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                 THE SWORD OF DEBORAH

                  F. TENNYSON JESSE




    "Women are timid, cower and shrink
    At show of danger, some folk think;
    But men there are who for their lives
    Dare not so far asperse their wives.
    We let that pass--so much is clear,
    Though little dangers they may fear,
    When greater dangers men environ,
    Then women show a front of iron;
    And, gentle in their manner, they
    Do bold things in a quiet way."

                     THOMAS DUNN ENGLISH.

[Illustration: A "FANY" WITH THE AERIAL TORPEDO DROPPED INTO THE CAMP]




                       THE SWORD
                      OF DEBORAH

            _FIRST-HAND IMPRESSIONS OF THE
            BRITISH WOMEN'S ARMY IN FRANCE_

                          BY
                   F. TENNYSON JESSE
    AUTHOR OF "SECRET BREAD," "THE MILKY WAY," ETC.

               NEW [Illustration] YORK

               GEORGE H. DORAN COMPANY




                  _Copyright, 1919,
             By George H. Doran Company_

      _Printed in the United States of America_




FOREWORD


This little book was written at the request of the Ministry of
Information in March of 1918; it was only released for publication--in
spite of the need for haste in its compiling which had been impressed on
me, and with which I had complied--shortly before Christmas. Hence it
may seem somewhat after the fair. But it appears to me that people
should still be told about the workers of the war and what they did,
even now when we are all struggling back into our chiffons--perhaps more
now than ever. For we should not forget, and how should we remember if
we have never known?




                       CONTENTS


    CHAPTER                                PAGE

        I A.B.C.                            13

       II THE FEVER CHART OF WAR            17

      III BACKGROUNDS                       26

       IV MY FIRST CONVOY                   34

        V OUTPOSTS                          41

       VI WAACS: RUMOURS AND REALITIES      48

      VII THE BROWN GRAVES                  58

     VIII VIGNETTES                         65

       IX EVENING                           74

        X NIGHT                             84

       XI "AND THE BRIGHT EYES OF DANGER"   93

      XII REST                             102

     XIII GENERAL SERVANTS AND A GENERAL
            QUESTION                       111

     XIV NOTES AND QUERIES                 123




                      ILLUSTRATIONS


    A "FANNY" WITH THE AERIAL TORPEDO
    DROPPED INTO THE CAMP      _Frontispiece_

    H. M. THE QUEEN INSPECTING A VAD DOMESTIC
    STAFF                                   48

    A VAD MOTOR CONVOY                      48

    WAAC GARDENERS AT WORK IN THE CEMETERY  48

    WREATHS FROM MOTHERS OF THE FALLEN      48

    WAACS IN THE BAKERY                     80

    WAAC COOKS PREPARING VEGETABLES         80

    WAAC ENCAMPMENT PROTECTED BY SAND BAGS  80




                 THE SWORD OF DEBORAH

"_Thou art an Amazon, and fightest with the sword of Deborah._"
                             --1 HENRY VI. 1. ii.




THE SWORD OF DEBORAH




CHAPTER I

A.B.C.


This world of initials ... in which the members of the British
Expeditionary Force live and move--it is a bewildering place for the
outsider. Particularly to one who, like the writer, has never been able
to think in initials, any more than in dates or figures. The members of
the B.E.F.--and that at least is a set of letters that conveys something
to all of us--not only live amidst initials, but are themselves embodied
initials. To them the string of letters they reel off is no meaningless
form, no mere abracadabra to impress the supplicant, but each is a
living thing, coloured, definitely patterned, standing for something in
flesh and blood, or stone and mortar; something concrete and present to
the mind's eye at the mere mention.

Just as, to anyone who does not know New York, it seems as though all
the streets must sound exactly alike, being merely numbered, while, to
anyone who knows them, the words East Sixty First, say, are as distinct
from East Twenty First, distinct with a whole vivid personality of their
own, as Half Moon Street from Threadneedle Street--so, to the initiate
in the game, the letters so lightly rattled off to designate this or
that official or institution stand for vivid, real, colourable things.

But at first one is reminded forcibly of that scene in "Anna Karenina"
where Levin proposes to Kitty for the second time by means of writing in
chalk on a table the letters "W, y, t, m, i, c, n, b, d, t, m, n, o, t,"
and Kitty, with great intelligence, guesses that they mean "When you
told me it could never be, did that mean never, or then?" Kitty, if you
remember, replies in initials at almost equal length, and Levin displays
an intelligence equal to hers. I had always found that scene hard of
credence, but I have come to the conclusion that Levin and Kitty would
have been invaluable at H.Q.B.R.C.S., A.P.O. 3, B.E.F.

And the fog of initials is symbolic in a double manner; for not only do
the initials stand for what they represent to those who know, but in
their very lack of meaning for those who do not, they typify with a
peculiar aptness the fact that after all we at home in England,
particularly we ladies of England who live at home in ease, know very
little indeed of even what the letters B.E.F. stand for. We have hazy
ideas on the subject. Vaguely we know, for instance, that there are
women, lots of women, working out in France, though quite at what,
beyond nursing, we don't seem to know. Motor drivers ... of course, yes,
we have heard of them. There is a vague impression that they are having
the time of their lives, probably being quite useful too ... but of the
technique of the thing, so to speak, what do we know? About as much as
we know when we first hear the clouds of initials rattling like shrapnel
about our heads if we go over to France.

