and
+"sensation-hunters" are flung through the air to the great obscuring
+thereof. The delight in danger for its own sake is common to all human
+beings, to the young as an intoxicant, to the old as a drug. It is not
+the least of the tragedies of woman that this is a delight in which she
+is so seldom able to indulge.
+
+When the war broke, everyone wanted to go and see what it was like, and
+it is merely useless to observe that this was treating it as a huge
+picnic. Before the tightening-up process began, in the wonderful days
+when the war was still fluid, it was possible to get out to the
+front--the real front--on all sorts of excuses. The tightening-up was
+necessary, and all too slow, but let us not, because of that, fall into
+the error of calling the instinct which urged non-combatants "mere"
+curiosity, as though that were not the greatest of the gifts of the
+gods, without which nothing is done.
+
+Among these non-combatants who wanted to see the war were many women,
+and if, mixed with their patriotism and desire to help, went a streak of
+that love of danger which is no disgrace to a man--why, I maintain that
+it is no disgrace to a woman either, but as natural an instinct as that
+which drives one to a wayside orchard if one is hungry.
+
+There is nothing sooner slaked, for the time being, than this inherent
+love of danger. Men who wanted the fun of it at the beginning of the war
+are heartily sick of it now, though they wouldn't be out of it for
+worlds. But most of the women haven't been allowed enough danger to get
+sick of it, and so, in patches of young women you meet working in
+France, the old craving still lifts its head. I came across a delightful
+streak of it at T----, the oldest big convoy in France.
+
+The garage, over which the girls live, for their camp is still
+a-building, is set in the eye of the cold winter winds on the top of a
+hill overlooking the sea. It was snowing heavily as I drove up, great
+fat flakes of snow that wove and interwove in the air in the way that
+only snowflakes can, so that sometimes they look as though they were
+falling upwards. The long line of the wooden garage showed dark in the
+background, in the space before it the ambulances stood about, but the
+girls were fox-trotting in couples all about them, their big rubber
+boots shuffling up little clouds of snow; on the head of one girl was
+swathed a greenish-blue handkerchief, which made a lovely note of colour
+against the swirling whiteness.
+
+I was taken in through the garage, where two drivers were painting their
+cars--for all painting is done by the girls, sometimes with unexpected
+effects, as on one car which I saw, where "Eve" from the _Tatler_ and
+her little dog were depicted in front of the body--and up a flight of
+wooden stairs with an out-of-doors landing on top, to the cubicles,
+which opened off on either side of the open-ended passage for the whole
+length of the building. Here, in one of the little bedrooms for two, we
+had a meal of cocoa and cake, known as the "elevener," for the obvious
+reason that it is consumed at eleven every morning. It was all quite
+different from my evening at the convoy at E----, but equally
+stimulating.
+
+The great plaint of the girls was that they weren't allowed nearer the
+fighting line, and I heard a story of how, in the early days, two cars
+had managed to get right through to Poperinghe, when that town was the
+centre of the Boche's attentions, by the simple expedient of the
+girl-drivers turning up their coat collars, pulling their peaked caps
+well down over their eyes, and just going ahead. They had a lovely time
+in Poperinghe and lunched under shell-fire, and when the military,
+including the Staff, were sitting in cellars, the "Chaufferettes"
+sallied forth and bought picture post-cards.
+
+"It's a shame they won't let us go up to the line now----"
+
+"Yes, indeed," put in another very seriously, as though she were adding
+the last uncontrovertible proof to the perfidy of the authorities--"They
+let the sisters get shelled, so why shouldn't they let us?"
+
+Isn't that a delightful spirit, and, I beg leave to insist, a perfectly
+natural and proper one? Any decent human being would like to be
+shelled--who hasn't been shelled too much. It is like being in love--a
+thing that ought to happen at least once to everybody.
+
+One of my hostesses was a violinist and plays at all the concerts for
+the wounded which take place thereabouts. I asked her whether she didn't
+find the work ruination to her fingers for the violin, but all she said
+carelessly was that they had been ruined for three years now, but it
+didn't matter, as anyway she couldn't have practised even if she had the
+time, since there were always some girls trying to sleep.
+
+And what do the local French people think of these young girls in their
+midst, who work like men and are out in all weathers and drive the
+soldiers wounded in the great common cause? They are quite charming to
+them, and indeed, when they first came, the French met them at every
+station with bouquets of flowers, so that the girls, pleased and
+embarrassed, English fashion, had a triumphal progress. But there are
+some of the French neighbours who think the life must be very hard on
+the poor things, and when, a little while ago, the Convoy organised a
+paper chase, the popular belief was that the hares were escaping from
+the rigours of life.... When the panting hares asked wayfaring traps for
+a lift, it was refused them, as, though the kindly drivers had every
+sympathy with the projected escape, they were not going to assist them
+to defy authority!
+
+The hardships which this Convoy had undergone I did not hear about from
+them, but from their Commandant. She told me of three weeks at the
+beginning of things, when there were no fires, no hot water, except a
+little always simmering for pouring into the radiators of the cars when
+there came a night call--for the snow was frozen on the ground all those
+three weeks and the water in the jugs was ice. The girls didn't talk
+about that because they were not interested in it, but neither would
+they talk about one other thing, though for a very different reason--and
+that was of the time when, after the great German gas attacks at
+Nieuport, they had to drive the gassed men who came on the hospital
+trains.... You can't get them now to describe what that was like, nor
+would you have tried, warned by the sudden change of voice in which they
+even mentioned it.
+
+There was one point in which this Convoy seemed to me to touch the
+extreme of abnegation attained by the G.S.V.A.D.'s. I had seen much
+earlier in my visit a G.S.V.A.D. Convoy, but have not mentioned it
+because I saw it before I had really grasped essentials, and it appeared
+to me then just a plain Convoy, and as the bare facts of it were not as
+spectacular as those relating to the Fannies, I chose the latter to
+write about.
+
+The G.S.V.A.D.'s, as I have said, rank as privates, and among them are
+workers of every kind--scrubbers, cooks, dispensers, clerks, motor
+drivers. This G.S.V.A.D. convoy which I had seen was made up of girls
+who had exchanged from V.A.D. convoys, mostly from this very one at
+T---- where I now was; and so they happened to be all friends and all
+girls of gentle birth. But when I saw their quarters--in a couple of
+tall French houses that had been converted to the purpose--I was very
+upset by the terrible fact that the girls had to share bedrooms. In all
+the camps I had seen since, both of Fannies and V.A.D.'s, each girl had
+her own tiny room which she cherished as her own soul--which, indeed, is
+what it amounts to. And the Waac officers, of course, have their own
+private rooms, though the girls sleep in dormitories. This convoy at
+T---- was the only voluntary one I had come across where the inestimable
+privilege of solitude was missing, though that will be put right when
+the new camp is built.
