Transcriber’s Notes

Hyphenation has been standardised.

Changes made are noted at the [end of the book.]

WOMEN WANTED

MABEL POTTER DAGGETT

WOMEN WANTED

The story written in blood red
letters on the horizon of the
Great World War

BY

MABEL POTTER DAGGETT

AUTHOR OF “IN LOCKERBIE STREET,” ETC.

Illustrated

NEW YORK

GEORGE H. DORAN COMPANY

COPYRIGHT, 1918,

BY GEORGE H. DORAN COMPANY

COPYRIGHT, 1917, 1918,

BY THE PICTORIAL REVIEW COMPANY

PRINTED IN THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA

To My Friend

KATHERINE LECKIE

THE ILLUMINATION OF

WHOSE PERSONALITY HAS

LIGHTED MY PATHWAY TO

TRUTH, THIS BOOK IS

AFFECTIONATELY

DEDICATED

CONTENTS

[Page 106]

MRS. PANKHURST’S GREATEST PARADE

When she led 40,000 English women through the streets of London in July, 1915. This procession is the vanguard in the march of all the women of the world to economic independence.

ILLUSTRATIONS

WOMEN WANTED

CHAPTER I

Glimpsing the Great World War

“Who goes there?”

I hear it yet, the ringing challenge from the war offices of Europe. Automatically my hand slides over my left hip. But to-day my tailored skirt drapes smoothly there.

The chamois bag that for months has bulged beneath is gone. As regularly as I fastened my garters every morning I have been wont to buckle the safety belt about my waist and straighten the bag at my side and feel with careful fingers for its tight shut clasp. You have to be thoughtful like that when you’re carrying credentials on which at any moment your personal safety, even your life may depend. As faithfully as I looked under the bed at night I always counted them over: my letter of credit for $3,000, my blue enveloped police book, and my passport criss-crossed with visés in the varied colours of all the rubber stamps that must officially vouch for me along my way. Ah, they were still all there. And with a sigh of relief I was wont to retire to my pillow with the sense of one more day safely done.

The long steel lines I have passed, I cannot forget. “Who goes there?” These that speak with authority are men with pistols in their belts and swords at their sides. And there are rows of them, O rows and rows of them along the way to the front. See the cold glitter of them! I still look nervously first over one shoulder and then over the other. This morning at breakfast a waiter only drops a fork. And I jump at the sound as if a shot had been fired. You know the feeling something’s going to catch you if you don’t watch out. Well, you have it like that for a long time after you’ve been in the war zone. Will it be a submarine or a Zeppelin or a khaki clad line of steel?

It was on a summer’s day in 1916 that I rushed into the office of the Pictorial Review. “Look!” I exclaimed excitedly to the editor at his desk. “See the message in the sky written in letters of blood above the battlefields of Europe! There it is, the promise of freedom for women!”

He brushed aside the magazine “lay out” before him, and lifted his eyes to the horizon of the world. And he too saw. Among the feminists of New York he has been known as the man with the vision. “Yes,” he agreed, “you are right. It is the wonder that is coming. Will you go over there and find out just what this terrible cataclysm of civilisation means to the woman’s cause?”

And he handed me my European commission. The next morning when I applied for my passport I began to be written down in the great books of judgment which the chancelleries of the nations keep to-day. Hear the leaves rustle as the pages chronicle my record in full. I must clear myself of the charge of even a German relative-in-law. I must be able to tell accurately, say, how many blocks intervene between the Baptist Church and the city hall in the town where I was born. They want to know the colour of my husband’s eyes. They will ask for all that is on my grandfather’s tombstone. They must have my genealogy through all my greatest ancestors. I have learned it that I may tell it glibly. For I shall scarcely be able to go round the block in Europe, you see, without meeting some military person who must know.

Even in New York, every consul of the countries to which I wish to proceed, puts these inquiries before my passport gets his visé. It is the British consul who is holding his in abeyance. He fixes me with a look, and he charges: “You’re not a suffragist, are you? Well,” he goes on severely, “they don’t want any trouble over there. I don’t know what they’ll do about you over there.” And his voice rises with his disapproval: “I don’t at all know that I ought to let you go.”

But finally he does. And he leans across his desk and passes me the pen with which to “sign on the dotted line.” It is the required documentary evidence. He feels reasonably sure now that the Kaiser and I wouldn’t speak if we passed by. And for the rest? Well, all governments demand to know very particularly who goes there when it happens to be a woman. You’re wishing trouble on yourself to be a suffragist almost as much as if you should elect to be a pacifist or an alien enemy. There is a prevailing opinion—which is a hang-over from say 1908 —that you may break something, if it is only a military rule. Why are you wandering about the world anyhow? You’ll take up a man’s place in the boat in a submarine incident. You’ll be so in the way in a bombardment. And you’ll eat as much sugar in a day as a soldier. So, do your dotted lines as you’re told.

They dance before my eyes in a dotted itinerary. It stretches away and away into far distant lands, where death may be the passing event in any day’s work. I shall face eternity from, say, the time that I awake to step into the bath tub in the morning until, having finished the last one hundredth stroke with the brush at night, I lay my troubled head on the pillow to rest uneasily beneath a heavy magazine assignment. “There’s going to be some risk,” the editor of the Pictorial Review said to me that day in his office, with just a note of hesitation in his voice. “I’ll take it,” I agreed.

The gangway lifts in Hoboken. We are cutting adrift from the American shore. Standing at the steamship’s rail, I am gazing down into faces that are dear. Slowly, surely they are dimming through the ocean’s mists. Shall I ever again look into eyes that look back love into mine?

I think, right here, some of the sparkle begins to fade from the great adventure on which I am embarked. We are steaming steadily out to sea. Whither? It has commenced, that anxious thought for every to-morrow, that is with a war zone traveller even in his dreams. A cold October wind whips full in my face. I shiver and turn up my coat collar. But is it the wind or the pain at my heart? I can no longer see the New York sky line for the tears in my eyes. And I turn in to my stateroom.

There on the white counterpane of my berth stretches a life-preserver thoughtfully laid out by my steward. On the wall directly above the wash-stand, a neatly printed card announces: “The occupant of this room is assigned to Lifeboat 17 on the starboard side.” It makes quite definitely clear the circumstances of ocean travel. This is to be no holiday jaunt. One ought at least to know how to wear a life-preserver. Before I read my steamer letters, I try mine on. It isn’t a “perfect 36.” “But they don’t come any smaller,” the steward says. “You just have to fold them over so,” and he ties the strings tight. Will they hold in the highest sea, I wonder.

The signs above the washstands, I think, have been seen by pretty nearly every one before lunch time. When we who are taking the Great Chance together, assemble in the dining-room, each of us has glimpsed the same shadowy figure at the wheel in the pilot house. We all earnestly hope it will be the captain who will take us across the Atlantic. But we know also that it may be the ghostly figure of the boatman Charon who will take us silently across the Styx.

Whatever else we may do on this voyage, we shall have to be always going-to-be-drowned. It is a curiously continuously present sensation. I don’t know just how many of my fellow travellers go to bed at night with the old nursery prayer in their minds if not on their lips. But I know that for me it is as vivid as when I was four years old:

Now I lay me down to sleep

I pray the Lord my soul to keep.

And should I die before I wake,

I pray the Lord my soul to take.

Each morning I awake in faint surprise that I am still here in this same seasick world. The daily promenade begins with a tour of inspection to one’s personal lifeboat. Everybody does it. You wish to make sure that it has not sprung a leak over night. Then you lean over the steamship’s rail to look for the great letters four feet high and electrically illuminated after dark, for all prowling undersea German craft to notice that this is the neutral New Amsterdam of the Holland-American line. Submarine warfare has not yet reached its most savage climax. Somebody says with confident courage: “Now that makes us quite safe, don’t you think?” And somebody answers as promptly as expected. “Oh, I’m sure they wouldn’t sink us when they see that sign.” And no one speaks the thought that’s plain in every face: “But Huns make ‘mistakes.’ And remember the Lusitania.”

We always are remembering the Lusitania. I never dress for dinner at night without recalling: And they went down in evening clothes. We play cards. We dance on deck. But never does one completely while away the recurring thought: Death snatched them as suddenly as from this my next play or as from the Turkey Trot or the Maxixe that the band is just beginning.

We read our Mr. Britlings but intermittently. The plot in which we find ourselves competes with the best seller. Subconsciously I am always listening for the explosion. If the Germans don’t do it with a submarine, it may be a floating mine that the last storm has lashed loose from its moorings.

What is this? Rumour spreads among the steamer chairs. Everybody rises. Little groups gather with lifted glasses. And—it is a piece of driftwood sighted on the wide Atlantic. That thrill walks off in about three times around the deck.

But what is that, out there, beyond the steamer’s path? Right over there where the fog is lifting? Surely, yes, that shadowy outline. Don’t you see it? Why, it’s growing larger every minute. I believe it is! Oh, yes, I’m sure they look like that. Wait. Well, if it were, it does seem as if the torpedo would have been here by now. Ah, we shall not be sunk this time after all! Our periscope passes. It is clearly now only a steamship’s funnel against the horizon.

Then one day there is an unusual stir of activity on deck. The sailors are stripping the canvas from off the lifeboats. The great crane is hauling the life rafts from out the hold. Oh, what is going to happen? The most nervous passenger wants right away to know. And the truthful answer to her query is, that no one can tell. But we are making ready now for shipwreck. In these days, methodically, like this it is done. It has to be, as you approach the more intense danger zone of a mined coast. You see you never can tell.

I go inside once more to try the straps of my life-preserver. But we are sailing through a sunlit sea. And at dinner the philosopher at our table—he is a Hindu from Calcutta—says smilingly, “Now this will do very nicely for shipwreck weather, gentlemen, very nicely for shipwreck weather.” It is the round-faced Hollander at my right, of orthodox Presbyterian faith, who protests earnestly, “Ah, but please no. Do not jest.” The next day when the dishes slide back and forth between the table racks, none of us laugh when the Hollander says solemnly, “See, but if God should call us now.” Ah, if he should, our life boats would never last us to Heaven. They would crumple like floats of paper in Neptune’s hand. Eating our dessert, we look out on the terrible green and white sea that licks and slaps at the portholes and all of us are very still. The lace importer from New York at my left, is the most quiet of all.

For eight days and nights we have escaped all the perils of the deep. And now it is the morning of the ninth day. You count them over like that momentously as God did when he made the world. What will to-morrow bring forth? Well, one prepares of course for landing.

I sit up late, nervously censoring my note book through. The nearer we get to the British coast, the more incriminating it appears to be familiar with so much as the German woman movement. I dig my blue pencil deep through the name of Frau Cauer. I rip open the package of my letters of introduction. What will they do to a person who is going to meet a pacifist by her first name? That’s a narrow escape. Another letter is signed by a perfectly good loyal American who, however, has the misfortune to have inherited a Fatherland name from some generations before. Oh, I cannot afford to be acquainted with either of my friends. I’ve got to be pro-ally all wool and yard wide clear to the most inside seams of my soul. I’ve got to avoid even the appearance of guilt. So, stealthily I tiptoe from my stateroom to drop both compromising letters into the sea.

Like this a journalist goes through Europe these days editing oneself, to be acceptable to the rows of men in khaki. So I edit and I edit and I edit myself until after midnight for the British government’s inspection. I try to think earnestly. What would a spy do? So that I may avoid doing it. And I go to bed so anxious lest I act like a spy that I dream I am one. When I awake on the morning of the tenth day, all our engines are still. And from bow to stern, our boat is all a-quiver with glad excitement. We have not been drowned! There beside us dances the little tender to take us ashore at Falmouth.

FACING THE STEEL LINE OF INQUIRY

The good safe earth is firm beneath our feet before the lace importer speaks. Then, looking out on the harbor, he says: “On my last business trip over a few months since, my steamship came in here safely. But the boat ahead and the next behind each struck a mine.” So the chances of life are like that, sometimes as close as one in three. But while you take them as they come, there are lesser difficulties that it’s a great relief to have some one to do something about. At this very moment I am devoutly glad for the lace importer near at hand. He is carrying my bag and holding his umbrella over me in the rain. For, you see, he is an American man. The more I have travelled, the more certain I have become that it’s a mistake to be a woman anywhere in the world there aren’t American men around. In far foreign lands I have found myself instinctively looking round the landscape for their first aid. The others, I am sure, mean well. But they aren’t like ours. An Englishman gave me his card last night at dinner: “Now if I can do anything for you in London,” he said, and so forth. It was the American man now holding his umbrella over me in the rain, who came yesterday to my steamer chair: “It’s going to be dark to-morrow night in London,” he said, “and the taxicabs are scarce. You must let me see that you reach your hotel in safety.” And I felt as sure a reliance in him as if we’d made mud pies together or he’d carried my books to school. You see, you count on an American man like that.

But the cold line of steel! That you have to do alone, even as you go each soul singly to the judgment gate of heaven. I grip my passport hard. It has been removed from its usual place of secure safety. Chamois bags are the eternal bother of being a woman abroad in war-time. Men have pockets, easy ones to get at informally. I have among my “most important credentials”—they are in separate packages carefully labelled like that—a special “diplomatic letter” commending me officially by the Secretary of State to the protection of all United States embassies and consulates. When they handed it to me in Washington, I remember they told me significantly: “We have just picked out of prison over there, two American correspondents whose lives we were able to save by the narrowest chance. We don’t want any international complications. Now, do be careful.”