And if we at home know so little, how can other countries know, who have
no inner working knowledge of English temperaments and training to go
upon as a rough guide to at least the probable trend of things? How can
we expect them to know? And yet knowledge of what every section of the
working community is doing was never so vital as at the present moment,
because never before has so much of the world been working together on
the same job--and the biggest job in history.

It is always a good thing to know what other folk are doing, even when
they are not your sort, and what they are doing does not affect you,
because it teaches proportion and widens vision--how much more
important, then, when what they are doing is what you are doing too, or
what you may yet come to do?

Gentle reader--and even more especially ungentle reader--if in these
pages I occasionally ask you to listen to my own personal confession
both of faith and of unfaith--please realise that it is not because I
imagine there is any particular interest in my way of seeing things, but
simply because it is only so that I can make you see them too. You are
looking through my window, that is all, and it is not even a window that
I opened for myself, but that had to be opened for me. If you will
realise that I went and saw all I did see, not as myself, but as you, it
will give you the idea I am wishful to convey to you. Anything I feel is
only valuable because my feeling of it may mean your feeling of it too.
Therefore, when you read "I" in these pages, don't say "Here's this
person talking of herself again ..." say "Here am I, myself. This person
only saw these things so that I should see them."

If you don't it will be nine-tenths my fault and one-tenth your own.

Just as all the apparently endless combinations of initials in France
are symbols of living realities to those who understand them, and of
their ignorance to those who don't just as the very heading of "A.B.C."
which I have given this chapter typifies both those combinations of
initials and the fact that you and I are beginning at the very
beginning--for no one could have been more blankly ignorant than I when
I went over to France--so the letter "I" whenever it occurs in this book
is a symbol for You.




CHAPTER II

THE FEVER CHART OF WAR


"The women are splendid...." How tired we are of hearing that, so tired
that we begin to doubt it, and the least hostile emotion that it evokes
is the sense that after all the men are so much more splendid, so far
beyond praise, that the less one says of anyone else the better. That
sentence is dead, let us hope, fallen into the same limbo as "Business
as Usual" and the rest of the early war-gags, but the prejudices it
aroused, the feeling of boredom, have not all died with it. Words have
at least this in common with men, that the evil that they do lives after
them.

Let me admit that when those in authority sent for me to go to France
and see what certain sections of the women there were doing, I didn't
want to go. I told them rather ungraciously that if they wanted the
"sunny-haired-lassies-in-khaki-touch" they had better send somebody
else. I am not, and never have been, a feminist or any other sort of an
'ist, never having been able to divide humanity into two different
classes labelled "men" and "women." Also, to tell the truth, the idea
of going so far behind the lines did not appeal. For this there is the
excuse that in England one grows so sick of the people who talk of
"going to the Front" when they mean going to some safe château as a base
for a personally conducted tour, or--Conscientious objectors are the
worst sinners in this latter class--when they are going to sit at
canteens or paint huts a hundred miles or so behind the last line of
trenches. The reaction from this sort of thing is very apt to make one
say: "Oh, France? There's no more in being in France behind the lines
than in working in England." A point of view in which I was utterly and
completely wrong. There is a great deal of difference, not in any
increased danger, but in quite other ways, as I shall show in the place
and order in which it was gradually made apparent to me.

Also, no one who has not been at the war knows the hideous boredom of it
... a boredom that the soul dreads like a fatal miasma. And if I had
felt it in Belgium in those terrible grey first weeks of her pain, when
at least one was in the midst of war, as it was then, still fluid and
mobile, still full of alarums and excursions, with all the suffering and
death immediately under one's eyes still a new thing; if I had felt it
again, even more strongly, when I went right up to the very back of the
front in the French war zone for the Croix Rouge, in those poor little
hospitals where the stretchers are always ready in the wards to hustle
the wounded away, and where, in devastated land only lately vacated by
the Germans, I sat and ate with peasants who were painfully and sadly
beginning to return to their ruined homes and cultivate again a soil
that might have been expected to redden the ploughshare, how much the
more then might I dread it, caught in the web of Lines of
Communication.... I feared that boredom.

And there was another reason, both for my disinclination and my lack of
interest. We in England grew so tired, in the early days of the war, of
the fancy uniforms that burst out upon women. Every other girl one met
had an attack of khaki-itis, was spotted as the pard with badges and
striped as the zebra. Almost simultaneously with this eruption came, for
the other section of the feminine community, reaction from it. We others
became rather self-consciously proud of our femininity, of being
"fluffy"--in much the same way that anti-suffragists used to be fluffy
when they said they preferred to influence a man's vote, and that they
thought more was done by charm....

With official recognition of bodies such as the V.A.D.'s and the even
more epoch-making official founding of the W.A.A.C.'s, the point of view
of the un-uniformed changed. The thing was no longer a game at which
women were making silly asses of themselves and pretending to be men; it
had become regular, ordered, disciplined and worthy of respect. In
short, uniform was no longer fancy dress.

But the feeling of boredom that had been engendered stayed on, as these
things do. It is yet to be found, partly because there still are women
who have their photographs taken in a new uniform every week, but more
because of our ignorance as to what the real workers are doing. And like
most ignorant people, I was happy in my ignorance.

Well, I went, and am most thankful for my prejudice, my disinclination,
my prevision of boredom. For without all those, what would my conversion
be worth? Who, already convinced of religion, is amazed at attaining
salvation? It is to the mocker that the miracle is a miracle, and no
mere expected sequence of nature, divine or human.