+
+And here I may mention that, deeply as I admire all the girls who are
+working so splendidly in France, I think perhaps my meed of admiration
+brims highest for those members of the G.S.V.A.D.'s who are gently born,
+for this very reason of the sleeping accommodation. Let us be frank, and
+admit that for the generality of working girls, such as the Waacs and a
+large proportion of the G.S.V.A.D.'s, it is not nearly so great a
+hardship to sleep in dormitories as it is for girls who have, as a
+matter of course, always been accustomed to privacy. It is not so bad in
+the case of members of a G.S. convoy such as that I have mentioned,
+where the girls are all friends, but what of those ladies who live in
+the big camps and sleep in long huts with other girls of every class,
+all, doubtless, decent good girls, but, in the nature of things, often
+girls with whom any ground of meeting must be limited to the barest
+commonalities of life? Also sometimes those in authority--those who are
+and always were professionals, not amateurs--have been known to use the
+power given to them, by the inferior rating of these girls, to make them
+rather miserable.
+
+Personally, I have long had a theory, which will doubtless bring down on
+me howls of rage from those who will say I am decrying the most noble of
+professions, that women are not meant to be nurses. It brings out all
+that is worst in them. The love of routine for its own sake, that deadly
+snare to which women and Government officials succumb so much more
+easily than do men, is fostered in them. And so is the love of authority
+for their own sakes, which is almost worse. It has taken nothing less
+than this way to show what splendid creatures nurses are under their
+starched aprons. In times of peace only amateur women should be nurses;
+for it may be observed that the V.A.D. nurses, though they have had long
+enough to do it in, have not developed the subtle disease of nursitis.
+Evidently nursing is a thing, like love-making, which should never
+become a profession.
+
+I was glad to have seen all the different convoys I had, because no two
+had been to me alike, and to each I am indebted for a differing
+expression of the same vision, which is the vision splendid of a duty
+undertaken gladly and sustained with courage. From my first convoys--the
+Fannies and the G.S.V.A.D.'s--I got the wonderful facts of it, at the
+V.A.D. Convoy at E---- I caught that side of it which I was most glad of
+all to encounter, and at the V.A.D. Convoy at T---- I found that
+delightful spirit of sheer joy in danger which is too precious to be
+allowed to die out of the world just because there happens to be, at
+present, such a great deal too much danger let loose upon it.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XII
+
+REST
+
+
+The snow danced in a fine white mist over the ploughed fields, and drove
+perpetually against the northerly sides of the tall bare tree-trunks
+that lined the way for miles, hardly finding a hold upon the smooth
+flanks of the planes, but sinking into the rough-barked limes till they
+looked dappled with their brown ridges and the white veining, and oddly
+as though covered with the pelt of some strange animal. High in the web
+of bare branches, the clumps of mistletoe showed as filigree nests for
+some race of fairy birds.
+
+Gracious country this, for all the desolate whiteness; it lay in great
+rolling slopes with drifts of purplish elms in the folds, and on the
+levels winding steel-dark streams along whose banks the upward-springing
+willows burned an ardent rust colour. And as the car rocked and bounded
+along and the wind screen first starred in one place, then in another,
+then fell out altogether, one got a better and better view of it all.
+
+What a wonderful people the French are for agriculture.... Hardly a man
+did I see all the days I motored about and about, but I saw mile after
+mile of cultivated land, the sombrely-clad women or boys guiding the
+slow ploughs, the rough-coated horses pulling patiently--white horses
+that looked pale against the bare earth, but a dark yellow when the snow
+came to show up the tarnishing that the service of man brings upon
+beasts. Several times I saw English soldiers ploughing, and rejoiced.
+
+We came into the town that was our bourn in the grey of the evening,
+passed the grey glimmer of the river between its grey stone quays,
+passed the grey miracle of the cathedral, and then, in the rapidly
+deepening dusk, turned in through great wrought iron gates into a grey
+courtyard.
+
+It may have been gathered that, much as I admire both their practical
+perfection and their spiritual significance, I am no lover of camps,
+which seem to me among all things man-created upon God's earth about the
+most depressing. I had lived and moved and had my being in camps it
+seemed to me for countless ages, the edges of my soul were frayed with
+camps. From the moment of walking into the old house at R---- a
+wonderful sense of rest that brooded over the place enveloped me. The
+thing had an atmosphere, impossible to exaggerate, though very difficult
+to convey, but I shall never forget the miracle that house was to me.
+
+It was a Hostel for the Relations of Wounded, and there are in France
+at present some half-dozen of these houses, supported by the Joint War
+Committee of the Red Cross and the Order of St. John, and staffed by
+V.A.D.'s. At all of them the relations of badly wounded are lodged and
+fed free of charge, while cars meet them and also convey them to and
+from the hospital. This much I knew as plain facts, what I had not been
+prepared for was the breath of exquisite pleasure that emanated from
+this house.
+
+The house was originally a butter market, and the entrance room, set
+about with little tables where the relations have their meals, has one
+side entirely of glass; the lounge beyond, which is for the staff, is
+glass-roofed, while that opening on the right hand of the dining-place,
+the lounge for the relations, has long windows all down the side; so it
+will be seen that light and air are abundant on the ground floor of the
+Hostel in spite of the fact that it looks on to a courtyard.
+
+From the relations' lounge, with its slim vermilion pillars ringed about
+with seats like those round tree-trunks, there goes up a curving
+staircase of red tiles, with a carved baluster of oak greyish with age,
+a griffon sitting upright upon the newel. Up this staircase I was taken
+to my room, and there the completion of peace came upon me.
+
+One could see at a glance it would be quiet, beautifully quiet. Its
+window gave on to the sloping grey flanks of pointed roofs and showed a
+filigree spire pricking the pale bubble of the wintry sky, its walls
+were panelled from floor to ceiling, its hangings were of white and
+vermilion, its floor dark and polished, and on the wide stone hearth
+burned a wood fire. And, to crown all, after tiny huts, it was so big a
+room that the corners were filled with gracious shadow; and the
+firelight flickered up and down on the panelling and glimmered in the
+polished floor and set the shadows quivering. I lay back in a
+vermilion-painted chair and felt steeped in the bath of restfulness that
+the place was.