I’m going to be. The Tower of London and some modern Bastille on the banks of the Seine and divers other dark damp places of detention over here are at this minute clearly outlining themselves as moving pictures before my mind. I earnestly don’t want to be in any of them.

We have reached the temporary wooden shack through which governments these days pass all who knock for admission at their frontiers. Inside the next room there at a long pine table sit the men with pistols in their belts and swords at their sides, whose business it is to get spies when they see them. We are to be admitted one by one for the relentless fire of their cross-questioning. They have taken “British subjects first.” Now they summon “aliens.”

To be called an alien in a foreign land feels at once like some sort of a charge. You never were convicted of this before. And it seems like the most unfortunate thing you can possibly be now. Besides, I am every moment becoming more acutely conscious of my mission. The rest of these my fellow travellers, it is true, are aliens. I am worse. For a journalist even in peace times appears a most suspiciously inquiring person who wishes to know everything that should not be found out. But in peace times one has only to handle individuals. In war-times one has to handle governments. The burden of proof rests heavier and heavier upon me. How shall I convince England that in spite of all, I can be a most harmless, pleasant person?

From the decision the other side of that door, there will be no appeal. The men in khaki there have authority to confiscate my notes—or me! And they are so particular about journalists. One friend of mine back from the front a month ago had his clothes turned inside out and they ripped the lining from his coat. Then there is the lemon acid bath, lest you carry notes in invisible writing on your skin. They do it, rumor says, in Germany. But who can tell when other War Offices will have adopted this efficiency method? Oh, dear, what is the use not to have been drowned if one must face an inquisition? And they may turn me back on the next boat. My thoughts are with the lemon acid bath. How many lemons will it take to fill the tub, I am speculatively computing, when “Next,” says the soldier. And it is I.

A battery of searching eyes is turned on me. I am face to face with my first steel line. The words of the British consul again ring warningly in my ears, “I don’t at all know what they’ll do about you over there.”

No one ever does know these days. It’s the tormenting uncertainty that keeps you literally guessing from day to day whether you’re going or coming. And on what least incidents does human judgment depend. Perhaps they’d like me better if my hat were blue instead of brown. Thank heaven I didn’t economise on the price of my travelling coat. I step bravely forward when the officer at the head of the table reaches out his hand for my passport.

In the upper left hand corner is attached my photograph. The Department of State at Washington requires it for all travellers now before they affix the great red seal that gives authenticity to the personal information recorded in this paper. From the passport photograph to my face, the officer glances sharply, suspiciously, like a bank teller looking for a forgery. I feel him looking straight through me to the very curl at the back of my neck. Ah, apparently it is I!

“Now what have you come over here for?” he inquires in a tone of voice that seems to say, “Nobody asked you to England. We’re quite too busy about other things to entertain strangers.”

I hand him my official journalistic letter addressed “To Whom it may Concern.” Signed by the editor of the Pictorial Review, it states that I am delegated to study the new position of women due to the war. Will he want me to? He may be as sensitive as the British consul in New York about the woman movement. He may prefer that it should not move at all.

I hold my breath while he reads the letter. Then I have to talk. I tell him, I think, the complete story of my life. I show him all of my credentials. I give him my photograph. You always have to do that. Photographs that are duplicates of the one on your passport, you must carry by the dozen. You have to leave them like visiting cards with gentlemen in khaki all over Europe.

Well, what is he going to do about me? I get out my letters of social introduction. There are 84! I strew them on the table for him to read. There is a door just behind his head. Will it be in there, the search and the confiscation and the lemon acid bath? I wonder, and I wonder. But I try to stand very still. If I move one foot, it might jar the decision that is forming in the officer’s mind. I am watching alertly for his expression. But there isn’t any. I can’t tell at all whether he likes me. An Englishman is always like that, completely shut up behind his face. It may be at this very moment he has made up his mind that I am a spy. He has read only four letters——

And he looks up suddenly, in his hand the letter from Mrs. Belmont in New York introducing me to the Duchess of Marlborough. He nods down the line to all the other military eyes fixed on me: “She’s all right. Let her go.”

I sign on the dotted line. And everything is over! In a flashing moment like that, it is accomplished. And a letter to “Our Duchess” has done it. At the magic of the name of the American woman who was Consuelo Vanderbilt, this steel like line of British officers quietly sheathes all opposition!

The soldier at the other end of the room opens a little wooden door in a wooden wall that lets me into England. My baggage is already being chalk marked “passed.” I am here! I clutch my passport happily and convulsively in my hand. You have to do that until you can restore it to the safer place. It’s the most important item in what the French call your “pieces de identité.” At any moment a policeman in the Strand, a gendarme in the Avenue de l’Opéra may tap an alien on the shoulder with the pertinent inquiry, Who are you?

THE WAY OF JOURNALISM IN WAR TIME NOT EASY

London, when we reached it that night in October, lay under the black pall of darkness in which the cities over here have enveloped themselves against war. Death rides above in the sky. To-night, every to-night, it may be the Zeppelins will come. Over there on the horizon, a searchlight streams suddenly and another and another, their great fingers feeling through the black clouds for the monsters of destruction that may be winging a way above the chimney pots. Every building is tightly shuttered. The street lamps with their globes painted three-quarters black have their pale lights as it were hid beneath an inverted bushel. Pedestrians must develop a protective sense that enables them to find their way at night as a cat does in the dark. “I’m sorry,” says an apologetic English voice, and before you know it, you have bumped against another passerby. There is another sudden jolt. And you are scrambling for your balance the other side of the curb you couldn’t see was there. If you are familiar with the door knob where you’re going to stop, you will be so much the surer where you’re at.

Looking out on this darkest London from Paddington railway station at midnight I sit on my trunk and wait. Do you remember the popular song, There’s a Little Street in Heaven Called Broadway? Oh, I hope there is.

I sit on my trunk and wait. In my handbag is the card of the Englishman politely ready to look after me in London. It is the American man who is out there in the night endeavouring to commandeer a taxicab. Somehow he has done it. At last the cab comes. He has compelled the chauffeur to take us. I shall not have to sit all night on my trunk.

A small green light within the hooded entrance, picks the Ritz Hotel out of the Piccadilly blackness. Inside, after the gloom through which we have come, I gasp with relief. It is as if one discovers suddenly in a place that has seemed a graveyard, Why, people still live here! Right then at the hotel register, the voice of Scotland Yard speaks for the War Office. And before the Ritz can be permitted to give me refuge from the night, I must answer. The “registration blank” presented for me to fill in, demands certain definite information: “(1) Surname. (2) Christian names. (3) Nationality. (4) Birthplace. (5) Year of birth. (6) Sex. (7) Full residential address: Full business address. (8) Trade or occupation. (9) Served in what army, navy or police force. (10) Full address where arrived from. (11) Date of signing. (12) Signature.” And a little below, “(13) Full address of destination. (14) Date of departure. (15) Signature.” A last line in conspicuous italics admonishes: “Penalty for failing to give this information correctly 100 pounds or six months imprisonment.” Well, of course a threat like that will make even a woman tell her age as many times as she is asked. But I do it rebelliously against the Kaiser and all his Prussians. For the “registration blank” was made in Germany. I remember it before the war, at the Hotel Adlon in Berlin.

I must sign now on the dotted line before I can even go to bed. I arrange my clothing carefully on a chair within reach of my hand. You rest that way in a warring city, always ready to run. The Zeppelins may come so swiftly. In London you know your nearest cellar. In France you have selected your high vaulted entrance arch under which to take refuge when the sirens go screaming down the street, “Gardez vous, Gardez vous.”

The sense of depression that had enwrapped me in the first darkness of London was not gone when I closed my eyes in sleep. One does not throw it off. You may not be of those who are wearing crêpe. But you cannot escape the woe of the world which will enfold you like a garment.

In the morning the ordinary business of living has become one of strenuous detail. The law requires that an alien shall register with the police within 24 hours of arrival. When I have thus established a calling acquaintance at the Vine Street station, I go out into Piccadilly feeling like a prisoner politely on parole. And I face an environment strung all over with barbed wire restrictions on my movements. Every letter that comes for me from America will be read before I receive it, marked “Opened by the Censor.” If I wish to go away from this country, I must ask the permission of the Foreign Office, the consulate of the country to which I wish to proceed and my own consulate before I can so much as purchase a ticket. I may not leave London for any “restricted area” where there has been an Irish revolution or a German bombardment without the consent of Scotland Yard. I may not even leave the Ritz Hotel, which is registered as my official place of residence, for more steam-heat at the Savoy, without notifying the Vine Street Station of my departure and the Bow Street Station of my arrival. The Defence of the Realm and the Trading with the Enemy Acts and others in a land at war are lying around like bombs all over the place. Have a care that you don’t run into them!

I am alone one evening at the International Suffrage Headquarters in Adam Street, deep lost in a sociological study of carefully filed data. Do you believe in subconscious warnings? Anyhow, I am bending over a box of manila envelopes when suddenly, out of the silence of this top floor room, I am impressed with a sense of danger. It is as plain and clear as if a voice over my shoulder said “Look out.” I do look up quickly. And there on the wall before my eyes, I read Order 4 from the Defence of the Realm Act, commonly enough posted all over London, I discover later. But this is the first time I have seen it. It reads: “The curtains of this room must be drawn at sundown.” And from two windows with wide open curtains, my brilliant electric light is streaming out on the London darkness, oh, as far as Trafalgar Square for all the German Zeppelins and Scotland Yard to see! Just for an instant I am paralysed with the fear of them all. Then my hand finds the electric button and I hastily switch myself into the protecting darkness. Somehow I grope my way through the hall and down the staircase. And I slam the outer door hurriedly. There, when the police arrive, I shall be gone! In the morning paper a week or so afterward I read one day of an earl’s daughter even, who had been arrested and fined 25 pounds for “permitting a beam of light to escape from her window.”

The government is regulating everything, the icing a housewife may not put on a cake, the number of courses one may have for dinner, even the conversation at table. Let an American with the habit of free speech beware! Notices conspicuously posted in public places advise, “Silence.” In France they put it most picturesquely, “Say nothing. Be suspicious. The ears of the enemy are always open.” Absolutely the only safe rule, then, is to learn to hold your tongue. Everybody’s doing it over here. Very well, I will not talk. But what about all the rest of this silent world that will not, either? For those under military orders, the rule is absolute. And you’ve no idea how many people are under military orders. This is a war with even the women in khaki. I begin to feel that to get into so much as a drawing-room, I ought to have my merely social letter of introduction crossed with some kind of a visé. Wouldn’t a hostess, even the Duchess of Marlborough, be able to be more cordial if she knew that I had seen the Government before I saw her? Even the girl conductor on the ’bus this morning, when I essayed to ask her as Exhibit 1 in the new-woman-in-industry I was looking for, how she liked her job, turned and scurried down her staircase like a frightened rabbit.

So, this is not to be the simple life for research work. And though I come through all the submarines and the lines of steel, and the Zeppelins have not got me yet, what shall it profit me to save my life and lose my assignment? I am bound for the front and for certain information I am to gather on the way. Now, what should a journalist do?

Well, a journalist, I discovered, should get one’s self personally conducted by Lord Northcliffe. There were those of my masculine contemporaries already headed for the front whom he was said on arrival here to have received into the bosom of his newspaper office and put to bed to rest from the nervous exhaustion of travel, and sent a secretary and a check and anything else to make them happy. And then he asked them only to name the day they wanted to see Woolwich or to cross to France. But nothing like that was happening to me. So what else should a journalist do?

Well, evidently a journalist should get in good standing with a war office which alone can press the button to everywhere she wants to go. The short cut to a war office is through a press bureau. But a press bureau modestly shrinks from the publicity that it purveys. You do not find it on Main Street with a lettered signboard and a hand pointing: “Journalists, right this way.” And you can’t run right up the front steps of a war office and ring the bell. It would be a what-do-you-call-it, a faux pas if you did. Even for a private residence it would be that. There isn’t anywhere that I know of over here even in peace time that as soon as you reach town you can call a hostess up on the telephone and have her say, “Oh, you’re the friend of Sallie Smith that she’s written me about. Come right along up to dinner.” Why, the butler would tell you her ladyship or her grace or something like that was not at home. It just can’t be done like that outside of America. You don’t rush into the best English circles that way, much less the English government. Absolutely your only way around is through a formal correspondence.

One day I wrap myself in the rose satin down bed-quilt at the Ritz and spread out my letters of introduction to choose a journalistic lead. There are carved cupids on the walls of this bedroom, and a lovely rose velvet carpet on the floor and heavy rose silk hanging at the windows. But there isn’t any place to be warm. The tiny open grate holds six or it may be seven coals—you see why Dickens always writes of “coals” in the plural—and you put them on delicately with things like the sugar tongs. It isn’t good form to be warm in England. The best families aren’t. It’s plebeian and American even to want to be.