I was often depressed, the wherefore of which you will see, but bored,
never. Thrilled, ashamed for oneself that one does so little--admiring,
critical, amused, depressed, elated, all this gamut and its gradations
were touched, but the string of boredom, never. And the only thing that
worries anyone sent on such a quest as mine, and with the inevitable
message to deliver at the end of it, is that terrible feeling that no
matter how really one feels enthusiasm, how genuine one's conversion,
there will always be the murmur of--"Oh, yes.... Of course she has to
say all that ... it's all part of the propaganda. She was sent to do it
and she has to do it, whether she really believes in it or not...."

What can one say? I can only tell you, O Superior Person, that no matter
what I had been sent to do and told to write I not only wouldn't but
couldn't have, unless I meant it. I can only tell you so, I can't make
you believe it. But let me also assure you that I too am--or shall I say
was?--Superior, that I too have laughed the laugh of sophistication at
enthusiasm, that I too know enough to consider vehemence amusing and
strenuous effort ill-bred, that doubtless I shall do so again. But there
is one thing that seems to me more ill-bred, and that is lack of
appreciation of those who are doing better than oneself.

Lest you should misunderstand me when I say that I didn't want to go to
France this time, and feared boredom, and felt no particular interest in
the work of the women over there, let me add that I was careful to
sponge my mind free of all preconceived notions, either for or against,
when once it was settled that I should go. I went without enthusiasm, it
is true, but at least I went with a mind rigorously swept and garnished,
so that there might enter into it visitants of either kind, angelic or
otherwise.

For this has always seemed to me in common honesty a necessary part of
equipment to anyone going on a special mission, charged with finding
out things as they are--to be free not only of prejudice against, but
predisposition for; and just as a juryman, when he is empanelled, should
try and sweep his mind bare of everything he has heard about the case
before, so should the Special Missioner--to coin a most horrible
phrase--make his mind at once blank and sensitised, like a photographic
plate, for events to strike as truly as they may, with as little help or
hindrance from former knowledge as possible.

Human nature being what it is, it is probably almost impossible for the
original attitude to be completely erased, however conscientious one is,
and that is why I am glad that my former attitude was, if not inimical,
at least very unenthusiastic, so that I am clear of the charge of seeing
things as I or the authorities might have wished me to see them.

And, for the first few days, as always when the mind is plunged headlong
into a new world, though I saw facts, listened to them, was impressed,
very impressed, by their outward show, it still remained outward show,
the soul that informed the whole evaded me, and for many days I saw
things that I only understood later in view of subsequent knowledge,
when I could look back and see more clearly with the mind's eye what I
before had seen with the physical. Yet even the first evening I saw
something which, though only dimly, showed me a hint of the spirit of
the whole.

I was at the Headquarters of the British Red Cross--which is what the
letters H.Q.B.R.C.S. stand for--and I was being shown some very peculiar
and wonderful charts. They are secret charts, the figures on which, if a
man is shown them, he must never disclose, and those figures, when you
read them, bring a contraction at once of pity and of pride to the
heart. For, on these great charts, that are mapped out into squares and
look exactly like temperature charts at a hospital, are drawn curves,
like the curves that show the fever of a patient. Up in jagged
mountains, down into merciful valleys, goes the line, and at every point
there is a number, and that number is the number of the wounded who were
brought down from the trenches on such a day. Here, on these charts, is
a complete record, in curves, of the rate of the war. Every peak is an
offensive, every valley a comparative lull.

Sheet after sheet, all with those carefully-drawn numbered curves
zigzagging across them, all showing the very temperature of War....

With this difference--that on these sheets there is no "normal." War is
abnormal, and there is not a point of these charts where, when the line
touches it, you can say--"It is well."

As I looked at these records I began to get a different vision of that
tract of country called "Lines of Communication" which I had come to
see. This, where War's very pulse was noted day by day, was the
stronghold of War himself. Here he is nursed, rested, fed with food for
the mouths of flesh and blood, and food for the mouths of iron; here,
the whole time, night and day, as ceaselessly as in the trenches, the
work goes on, the work of strengthening his hands, and so every man and
woman working for that end in "L. of C." is fighting on our side most
surely. Something of the hugeness and the importance of it began to show
itself.

And, as regards that particular portion which I had come out to see, I
began to get a glimmering of that also, when it was told me, that of
those thousands of wounded I saw marked on the charts, a great
proportion was convoyed entirely by women. There are whole districts,
such as the Calais district, which includes many towns and stations,
where every ambulance running is driven by a woman. Not only the fever
rate of War is shown on those charts, but just as to the seeing eye,
behind any temperature-chart in a hospital, is the whole construction of
the great scheme--doctors, surgeons, nurses, food, drugs, money,
devotion, everything that finds its expression in that simple sheet of
paper filled in daily as a matter of routine, so behind these charts of
War's temperature kept at H.Q. is the whole of the complex organisation
known as the British Red Cross. And outstanding even amongst so much
that is splendid are certain bands of girls behind the lines, who, not
for a month or two, but year in, year out, during nights and days when
they have known no rest, have they, also, had their fingers on the pulse
of war.