+
+The whole house was very perfectly "got-up," the maximum of effect
+having been attained with the minimum of expense, though not of labour;
+it all having been achieved under the direction of a former
+superintendent with a genius for decoration, who is now V.A.D. Area
+Commandant and still lives at the Hostel. The evening I arrived there,
+she and the staff were busy stenciling a buff bedspread with blue
+galleons in full sail, varied by gulls. Everything is exceedingly
+simple, there is no fussy detail, nothing to catch dirt. The walls are
+all panelled, and painted either ivory or dark brown; the furniture is
+of wicker and plain wood, painted in gay colours--rich blues and
+vermilion; the tablecloths are of red or blue checks. In the spacious
+bedrooms are simple colour schemes--in one there are thick, straight
+curtains of flaming orange, in another of a deep blue, in another of
+red and white checked material. The floors are of polished wood or red
+tiles strewn with rugs; vivid-coloured cushions lie in the easy chairs;
+and set about in earthen jars are great branches of mimosa and lilac
+from the South, boughs of pussy-willow, the tender velvety grey ovals
+blossoming into fragile yellow dust; all along the sills are indoor
+window-boxes filled with hyacinths of pink and white and a cold faint
+blue.
+
+On the walls the only decoration is that of posters, and these create an
+extraordinary effect as of a series of windows, opening upon different
+climes and strange worlds, windows set in ivory walls. Here is an old
+Norman castle, grey against a sky of luminous yellow, there a stream in
+Brittany which you can almost hear brawling past the plane-trees with
+their freckled trunks, while beyond it, through another window, you see
+a pergola of roses whose deep red has turned wine-coloured under the
+moonlight, and beyond that again, the white cliffs of England go down
+into a peacock sea. And, in the Red Cross dining-room, a poilu, his
+mouth open on a yell of encouragement, charges with uplifted hands,
+looking over his shoulder at you with bright daring eyes, and you do not
+need the inscription underneath of "_On les aura!_" to guess what spirit
+urges him.
+
+This, then, is the setting for one of the most merciful of the works of
+the Red Cross. That it is appreciated is shown by the fact that at
+Christmas, at this house, with its staff of Superintendent, cook,
+parlourmaid, housemaid and "tweeny," with one chauffeuse, there were
+forty relations of wounded staying. The average number of people for
+whom Army and Red Cross rations are drawn three times a week is
+twenty-five, but for these rations as for fifteen are drawn, as the food
+supply is too generously proportioned for a household consisting so
+largely of women. But it will be seen that with a constantly fluctuating
+population the task of housekeeping is no easy one, though it is tackled
+by the voluntary staff with gaiety and courage.
+
+They have troubles of their own, too, the members of that staff, and in
+the big kitchen, where among the dishes on the table a pink hyacinth
+bloomed, the fair-haired cook I saw so busily working was back from a
+leave in England that was to have been her marriage-leave, had not her
+fiancé been killed the day before he was to join her. Now she is amongst
+her pots and pans again and smiling still, as I can testify. The
+"tweeny," who also describes herself as a boot-boy, is a young
+war-widow. Things like these are almost beyond the admiration of mortals
+less severely tested.
+
+The material difficulties are not the worst in a hostel of this kind,
+which in its very nature presupposes grief. The relations, of course,
+are of all kinds, after every pattern of humanity, and each makes his or
+her emotional demand, if not in active appeal to sympathy, yet in the
+strain that it entails on the sensitively organised to see others in
+sorrow--and unless you are sensitive you are no good for work such as
+this. This hostel is blessed in its Superintendent, an American V.A.D.
+worker of a personality so _simpatica_--there is no adequate English for
+what I mean--that you are aware of it at first meeting with her; and she
+is a woman of the world, which is not always the case with women
+workers, however excellent.
+
+Shortly before I came to the Hostel a very young wife arrived to see her
+husband, who lay desperately ill in one of the hospitals. When he died
+she became as a thing distraught and could not be left, and the
+Superintendent even had to have her to sleep in her room with her all
+the time she was there. Others, again, are aloof in their sorrow, though
+it is none the less tragic for that. The first question on the lips of
+the Staff when the chauffeuse comes back from taking the relatives to
+the hospital is, "Was it good news?"
+
+It was good news for the couple who arrived on the same evening that I
+did, the mother and father of a young officer who was very badly
+injured. I saw them next morning in the lounge, sitting quietly on
+either side of the centre-stove, a business man and his wife, as neat,
+he in his serge suit, she in her satin blouse and carefully folded lace
+and smooth grey hair, as if they had not been travelling for a day and a
+night on end, racked by anxiety, though you could see the deep lines
+that the strain had left. He looked at me with those patient eyes of the
+elderly which hold the same unconscious pathos as those of animals, and
+talked in a low quiet voice, and it seemed almost an impertinence of a
+total stranger to assure these gentle, dignified people of her gladness
+that their only son was safe, yet how glad one is that any one of these
+brief contacts in passing should be of happiness! It is so impossible
+not to weep with them that weep that it is a keen joy to be able to
+rejoice with them that do rejoice.
+
+"It's so free here ..." he told me, "that's what the wife and I like so.
+No rules and regulations, you can do just what you like as though you
+were in your own home ... no feeling that as you don't pay you've got to
+do what you're told." And there was expressed the spirit of the Hostel
+as I discovered it.
+
+There are no rules, and it is always impressed upon the Superintendents
+that the relations are not obliged to go there, that they do so because
+they choose to, and must be treated as honoured guests. In the
+dining-room there are little tables as at an hotel, so that the
+different parties can keep to themselves if they prefer it; there are
+no times for going out or coming in, no times for "lights out," no need
+to have a meal in if the visitor mentions he is going out for it. The
+relations who stay at these hostels are guests in every sense of the
+word, and there is not one trace of red tape or the faintest feeling of
+obligation about the whole thing.
+
+And that must have been what I had felt in the very air of the place
+when I arrived, what stole with so precious a balm over me who had been
+in camp after camp, institution after institution. This place, with its
+quiet walls and its grey shutters wing-wide upon its grey walls, was not
+only beautiful and rich with that richness only age can give, it was
+instinct as well with freedom and with peace.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XIII
+
+GENERAL SERVANTS AND A GENERAL QUESTION
+
+
+I have left till the last what to some people will be the dullest and
+what is certainly the least spectacular of all the work done by the
+women in France, but what is to me perhaps the most wonderful and
+admirable of all. I mean that of the Domestic Staffs.
+
+For there is something thrilling about driving wounded, something
+eternally picturesque about nursing them, but there is no glamour about
+being a general servant.... A general servant, year in, year out, and
+with no wages at that, for I talk of the voluntary staffs, girls of
+gentle birth and breeding who deliberately undertake to wash dishes and
+clean floors and empty slops day after day. I think heroism can no
+higher go, and I am not trying to be funny; I mean it.