My soul is all curled up with the cold while I am trying to determine which letter. This to Sir Gilbert Parker was the 84th letter handed me by the editor of the Pictorial Review as I stepped on the boat. It is the one I now select first, quite by chance, without the least idea of where it is to lead me. The next evening at 6 o’clock I am on my way to Wellington House. “Sir Gilbert,” speaks the attendant in resplendent livery. And I find myself in a stately English room. There, down the length of the red velvet carpet beneath the glow of a red shaded electric lamp, a man with very quiet eyes is rising from his chair. “Do you know where you are?” he asks with a smile, glancing at the letter of introduction on his desk that tells of my mission. “This,” he says, “is the headquarters of the English government’s press bureau for the war and I am in charge of the American publicity.” Who cares for Lord Northcliffe now! Or even the King of England! Of all the inhabitants of this land, here was the man a journalist would wish to meet. The man who has written “The Seats of the Mighty” sits in them. From his desk here in the red room he can touch the button that will open all the right doors to me. He can’t do it immediately, in war-time. One has to make sure first. I must come often to Wellington House. There are days when we talk of many things, of life and of New York. He is less and less of a formal Englishman. His title is slipping away. He is beginning to be just Gilbert Parker, who might have belonged to the Authors’ League up on Forty-second Street. I half suspect he does. “I do know my America rather well,” he says at length. “I married a girl from Fifty-seventh Street. And I have a brother who lives in St. Paul.”

It is the way his voice thrills on “my America.” I am sure any American correspondent hearing it would have been ready even in the fall of 1916 to clasp hands across the sea in the Anglo-American compact to win this war. Gilbert Parker is in tune with the American temperament. He doesn’t wear a monocle. And he says to a woman “Now, what can I do for you?” in just the tone of voice that an American man would use when everything is going to be all right. I remember the red room just before he said it. Everything hung in the balance for me at this moment: “I have confidence in Mr. Vance, your editor. I know him,” reflects the man who is deciding. “But—are you in ‘Who’s Who’?” Just for the lack of a line in a book, a government’s good favour might have been lost! But he reached for the copy above his desk. “Any more credentials?” he asks. I cast desperately about in my mind—and drop a Phi Beta key in his hand. “I won’t take that up on you,” he says with a smile. And my cause is won.

THE WAY IT IS DONE

Long important envelopes lettered across the top “On His Majesty’s Service” begin to arrive in my mail. All the government offices will be “at home” and helpful—when a personal interview has further convinced each that I am clearly not at all a German person nor the dangerous species of the suffragist. Where are the slippers that will match this gown? And which are the beads that will be best? Mine is a hazardous undertaking, you see, that requires all of the art at the command of a woman: I must so state the mission on which I have come that my woman movement may seem pleasing in the eyes of a man—why, possibly a man whose country house even may have been burned in behalf of votes for women! Clearly I must mind my phrases, to get my permits. And if you’re a journalist in war-time, you need the permit as you do your daily bread.

To get it, you write about it and call about it and write about it some more. And then it comes like this:

Foreign Office, Nov. 6, 1917.

If you will call to-morrow Wednesday at 3 o’clock at the main entrance to Woolwich Arsenal and ask for Miss Barker, presenting the attached paper, you will find that arrangements have been made for your visit.

Yours very truly,

G. S. B.

Or it comes like this:

Headquarters, London District,
Horse Guards, S.W., Nov. 7, 1917.

Mrs. M. P. Daggett,

Room 464 Ritz Hotel,

Dear Madam:—

I have pleasure in informing you that under War Office instructions I have arranged with the officer commanding 3rd London General Hospital, Wandsworth Common, S.W., for you to visit his hospital at 11 A. M. on Friday next, the 9th instant.

I am, dear Madam

Yours faithfully,

O. ——

Colonel D.A.D.M.S.

London District.

England in war-time is open for my inspection. I am getting my data nicely when one day there develops the dilemma of getting away with it. I open the Times one morning to read a new law: “On and after Dec. 1,” the newspaper announces, “no one may be permitted to take out of England any photograph or printed or written material other than letters.” I have a trunkful. Clearly I can’t get by any khaki line with that concealed about my person. Sir Gilbert walks twice, three times up and down the red room. “I’ll see what I can do about it,” he says. “I don’t know. But I’ll try.” A few days later my data begins to go right through all the laws.

“First consignment,” I cabled across the Atlantic, “coming on the St. Louis, if it doesn’t strike a mine.” I follow it with a registered letter to the editor: “I hope God and you will always be good to Gilbert Parker. And now if I don’t get back—” And I give him exact directions about the material on the way. For it is no idle imagining that I may not reach home.

I am facing France and the Channel crossing. Here in London it is so long since the Zeppelins have been heard from that we are almost lulled into a sense of security that they will not come again. If they do high government circles usually hear in advance. A friend whose cousin’s brother-in-law is in the Admiralty will let me know as soon as he finds out. But now all of these neatly arranged life and death plans must go into the discard. For you see I am changing my danger back again from Zeppelins to submarines.

Let us see about the sinkings. Rumour reports now that about four out of six boats are getting across. I may get one of the four. On the night train from London, I wrap myself in my steamer-rug in the unheated compartment. Travelling is not what you might say encouraged. This journey to Paris, accomplished ordinarily in four hours, will now take twenty-four. No two time-tables will anywhere connect. There are as many difficulties as can possibly be arranged. Governments don’t want you doing this every day in the week. And there is always a question whether you will be permitted to do it at all. At Southampton I must meet the steel line with the challenge, “Who goes there?”

Again I tell all my life to the man with a pistol at his belt and a sword at his side. He looks a second time at my passport: “You want to go all sorts of places you’ve no business to,” he says sharply.

“Not all of them now,” I answer humbly, “only France.” “Well, why even France?” he persists testily. I try to tell him. I present for a second consideration one of my “most important credentials.” It is a personal letter from the French consul in New York specially and cordially recommending me to the “care and protection of all the civil and military authorities in France.” At last he tosses the letter inquiringly down his khaki line as much as to say, “Oh, well, if they want her over there?” It comes back with a nod of acquiescence from the last man, and a visé in purple ink lets me through to the boat.

Shall I remember the Sussex? You don’t so much after you’ve lived daily with death for a while. Some time during the night I am drowsily conscious that the boat begins to move. A skilled pilot has taken the wheel to guide us in and out among mines placed perilously as a protection against German submarines. Our lives are coming through dangerous narrows. In the morning we are safe in Havre. The next steel line, here, is French. And with the letter from the consul at New York in my hand I am literally and cordially and politely bowed into France.

At my hotel in the Rue de Rivoli, the American man opposite me at the dinner table the next day is just about to sail, “going back to God’s country, as far away home as I can get, to the tall pine trees on the Pacific Coast,” he tells me. He had come to Europe on an assignment that was to have been accomplished in three months. It has taken him a year to get to the front. My knife and fork drop in despair on my plate as he says it. “Cheer up,” he urges. “You just have to remember to take a Frenchman’s promises as lightly as they’re made. They always aim to please. And your hopes rise so that you order two cocktails for dinner to-night. Then to-morrow and to-morrow and to-morrow there will be only more promises. But you’re an American woman. You’ll dig through. Good luck,” he says. And a taxicab takes him.

WAR AS YOU FIRST SEE IT

Here in Paris I stand in the boulevards as I stood in the Strand and Oxford Street, and watch the new woman movement going by. Every time a man drops dead in the trenches, a woman steps permanently into the niche he used to hold in industry, in commerce, in the professions, in world affairs. It is the woman movement for which the ages have waited in ghastly truth. But, O God in Heaven, the price we pay! The price we pay! There is Madelaine La Fontaine, whom I saw yesterday in the Rue Renouard. Her black dress outlined her figure against the yellow garden wall where she stood in a little doorway. She leaned and kissed her child on his way to school. As she lifted her head, I saw the grief in her eyes and the dead man’s picture in the locket at her throat.

They are everywhere through England and France, these women with the locket at their throats. Yet not for these would your heart ache most. There are the others, the clear-eyed girls in their ’teens just now coming up into long dresses. And life may not offer them so much as the pictured locket! There will be no man’s face to fill it! Love that would have been, you see, lies slain there with all the bright boyhood that’s falling on the battlefields. O God, the price we pay!

How far off now seems that summer’s day I walked through 39th Street, my pulses throbbing pleasantly with the thrill of adventure and this commission! I wonder if ever life can look like that again. The heavens arched all blue above New York and the sunshine lay all golden on the city pavements. But that was before I knew. Oh, I had heard about war, even as have you and your next door neighbour. War was battle dates that had to be committed to memory at school. Or if instead of tiresome pages in history it should mobilise before our eyes, why, of course it would be flags flying, bands playing, and handsome heroes marching down Fifth Avenue!

And now I have seen war. Every way I turn I am looking on men with broken bodies and women with broken hearts. War is not merely the hell that may pass at Verdun or the Somme in the agony of a day or a night that ends in death. War is worse. War is that big strong fellow with eyes burned out when he “went over the top,” whom I saw learning to walk by a strip of oilcloth laid on the floor of the Home for the Blind in London. They’re teaching him now to make baskets for a living! War is that boy in his twenties without any legs whom I met in Regents Park in a wheel chair for the rest of his life! War is that peasant from whom to-day I inquired my way in one of the little banlieues of Paris. There was the Croix de Guerre in his coat lapel. But he had to set down on the ground his basket of vegetables to point down the Quai de Bercy with his remaining arm. You know how a Frenchman just has to gesture when he talks? The stump of the other arm twitched a horrible accompaniment as he indicated my direction!

Those are brave men who are dying on all the battlefields for their native lands. But oh, the bravery of these men who must live for their countries! These who have lost their eyes and their arms and their legs are as common over here as, why, as, say, men with brown hair. And these are terrible enough. But the men who have lost their faces! So long as they shall live, in every one’s eyes into which they look, they must see a shudder of horror reflecting as in a looking glass their old agony. God in Heaven pity the men who have lost their faces! The greatest sculptors in the world are busy to-day making faces to be fastened on.

Like this you’ve got to go through Europe these days with a sob in the throat. I turn to the difficult details of living for relief from the awful drama of existence. In Paris there is the nicest United States ambassador that ever was sent in a black frock coat to represent his country abroad. In the course of my travels there are embassies I have met who are about as useful to the wayfaring American in a foreign land as a Rogers plaster group on a parlour table. But you arrive at Mr. Sharpe’s embassy in the Rue de Chaillot and it doesn’t matter at all if it happens to be perhaps 4:33 and his reception hour closed at, say, 4:31. He says, “Come right in.” Yes, he talks like that, not at all in the tone of royalty. “When’d you get in town?” he asks as genially as if it might be Albany or Detroit instead of Paris. By this time you’re sitting in a chair drawn up to his desk and discussing the last Democratic victory. “How’s Charlie Murphy standing now with the administration?” perhaps he asks, and then pretty soon, “But what can I do for you in Paris?”

And he does it. You don’t have to call his secretary a week later to ask, How about that letter the embassy was going to give me? And the week after and the week after ring up some more to recall that there’s an American running up an expense account at the hotel down the street. That’s not Mr. Sharpe’s way. Within ten minutes he had handed me a letter of introduction to M. Briand, Prime Minister of France. He laughed as he passed it to me. “Honestly, I’d hate to hand any one a gold brick,” he said. “That document looks imposing enough and important enough that a limousine should be at your hotel entrance to take you to the front at 9 A. M. to-morrow. But nothing like that will happen. In France you have to remember that no one hurries. And an American can’t.”

You can hear that in every foreign language. It was a spectacled Herr Professor in Berlin who once said to me severely, “You Americans, this hurry it is your national vice.” I feel that foreign governments have duly disciplined me in this direction during the past few months. So much of my job in serving the Pictorial Review in Europe seems to be to sit on a chair and wait in a War Office ante room. At the Maison de la Presse, 3 Rue François 1st, in the Service de l’Information Diplomatique, whither my Briand letter leads me, I seem to spend hours.

They are going to be charmed, as Frenchmen can be, to take me to the front. And the days pass and the days pass. “Ah, but you see, for a lady journalist it is so different and so difficult. The trip must be specially arranged.” And the weeks go by. And M. Polignac is so polite and polite and polite—just that and nothing more.

One day he says to me: “And, Mme. Daggett, how long is it you will be in Paris?” “Why,” I falter, “I hadn’t expected to winter here. I’m waiting, you know, just waiting until I can go to the front.” “And how much longer now could you wait?” he inquires. “Oh,” I answer desperately, “I’ll surely have to go by the 29th. I couldn’t stay longer than that.”

So in the course of the next few days there comes a letter telling me how it pains the French government that they should not be able to “take that trip in hand” before the 29th. And of course if I must leave them on that date, as I had said I must, oh, they so much regret, etc., etc.

If I intend to get to the front, evidently then I must dig through! And in my room at the Hotel Regina in the Rue de Rivoli, I take my pen in hand.

To “Maison de la Presse, Service de l’Information Diplomatique,” I write: “Gentlemen, your favour of the 26th inst. with your regrets just received. And I hasten to write you that I cannot, for the sake of France, accept your decision as final, without presenting to your attention a situation with which you may not be familiar. You see, gentlemen, in the country from which I come, we have a feminism that is neither an ideal nor a theory, but a working reality. In America, there were when I left, four million women citizens, and the State legislatures every little while making more. These are, gentlemen, four million citizens with a vote, whose wishes must be consulted by Congress at Washington in determining the war policy of the United States. Their sympathies help to determine the amount of the war relief contributions that may come across the Atlantic. These are four million women who count, gentlemen, please understand, exactly the same as four million men.