CHAPTER III

BACKGROUNDS


At H.Q.B.R.C.S. the D. of T. told me the first things for me to see were
the F.A.N.Y.'s and the G.S.V.A.D.'s. That is the sort of sentence that
was shot at me on my first day. I have told you what H.Q.B.R.C.S. means;
the D. of T. means Director of Transport; the F.A.N.Y. is the First Aid
Nursing Yeomanry, and the G.S.V.A.D. is the General Service Voluntary
Aid Detachment. Now the V.A.D. I had heard of, and of its members,
always called V.A.D.'s, but G.S.V.A.D. was something new to me. Yet the
importance of the distinction, I soon learned, was great.

Four sets of initials represented my chief objectives in France, the
F.A.N.Y.'s, the V.A.D.'s, the G.S.V.A.D.'s, and the W.A.A.C.'s. Of these
the former are known as the Fannies, and the last named as the Waacs,
owing to the tendency of the eye to make out of any possible combination
of letters a word that appeals to the ear. Of these four bodies, the
Fannies and the V.A.D.'s were in existence before the war, being amongst
those who listened to the voice of Lord Roberts crying in the
wilderness. They are all unpaid, voluntary workers, and they rank
officially as officers. Among themselves, of course, they have their own
officers, but socially, so to speak, every Fanny and V.A.D. is ranked
with the officers of the Army. But with the G.S.V.A.D.'s and the Waacs
it is not so. They are paid, and are to replace men; G.S.V.A.D.'s work
in motor convoys and at the hospitals, as cooks, dispensers, clerks,
etc., and the Waacs work for the combatant service. Except for their
officers, who rank with officers of the Army, the members of these two
bodies are considered as privates.

And as both the Fannies and the Waacs go in khaki, and both the V.A.D.'s
and the G.S.V.A.D.'s in dark blue, it will be seen that confusion is
very easy to the uninitiate. That is my only excuse for perpetrating the
worst blunder that has probably ever been committed in France. Taken to
tea at a Fanny convoy I committed the unspeakable sin of asking whether
they were Waacs....

They were very kind to me about it, but when I eventually grasped the
system, I saw it was as though I had asked a Brass Hat whether he
belonged to the Salvation Army. Yet when I told the sad tale of my
_gaffe_ to the members of a V.A.D. convoy, they only seemed to think it
must have been quite good for the Fannies ... but somehow it wasn't
equally good for them when I timidly asked whether they were
G.S.V.A.D.'s ... though they were also very kind to me about it.

The D. of T. motored me over to the Fannies' convoy, on a pale day of
difficult sunlight. Is there anywhere in the world, I wondered, more
depressing--more morbid--landscape, than that round Calais? It weighs on
the soul as a fog upon the senses, and it seemed to me that only people
of such a tenacious gaiety as the French or such an independence from
environment as the British could survive there for long. I have seen
country far flatter that was yet more wholesome, and I loathe flat
country. There is something in the perpetual repetition of form in the
country round Calais, the endless sameness of its differences, that is
peculiarly oppressive. Pearly skies blotted with paler clouds, endless
rows of bare poplars, like the skeletons of dead flames, yellowish roads
unwinding for ever, acres of unbroken and sickly green, of new-turned
earth of an equally sad brown ... and over all the trail of war, whose
footprint is desolation. The occupation even of an army of defence means
camp after camp; tin huts, wooden huts, zinc roofs; hospitals; barbed
wire; mud. And, amidst all this, and the sudden reminders of more active
warfare in houses crumpled to a scatter of rubble by a bomb, there are
people working, year in, year out, undismayed by the sordid litter of
it....

The saving of it all to the newcomer, though even that must pall on
anyone too accustomed, is that, like Pater's Monna Lisa, upon this part
of France "the ends of the world are come" ... (and who shall wonder if
in consequence "her eyelids are a little weary"?). Inscrutable Chinamen,
silent as shadows, flashing their sudden smiles, even more mysterious
than their immobility, turned from their labour to watch the passing of
the car; Kaffirs from South Africa, each with a white man's vote,
voluntarily enlisted for the Empire, swung along; vividly dark
Portuguese, clad in grey, came down to their rest camps; Belgians
trotted past with their little tassels bobbing from their jaunty caps.
And, in great droves along the roads, or, sometimes, more solitary in
the fields, the German prisoners stood at gaze, their English escort
shepherding.

The first time my companion told me we were coming on German prisoners,
I shut my eyes, determined to open them unprejudiced, with a vision
clear of all preconceptions; really, at the bottom of my heart,
expecting that I should find them extraordinarily like anyone else....
But they were not. They were all so like each other, that by the time
you had seen several hundreds you were still wondering confusedly
whether they were all relations ... even my Western eye detected more
difference between the types of Chinamen I met upon the road than in
these Teutons. Of course, the round brimless cap has something to do
with it, as has the close hair-crop, but when all is said, how much of a
type they are, how amazingly so, as though they had all been bred to one
purpose through generations! The outstanding ear, placed very low on the
wide neck, the great development of cheekbones and of the jaw on a level
with the ears, and then the sudden narrowing at the short chin ... and
the florid bulkiness of them. A detachment of _poilus_ swung past in
their horizon blue, and what a different type was flashed up against
that background of square jowls, what a thin, nervous, wiry type, all
animation....

The Germans were so exactly like all the photographs of prisoners one
has seen in the daily papers that it was quite satisfying; I remember
the same feeling of satisfaction when on first going to New England I
saw a frame house and an old man with a goatee beard driving a
spider-wheeled buggy, exactly like an illustration out of _Harper's_....

All of which--with the exception of the old man out of _Harper's_--is
not as irrelevant as it may appear, in fact, is not irrelevant at all,
for it is these things, this landscape, these varied races, this whole
atmosphere, which goes to make life's background for everyone quartered
hereabouts, and it is the background which, especially to memory in
after years, makes so great a part of the whole.