+
+All the voluntary camps I had seen, all the hostels, the rest stations,
+and many hospitals, are staffed by voluntary domestic help; and the
+girls they wait upon, the drivers and secretaries and such like, are
+eager in recognition of them. But that seems to me about all the
+recognition they do get; they get no "snappy pars," no photographs in
+the picture papers, no songs are sung of them, no reward is theirs in
+the shape of medal or ribbon, nothing but the sense of a dish properly
+cleaned or rugs duly swept under. I consider that there ought to be a
+special medal for girls who have slaved as general servants during the
+war, without a thrill of romance to support them; a "Skivvy's Ribbon" as
+one of them laughingly suggested to me when I propounded the idea.
+
+Take, for example, the Headquarters of the British Red Cross, at the
+Hotel Christol at Boulogne, to which I returned on my homeward way, as I
+had come to it on landing. The staff, counting the Commissioner and
+officials, the clerks, typists, secretaries, and Post Office girls,
+amount to about a hundred and forty-five people, and the house staff
+number seventeen and are all V.A.D.'s. The Hotel Christol is also the
+headquarters for all Red Cross people going on leave or arriving
+therefrom via Boulogne, and all have to report there; nearly all want a
+meal, many want a bed.
+
+The men-workers and many of the women, such as V.A.D. Commandants, etc.,
+live out in billets in the town, but the manageress and her assistant,
+the Post Office Commandant, the girl driver of the mail-car with her
+orderly (these two girls drive about sixty miles daily with the mails),
+the girls of the telephone exchange and the rest of the Post Office
+girls, all "live in," and in addition to the casual Red Cross workers
+who may appeal for a bed any time there are the relations of wounded who
+have been put up there whenever possible, though now a hostel is being
+opened in Boulogne for the purpose. All the people working in the house
+and all Red Cross workers arriving by boat are entitled to take their
+meals at the Christol, as are all Red Cross workers in Boulogne, both
+officers and privates, and the average number of meals served is 2,500 a
+week. Four or five girls act as waitresses in the dining-room, and three
+are always in the pantry, which must never be left for a moment during
+the day; so it will be seen that the headquarters of the Red Cross is a
+sort of hotel, except that nobody pays.
+
+There are French servants to do the roughest work, but the girls have
+plenty to do without that. The house staff begin work at seven in the
+morning; at seven-thirty in the evening they start to turn out the
+forty-two offices, which they sweep and dust every day. They wash all
+the tea-things (not the dinner-things), and clean all the silver and
+glass, they make the beds and do all the waiting. A pretty good list of
+occupations, is it not, carried out on such a huge scale?
+
+The girls are well looked after, for it must not be forgotten that some
+of them are not more than eighteen, and their parents in England have a
+right to demand that these children should be at once guarded and
+cheered. No Red Cross girl is allowed out after half-past nine in a
+restaurant, and none is ever allowed to dine out unaccompanied by
+another girl. But when a friend of a girl passes through Boulogne, then
+it is permitted that she and another girl may go and dine with the
+officer in question, always provided they are back by nine-thirty. For
+superiors are merciful and human creatures these days, and there is
+always the thought that the girl may never see that friend again. And
+Heaven--and the superior--knows that these girls need and deserve a
+little relaxation and enjoyment.
+
+And would you not think that to girls who work as these do and behave so
+well would at least be given the understanding and respect of all of us
+who do so much less? Yet how often one hears careless remarks of censure
+or--worse--of belittlement. That to other nations our ways may need
+explaining is understandable, but we should indeed be ashamed that any
+amongst ourselves fail in comprehension.
+
+What do the French think of our women? That is a question that
+inevitably arises in the mind of anyone who knows the differences in
+French and English education. Let me show the thing as I think it is, by
+means of a metaphor.
+
+It is universally conceded that marriage is a more difficult proposition
+than friendship, that it is more a test of affection to live under one
+roof and share the daily commonplaces of life than it is to meet
+occasionally when one can make a feast of the meeting. Yet this is not
+to say that marriage is the less admirable state, but only to allow that
+it is one requiring greater sacrifices, greater tact, and--greater
+affection. Therefore, when it is admitted that the presence in France
+for nearly four years of English soldiers, English civilians on
+war-work, and the consequent erection of whole temporary townships for
+their accommodation, is a greater test--if you will a greater
+strain--for the Entente than if intercourse had been limited to an
+occasional interchange of a handful of people, one is not saying
+anything derogatory either to French hosts or English guests, but merely
+frankly conceding that more depth of affection and understanding is
+necessary than would otherwise have been the case. To superficial
+relationships, superficial knowledge, but to the big partnerships of
+life, complete understanding. And, if that is never quite possible in
+this world, at least let the corner where knowledge cannot come be
+filled by tolerance.
+
+England is no longer on terms of mere friendly intercourse with France;
+the bond is deeper, more indissoluble.... And as in marriage the closest
+bond of all is the birth of children, so in this pact of nations the
+greatest bond is the loss of children--lost for the same cause upon the
+same soil....
+
+With a bond as deep as this--a bond always acknowledged and given its
+meed of recognition by the most thoughtful brains and sensitive
+hearts--yet, as in marriage, there are bound to be minor irritations,
+points, not of meeting, but of conflict. Trifles, indeed, these points,
+compared with the magnitude of the bond which unites, but nevertheless
+trifles which would be better adjusted than ignored.
+
+In the first place, we must recognise that though the things which unite
+us, our common ideals, our common needs, are far stronger than any
+difference in our modes of thought, yet those differences exist, and
+that, in marriage, it is often said that it is the little things which
+count.... Heaven forbid that we should so lose sense of proportion as to
+say it when the matter in hand is the marriage of nations, but
+nevertheless it is well not entirely to forget it.... And, of all the
+differences in customs between us, there is probably none more marked
+than in our way of treating what is known--loosely and with considerable
+banality--as the "sex-problem." This is not the place to discuss those
+differences, though, as one who has known and loved France all her life,
+I may mention that, personally, I see much to admire in the French
+system and could wish that we emulated it, but that is neither here nor
+there at the moment.
+
+France has probably evolved for the happiness and welfare of her
+womenkind the sort of life which suits best with their temperament and
+circumstances. Women, like water, find their own level, and no one who
+knows France, and knows the devotion, the business capacity, and the
+good works of her women, imagines them to be the butterfly creatures
+that English fancy used to paint them twenty or thirty years ago. As a
+matter of fact, the present writer had occasion, two winters ago, to
+make a close study of the varied scope of women's work in France--the
+hospitals for training of _femmes du monde_, the schools like Le Foyer,
+for the training of young girls of the upper classes to help their
+poorer sisters, etc., etc., all works carried on unostentatiously long
+before the war broke upon us and proved their usefulness. The
+"butterfly" Frenchwoman underwent, before the war, a far more serious
+social training than did the happy-go-lucky English girl, and was better
+equipped in consequence, with a knowledge of economic conditions, than
+the untrained Englishwoman could be.