“Other American publications may offer Maison de la Presse other facilities for reaching the American public. But none of them can duplicate the facilities presented by the Pictorial Review, the leading magazine to champion the feminist cause. It is the magazine that is read by the woman who votes. Is not France interested in what she shall read there?

“Believe me, gentlemen, the opportunity for propaganda that I offer you is unparalleled. I beg you therefore to reconsider. I earnestly desire to go to the front this week. Can you, I ask, permit me to leave this land without granting the privilege? For the sake of France, gentlemen! Awaiting your reply, I remain,” etc.

That letter was posted at 11 o’clock at night. Before noon the next day Maison de la Presse was on the telephone and speaking English. In France they do not hurry. It is not customary to use the telephone. And it is at this time against the law to speak English on it. But listen: “Will Mme. Daggett find herself able to accept the invitation of the French government to go to the front on Thursday?” inquires the voice on the wire.

CHAPTER II

Close Up Behind the Lines

“It is going to be perhaps a dangerous undertaking,” says the French army officer the next day in the reception room at Maison de la Presse. He is speaking solemnly and impressively. “Do you still wish to go?” he asks, addressing me in particular. I look back steadily into his eyes. “Oui, Monsieur.” Then his glance sweeps inquiringly the semicircle of faces. There are six journalists and a munitions manufacturer from Bridgeport, Connecticut. And they all nod assent. The room is singularly silent for an instant, the officer just standing quietly, his left hand resting on his sword-hilt. Then he turns and passes to each of us the official Permis de Correspondent de la Presse aux Armees, for our journey to Rheims the next day. And we all sign on the dotted line.

Before I retire that night I rip the pink rose from off my hat and lay out the long dark coat which is to envelop me from my neck to my heels. It is the camouflage which, in accordance with the army orders, blends one with the landscape as a means of concealment from the German gunners’ range. Rheims is under bombardment. It was fired on yesterday. It may be to-morrow. There must not be, the army officer has assured us, even the flower on the lady’s hat for a target.

My electric light winks once. Two minutes later it winks twice, and is gone, according to the martial law which puts out all lights in Paris from 11:30 at night until 8 o’clock in the morning. I grope my way to bed in the darkness and at 6 o’clock the next morning, I dress by candle light. I count carefully the “pieces de identité” in the chamois safety bag that hangs over my left hip and place in my hand bag my passport and my French permis, both of which must be presented at the railway station before I can purchase a ticket. I look to make sure that the inside pocket of my purse still contains my business card with its pencilled request: “In case of death or disaster kindly notify the Pictorial Review, New York City.” And as I pass the porter’s desk at the hotel entrance I leave with the sleepy concierge one other last message: “If Mme. Daggett has not returned by midnight, will the hotel management kindly communicate with her friend Mlle. Marie Perrin, 12 Rue Ordener?” All these are precautions that you take lest you be lost in the great European war.

The Gare l’Est is crowded always with throngs of soldiers arriving and departing for the front. It is necessary that our party assemble as early as seven o’clock to get in line at the ticket window for the eight o’clock train, for every traveller’s credentials must be separately and carefully read and inspected. At Epernay, where we alight at 10:30, the station platform is densely packed with French soldiers in the sky blue uniforms that have been so carefully matched with the horizon color of France. A debonnair French captain has been appointed by the French government to receive us. He is in full uniform, splendid scarlet trousers and gold braided coat, with his left breast ornamented with the Croix de Guerre and the Médaille de Honneur. After the formal salutations are over, however, his orderly envelops all of the captain’s splendour too in the long sky blue coat for camouflage against the Germans. And we start for Rheims in the convoy of three luxuriously appointed “camoens,” the limousines placed at our disposal by the government. They, too, are painted blue grey to blend with the landscape, and each flies a little French flag.

“Ou allez vous, Monsieur?” the sentry at the bridge of Epernay challenges our chauffeur. And the French captain himself leans from the window to answer, “À Rheims. Une mission de la gouvernement.” So we pass sentry after sentry. It is 15 miles to Rheims. This is the Department of the Marne, with the vineyards that have produced the most famous wines of the world. The “smiling countryside of France,” the poets have termed it. In September, 1914, history changed it to the grim field of carnage running red with the blood of civilisation that here made its stand against the onrushing Huns. Right across that valley see the battlefield of the Marne. Along this road the German army passed. From this little village that we are entering, all the inhabitants fled before their approach. The enemy now is not far away. Over there, just against that horizon, lie the trenches they now occupy. See this roadside along which we are driving, how it is curiously hung with linen curtains? They are strung on wires fifteen feet high. For miles we ride behind them. It is the camouflage, the French captain says, that hides us from German view. We have just emerged from the forest at the edge of the Mountain of Rheims when, hark! Hear it—the sharp, distinct sound of an explosion! What is it? Where is it? The captain lays his hand reassuringly on my arm: “It is, I think, a tire that has burst on the rear car.”

“Captain,” I say, “no automobile tire I ever heard sounded exactly like that.”

“You are not nervous?” he asks. I shake my head. “Well,” he admits, “it is sometimes that the Germans do take a chance shot at this road.”

But at Rheims when we arrive, I notice that all our automobile tires are quite intact. We enter the city through the great bronze gate, the finishing ornaments of which have been nicked off by German shells. We stand in the midst of a scene of desolation that looks like the ruins of some long ago civilisation. Once, before this world that men had builded began to go to pieces, even as the blocks that children pile tumble to a nursery floor, here was a populous busy city of some 120,000 souls. Now our footsteps echo through deserted streets. Not a man or woman or child is in sight. The grass is growing in the pavement there between the street-car tracks. The Hotel de Ville is only a shell of a building with the outer walls standing. This shop is shuttered tight. The next has the entire front gone, blown away in a bombardment. There are empty houses from which the occupants have months ago fled. Here stands the skeleton of a pretentious residence, the roof gone and the front riddled: we look directly in on the second-story room with a dresser and a bed in disarray. There a curtain from a deserted little front parlour flaps dismally through a shattered window-pane almost in our faces. Here above the cellar-grating of a house in ruins, there arises a sickening odour. We look at each other in questioning horror; perhaps the military with the pick and spade assigned to disinterment duty after some bombardment did not dig deep enough here. But the captain does not wish to understand and hurries us along to the next street.

A CRUMBLING CIVILISATION

In the ghastly stillness of this city that was once Rheims, at last there is a sound of life. Down the Rue de la Paix, the street of peace, an army supply-wagon clatters past us. And you have no idea how pleasant can be the sound even of noise.

Then across the way appears a milk-woman, pushing her cart with four tin cans and jingling a little bell. There are a few people, it seems, still left, employés in the champagne industry, who cling to their homes even though they must live in the cellar. Now the devastation increases and the houses begin to be mere rubbish heaps of brick and mortar as we approach the Place de la Cathédrale.

At length we stand before the famous Cathedral of Rheims itself. I know of no more impressive place to be in the closing days of the year 1916 than here at the front of the terrible world war.

In this edifice is symbolised all that civilisation of ours that culminated in the Twentieth Century, now to be razed to the ground. For lo, these seven hundred years, even as the two great towers above us have lifted the infinite beauty of their architectural lace-work against the blue-domed sky, some thirty generations of the human soul have sent their aspirations heavenward on the incense of prayer. Over these very stones beneath our feet, king after king of France has walked, to receive the crown of Charlemagne and to be anointed before this altar from “le sainte ampouli.” And now here to-day is history in no dead and musty pages but in the making, white-hot from the anvil of the hour! Only a little over a mile away are the German guns that from day to day shower the shell-fire of their destruction on the city. This spot upon which we stand is their particular objective point of attack. Hear! There is a rumbling detonation. We wait hushed for an instant. But the sound is not repeated. You see, already there have been some 30,000 shells poured on Rheims. Twelve hundred fell in one day only. At any moment there may be more.

“If the bombardment should begin,” we had been instructed at Maison de la Presse, “you would rush for the nearest cellar.” I think we all have listening ears. Every little while there is certainly repeated that desultory firing on the front.

But nothing is dropping on us. And reassured, we turn to examine the great shell hole in the pavement not five yards distant. The Archbishop’s Palace, immediately adjoining the church, is flat on the ground in ruins. The cathedral itself is slowly being wrecked. But in the public square directly before it, look here! See Joan of Arc on her horse triumphantly facing the future! In her hand she is waving the bright flag of France. Amid the débris of the great war piling up about her, the famous statue stands absolutely untouched. Here at the very storm centre of the attack on civilisation, with the hell-fire of the enemy falling in a rain of thousands of shells about her, she seems as secure, as safe under God’s heaven as when the people passed daily before her to prayer. Shall we not call it a miracle?

“See,” says the captain, his head reverently uncovered, his eyes shining, “our Maid of Orleans. No German shall ever harm her!” And since the war began, it is true, no German ever has. Not a statue of the famous girl-warrior anywhere in France has been so much as scratched by the enemy. Her name was the password on the day of the Battle of the Marne and there are those who think it was the shadowy figure of a girl on a horse that led the troops to that victory. Oh, though cathedrals may crumble and cities be laid waste and fields be devastated, some time again it shall be well with the world. For the faith of the people of France in Joan of Arc shall never pass away.

That we realize, as we look on the rapt face of the captain who leads us now within the great church itself, where for three years all prayers have ceased. The marvellous stained glass from the thirteenth century, which made the religious light of the beautiful windows, now hangs literally in tatters like torn bed-quilts blowing in the wind. That great jagged hole in the roof was torn by a shell at the last bombardment. There are fissures in the side walls. The rain comes in, and the birds. Doves light there on the transept rail. Amid the rubbish of broken saints with which the floor is littered, there yet stands here and there a sorrowful statue hung with the garland of faded flowers reminiscent of some far-off fête day. And Requiescat in pace, you may read the legend cut in the stone of the eastern wall above the tomb of some Christian Father.

In the nearby Rue du Cardinal de Lorraine, in a garden saying his rosary, walks an old man in a red cap, one of the few remaining residents who will not leave the city. He is the venerable Mgr. Lucon, Cardinal of Rheims. Always he is praying, praying to God to spare the cathedral. And God does not. “I do not understand. I suppose that He in His wisdom must have some purpose in permitting the church to be destroyed,” says the Cardinal of Rheims. “I do not understand,” he always adds humbly.

“One may not understand,” repeats the captain. And he takes us to luncheon at the Lion d’Or, the little inn where the wife of the proprietor still stays to serve any “mission of the French gouvernement.” Then he shows us the famous champagne cellars of the Etablissement Pommery. Here one hundred feet below the ground, in the chalk caves built a thousand years ago by the Romans, are twelve miles of subterranean passageways with thirteen million bottles of the most celebrated champagne in the making.

The superintendent pours out his choicest brand: “Vive la France and the Allies,” he says, lifting his glass. He talks more English than the captain can. He is telling us of when the Germans entered Rheims. “Four officers,” he says, “came riding ahead of the army. And I met them by chance just as they arrived in the market place of Rheims.”

“What did you do?” asks the New York correspondent of the London Daily Mail. “I wept,” says the Frenchman, simply and impressively. “Gentlemen,” he adds solemnly and sadly, “I hope you may never meet some day four conquering Chinamen riding up Broadway.”

I find myself catching my breath suddenly at that. And I am glad when the captain hums a gay little French tune and holds out his glass a second time: “Give us again ‘Vive la France.’”

The sun is dipping red in the west when we turn to leave Rheims and Joan of Arc bravely flying the French flag before its crumbling cathedral. There is the rumble of guns once more at the front. Then the winter dusk rapidly envelops the road along which we are speeding. It is the same road to Epernay. But now it is alive with traffic. Under the protecting cover of the soft darkness, all sorts of vehicles are passing. The headlights of our car flash on a continuous procession of motor lorries, munition-wagons, army supply-wagons, tractors, and peasants’ carts carrying produce to market. So we arrive at Epernay for a lunch of red wine and war bread at the little station. By ten o’clock we are safely within the walls of Paris. We have escaped bombardment!

It is two days later before the French official communiqué in the daily papers begins again recording: “At Rheims toward six o’clock last night, after a violent attack with trench mortars, the Germans twice stormed our advance posts. But these two attempts completely failed under our machine-gun fire and grenade bombing.”

DIFFICULT DAYS IN THE WAR ZONE

It isn’t what happens necessarily. It’s what’s always-going-to-happen that keeps one guessing between life and death in a war zone. And there are special torments of the inquisition devised for journalists. Ordinary civilians are occupied only with saving their lives. Journalists must save their notes.

At half-past eleven o’clock that night of my return from Rheims, there is dropped in the mail box on my hotel room door, a cablegram from America: “Steamship St. Louis here. Your material from London not on it.” The room in which I stand, the Hotel Regina, and the city of Paris all reel unsteadily for an instant. Has the British Government eaten up all my journalistic findings so preciously entrusted to Wellington House? I grasp the brass foot rail of the bed and bring myself upstanding. If they have, it is no time for me to lose my head.