As we went, remember, I still knew nothing about the work I had come out
to see or the lives of those employed in it, I could only watch flashing
past me the outward setting of those lives, and try, from the remarks of
my companion, to build up something else. Yet what I built up from him,
as what I had built up from the talk at my hotel the night before, was
more the attitude of the men towards the women than the attitude of the
women towards their life, though it was none the less interesting for
that. And here I may as well record, what I found at the beginning--and
I saw no reason to reverse my judgment later on--and that was no trace
of sex-jealousy in any department whatsoever. I only met genuine
unemotional, level-headed admiration on the part of the men towards the
women working amongst them. The D. of T. was no exception, and opined
that if the war hadn't done anything else, at least it had killed that
irritating masculine "gag" that women couldn't work together. For that,
after all, will always be to some minds the surprise of the thing--not
that women can work with men, but that they can work together.

"People talk a lot," he said reflectively, "about what's to happen after
the war ... when it's all over and there's nothing left but to go home.
What's going to happen to all these girls, how will they settle down?"

"And how do you think...?"

"I don't think there'll be any trouble whether they marry or not. They
will have had their adventure."

I looked at him and thought what a penetrating remark that was. Later,
in view of what I came to think and be told, I wondered whether it were
true after all; later still came to what seems to me the solution of it,
or as much of a solution as that can be which still leaves one with an
"I wonder...."

He told me tales of the Fannies who, being now under the Red Cross, came
directly under his jurisdiction. He told me of a lonely outpost at the
beginning of the war where there was only one surgeon and two Fannies,
and how for twenty-four hours they all three worked, "up to the knees in
blood," amputating, tying up, bandaging, without rest or relief. How the
whole of the work of the convoying of wounded for the enormous Calais
district was done entirely by the girls, of how, at this particular
Fanny convoy to which we were going, they were raided practically every
fine night, and that their camp was in about the "unhealthiest spot," as
regarded raids, in the district. How during the last raid nine aerial
torpedoes fell around the camp, and exploded, and one fell right in the
middle and did not explode, or there would have been very little Fanny
Convoy left ... but how it made a hole seven feet deep and weighed a
hundred and ten pounds and stood higher than a stock-size Fanny. And,
crowning touch of jubilation to the Convoy, of how the French
authorities had promised to present it to them after it was cleaned out
and rendered innocuous, to their no small contentment. As well-earned a
trophy as ever decorated a mess-room....

He talked very like a nice father about to show off his girls and back
them against the world.




CHAPTER IV

MY FIRST CONVOY


We arrived on a great day for the Fannies--the famous Aerial Torpedo had
preceded us by a bare hour. There it lay, on the floor of the mess-room,
reminding me, with its great steel fins and long rounded nose, of a dead
shark. The Commandant showed it us with pride, and every successive
Fanny entering was greeted with the two words--"It's come." The D. of T.
swore he would have it mounted on a brass and mahogany stand with an
engraved plate to tell its history. Two strong Fannies reared it up, for
even empty its weight was noteworthy, and it stood on its murderous nose
with its wicked fins, the solid steel of one of them bent and crumpled
like a sheet of paper, above my head. A great trophy, and a hard-earned
one.

This was the first camp I saw, and a very good one as camps go. (I
merely add that latter sentence because personally I think any form of
community life the most terrible of hardships.) It is rather pathetic to
see how, in all the camps in France, the girls have managed to get not
only as individual but as feminine touches as possible. I never saw a
woman's office anywhere in France that was not a mass of flowers; and
window-boxes, flower-beds, basins of bulbs, are cultivated everywhere.
Every office, too, though strictly businesslike, has chintz curtains of
lovely colours. You can always tell a woman's office from a man's, which
is a good sign, and should hearten the pessimists who cry that this
doing of men's work will de-feminise the women.

The Commandant at this Fannies' camp took me into her office, and she
and the D. of T.--who chimed in whenever he thought she was not saying
enough in praise of his admired Fannies--told me the rough outlines of
the history of the body since the beginning of the war. Though now
affiliated to the Red Cross, they were an independent body before the
war, and when hostilities broke out were a mounted corps, with horse
ambulances. They offered themselves to the English authorities, were
refused, and came out to the war-zone and worked for the Belgians for
fourteen months. They ran a hospital in Calais staffed by themselves for
nurses and with Belgian doctors and orderlies. Then, in the beginning of
1916 they offered to drive motor ambulances and thus release Red Cross
men drivers, and now they are running, with the exception of two
ambulances for Chinese, the whole of the Calais district, and have
released many A.S.C. men as well. It is a big area, with many outlying
camps where there are detached units. As a rule, there is only one girl
to each ambulance, but in very lonely spots the allowance is three girls
to two cars. At St. Omer the authorities at first objected to having
them, but now they have taken over the whole of the Red Cross and A.S.C.
ambulances there.

At this camp that I saw, they have no day or night shifts, as there is
not much night work except during a push, when everyone works night and
day without more than a couple of hours' sleep snatched with clothes
on--indeed, I heard of a convoy where for a fortnight the girls never
took off their clothes, but just kept on with fragmentary rests. The
other occasion when there is night work is when there is a raid. As I
have said, the camp is in a peculiarly unhealthy spot for bombs, and
until just lately the girls had no raid-shelter. Now one has been dug
for them, roofed with concrete and sandbags and earth, which would stand
anything short of a direct hit from some such pleasant little missile as
is now the pride of the camp.