+
+But we too have our quality, and I rather think it is to be found in the
+greater freedom which we are allowed. We were not so well trained, but
+freedom stepped into the place of custom, and gave the necessary
+attitude of mind--that unprejudiced, untrammelled attitude which is
+essential to the quick grasping of a fresh _métier_. That is where our
+method--or, if you prefer it, our lack of method--helped us, even as
+their training helped the French. And the French, with their
+extraordinary facility of vision, do, I think, understand that we have
+simply pushed our freedom to its logical and legitimate outcome, that we
+could not be expected, after being accustomed, for many years past, to
+be on terms of simple easy friendship with men as with our own sex,
+above all, after working side by side with them since this war began, we
+could not be expected to say that we could not work with them in France,
+though we could in England, or that perhaps this girl would, and that
+girl couldn't....
+
+We naturally proceeded to act _en masse_ as we had acted individually,
+to do on a large scale what had been done on a small, to manipulate
+great bodies of women where before a few friends had worked together. In
+every large body of persons there are bound to be one or two individuals
+who fail to come up to the required standard, but that does not alter
+the principle that what can safely be done in small quantities can
+safely be done in large, provided the conditions are altered to scale.
+
+And that is what we are doing, and what our Government is helping us to
+do; that is what our Women's Army and our voluntary workers in France
+are--the expression, on a large scale, of what bands of women have been
+doing so successfully on a small scale since the beginning of the
+war--helping, and even replacing the men. And just as, with our
+peculiar training and mode of thought, it is possible for the average
+Englishwoman to eliminate sex as a factor in the scheme of things, so it
+is possible to eliminate it in greater masses. In other words, it is
+perfectly possible, to men and girls brought up with the English method
+of free friendly intercourse, to work side by side, to meet, to walk
+together, and to remain--merely friends. Whether that is a good thing or
+not is another point altogether, as it is whether it makes for charm in
+a woman.... Certainly no woman in this world competes with a Frenchwoman
+for charm. It is as recognised as an Englishwoman's complexion--and
+considerably more lasting!
+
+Probably it is only ourselves and the Americans among the races of the
+world who could have instituted such an experiment as that of our
+Women's Army, but there is among the nations one which is supreme in
+"flair," in sympathy, and a certain ability to comprehend intellectually
+what it might not understand emotionally, and that nation is France.
+
+I am confident that it will never have to be said that when Englishwomen
+sacrificed so much--and to a Frenchwoman one does not need to point out
+what a sacrifice it is when a woman risks youth and looks in hard
+unceasing work--that Frenchwomen failed to understand them or to
+attribute motives to them other than those that have animated
+themselves in their own labours throughout the war.
+
+That it must sometimes look odd to them one knows so well; how can it be
+otherwise? They see the girls, khaki-clad, out walking without
+"Tommies," hear the sounds of music and dancing coming from the
+recreation huts, where the girls are allowed to invite the men, and
+_vice versa_. Yet, if you investigate, you will find out that they are
+of an extraordinary simplicity, these girls and men, in their
+intercourse, in their earnest dancing, taught them by instructors from
+our Young Men's Christian Association, inspired by nothing more heady
+than lemonade, and chaperoned by the women-officers, who have attained a
+mixture of authority and motherly supervision over every individual girl
+that reminds me of nothing so much as the care, born of a sort of divine
+cunning, of a very dear and clever Mother Superior at a convent I once
+stayed at in France. For the interesting point for both the French and
+ourselves to note is that in the treatment of our Women's Army in France
+we have taken a leaf out of their book. We look after the girls with
+something of that love and care which surrounds a girl in France.
+
+For many of the Women's Army are working girls, who have never been
+guarded in their lives, whose parents had probably, after the
+lower-class English way, very little influence with them, and who,
+though good, honest, rough girls, were free to roam the streets of their
+native towns with their friends every evening once their work was over.
+Now, for what is for many of them the first time in their lives, they
+are being watched and guarded in a manner that is more French than
+English, and which I find admirable. As for their walks, their
+friendships with men, the personal observation of the acute French will
+show them that it is merely our Anglo-Saxon way, and the official
+statistics will prove to any doubters how well both the girls and the
+men can be trusted to behave themselves. We are a cold nation if you
+like, but there it is--it has its excellences, if not its charms.
+
+So much for fundamental differences, which, when intelligence and
+sympathy go out to meet them, become merely points on which temperaments
+agree to differ amicably, each giving its meed of admiration to the
+other. And for minor matters, little things of different customs only,
+that nevertheless, occasionally, in the strain of this war, ruffle even
+friends, I would say something like this, which is in the hearts of us
+all....
+
+France--dear lovely France, to so many of us adored for many years, who
+has stood to us for the romance of the world, we know that in many
+things our ways are not your ways and never will be, nor would we wish
+it otherwise. To each nation her distinctiveness, or she loses her
+soul. But, when those ways of ours seem to you most alien, say to
+yourself: "This is only England's differing way of doing what we are
+doing, of fighting for what we are fighting for--the saving of the right
+to individualism, the right to be different...." To gain that we are all
+having to become alike, just as to win freedom we are having for a time
+to give it up, and the great thing to remember is that this terrible
+coherent community life is being borne with only that eventually we may
+all be free men once more. Let us, for all time, differ in our own ways,
+rather than agree in the German! But also let us, while differing,
+understand.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XIV
+
+NOTES AND QUERIES
+
+
+On my last evening I sat and thought about the girls I had seen and
+known, in greater and less degrees, in passing. And I saw them, not as
+unthinking "sporting" young things, who were having a great adventure,
+but as girls who were steadily sticking to their jobs, often without
+enjoyment save that of knowledge of good work well done. And I thought
+of those prophets who gloomily foretell that the women will never want
+to drop into the background again--forgetful of the fact that where a
+woman is is never a background to herself. I smiled as I thought of the
+eagerness with which these hard workers in mud and snow and heat will
+start buying pretty clothes again and going out to parties ... and I was
+very thankful to know how unchangedly woman they had all remained, in
+spite of the fact that they had had the strength to lay the privileges
+and the fun of being a woman aside for a time.
+
+I remembered what the D. of T. had said to me when we discussed the
+question of how the girls would settle down when it was all over, and
+how he had thought that even if they did not marry all would be well,
+because they would have had their adventure.... I remembered too how
+that had seemed to me the correct answer at the time. Then later, when
+that awful web of depression caught me, and the horror of the
+school-girl conditions of life and all the apparent "brightness" had
+choked me, I had all the more thought it true, but marvelled; later
+still, when I caught glimpses of that wonderful spirit and that deep
+sophistication which had so cheered me, I reversed the whole judgment
+and thought there was nothing in it.