Jacques with the empty coat sleeve and the Croix de Guerre on his breast, who operates the elevator, I am sure thinks it a woman demented who is going out in the streets of Paris alone at midnight. But “an Americaine,” one can never tell what “an Americaine” will do. “Pardon,” he says hesitatingly as I step out, “madame knows the hour?” Yes, madame knows the hour. But an alien may not send a telegram without presenting a passport, the document that never for an instant goes out of one’s personal possession. No messenger can do this errand for me.

Five minutes later I am in a taxicab tearing down the Rue Quatre Septembre to the cable office in the Bourse. My appeal for help to Sir Gilbert Parker in London is being counted on the blue telegraph blank by the operator at the little window, when suddenly I remember I have forgotten. My hand feels helplessly over my left hip where there is concealed a letter of credit for three thousand dollars. But I falter, “I haven’t any money, that is, where I can get at it.”

“I have,” speaks a voice over my shoulder. I look around into a man’s cheerful countenance. “What’s the damage?” he says again in pleasant Manhattan English. I hesitate only for an instant. “It’s sixteen francs I need.”

He promptly pulls out his bank-roll. I ask for his card, of course, to return the loan the next day with many thanks for his courtesy. He, however, has no security that I will. As he puts me in my taxicab and lifts his hat beneath the faint war-dimmed light of the street lamps in the dark Rue Vivienne, he only knows that I am his country-woman. And he is an American man. The Lord seems to send them when you need them most.

Three days later the awful silence in which I am suffering all the fears there are for a journalist in war-time, is broken by a reply from London: “Material only delayed. Sailed steamship New York instead of St. Louis.” After another two weeks of fitful nights in which I dream of men in khaki who confiscate journalistic data, there comes the message from New York that is like hearing from Heaven: “Your consignment of material safely arrived.” Meanwhile, before I may be permitted to take a line out of this country, Maison de la Presse must pass on my French data. I am feverishly editing it for their approval when there is a knock at my door. The maid is there with more letters than the little brass mail box will hold. I eagerly open my American mail to find it filled with holiday greetings. So, it can still be Christmas somewhere in the world! I am standing at the window with a Christmas card in my hand, thinking pleasant thoughts of the far-away city called New York where there is still peace on earth, good-will to men, when down the Rue de Rivoli passes a motor lorry piled high with black crosses. There are fields in France that are planted with black crosses, acres and acres of them. After each new push on the front, more are required, black crosses by the cartload! I glanced at my calendar. Why, to-day is Christmas! I had quite forgotten. You see, over here all joy-making occasions seem to have been such a long while ago, like the stories of once upon a time.

I turn once more to the task of making ready my data for Maison de la Presse. Here a too colourful sentence must be rejected. There is a too flagrantly feministic document that will be safest in the waste basket. It is the martial mind that I must meet. A press bureau, you see, is prepared to pass promptly propaganda on the battles of the Somme. But dare one risk, say, a pamphlet on the breast feeding of infants? Propaganda about the rising value of a baby! Dear, dear, it might, for all a man could tell, be treason, seditious material calculated to give aid and comfort to the enemy! Already to my inquiries about maternity measures in Paris, have I not been answered suspiciously: “But why do you ask? This matter it is not of the war.”

My emasculated data at last are ready for review by le chef du service de la presse. He stamps it all over with his signature in red ink. It is done up in packages and officially sealed in red wax with the seal of the state of France. At the Post Office in the Rue Etienne Marcel, I register it and mail it, committing it with a sigh to the mercies of the great Atlantic.

DEALING WITH GOVERNMENT

Having crossed the Channel once alive, it seems like tempting fate to try it again. I draw in my breath as one about to plunge into a cold bath in the morning, and go out to secure from three governments the necessary permission that will allow me to return to England. From the police alone it sometimes takes eight days to secure this concession. But at the Prefecture of Police, they read my letter of introduction from the French consul in New York. And I have only to leave my photograph and sign on the dotted line. In five minutes they have given my passport the necessary visé. The American consul easily enough adds his. All my journey apparently is going as pleasantly as a summer holiday planned by a Cook’s Agency, when at length I come up with a bump against the British Control office in the Rue Cheveaux Lagarde. And the going away from here requires some negotiations. The British lieutenant in charge reads my nice French letter and without comment tosses it aside. “You wish to go to London?” he asks in great surprise. “Now, why should you wish to go to London?” He gives me distinctly to understand this is not the open season for tourists in England. “We don’t care to have people travelling,” he says in a tone of voice as if that settles it. “Why have you come over here in these difficult and dangerous times, anyhow?” he asks querulously and a trifle suspiciously. “The best thing you can do is to go home directly. And America is right across the water from here.”

“But, Lieutenant,” I gasp, “my trunk is in England and I’ve got to have a few clothes.”

“No,” he says, “personal reasons like that don’t interest the British Government. Neither am I able to understand a journalistic mission which should take a woman travelling in these days of war.” He looks at me. “The New Position of Women! It is not of sufficient interest to the British Government that I should let you go,” he says with finality.

“I know, Lieutenant,” I agree. “But surely you are interested in the Allies’ war propaganda for the United States?” The light from the window shines full on his face and I can see a faint relaxation about the lines of his mouth. “Now I wish to go to England so that I may tell the story of the British women’s war work. The readers of Pictorial Review are four million women who vote.” The lieutenant stirs visibly. His sword rattles against the rounds of his chair.

Well, my request hangs in the balance like this for a week. At length one day he says, “I’m thinking about letting you go. I shall have to consult with my superior officer. I don’t at all know that he will consent.”

There is the day that I have almost given up hope. I am waiting again before the lieutenant’s desk. He has gone for a last consultation with the superior officer. Will he never come back? I stare at his empty chair. The clock on the mantel ticks and ticks. The fire in the grate snaps and snaps. Other people at the next desk who get easier visés than mine, come and go—a Red Cross nurse, two French sisters of charity, a little French boy returning to school. I have counted the pens in the lieutenant’s glass tray. I know every blot on his desk-pad. The clock has ticked thirty-five minutes of suspense for me before the little French soldier in red trousers opens the door and the lieutenant is here.

“Well,” he says, “we have decided. You are to be permitted to go, but on one condition.” And he visés my passport, “No return to France during the period of the war.”

It has taken nearly two weeks to win my case. Two days later at 6 A. M., when the gardens of the Tuileries are outlined dimly against the faint rays of dawn, my taxicab is reeling through the streets of Paris to the Gare St. Lazare. It is noon before the train reaches Havre. The Red Cross nurse, the London newspaper correspondent and the Belgian air-man all file out of our compartment and the Irish major from Salonica is last. He turns to me with a frank Irish smile: “Your bag can just as well go along with my military luggage. And they’ll never even open it.”

At eight o’clock that night in Havre, my passport and the letter from the French consul in New York are handed down the steel line of ten men at a table. Each looks up with the same curious smile when his glance arrives at the last visé: “Who put that on your passport?” asks the officer at the head of the line. “The British Control Office?” he says with heat. “It’s none of their business.” In an inner room, four more men examine my documents. “Did the British officer see this letter from the French consul?” I am asked. I nod assent. A laugh goes round the room. “Pardon, madame,” says the man with the most gold braid, “the British Control Office does not control France. You are welcome to France, madame, welcome to France any time you choose to come.”

That is the War Office that speaks. So, with the French Government’s cordial invitation ringing pleasantly in my ears, I go on board the Channel boat. But I have no intention of returning to France right away, gentlemen. I lay out my life-preserver with a feeling of great relief that if I survive this crossing, it will not have to be done over again. And once more the boat in the darkness steals safely and silently across the Channel.

In the morning, in Southampton, the major from Salonica hands me his card: “Letters,” he says, a trifle wistfully, “will always reach me at that address.” I look at the card here before me on my desk as I write and I wonder. The major with his Irish smile may now be lying dead on the field of battle somewhere on the front. In the midst of life we are in death almost anywhere in the world to-day.

THE STAFF OF THE GREAT WOMEN’S WAR HOSPITAL IN ENDELL STREET, LONDON
This is the shining citadel that marks the capitulation the world over of the medical profession to the new woman movement.

IN COLDEST ENGLAND

I have again “established my residence” with the police in London. I feel on terms of the most intimate acquaintance with the London police. So many of them have my photograph and are conversant with all the biographical and genealogical details of my life. You have to do it, register at a police station, every time you change your hotel. I have moved so often, I am nervous lest I seem like a German spy. But at the Bow Street Station, the officer in charge just nods genially: “Oh, that’s quite all right. Looking for more heat, aren’t you? I know. You Americans are all alike.”

Have you ever shivered in London in January? Then you don’t know what it is to be cold, not even when the thermometer drops to zero and New York’s all snowed in but the subway, and the street cleaning department has to spend a million dollars to dig you out of the drifts. Yes, I know about the Gulf Stream. It does pleasantly moderate the outdoor climate so that it is never really winter in England. But the Gulf Stream does not get into their houses. I was a luncheon guest the other day at a residence with a crest on its note-paper. The hostess put on a wrap to pass down the staircase from the drawing-room to the dining-room, and with my bronchitis—all Americans get it in London—I was simply unable to remove my coat at all. This mansion, English ivy-covered, and mildewed with ages of aristocracy, has never had a real fire within its walls. There are only the tiny grate fires which are, as it were, mere ornaments beneath the mantelpiece. The drawing-room fire is lighted only just before the guests arrive: the men with lifted coat-tails back up to it, their hands crossed behind them spread to the blaze; the dog and the cat draw near to the fender; conversation about the fire becomes general in the tone of voice, well, in which one might admire a rare sunset. The dining-room fire, likewise, is lighted only just before the butler announces luncheon. And in all this grand mansion you discover there isn’t any place to be warm, unless perchance the cook in the kitchen may have it.

Well, English hotels strive to be as coldly correct as this English high life. And I have suffered cold storage in Piccadilly at the rate of ten dollars a day as long as my bronchitis will bear it. I ought to be ill in bed at this moment. But I can’t be. There isn’t a hospital bed in Europe without a wounded soldier in it. Schools, orphanages, monasteries, country residences, castles and many hotels have been turned into hospitals, all of them full of soldiers. A civilian who may be ill literally has not where to lay his head. So I set out desperately to find heat in London. I think I have searched every hotel from Mayfair to Bloomsbury Square. As a special concession to American patronage a few of them have put steam-heat on their letter heads, “central heat,” they call it. But all European radiators, when there are any, are as reluctant as their elevators. “Lifts” move under groaning protest and if they go up, they let you know they do not expect to come down. The radiators are equally as sullen about radiating. They don’t want to at all. English radiators are such toy affairs as to be incapable of any real action. They are so small they get lost behind the furniture. At the Hyde Park Hotel, the clerk and I hunted all over the place: “I’m sure we used to have them,” he said. At last our search was rewarded. We found the one that was to keep me warm. It was behind the dresser and such a miniature affair, you’d surely have guessed Santa Claus must have left it for the children at Christmas time.

Some one advised me that English hotels really didn’t do steam heat well and the best way to be warm was to go to Brown’s, which is famous for its grate fires. The Queen of Holland and the English nobility always stop at Brown’s. So I tried Brown’s. I bought all the “coals” the management would sell at one time and tipped the maid liberally to start the fire in my room. To maintain the temperature anything above fifty, I had to sit by the grate and keep putting on the coals myself. In the bathroom there was no heat at all. “Oh, yes, there was,” the management argued; “didn’t the hot-water pipe for the bath come right up through the floor?” No, they insisted, there couldn’t be any fire in the grate in the bathroom—because there never had been since Brown’s began. Why, probably the hotel would burn up with so much heat as that.

So I moved on and on. At last I came in the Strand to the Savoy, where all Americans eventually arrive. It is the only hotel in England with real steam-heat. Just pull out your dresser and your wash-stand. Concealed behind each you will discover a radiator, warm, real, life-size! Eureka! It is the only modern-comfort temperature in London. I am able to remove sundry clothing accessories of Shetland wool accumulated at Selfridge’s Department Store in Oxford Street. And for the first time since my arrival on these shores I am sitting in my hotel room unwrapped in either a rose satin down bed-quilt or a steamer-rug. My soul once more uncurls itself for work. It is wonderful to be warm to-day, even if one must be drowned by the Germans to-morrow.

GREATEST DRAMA IN HISTORY

It begins to look gravely as if one may be. Out there in the yellow fog beyond my window, more and more ominous are the posters that come hourly drifting down the Strand from Fleet Street. Germany has announced to the world that she is going to do her worst. And she begins to tune her submarines for the sink-on-sight frightfulness more terrible than any that has preceded. The Dutch boats stop. The Scandinavian boats stop. The American boats stop. The entire ocean is now blanketed in one danger zone.

All the world’s a stage of swift-moving events, the greatest and most terrible spectacle that has ever been put on since civilisation began. And we in London are spectators before a drop-curtain tight buttoned down at the corners! It is lifted now and then by the hand of the censor to reveal only what the Government decides is good for the people to see. The plain citizen in London has no means of knowing how much it is that he does not know. It was six months after the Battle of Ypres had occurred before the English newspapers got around to mention the event. So you see with what a baffling sense of futility it is that one scans the newspapers here now while history is making so fast that a new page is turned every day. I am hungry for a real live paper, bright yellow from along Park Row. And over my breakfast coffee at the Savoy I have only the London Times, gravely discussing by the column, “What Is Religion?” and “The Value of Tudor Music,” while the rest of the world is breathless before a Russian revolution, later to be given out in London exactly a week old.