But at first, even when the raid-shelter was built, there was no
telephone extension to it from the office, and therefore the Commandant
had to stay in the office with one other to take the telephone calls,
then had to cross the open, in full raid, and going to the mouth of the
shelter call out the names of the girls whose turn it was to drive the
ambulances. She told it me as exemplifying the spirit of the girls, that
never once, through all the noise and danger, did a girl falter, always
answered to her name and came coolly and unconcernedly up the steps and
went across to her car. But it seemed to me that it was as good to sit
quietly in a matchboard office and await the messages, to say nothing of
taking them across that danger zone. Now an order has gone forth that
the ambulances are not to start till the raid is over, as they are too
precious to be risked.

It is not a bad record, this continuous service of the Fannies since the
outbreak of war, is it?

For remember it is not work that can be taken up and dropped. You sign
on for six months at a time, and only have two fortnights of leave in
the year. And the girls sign on, again and again; they are nearly all
veterans at it. And, comfortable as the camp has been made--all the
necessities of life are provided by the War Office and the "frills" by
the Red Cross--and in spite of the tiny separate cubicles--greatest
blessing of all--decorated to taste by the owner, in spite of everything
that can be done to make the girls happy and keep them well--it is still
a picnic. And a picnic may be all very well for a week or even a
fortnight, but a picnic carried on over the years is not at all the same
thing....

Certainly they all seemed very happy, and are all very well. Girls who
go out rather delicate soon become strong in the hard open air life,
and there has not been a single case of strain from working the heavy
ambulances. The girls do all cleaning and oiling of the cars themselves,
and all repairs with the exception of the very complicated cases, for
which they are allowed to call on the help of two mechanics, but only
after the request has gone through those in authority.

The domestic staff, with the exception of one Frenchwoman in the
kitchen, is supplied by the girls themselves, and on this subject of
domestic staffs in France I shall say more later. Their food is Army
rations, which are excellent, as I can testify after straitened
England--supplemented by milk and fresh vegetables, while the Red Cross
gives the extras of life such as custard, cornflower, etc.

When at tea I saw butter brought forth in a lordly dish and was told to
take as much as I liked on hot toast, I felt it was a solemn moment.
There seemed a very care-free atmosphere about the Fannies, and at this
camp the Commandant was known as "Boss," a respectful familiarity I did
not meet anywhere else. Some irreverent soul had even inscribed it on
the door of her cubicle. The Fannies "break out," so to speak, all over
the place; even the bath-room is not sacred to them. It is a pathetic
sight, that bath-room of the Fannies, more pathetic, I thought it, after
I had seen the rows of big baths in other camps. The Fannies have a
limited and capricious water supply, and their bath is so small as to
remove forcibly the temptation for one person to use it all up. Perched
on two stalks of stone stands a long bath in miniature, long enough to
sit in with the knees up, but of no known human size. Inscribed above
it--(under a fresco in black and white of cats in the moonlight)--are
these touching words: "Do not turn on the hot water when the cold is off
or the Boiler will Bust."

Everything I have been saying and describing is external, I know, but
you see I was still grasping at externals, though underneath certain
things were beginning to worry me. But I couldn't bring myself to voice
anything I was wondering to these splendid strangers; later, though I
never was with any one convoy more than a night, still I got the feeling
that seeing so many of them had made me more familiar with the ones I
happened to be with at the time, and so I screwed myself up to the point
and was richly rewarded. But that, as Mr. Kipling would say, is another
story.

We drove away in the windy evening, past the parked rows of great glossy
ambulances, and I bore with me chiefly an impression of gaiety, of a set
purpose, of a certain schoolgirlish humour and that knack of making the
best of everything which community life engenders when it does not do
exactly the reverse; of long wooden huts that might have been bare but
were decked with pictures, patterned chintzes, bookshelves, cushions;
and above all, I took an impression of a certain quality that I can only
describe as "stark" in the girls, though that is too bleak a word for
what I mean. It is a sort of splendid austerity, that pervades their
look and their outlook, that spiritually works itself out in this
determined sticking at the job, this avoidance of any emotion that
interferes with it, and in their bodies expresses itself in a disregard
for appearances that one would never have thought to find in human
woman. It leaves you gasping. They come in, windblown, reddened, hot
with exertion, after recklessly abandoning their hands to all the harsh
treatment of a car--the sacrifice of the hands is no small one, and
every girl driving a car makes it--they come in, toss their caps down,
brush their hair back from their brow in the one gesture that no woman
has ever permitted to herself or liked in a lover--and they don't mind.

It is amazing, that disregard for appearances, but of course it is
partly explained by the fact that the natural tendency in young things
would be to accentuate anything of that kind once it was discovered ...
and for the rest--I really think they are too intent on what they are
doing and care too little about themselves or what anyone may be
thinking of them. What a blessed freedom!... This at last is what it is
to be as free as a man.




CHAPTER V

OUTPOSTS


It is a matter of temperament whether community life, with its enforced
lack of individualism, or the intense refraction engendered by the fact
of two people only living together in a solitude, is the more trying. In
the former state one may hope to attain isolation from the very
superabundance of personalities all around, but for the latter there is
at least this to be said, that if the two feel like leaving each other
alone there is no distraction of noise and presences. Either is a test
to persons who are sensitive about their right to solitude, a greater
one than to those who mix happily with their fellow humans. Both are to
be found in their best expression among the English girls in France.
From the Fanny convoy to a lonely rest station was a change that set me
thinking over the problem, a problem in which I was a mere observer, but
which all these girls had solved each in her different way, doubtless,
but as far as I could tell, to the nicest hair-fine edge of success.