+
+Now, thinking it all over, it seemed to me that somewhere midway lay
+Truth. These girls have had, in a certain sense, their adventure, but
+when it is all over, they will have a reaction from it, and I believe
+that reaction will be pleasant to them, that it will be the reaction,
+and not the memory of adventure, which will content them. It is certain
+that to anyone who has worked as these girls work a considerable period
+of doing nothing in particular will be very acceptable. They will all
+have to become themselves again, which will be interesting....
+
+Dear, wonderful girls ... you who wash dishes and scrub and sweep, you
+girls of the Women's Army who replace men and who do it so thoroughly,
+you drivers who are out in all weathers, night and day, sometimes for a
+week or more on end, who face hardships such as were faced in those
+three weeks at T---- when there were no fires and no water, how glad I
+am to have met you.... So I sat and thought, and then I picked up a copy
+of _The Times_ which had just come over. And in the "Personal" column
+this caught my eye:
+
+"Lady wants war-work, preferably motor-driving, from three to five p.m."
+
+And I saw that it was not only those far removed from the war who
+misunderstood both what it demands and that which has arisen to meet
+those demands.
+
+Do we not nearly all fail to realise the magnitude and import of what is
+being done by these unspectacular workers behind the lines, who are yet
+part of war itself, and daily and nightly strengthen the hands of the
+fighters? Some of us in England realise as little as you in far-off
+countries, and yet it should be our business to know, because the least
+we can do is to understand so that we, in our much less fine way, can
+help them a little, one tithe of the amount they help our fighting men.
+
+Not because of any desire of theirs for praise is it necessary--I never
+saw a healthier disregard, amounting to a kindly contempt, for what
+those at home think or don't think, than among the women working in
+France--but because it is only by knowing that we can respond
+generously enough to the needs of their work, and only by understanding
+that we can save our own souls from that fat and contented ignorance
+which induces a sleep uncommonly like death.
+
+Nor, as long as we listen to the girls themselves, are we in any danger
+of thinking too much of them or of their work. Not a woman I met,
+English or American, working in France, but said something like this,
+and meant it: "What, after all, is anything we can do, except inasmuch
+as it may help the men a little? How could we bear to do nothing when
+the men are doing the most wonderful thing that has ever been done in
+the world?"
+
+
+
+
+THE END
+
+
+
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+
+Transcriber's Note:
+
+Punctuation has been normalised.
+
+
+
+
+
+
+End of Project Gutenberg's The Sword of Deborah, by F. Tennyson Jesse
+
+*** END OF THIS PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK THE SWORD OF DEBORAH ***
+
+***** This file should be named 33906-8.txt or 33906-8.zip *****
+This and all associated files of various formats will be found in:
+        http://www.gutenberg.org/3/3/9/0/33906/
+
+Produced by Julia Neufeld, Suzanne Shell and the Online
+Distributed Proofreading Team at http://www.pgdp.net (This
+file was produced from images generously made available
+by The Internet Archive/American Libraries.)
+
+
+Updated editions will replace the previous one--the old editions
+will be renamed.
+
+Creating the works from public domain print editions means that no
+one owns a United States copyright in these works, so the Foundation
+(and you!) can copy and distribute it in the United States without
+permission and without paying copyright royalties.  Special rules,
+set forth in the General Terms of Use part of this license, apply to
+copying and distributing Project Gutenberg-tm electronic works to
+protect the PROJECT GUTENBERG-tm concept and trademark.  Project
+Gutenberg is a registered trademark, and may not be used if you
+charge for the eBooks, unless you receive specific permission.  If you
+do not charge anything for copies of this eBook, complying with the
+rules is very easy.  You may use this eBook for nearly any purpose
+such as creation of derivative works, reports, performances and
+research.  They may be modified and printed and given away--you may do
+practically ANYTHING with public domain eBooks.  Redistribution is
+subject to the trademark license, especially commercial
+redistribution.
+
+
+
+*** START: FULL LICENSE ***
+
+THE FULL PROJECT GUTENBERG LICENSE
+PLEASE READ THIS BEFORE YOU DISTRIBUTE OR USE THIS WORK
+
+To protect the Project Gutenberg-tm mission of promoting the free
+distribution of electronic works, by using or distributing this work
+(or any other work associated in any way with the phrase "Project
+Gutenberg"), you agree to comply with all the terms of the Full Project
+Gutenberg-tm License (available with this file or online at
+http://gutenberg.org/license).
+
+
+Section 1.  General Terms of Use and Redistributing Project Gutenberg-tm
+electronic works
+
+1.A.  By reading or using any part of this Project Gutenberg-tm
+electronic work, you indicate that you have read, understand, agree to
+and accept all the terms of this license and intellectual property
+(trademark/copyright) agreement.  If you do not agree to abide by all
+the terms of this agreement, you must cease using and return or destroy
+all copies of Project Gutenberg-tm electronic works in your possession.
+If you paid a fee for obtaining a copy of or access to a Project
+Gutenberg-tm electronic work and you do not agree to be bound by the
+terms of this agreement, you may obtain a refund from the person or
+entity to whom you paid the fee as set forth in paragraph 1.E.8.
+
+1.B.  "Project Gutenberg" is a registered trademark.  It may only be
+used on or associated in any way with an electronic work by people who
+agree to be bound by the terms of this agreement.  There are a few
+things that you can do with most Project Gutenberg-tm electronic works
+even without complying with the full terms of this agreement.  See
+paragraph 1.C below.  There are a lot of things you can do with Project
+Gutenberg-tm electronic works if you follow the terms of this agreement
+and help preserve free future access to Project Gutenberg-tm electronic
+works.  See paragraph 1.E below.
+
+1.C.  The Project Gutenberg Literary Archive Foundation ("the Foundation"
+or PGLAF), owns a compilation copyright in the collection of Project
+Gutenberg-tm electronic works.  Nearly all the individual works in the
+collection are in the public domain in the United States.  If an
+individual work is in the public domain in the United States and you are
+located in the United States, we do not claim a right to prevent you from
+copying, distributing, performing, displaying or creating derivative
+works based on the work as long as all references to Project Gutenberg
+are removed.  Of course, we hope that you will support the Project
+Gutenberg-tm mission of promoting free access to electronic works by
+freely sharing Project Gutenberg-tm works in compliance with the terms of
+this agreement for keeping the Project Gutenberg-tm name associated with
+the work.  You can easily comply with the terms of this agreement by
+keeping this work in the same format with its attached full Project
+Gutenberg-tm License when you share it without charge with others.