But there is news that even the censor is playing up with a lavish hand. The Strand streams with the posters: “The United States on the Verge of War.” My official permit from Downing Street to go to Holland has arrived in the morning’s mail. I cannot get there. I cannot get to Scandinavia. Can I get home? It is the question that is agitating a number of Americans abroad. We watchfully wait for a warship to convoy us. But scan the Atlantic as we may from day to day, there is none arriving. The folks back home have a way of forgetting that we are here. Those that do remember are saying it serves us right. We had no business to come in war-time. Sixteen Americans at the Savoy every day rush to read the news bulletins that hourly are tacked up in the lounge. But the wheels of government at Washington move so slowly. The Senate only debates and debates. And there is nothing said about us! Will it be possible to flag the attention of Congress? The same idea occurs simultaneously to Senator Hale in Paris and to several of us in London. This is the answer to my cabled inquiry to Washington: “Your request the fifth. Impracticable send warship convoy American liner bringing Americans back from Europe. Signed, Robert Lansing, Secretary of State.”

So, that’s settled. The only way for any of us to get away from here will be just—to go. And I begin to. There is myself to get home, and my data. Three consignments have already gone over under special government auspices. But there have been anxious periods of waiting before a cable, “Stuff safe,” has reached me. I am going to sink or swim with the remainder of it. Wellington House arranges with the censor at Strand House. There the material is read and done up in packages, in each of which is enclosed a letter with the War Office Stamp: “Senior Aliens Officer. Port of Embarkation. Please allow the package in which this is enclosed to accompany bearer Mrs. M. P. Daggett as personal luggage. This package has been examined by the censorship.” All these data are now packed in a suitcase that stands in my hotel room awaiting my departure.

When I was caught in the homeward rush of Americans from London in 1914, the steamship offices in Cockspur Street were jammed to the doors. To-day they are silent, empty, echoing places. In 1917 it is such a life and death matter to travel, that most people don’t. So grave is the danger that the Government refuses to permit passports at all for English women. But for me, this that I am facing is the risk of my trade in war-time.

To-day I had a letter from my New York office:

“The best thing for you to do is to get home as quick as you can. Wouldn’t it be safest by way of Spain? Any way of course is taking a chance and a big one. I wish to the Lord you were here, safe and sound. But there isn’t a darn thing any of us can do about getting you back. You have either got to take your life in your hands and take a chance coming back, or stay in London. And God knows when this war is going to end now!”

It is “safest by way of Spain.” Ambassador Gerard getting home from Germany selected that route. But my passport, I remember, is black-marked, “No return to France.” And I shall have the British Foreign Office to explain to before I can reach my French friends who so cordially invited my return. There will be altogether some four steel lines to pass that way. I’d rather face the submarines. The Spanish boats are small, only about 4,000 tons, which would be like crossing the Atlantic in a bathtub. I’d rather be drowned than seasick. I think I shall make sure of comfort by a British boat.

And then—the posters in the Strand begin to announce, “Seven ships sunk to-day.” Four Dutch boats trying for their home port, are submarined in English waters. The Laconia goes down. The Anchor liner California meets her fate. It’s real, I tell you, on this side where they’re daily bringing in the survivors. About nine hours in the open boats is the usual experience for the rescued. Do you see the deterring, dampening effect that this might have on one’s enthusiasm for departure?

FACING LIFE OR DEATH?

This is the month of March. Oh, wouldn’t it be well to wait until the water is warmer? It’s a disquieting sensation to wake up in the night and meditate on whether, say, a week or ten days from now, you may find yourself at the bottom of the Atlantic. In this state of low depression, you decide to live a little longer. And so to-morrow you select a little later date for your sailing. Then the arrival of American mail proves that at least one more boat has run the blockade and escaped the submarines. Yours might.

So I take my courage in both hands, and my passport, too, and buy my ticket. When I have done this, a nice, quiet calm possesses me. It is as if I had been a long time dying. Now it is over and finished. I have nothing more to do about it. I pack my trunk just curiously wondering, shall I ever wear this gown again? Or shall I not? Oh, well, it is such a relief to be going away from all this Old World grief. Are the war clouds gathering over New York, too? But I still can see the city all golden in the sunlight beneath the clear blue sky.

Last night I was awakened at twelve o’clock by the sounds of a gay supper party’s revelry in some room down my corridor. Which of the staid American gentlemen at this hotel is celebrating? Listen. They are singing, evidently with lifted glasses: “Hail, hail, the gang’s all here.” Not to the national anthem could my heart thrill more than to Tammany’s own classic refrain. New York! New York! Not all the Kaiser’s submarines can stop me from starting.

I may not send word of the steamship or the date of my departure. But I cable my home office: “If I do not succeed in reporting to you myself, apply for the latest information of my movements, to the International Franchise Club, 9 Grafton Street, London.” You see, if I should get the last Long Assignment....

There are only sixteen first class passengers for this trip on the Carmania in her grim grey warpaint. Two of us are women, at whom the rest stare with curious interest. Each of us as we step aboard is handed a lifeboat ticket. Mine reads: “R. M. S. Carmania. Name, Mrs. M. P. Daggett, Boat No. 5.”

I think I know now how a person feels who is going to his execution. We who walk up this steamship gangway are under sentence of death by the German Government. The old Latin proverb flashes into my mind: “Morituri te salutamus.” It is we who may be about to die who salute each other here on the Carmania and then we are facing the steel line. Four British officers with swords at their sides and pistols in their belts wait for us in the drawing-room. All the other passengers go easily by but the New York Jewish gentleman with the German name. At last he, too, clears. But the British Government is not yet finished with a journalist. The Tower of London and its damp dark dungeons is again materialising clearly for me.

The lieutenant has been questioning me for half-an-hour. “I’m sorry,” he says, “but I think I shall have to have you searched. This suitcase of journalistic data, you say that there is inside each package a note stating that the material has been passed by the Government? Why isn’t that note on the outside of the package?”

“I don’t know,” I answer earnestly. “It’s the question I asked in vain at Strand House. The censor said that it had to be this way. I assure you the note is there. But if you break the outside seal to find out, my government guarantee is gone. And if this boat by any chance goes to Halifax, how are they to know there that I’m not a German spy?”

The lieutenant’s eyes are on my face. I think he believes I am telling the truth. “Well,” he orders his corporal, “go to her stateroom with her and have a look at her luggage.” The corporal is very nice. He finds a blank note book in my trunk. “You aren’t supposed to have this,” he says. And there is a package of business correspondence. “Did you tell him out there about these letters? Well, you needn’t. And I won’t.” At the suitcase with the magic seals he gives only one glance. To his superior officer, when we return, the corporal reports: “Everything’s quite all right. Stuff’s stamped all over with the seal of the War Office.”

The lieutenant looks at his watch. “I had breakfast at seven. It’s now one o’clock. That’s lunch time.”

“Don’t let me detain you,” I suggest pleasantly. He shakes his head. “I’ve got to put this job through.”

I am this job. But the lieutenant has smiled. The conversation eases up. “Pretty good suffrage data down at the Houses of Parliament,” he himself suggests. “Do you know, I’m almost willing now that women should vote. I didn’t used to be. But the war has changed my mind.”

“By the way,” he asked suddenly, “you’re not mixed up with any of those militants, are you?” I explain that I am not a suffragette, just a plain suffragist. “Because I think those militants ought to be shot,” he adds. I can only bite my tongue. Has the lieutenant no sense of humour? No militant in Holloway Jail was ever more militant than he is with his sword and pistol at this moment.

“There’s a question I’d like to ask,” he goes on. “In your country where women have the franchise, do you find that they all vote alike?” “No more than all the men,” I answer. “Then that’s all right,” he says in a relieved tone. “I’ve been afraid that if we let women vote, they might all vote against war.”

SHALL WE GO DOWN OR ACROSS?

“You really aren’t a militant, are you?” he says again, thoughtfully. “Well, I’ll let you go.” So that’s my last steel line.

The boat begins to move in the Mersey. And the ship’s siren sounds shrilly. It is the summons to shipwreck drill. We assemble quickly in the lounge on the top deck, every one wearing a life-preserver. At a second call of the siren, we file out following the captain’s lead, to stand by our boats in which the crew are already clambering to their oars.

So now we know how for the moment of disaster. The whole steamship waits for it. This is a weird voyage that we begin. Mine-sweepers out there ahead of us are cleaning up the seas. A Scandinavian boat has just been sowing mines all over the water. The Baltic, here beside us, poked her nose out yesterday, scented danger and returned to the river. We wait now in the Mersey twenty-four hours before the mysterious signal is given that it is the propitious moment for our boat to get away. We steal softly to sea under cover of a dense fog and a white snow-storm. The sea-gulls are screaming shrilly above us like birds of prey. And we who look into each other’s eyes are facing we know not whither, it may be America or the Farthest Country of all.

Three men pace the wind-swept captain’s bridge, scanning the horizon, and there are always two clinging in the crow’s nest in the icy gale. This boat is manned by a pedigreed crew. From the captain to the last cabin-boy, everybody has been torpedoed at least once. The Marconi operator never smiles. He sits at his instrument with a grey, drawn look about his young boyish mouth. He was on the Lusitania when she went down. He was the last man off the Laconia the other day. The wrinkled suit he’s wearing is the one they picked him up in out of the sea.

For two days out, we have the little destroyers with us, and then we are left to our luck and the gun in front and the watching men aloft. The lifeboats are always swung out on their davits for the siren’s sudden call. The doors of the upper deck stand open, waiting beside each a preparedness exhibit, boxes of biscuit, flasks of brandy, and a pile of blankets we are to seize as we run. We two women have filled the pockets of our steamer-coats with safety-pins, hairpins and a comb, first aid that no one remembers to bring when they pick you up from the open boat. My fellow traveller is huddling very close to her six-foot husband, to be tucked safely under his arm at the emergency moment. It is good that we are having rough weather. When the waves are tossing high, the periscopes may not find us.

We are sixteen people who wander like disembodied spirits from the gay days of old through these great empty rooms that once rang with the joy of hundreds of tourists on their pleasure-jaunts over the world. There are no games. There is no dancing. There is no band. There are no steamerchairs on deck. At sundown we are closed in tight behind iron shutters. No one may so much as light a cigaret outside.

In the ghastly silence of the days that pass, there is only the strain and quiver of the ship, and the solemn boom, boom of the sea. Death is so near that it seems fitting the glad activities of life should cease, as when a corpse is laid out in the front room of a house. For a while there is a tendency to whisper, as if we were at a funeral, or as if, perchance, the Germans in the sea could hear. But soon we find ourselves functioning quite normally. Not until the sixth day out, it is true, does any one venture to take a bath. You don’t want to be rushed like that, you know, to your drowning. But we are sleeping regularly at night. We eat bacon and eggs for breakfast as usual. We are pleased when there is turkey and cranberry sauce for dinner. One does not maintain an agony of suspense forever. For most of us, I think it began to end when we had committed ourselves to the decision of this voyage. After that, the issue rests with God or with destiny, according to one’s religion.

There is no attempt at dressing for dinner on the Carmania. Evening dress and all the time dress is life-preservers. We do not take them off even at night for a while. We sleep in them. With the new styles, of which there are many, you can. Mine is a garment that buttons up exactly like a man’s vest. Next to the lining is a padded filling, an Indian vegetable matter that will keep one afloat like cork. To-day one desires the latest modern devices against death. A life-preserver costs anywhere from five to fifteen dollars. You carry yours with you as you do your toothbrush and your steamer-rug.

Time ticks off the minutes to life or to death to-morrow. We walk the decks and scan a nearly deserted ocean. Only twice do we sight a steamship on the horizon. At table we discuss as one does usually, oh, immortality and Christian Science and woman suffrage. The Englishman says, “Votes for women are really impossible, don’t you know. Why, if the British women had voted twelve years ago, there might not have been any battleships in 1914. And then where would England have been to-day?”

“But if the German women too had voted twelve years ago, have you thought how much happier the world might be to-day?” I ask. The Englishman does not see the point but the American at my left says, “Guess you handed him one that time.”

On April sixth the Cunard Bulletin, the wireless newspaper, is laid beside our plates at breakfast with the announcement that’s thrilled around a world, “The United States has declared for war.” The Englishman next me says, “That must be a great relief for you.” And I cannot answer for the choking in my throat. My country, oh, my country, too, at the gates of hell to go in regiment by regiment!

On Sunday the English clergyman reads the service including the phrases in brackets: “God save the King (and the President of the United States). Vanquish their enemies and preserve them in felicity.” Down beneath the sea the Germans in their submarines too are praying like that to the same God. But one hopes, oh, one earnestly hopes, that God will not hear them.

After the sixth day out, we have probably escaped the submarines. The American men are no longer kindly asking me in anxious tone, “You’re not nervous, are you?” On the eighth day they get out the shuffleboard. Two mornings later when we awake, the sea is a beautiful blue, all dimpling with sparkling points of golden light. It is real New York sunlight again! The captain comes down from the pilot house smiling: “Well, we got away this time,” he says.