My first rest station was in an out-of-the-way little place, bleak and
treeless, and consisted of a wooden hut built alongside the railway
line. In this hut lived the two V.A.D.'s who ran the show--which means
that they do the cooking for themselves and for the trains which they
supplied with food, that they dispense medicines for the patients who
appear daily at sick parade, and give first aid to accidents, change
dressings if any cases on a hospital train need it, feed
stretcher-bearers and ambulance drivers, whose hours often prevent them
getting back to billets for regular meals, take in nurses who are either
arriving or leaving by a night train and would otherwise have nowhere to
go, and in their spare time--if you can imagine them having any--grow
their own vegetables, and make bandages, pillows, and other supplies for
the troops. Just two girls, voluntary unpaid workers, who are nurses,
needle-women, doctors, chemists, gardeners and general servants, and
whose work can never be done, or, when done, has to begin at once all
over again. No recreation except what they find in books and themselves,
nowhere to go, and that perpetual silhouette of railway trucks and the
hard edge of station roof out of the window, of shabby houses and their
own tiny yard at the back, the noise of shunting and train whistling in
their ears night and day, and with it all--worst touch of the lot--to
have to do their own work for themselves.

To slave for others all day as long as you can come in and find things
ready for you at night--your hot cocoa in its cup and your hot-water
bag--that great consolation of the women members of the B.E.F.--in your
bed, is endurable. But to come in and have no cocoa if you don't make it
yourself, no bag if you don't see to it--that is a different affair, and
that is where these two girls seemed to me to touch a point that of
necessity the others I had seen did not. And now that women are doing
men's work it is to be supposed they have found out the value of meals
and no longer look on an egg with one's tea as the greatest height to
which nourishment need rise, and hence have honourably to set about
cooking for themselves--and there is no woman but will understand the
boredom of that--the rations that a paternal army insists on showering
upon them. Under such circumstances to work is human, but to eat divine.

As I stepped out of the car at the door, feeling terribly impertinent at
this rolling round in luxury to gaze at the work of my betters, one of
the V.A.D.'s came to the door of the shanty to greet us. She was a fair
creature, with windblown yellow hair and a smut which kindly accident
had placed exactly like an old-time patch upon the curve of one flushed
cheek. She was wrapped in a big pinafore of butcher blue, and explained
that she was "cleaning up."

It all looked very clean to me, certainly the little dispensary, the
room into which you first walked, was spotless, everything ranged ready
for Sick Parade, glass, white enamel, metal, shining in the shaft of
sunlight which came palely in at the open doorway. To the left was the
kitchen, stone-floored, fitted with an English stove, to the right the
tiny slip of sitting-room from which opened the two still narrower
little bedrooms. That was all.

This is the atmosphere in which the two girls live, but, as usual, they
have done everything that is possible with it. Brilliant curtains,
pictures, rows of books--the rest stations keep up a sort of circulating
library, exchanging their books from time to time amongst themselves by
way of the ambulance trains, which are thus supplied with a library
also--and charming pottery ranged along the shelves. The rest stations
rather make a point of their pottery. It is their tradition always to
drink out of bowls instead of cups, and their plates have the triumphant
Gallic cock, in bravery of prismatic plumage, striding across them.

After I had said good-bye to the golden girl of the inspired smut, I
went on to a bigger rest station at a terminus and was in time to lunch
there. It was a more sophisticated affair than that which I had left,
yet when this rest station was started, at the beginning of the war, its
habitation was a railway truck--for the romance of which some of those
who were there in that first rush, when you were never off your feet
for twenty-four hours at a time, sometimes sigh....

Now part of the station buildings has been partitioned off for them, and
there is a fairly big dispensary, with a bed for dressings and accident
cases, of which quite a number are brought in, a kitchen, a little
dining-room where all the furniture is home-made--deep chairs out of
barrels and the like--and behind that a big storeroom, crammed from
floor to ceiling with stores. The girls do not sleep here, but in
billets at the town, but they have to provide meals at any hour and meet
all the ambulance trains with food and extra comforts.

We had a very good lunch, of stew and onions and potatoes, big bowls of
steaming coffee, and a pudding with raisins, all cooked by one of the
V.A.D. domestic staff, who always had to slip into her place last to eat
it, and get out of it first to serve the next course. I saw only these
two rest stations, each typical in its way, the one of the isolated and
the other of the central kind, but they are scattered up and down the
line, varying in character according to the needs of the particular
place.

At one, for instance, there is a small ward attached, where slight
cases, not bad enough to be admitted to the hospital, and yet requiring
some attention, can be kept for a day or two, thus possibly avoiding
serious illness. Near to this same one is a Labour Battalion, many of
the men from which are out-patients whose medical inspection is held at
the rest station. Near another is a large convalescent camp, the O.C. of
which looks to the V.A.D.'s of the rest station for help in various
ways.