+
+1.D.  The copyright laws of the place where you are located also govern
+what you can do with this work.  Copyright laws in most countries are in
+a constant state of change.  If you are outside the United States, check
+the laws of your country in addition to the terms of this agreement
+before downloading, copying, displaying, performing, distributing or
+creating derivative works based on this work or any other Project
+Gutenberg-tm work.  The Foundation makes no representations concerning
+the copyright status of any work in any country outside the United
+States.
+
+1.E.  Unless you have removed all references to Project Gutenberg:
+
+1.E.1.  The following sentence, with active links to, or other immediate
+access to, the full Project Gutenberg-tm License must appear prominently
+whenever any copy of a Project Gutenberg-tm work (any work on which the
+phrase "Project Gutenberg" appears, or with which the phrase "Project
+Gutenberg" is associated) is accessed, displayed, performed, viewed,
+copied or distributed:
+
+This eBook is for the use of anyone anywhere at no cost and with
+almost no restrictions whatsoever.  You may copy it, give it away or
+re-use it under the terms of the Project Gutenberg License included
+with this eBook or online at www.gutenberg.org
+
+1.E.2.  If an individual Project Gutenberg-tm electronic work is derived
+from the public domain (does not contain a notice indicating that it is
+posted with permission of the copyright holder), the work can be copied
+and distributed to anyone in the United States without paying any fees
+or charges.  If you are redistributing or providing access to a work
+with the phrase "Project Gutenberg" associated with or appearing on the
+work, you must comply either with the requirements of paragraphs 1.E.1
+through 1.E.7 or obtain permission for the use of the work and the
+Project Gutenberg-tm trademark as set forth in paragraphs 1.E.8 or
+1.E.9.
+
+1.E.3.  If an individual Project Gutenberg-tm electronic work is posted
+with the permission of the copyright holder, your use and distribution
+must comply with both paragraphs 1.E.1 through 1.E.7 and any additional
+terms imposed by the copyright holder.  Additional terms will be linked
+to the Project Gutenberg-tm License for all works posted with the
+permission of the copyright holder found at the beginning of this work.
+
+1.E.4.  Do not unlink or detach or remove the full Project Gutenberg-tm
+License terms from this work, or any files containing a part of this
+work or any other work associated with Project Gutenberg-tm.
+
+1.E.5.  Do not copy, display, perform, distribute or redistribute this
+electronic work, or any part of this electronic work, without
+prominently displaying the sentence set forth in paragraph 1.E.1 with
+active links or immediate access to the full terms of the Project
+Gutenberg-tm License.
+
+1.E.6.  You may convert to and distribute this work in any binary,
+compressed, marked up, nonproprietary or proprietary form, including any
+word processing or hypertext form.  However, if you provide access to or
+distribute copies of a Project Gutenberg-tm work in a format other than
+"Plain Vanilla ASCII" or other format used in the official version
+posted on the official Project Gutenberg-tm web site (www.gutenberg.org),
+you must, at no additional cost, fee or expense to the user, provide a
+copy, a means of exporting a copy, or a means of obtaining a copy upon
+request, of the work in its original "Plain Vanilla ASCII" or other
+form.  Any alternate format must include the full Project Gutenberg-tm
+License as specified in paragraph 1.E.1.
+
+1.E.7.  Do not charge a fee for access to, viewing, displaying,
+performing, copying or distributing any Project Gutenberg-tm works
+unless you comply with paragraph 1.E.8 or 1.E.9.
+
+1.E.8.  You may charge a reasonable fee for copies of or providing
+access to or distributing Project Gutenberg-tm electronic works provided
+that
+
+- You pay a royalty fee of 20% of the gross profits you derive from
+     the use of Project Gutenberg-tm works calculated using the method
+     you already use to calculate your applicable taxes.  The fee is
+     owed to the owner of the Project Gutenberg-tm trademark, but he
+     has agreed to donate royalties under this paragraph to the
+     Project Gutenberg Literary Archive Foundation.  Royalty payments
+     must be paid within 60 days following each date on which you
+     prepare (or are legally required to prepare) your periodic tax
+     returns.  Royalty payments should be clearly marked as such and
+     sent to the Project Gutenberg Literary Archive Foundation at the
+     address specified in Section 4, "Information about donations to
+     the Project Gutenberg Literary Archive Foundation."
+
+- You provide a full refund of any money paid by a user who notifies
+     you in writing (or by e-mail) within 30 days of receipt that s/he
+     does not agree to the terms of the full Project Gutenberg-tm
+     License.  You must require such a user to return or
+     destroy all copies of the works possessed in a physical medium
+     and discontinue all use of and all access to other copies of
+     Project Gutenberg-tm works.
+
+- You provide, in accordance with paragraph 1.F.3, a full refund of any
+     money paid for a work or a replacement copy, if a defect in the
+     electronic work is discovered and reported to you within 90 days
+     of receipt of the work.
+
+- You comply with all other terms of this agreement for free
+     distribution of Project Gutenberg-tm works.
+
+1.E.9.  If you wish to charge a fee or distribute a Project Gutenberg-tm
+electronic work or group of works on different terms than are set
+forth in this agreement, you must obtain permission in writing from
+both the Project Gutenberg Literary Archive Foundation and Michael
+Hart, the owner of the Project Gutenberg-tm trademark.  Contact the
+Foundation as set forth in Section 3 below.
+
+1.F.
+
+1.F.1.  Project Gutenberg volunteers and employees expend considerable
+effort to identify, do copyright research on, transcribe and proofread
+public domain works in creating the Project Gutenberg-tm
+collection.  Despite these efforts, Project Gutenberg-tm electronic
+works, and the medium on which they may be stored, may contain
+"Defects," such as, but not limited to, incomplete, inaccurate or
+corrupt data, transcription errors, a copyright or other intellectual
+property infringement, a defective or damaged disk or other medium, a
+computer virus, or computer codes that damage or cannot be read by
+your equipment.
+
+1.F.2.  LIMITED WARRANTY, DISCLAIMER OF DAMAGES - Except for the "Right
+of Replacement or Refund" described in paragraph 1.F.3, the Project
+Gutenberg Literary Archive Foundation, the owner of the Project
+Gutenberg-tm trademark, and any other party distributing a Project
+Gutenberg-tm electronic work under this agreement, disclaim all
+liability to you for damages, costs and expenses, including legal
+fees.  YOU AGREE THAT YOU HAVE NO REMEDIES FOR NEGLIGENCE, STRICT
+LIABILITY, BREACH OF WARRANTY OR BREACH OF CONTRACT EXCEPT THOSE
+PROVIDED IN PARAGRAPH 1.F.3. YOU AGREE THAT THE FOUNDATION, THE
+TRADEMARK OWNER, AND ANY DISTRIBUTOR UNDER THIS AGREEMENT WILL NOT BE
+LIABLE TO YOU FOR ACTUAL, DIRECT, INDIRECT, CONSEQUENTIAL, PUNITIVE OR
+INCIDENTAL DAMAGES EVEN IF YOU GIVE NOTICE OF THE POSSIBILITY OF SUCH
+DAMAGE.