The Statue of Liberty is rising on the horizon. The Manhattan sky-line etches itself against the heavens. Do you know, I’d rather be a door-keeper here at Ellis Island, than a lady-in-waiting anywhere in Europe. The Carmania warps into dock in sight of the Metropolitan Tower. Was Fourteenth Street ever cheap, common, sordid? As my taxicab rolls across town, see how beautiful, oh, see how beautiful is Fourteenth street, a little landscape cross-section right out of Paradise! Nobody here is blinded, nobody maimed, nobody in crêpe, nobody broken-hearted—yet. I have escaped from a nightmare of the Middle Ages. I lift my face to the sunlight again.

I know I am tired, terribly tired of doing difficult things and saving my life from day to day. But I have not realised how near collapse I am until I drop in a chair before the Editor’s deck in the office of the Pictorial Review. I, who have been so crazy to get to the country where there is still free speech, that I had insanely hoped to stand in Broadway and shout, have suddenly lost my voice. I can only report in a whisper!

My chief looks at me in concern. “For God’s sake, girl,” he says, “go somewhere and go to bed!”

CHAPTER III

Her Country’s Call

One Thousand Women Wanted! You may read it on a great canvas sign that stretches across an industrial establishment in lower Manhattan. The owner of this factory who put it there, only knows that it is an advertisement for labour of which he finds himself suddenly in need. But he has all unwittingly really written a proclamation that is a sign of the times.

Across the Atlantic I studied that proclamation in Old World cities. Women Wanted! Women Wanted! The capitals of Europe have been for four years placarded with the sign. And now we in America are writing it on our sky line. All over the world see it on the street-car barns as on the colleges. It is hung above the factories and the coal mines, the halls of government and the farm-yards and the arsenals and even the War Office. Everywhere from the fireside to the firing line, country after country has taken up the call. Now it has become the insistent chorus of civilisation: Women Wanted! Women Wanted!

But yesterday the great war was a phenomenon to which we in America thrilled only as its percussions reverberated around the world. Now our own soldiers are marching down Main Street. But their uniforms still are new. Wait. Soon here too one shall choke with that sob in the throat. Oh, I am walking again in the garden of the Tuileries on a day when I had seen war without the flags flying and the bands playing. It was dead men and disabled men and hospitals full and insane asylums full and cemeteries full. “You have to remember,” said a voice at my side, “that all freedoms since the world began have had to be fought for. They still have to be.”

So I repeat it now for you, the women of America, resolutely to remember. And get our your Robert Brownings! Read it over and over again, “God’s in his heaven.” For there are going to be days when it will seem that God has quite gone away. Still He hasn’t. Suddenly in a lifting of the war clouds above the blackest battle smoke, we shall see again His face as a flashing glimpse of some new freedom lights for an instant the darkened heavens above the globe of the world. Already there has been a Russian revolution which may portend the end of a German monarchy. In England a new democracy has buckled on the sword of a dead aristocracy. And a great Commoner is at the helm of state. But with all the freedoms they are winning, there is one for which not the most decorated general has any idea he’s fighting. I am not sure but it is the greatest freedom of all: when woman wins the race wins. The new democracy for which a world has taken up arms, for the first time since the history of civilisation began, is going to be real democracy. There is a light that is breaking high behind all the battle lines! Look! There on the horizon in those letters of blood that promise of the newest freedom of all. When it is finished—the awful throes of this red agony in which a world is being reborn—there is going to be a place in the Sun for women.

Listen, hear the call, Women Wanted! Women Wanted! Last Spring the Government pitched a khaki colored tent in your town on the vacant lot just beyond the post office, say. How many men have enlisted there? Perhaps there are seventy-five who have gone from the factory across the creek, and the receiving teller at the First National Bank, and the new principal of the High School where the children were getting along so well, and the doctor that everybody had because they liked him so much.

And, oh, last week at dinner your own husband had but just finished carving when he looked across the table and said: “Dear, I can’t stand it any longer. I’m going to get into this fight to make the world right.” You know how your face went white and your heart for an instant stopped beating. But what I don’t believe you do know is that you are at this moment getting ready to play your part in one of the most tremendous epochs of the world. It is not only Liège and the Marne and Somme, and Haig and Joffre and Pétain and Pershing who are making history to-day. Keokuk, Iowa, and Kalamazoo, Mich., and Little Falls, N. Y., are too—and you and the woman who lives next door!

THE NEW WOMAN MOVEMENT

Every man who enlists at that tent near the post office is going to leave a job somewhere whether it’s at the factory or the doctor’s office or the school teacher’s desk, or whether it’s your husband. That job will have to be taken by a woman. It’s what happened in Europe. It’s what now we may see happen here. A great many women will have a wage envelope who never had it before. That may mean affluence to a housefull of daughters. One, two, three, four wage envelopes in a family where father’s used to be the only one. You even may have to go out to earn enough to support yourself and the babies. Yes, I know your husband’s army pay and the income from investments carefully accumulated through the savings of your married life, will help quite a little. But with the ever rising war cost of living, it may not be enough. It hasn’t been for thousands of homes in Europe. And eventually you too may go to work as other women have. It’s very strange, is it not, for you of all women who have always believed that woman’s place was the home. And you may even have been an “anti,” a most earnest advocate of an ancient régime against which whole societies and associations of what yesterday were called “advanced” women organised their “suffrage” protests.

To-day no one any longer has to believe what is woman’s place. No woman even has anything to say about it. Read everywhere the signs: Women Wanted! Here in New York we are seeing shipload after shipload of men going out to sea in khaki. We don’t know how many boat loads like that will go down the bay. But for an army of every million American men in Europe, there must be mobilised another million women to take their places behind the lines here 3,000 miles away from the guns, to carry on the auxiliary operations without which the armies in the field could not exist.

In the department store where you shopped to-day you noticed an elevator girl had arrived, where the operator always before has been a boy! Outside the window of my country house here as I write, off on that field on the hillside a woman is working, who never worked there before. At Lexington, Mass., I read in my morning paper, the Rev. Christopher Walter Collier has gone to the front in France and his wife has been unanimously elected by the congregation to fill the pulpit during his absence. Sometimes women by the hundred step into new vacancies. The Æolian Company is advertising for women as piano salesmen and has established a special school for their instruction. A Chicago manufacturing plant has hung out over its employment gate the announcement, “Man’s work, man’s pay for all women who can qualify,” and within a week two hundred women were at work. The Pennsylvania railroad, which has rigidly opposed the employment of women on its office staffs, in June, 1917, announced a change of policy and took on in its various departments five hundred women and girls. The Municipal Service Commission in New York last fall was holding its first examination to admit women to the position of junior draughtsmen in the city’s employ. The Civil Service Commission at Washington, preparing to release every possible man from government positions for war service, had compiled a list of 10,000 women eligible for clerical work in government departments.

Like that it is happening all about us. This is the new woman movement. And you’re in it. We all are. I know: you may never have carried a suffrage banner or marched in a suffrage procession or so much as addressed a suffrage campaign envelope. But you’re “moving” to-day just the same if you’ve only so much as rolled a Red Cross bandage or signed a Food Administration pledge offered you by the women’s committee of the Council of National Defence. All the women of the world are moving.

“Suffrage de la morte,” a Senator on the Seine has termed the vote offered the French feminists in the form of a proposition that every man dying on the field of battle may transfer his ballot to a woman whom he shall designate. And the French women have drawn back in horror, exclaiming: “We don’t want a dead man’s vote. We want only our own vote.” Nevertheless it is something like this which is occurring.

And we may shudder, but we may not draw back. It is by way of the place de la morte, that women are moving inexorably to-day into industry and commerce and the professions, on to strange new destinies that shall not be denied.

There on the firing line a bullet whizzes straight to the mark. A man drops dead in the trenches. Some wife’s husband, some girl’s sweetheart who before he was a soldier was a wage earner, never will be more. Back home another woman who had been temporarily enrolled in the ranks of industry, steps forward, enlisted for life in the army of labour.

Dear God, what a price to pay for the freedom the feminists have asked. But this is not our woman movement. This is His woman movement, who moves in mysterious ways His ends to command. We may not know. And we do not understand. But as we watch the war clouds, we see, as it were in the lightning flash of truth, the illuminated way that is opening for women throughout the world. It is westward to us that this star of opportunity has taken its course directly from above the battlefields of Europe.

A WOMAN OF YESTERDAY LOOKS ON

Women Wanted! Women Wanted! I am hearing it again over there. Outside the windows of my London hotel in Piccadilly, a shaft of sharp white light played against the blackness of the London sky. Down these beams that searched the night for enemy Zeppelins, a woman’s figure softly moved. And as I looked, the close drawn curtains of my room, it seemed, parted and she stepped lightly across the window sill. She was gowned in a quaint, old-time costume. “They’re not wearing them to-day,” I smiled.

She looked down at her cotton gown stamped with the broad arrows of Holloway jail. There were women, you know, who suffered and died in that prison garb. The way of the broad arrow used to be the way of the cross for the woman’s cause.

“You ought to see the new styles,” I said. “Governments are getting out so many new decorations for women.”

“Tell me,” she answered. “Up in heaven we have heard that it is so. And I have come to see.”

So we went out together, the Soul of a Suffragette and I, to look on the Great Push of the new woman movement that is swinging down the twentieth century in sweeping battalions. It has the middle of the road and all the gates ahead are open wide. No ukase of parliament or king halts it. No church dogma anathematises it. No social edict ostracises it. The police do not arrest it and the hooligans do not mob it. No, indeed! The applauding populace that’s crying “Place aux dames” would not tolerate any such treatment as that. And in fact, I don’t think there’s any one left in the world who would want to so much as pull out a hairpin of this triumphant processional.

You see, it’s so very different from the woman movement of yesterday. That was the crusade of the pioneers who gave their lives in the struggling service of an unpopular ideal. Who wanted feminists free to find themselves? Even women themselves came haltingly as recruits. But this is a pageant, with Everywoman crowding for place at her country’s call. And who would not adore to be a patriot? It is with flying colors, albeit to the solemn measures of a Dead March that the new columns are coming on.

It is the Woman Movement against which all the parliaments of men shall never again prevail. Majestically, with sure and rhythmic tread, it is moving, not under its own power of propaganda, but propelled by fearful cosmic forces. At the compulsion of a sublime destiny accelerated under the ægis of a war office press bureau, suffragists pro and anti alike are gathered in. Theirs no longer to reason why. For see, they are keeping step, always keeping step with the armies at the front!

There is a new offensive on the Somme. There is a defeat at the Yser, a victory at Verdun or Marne. The dead men lie deep in the trenches! The war office combs out new regiments to face the hell-fire of shrapnel and the woman movement in all nations joins up new recruits to fill the vacant places from which the men, about to die, are steadily enlisted. See the sign of the times. I point it out to My Suffragette: “Women Wanted.” With each year of war the demand becomes more insistent. Women Wanted! Women Wanted!

“But they didn’t used to be,” she gasps in amazement.

And of course, I too remember when the world was barricaded against everywhere a woman wanted to go beyond the dishpan and the wash tub and the nursery. It all seems now such a long while ago.

“Dear old-fashioned girl,” I reply, “women no longer have to smash a way anywhere. They’ll even be sending after you if you don’t come.”

When the militants of England signed with their government the truce which abrogated for the period of the war the Cat and Mouse Act with which they had been pursued, it was the formal announcement to the world of the cessation of suffrage activities while the nations settled other issues. From Berlin to Paris and London, feminists acquiesced in the decision arrived at in Kingsway. It seemed indeed that the woman’s cause was going to wait. But is it not written: “Whoso loseth his life,” etc., “shall find it.”

Women Wanted! Women Wanted! “Listen,” I say to the Soul of a Suffragette, as we stand in the Strand. “You hear it? And it’s like that in the Avenue de l’Opéra and in Unter den Linden and in Petrograd and now in Broadway. To every woman, it is her country’s call to service.”

I think we may write it down in history that on August 14, 1914, the door of the Doll’s House opened. She who stood at the threshold where the tides of the ages surged, waved a brave farewell to lines of gleaming bayonets going down the street. Then the clock on her mantel ticked off the wonderful moment of the centuries that only God himself had planned. The force primeval that had held her in bondage, this it was that should set her free. As straight as ever she went before to the altar and the cook stove and the cradle, she stepped out now into the wide wide world, the woman behind the man behind the gun.

“See,” I say to My Suffragette, “not all the political economists from John Stuart Mill to Ellen Key could have accomplished it. Not even your spectacular martyrdom was able to achieve it. But now it is done. For lo, the password the feminists have sought, is found. And it is Love—not logic!”

There are, the statisticians tell us, more than twenty million men numbered among the embattled hosts out there at the front where the future of the human race is being fought for. Modern warfare has most terrible engines of destruction. But with all of these at command, there is not a brigade of soldiers that could stand against their foes without the aid of the women who in the last analysis are holding the line.

Who is it that is feeding and clothing and nursing the greatest armies of history? See that soldier in the trenches? A woman raised the grain for the bread, a woman is tending the flocks that provided the meat for his rations to-day. A woman made the boots and the uniform in which he stands. A woman made the shells with which his gun is loaded. A woman will nurse him when he’s wounded. A woman’s ambulance may even pick him up on the battlefield. A woman surgeon may perform the operation to save his life. And somewhere back home a woman holds the job he had to leave behind. There is no task to which women have not turned to-day to carry on civilisation. For the shot that was fired in Serbia summoned men to their most ancient occupation—and women to every other.