+
+1.F.3.  LIMITED RIGHT OF REPLACEMENT OR REFUND - If you discover a
+defect in this electronic work within 90 days of receiving it, you can
+receive a refund of the money (if any) you paid for it by sending a
+written explanation to the person you received the work from.  If you
+received the work on a physical medium, you must return the medium with
+your written explanation.  The person or entity that provided you with
+the defective work may elect to provide a replacement copy in lieu of a
+refund.  If you received the work electronically, the person or entity
+providing it to you may choose to give you a second opportunity to
+receive the work electronically in lieu of a refund.  If the second copy
+is also defective, you may demand a refund in writing without further
+opportunities to fix the problem.
+
+1.F.4.  Except for the limited right of replacement or refund set forth
+in paragraph 1.F.3, this work is provided to you 'AS-IS' WITH NO OTHER
+WARRANTIES OF ANY KIND, EXPRESS OR IMPLIED, INCLUDING BUT NOT LIMITED TO
+WARRANTIES OF MERCHANTIBILITY OR FITNESS FOR ANY PURPOSE.
+
+1.F.5.  Some states do not allow disclaimers of certain implied
+warranties or the exclusion or limitation of certain types of damages.
+If any disclaimer or limitation set forth in this agreement violates the
+law of the state applicable to this agreement, the agreement shall be
+interpreted to make the maximum disclaimer or limitation permitted by
+the applicable state law.  The invalidity or unenforceability of any
+provision of this agreement shall not void the remaining provisions.
+
+1.F.6.  INDEMNITY - You agree to indemnify and hold the Foundation, the
+trademark owner, any agent or employee of the Foundation, anyone
+providing copies of Project Gutenberg-tm electronic works in accordance
+with this agreement, and any volunteers associated with the production,
+promotion and distribution of Project Gutenberg-tm electronic works,
+harmless from all liability, costs and expenses, including legal fees,
+that arise directly or indirectly from any of the following which you do
+or cause to occur: (a) distribution of this or any Project Gutenberg-tm
+work, (b) alteration, modification, or additions or deletions to any
+Project Gutenberg-tm work, and (c) any Defect you cause.
+
+
+Section  2.  Information about the Mission of Project Gutenberg-tm
+
+Project Gutenberg-tm is synonymous with the free distribution of
+electronic works in formats readable by the widest variety of computers
+including obsolete, old, middle-aged and new computers.  It exists
+because of the efforts of hundreds of volunteers and donations from
+people in all walks of life.
+
+Volunteers and financial support to provide volunteers with the
+assistance they need, are critical to reaching Project Gutenberg-tm's
+goals and ensuring that the Project Gutenberg-tm collection will
+remain freely available for generations to come.  In 2001, the Project
+Gutenberg Literary Archive Foundation was created to provide a secure
+and permanent future for Project Gutenberg-tm and future generations.
+To learn more about the Project Gutenberg Literary Archive Foundation
+and how your efforts and donations can help, see Sections 3 and 4
+and the Foundation web page at http://www.pglaf.org.
+
+
+Section 3.  Information about the Project Gutenberg Literary Archive
+Foundation
+
+The Project Gutenberg Literary Archive Foundation is a non profit
+501(c)(3) educational corporation organized under the laws of the
+state of Mississippi and granted tax exempt status by the Internal
+Revenue Service.  The Foundation's EIN or federal tax identification
+number is 64-6221541.  Its 501(c)(3) letter is posted at
+http://pglaf.org/fundraising.  Contributions to the Project Gutenberg
+Literary Archive Foundation are tax deductible to the full extent
+permitted by U.S. federal laws and your state's laws.
+
+The Foundation's principal office is located at 4557 Melan Dr. S.
+Fairbanks, AK, 99712., but its volunteers and employees are scattered
+throughout numerous locations.  Its business office is located at
+809 North 1500 West, Salt Lake City, UT 84116, (801) 596-1887, email
+business@pglaf.org.  Email contact links and up to date contact
+information can be found at the Foundation's web site and official
+page at http://pglaf.org
+
+For additional contact information:
+     Dr. Gregory B. Newby
+     Chief Executive and Director
+     gbnewby@pglaf.org
+
+
+Section 4.  Information about Donations to the Project Gutenberg
+Literary Archive Foundation
+
+Project Gutenberg-tm depends upon and cannot survive without wide
+spread public support and donations to carry out its mission of
+increasing the number of public domain and licensed works that can be
+freely distributed in machine readable form accessible by the widest
+array of equipment including outdated equipment.  Many small donations
+($1 to $5,000) are particularly important to maintaining tax exempt
+status with the IRS.
+
+The Foundation is committed to complying with the laws regulating
+charities and charitable donations in all 50 states of the United
+States.  Compliance requirements are not uniform and it takes a
+considerable effort, much paperwork and many fees to meet and keep up
+with these requirements.  We do not solicit donations in locations
+where we have not received written confirmation of compliance.  To
+SEND DONATIONS or determine the status of compliance for any
+particular state visit http://pglaf.org
+
+While we cannot and do not solicit contributions from states where we
+have not met the solicitation requirements, we know of no prohibition
+against accepting unsolicited donations from donors in such states who
+approach us with offers to donate.
+
+International donations are gratefully accepted, but we cannot make
+any statements concerning tax treatment of donations received from
+outside the United States.  U.S. laws alone swamp our small staff.
+
+Please check the Project Gutenberg Web pages for current donation
+methods and addresses.  Donations are accepted in a number of other
+ways including checks, online payments and credit card donations.
+To donate, please visit: http://pglaf.org/donate
+
+
+Section 5.  General Information About Project Gutenberg-tm electronic
+works.
+
+Professor Michael S. Hart is the originator of the Project Gutenberg-tm
+concept of a library of electronic works that could be freely shared
+with anyone.  For thirty years, he produced and distributed Project
+Gutenberg-tm eBooks with only a loose network of volunteer support.
+
+
+Project Gutenberg-tm eBooks are often created from several printed
+editions, all of which are confirmed as Public Domain in the U.S.
+unless a copyright notice is included.  Thus, we do not necessarily
+keep eBooks in compliance with any particular paper edition.
+
+
+Most people start at our Web site which has the main PG search facility:
+
+     http://www.gutenberg.org
+
+This Web site includes information about Project Gutenberg-tm,
+including how to make donations to the Project Gutenberg Literary
+Archive Foundation, how to help produce our new eBooks, and how to
+subscribe to our email newsletter to hear about new eBooks.