“All the suffrage flags are furled?” questions My Suffragette incredulously, as we pass through the streets where once her banners waved most militantly. “Gone with your broad arrows of yesterday,” I affirm. “And you should see our modern styles.”

NEW COSTUMES FOR NEW WOMEN

When women stood at the threshold listening breathlessly that August day, there was one costume ready and laid out by the nations for their wear in every land. Coronets and shimmering ball gowns, cap and gown in university corridors and plain little home made dresses in rose bowered cottages were alike exchanged for the new uniform and insignia. And the woman who set the sign of the red cross in the centre of her forehead appeared in her white gown and her flowing white head dress all over Europe as instantaneously as a new skirt ever flashed out in the pages of a fashion magazine. To her, every country called as naturally, as spontaneously as a hurt child might turn to its mother. She it is who has worn the red cross to her transfiguration in this new Woman Movement with one of the largest detachments in hospital service. See her on the sinking hospital ships in the Channel or the Dardanelles, insisting on “wounded soldiers first” as she passes her charges to safety, and waiting behind herself goes quietly under the water. And with bandaged eyes she has even walked unflinchingly to death before the levelled guns of the enemy soldiery, as did Edith Cavell in Belgium who went with her red cross to immortality. All the world has been breathless before the figure of the woman who dies to-day for her country like a soldier. No one knew that the Red Cross would be carried to these heights of Calvary. But from the day that the great slaughter began, it was accepted as a matter of course that woman’s place was going to be at the bedside of the wounded soldier. Even as the troops buckled on sword and pistol and the departing regiments began to move, it was made sure that she should be waiting for them on their return.

In Germany in the first month of the war, no less than 70,000 women of the Vaterlandischer Frauenverein, trained in first aid to the injured, had arrived at the doors of the Reichstag to offer themselves for Red Cross service.

I remember in the spring of 1914 to have stood at Cecilienhaus in Charlottenburg. Cecilienhaus with its crèche and its maternity care and its folks kitchens and its workingmen’s gardens, was devoted to the welfare work in which the Vaterlandischer Frauenverein of the nation was engaged. Frau Oberin Hanna Kruger showed me with pride all these social activities. Then she looked away down the Berliner Strasse and said: “But when war comes—” Had I heard aright? That you know was in May, 1914. But she repeated: “When war comes we are going to be able to take care of seventy-five soldiers in this dining-room and in that maternity ward we shall be able to have beds for a dozen officers.” All over Germany the half million women of the Vaterlandischer Frauenverein planning like that, “when war comes,” had taken a first aid nurse’s training course. They were as ready for mobilisation as were their men. France, viewing with alarm these preparations across the border, had her women also in training. The Association des Dames Français, the Union des Femmes de France and the Société Secours aux Blessés Militaires, at once put on the Red Cross uniform and brought to their country’s service 59,500 nurses. In England the Voluntary Aid Detachments of the Red Cross had 60,000 members ready to serve under the 3,000 trained nurses who were registered for duty within a fortnight of the outbreak of war. Similarly every country engaged in the conflict, taking inventory of its resources, eagerly accepted the services of the war nurse. The same policy of state actuated every nation as was expressed by the Italian Minister of War who announced: “By utilising the services of women to replace men in the military hospitals, we shall release 20,000 soldiers for active duty at the front.”

The Red Cross of service to the soldier is the most conspicuous decoration worn by women in all warring countries. Everywhere you meet the nurses’ uniform almost as universally adopted a garb as was the shirt waist of yesterday. We are here at Charing Cross station where nightly under cover of the soft darkness the procession of grim grey motor ambulances rolls out bearing the wounded. They are coming like this too at the Gare du Nord in Paris, at the Potsdam station in Berlin, and up in Petrograd. In each ambulance between the tiers of stretchers on which the soldiers lie, you may see the figure of a woman silhouetted faintly against the dim light of the railroad station as she bends to smooth a pillow, to adjust a bandage, or now to light a cigarette for a maimed man who never can do that least service for himself again. She may be a peeress of the realm, or she may be a militant on parole granted the amnesty of her government that needs her more these days for saving life than for serving jail sentence. But look, and you shall see the Red Cross on her forehead!

The grey ambulances like this coming from the railroad stations long ago in every land filled up the regular military hospitals through which the patients are passed by the thousands every month. And other women taking the Red Cross set it above the doorways of historic mansions opened to receive the wounded. In Italy, Queen Margherita and Queen Elena gave their royal residences. In Paris Baroness Rothschild has made her beautiful house with its great garden behind a high yellow wall a Hôpital Militaire Auxiliaire. And many private residences like this are among the eight hundred hospitals in France which are being operated under the direction of one woman’s organisation alone, the Société de Secours aux Blessés Militaires.

MRS. H. J. TENNANT
Director of the Woman’s Department of National Service in England. Like this in all lands, women have been called to government councils.

Here in London, in Piccadilly, at Devonshire House, desks and filing cabinets fill the rooms once gay with social functions. And hospital messengers go and come up and down the marvellous gold and crystal staircase. The Duchess of Devonshire has turned over the great mansion as the official headquarters for the Red Cross. Nearby, in Mayfair, Madame Moravieff, whose husband is connected with the Russian diplomatic service, is serving as commandant for the hospital she has opened for English soldiers. Lady Londonderry’s house in Park Lane is a hospital. By the end of the first year of war, like this, no less than 850 private residences in England had been transformed into Voluntary Aid Detachment Red Cross Hospitals.

In hospital financiering the American woman in Europe has led all the rest. Margaret Cox Benet, the wife of Lawrence V. Benet in Paris, braved the perils of the Atlantic crossing to appeal to America for contributions to the American Ambulance Hospital at Neuilly. It is equalled by only one other war hospital in Europe, the splendidly equipped hospital of the American women at Paignton, England, initiated by Lady Arthur Paget, formerly Mary Paran Stevens of New York. Lady Paget, who is president of the American Women’s War Relief Fund, has just rounded out the first million dollars of the fund which she has personally raised for war work.

You see how these also serve who are doing the executive and organisation work that makes it possible for the woman in the front lines to wear her red cross even to her transfiguration. Accelerated by the activities of women like these behind the lines, the Red Cross battalions are leading the Great Push of the new woman movement. The woman in the nurse’s uniform is not exciting the most comment, however. It is by reason of her numbers, the thousands and thousands of her that she commands the most attention. But she was really expected.

WHERE YOU FIND THE MILITANTS TO-DAY

For the amazing figure that has emerged by magic directly out of the battle smoke of this war, see the woman in khaki! Khaki, I explain to My Suffragette, is one of the most popular of government offerings for women’s wear. The material has been found most serviceable in a war zone either to die in or to live in, while you save others from dying. It is sometimes varied with woollen cloth preferred for warmth. But the essential features of the costume are preserved: the short skirt, the leather leggings, the military hat and the shoulder straps with the insignia of special service. When governments have called for unusual duty that is difficult or disagreeable or dangerous, it is the woman in khaki who responds: “Take me. I am here.” She will, in fact, do anything that there’s no one else to do.

Stick-at-nothings, the London newspapers have nicknamed the women’s Reserve Ambulance Corps of 400 women who wear a khaki uniform with a green cross armlet. With white tunics over these khaki suits, a detachment of green cross girls at Peel House, the soldiers’ club in Westminster, does house-maid duty from seven in the morning until eight at night. They are making beds and waiting on table, these young women, who, many of them, in stately English homes have all their lives been served by butlers and footmen. I saw a Green Cross girl at the military headquarters of the corps in Piccadilly making to Commandant Mabel Beatty her report of another phase of war work. She was such a young thing, I should say perhaps eighteen, and delicately bred. I know I noticed the slender aristocratic hand that she lifted to her hat in salute to her superior officer: “I have,” she said, “this morning burned three amputated arms, two legs and a section of a jaw bone. And I have carried my end of five heavy coffins to the dead wagon.” That’s all in her day’s work. She’s a hospital orderly. And it’s one of the things an orderly is for, to dispose of the by-products of a great war hospital.

See also, these ambulances that bring the wounded from Charing Cross. They are “manned” by a woman outside as well as the nurse within. There is a girl at the wheel in the driver’s seat. The Motor Transport Section of the Green Cross Society accomplishes an average weekly mileage of 2,000 miles transporting wounded and munitions. Like this they respond for any service to which the exigencies of war may call. There was the time of the first serious Zeppelin raid on London when amid the crash of falling bombs and the horror of fire flaming suddenly in the darkness, the shrieks of the maimed and dying filled the night with terror and the populace seemed to stand frozen to inaction at the scene about them. Right up to the centre of the worst carnage rolled a Green Cross ambulance from which leaped out eight khaki clad women. They were, mind you, women of the carefully sheltered class, who sit in dinner gowns under soft candle light in beautifully appointed English houses. And they never before in all their lives had witnessed an evil sight. But they set to work promptly by the side of the police to pick up the dead and the dying, putting the highway to order as calmly as they might have gone about adjusting the curtains and the pillows to set a drawing-room to rights. “Thanks,” said the police, when sometime later an ambulance arrived from the nearest headquarters, “the ladies have done this job.” Since then the Woman’s Reserve Ambulance Corps is officially attached to the “D” Division of the Metropolitan Police for air raid relief.

That girl in khaki who is serving as a hospital orderly, you notice, wears shoulder straps of blue. She comes from the great military hospital in High Holborn that is staffed entirely by women. We may walk through the wards there where we shall see many of her. Above her in authority are women with shoulder straps of red. These are they who wear the surgeon’s white tunic in the operating theatre, who issue the physician’s orders at the patient’s bedside. Now the door at the end of the ward opens. A woman with red shoulder straps stands there, whom every wounded patient able to lift his right arm, salutes as if his own military commander had appeared. “But it’s my doctor, my doctor,” exclaims the Suffragette of yesterday.

And it is. The doctor, you see, used to hold in fact the unofficial post of first aid physician to the Women’s Social and Political Union. Frequently she was wont to hurry out on an emergency call to attend some militant picked up cut and bleeding from the missiles of the mobs or released faint and dying from a hunger strike. And the doctor herself did her bit in the old days. The Government had her in Holloway jail for six weeks. Well, to-day they have her as surgeon in command of this war hospital with the rank of major. She’s so well fitted for the place, you see, by her earlier experience.

But, visibly agitated, My Suffragette again plucks at my sleeve: “Are you quite sure,” she asks, “that Scotland Yard won’t take her?”

Poor dear lady of yesterday. They’re not doing that to-day. Your woman movement was militant against the Government. This woman movement is militant with the Government. There’s all the difference in the world. And the woman in khaki has found it. Militancy of the popular kind has come to be most exalted in woman. Besides a woman doctor is too valuable in these days to be interfered with. She is no longer sent as a missionary physician to the heathen or limited to a practice exclusively among women and children. She is good enough for anywhere. One issue of the Lancet advertises: “Women doctors wanted for forty municipal appointments.” Women doctors wanted, is the call of every country. This military hospital in London of which Dr. Louisa Garrett Anderson, major, is in command, is entirely staffed with women. Paris has its war hospital with Dr. Nicole Gerard-Mangin, major in command. Dr. Clelia Lollini, sub-lieutenant, is operating surgeon at a war hospital in Venice. In Russia one of the most celebrated war doctors is the Princess Gurdrovitz, surgeon in charge of the Imperial Hospital at Tsarkoe Selo.

Oh, the khaki costume I think we may say is admired of every war office. It has found a vogue among all the allies. It has appeared the past year in America, where it has been most recently adopted. But the model for whom it was particularly made to measure was the militant suffragette of England. Nearly everybody who used to be in Holloway jail is wearing it. It’s the best fit that any of them find to-day in the shop windows of government styles. And it’s so well adapted to women to whom all early Victorian qualities are as foreign as hoop skirts. You would not expect one inured to hardship by alternate periods of starvation and forcible feeding to be either a fearsome or a delicate creature. And the courage that could horsewhip a prime minister or set off a bomb beneath a bishop’s chair, is just the kind that every nation’s calling for in these strenuous times. It’s the kind that up close to the firing line gets mentioned in army orders and decorated with all crosses of iron and gold and silver.

You will find the woman who has put on khaki at the front in all the warring countries. The Duchess of Aosta is doing ambulance work in Italy. The Countess Elizabeth Shouvaleff of Petrograd commanded her own hospital train that brought in the wounded. But it is the British woman in khaki who has gone farthest afield. The National Union’s “Scottish Women’s Hospitals,” as they are known, are right behind the armies. Staffed from the surgeons to the ambulance corps entirely by women, they go out to any part of the war zone where the need is greatest.

See the latest “unit” that is leaving Paddington Station. The equipment they are taking with them includes every appliance that will be required, from a bed to a bandage, and numbers just 1,051 bales and cases of freight. The entire unit, forty-five women, have had their hair cut short. For sanitary reasons, is the euphemistic way of explaining it. For protection against the vermin with which patients from the trenches will be infested, if you ask for war facts as they are. Units like this have gone out to settle wherever by army orders a place has been made for them, in a deserted monastery in France that they must first scrub and clean, in a refugee barracks in Russia, in a tent in Serbia where they themselves must dig the drainage trenches.