At them all there is always the work of feeding the stretcher-bearers
and ambulance drivers, who in times of pressure have to spend many hours
at their work of unloading the trains without any chance of getting a
regular meal. In the early days of the rest stations, when the ambulance
trains were often merely improvised, food and dressings had to be
provided for all the wounded on board, but now, when the working of the
British Red Cross is as near perfection as any human organisation well
can be, the men have every care taken of them on the perfectly-fitted
trains. Yet there is much attention given to the sick and wounded of
every nation who come in on the trains, attention chiefly consisting of
the giving of extra comforts--cocoa, lemons, shirts, slippers,
cigarettes, cushions--and the re-dressing of wounds, while a great deal
as well as feeding them is done for the staffs of the trains, for whom,
besides the lending library, an exchange of gramophone records and of
laundry has been arranged.

Perhaps the most interesting thing to note about the rest stations is
that they are one of the few points of contact between the members of
the B.E.F. and the French population. Our camps, our hospitals, our
motor convoys, are all little Englands in themselves, but every morning
to the sick parade of these rest stations come not only the local
V.A.D.'s and ambulance drivers, but the French civilian population as
well, and in greater and greater numbers. Accidents are brought to a
rest station very often in preference to being taken anywhere else, and
anxious mothers bring Jean or Marie when a mysterious ailment shows
itself in untoward spot or sneeze. The Gallic cock is more than a
decoration as he strides across the pottery of the rest stations--he is
become a symbol as well.




CHAPTER VI

WAACS: RUMOURS AND REALITIES


When I spoke at H.Q. of the depression I found in all the landscape
around and of its peculiar morbid quality, nearly everyone assured me
that I should find the country round E----, whither I was going, far
more depressing. "There is nothing but sand dunes and huts, miles of
huts, hospitals and camps and so on...." It did not sound very
delightful.

But to differing vision, differing effects, and personally, I loved
E----; terrible as cities of huts generally are, here they seemed to me
to have lost much of their terror. I loved the long rippling lines of
dunes, the decoration of hundreds of tall pines that came partly against
the sandy pallor, partly against the vivid steely blue of the river
beyond, I loved the bare woods we passed all along the road, the trees
still not perceptibly misted with buds but giving, with their myriads of
fine massed twigs, an effect of clouded wine-colour. And was there ever
such a countryside for magpies? Superstition dies before their numbers,
helpless to count them, so far are they beyond the range of sorrow,
mirth, marriage and birth, at any one glance. Everywhere through those
winey woods there went up the fanlike flutter of black-and-white, the only
positive notes in all the delicate universe, compact of pearly skies, dim
purples of earth, and pale irradiation of the sun.

[Illustration: H. M. THE QUEEN INSPECTING A "VAD" DOMESTIC STAFF]

[Illustration: A V. A. D. MOTOR CONVOY]

[Illustration: WAAC GARDENERS AT WORK IN THE CEMETERY]

[Illustration: WREATHS FROM MOTHERS OF THE FALLEN]

On the roads there was the usual medley of the races of the world, added
to as we neared E---- by Canadian nurses in streaming white veils and
uniforms of brilliant blue, and also--for surely the most delightful of
created blessings may rank as a race of the world--by the glossy golden
war-dogs, who also have their training camp near here, and take their
walks abroad, waving their plumy tails and jumping up on their masters,
like any leisured dog at home.

But--to my sorrow--I was not sent to look at war-dogs, and so had to
pass by and leave the wagging plumes behind. I had several ends in view
at E----; I had to see the large Waac camp there, its outflung
ramifications, and the work that the Waacs did in the men's camps; and I
had to see the V.A.D. Motor Convoy, at which I was to spend a night.
Incidentally, I had high hopes of getting permission to go out in an
ambulance with the latter, though it is against the most sacred Army
Orders for anyone not in uniform to be seen upon an ambulance. Here I
may say that the permission was granted by a powerful individual known
as the D.D.M.S., though he mentioned that being shot at dawn was the
least painful thing that ought to happen to me for doing it.

I was going first to the Waac headquarters, to see the Area Controller,
who corresponds to an Area Commandant in the V.A.D.'s and whose rank
approximates to that of a Major. She is supreme in her area and only the
Chief Controller of the Waacs is above her. Below her are her Unit
Administrators, who are in charge of units and approximate to captains,
and have their Deputy and Assistant Administrators whom for convenience'
sake we can classify as lieutenants and second lieutenants.

This is the place to say frankly that I had heard--as had we all--"the
rumors" that were flying round about the Women's Army. They "weren't a
success," ... "it had been found to be unworkable ..." and, as reason, a
more specific charge. Need I say what that specific charge was? What is
it that always jumps to the mind of the average materialist? The most
innocent thing in the world--in itself--and the cause of most of the
scandal since the dawn of civilisation. A Baby.

There is a certain type of mind which always jumps to babies, apparently
looking on them as the Churchmen of the Middle Ages looked on women--as
the crowning touch of evil in an evil world. If you remember, there was
great agitation in certain quarters at the beginning of the war, over
"War-Babies." They were going to inundate the country, they were going
to be a very serious proposition indeed. The Irish question,
Conscription, Conscientious Objectors, were going to be as nothing to
the matter of the War-Babies. It is perhaps from some points of view a
pity that the War-Babies didn't materialize, but that of course is
another question altogether. "Passons oultre," as the great Master of
delicate--and indelicate--situations used to say.

The point as regards the Women's Army is that the whole of the agitation
against it is a libel, and one which decent people should be ashamed to
circulate even as supposititious. Quite apart from the evidence of my
own ears and eyes, at various camps I was supplied with the official
statistics for the Women's Army from March of 1917 to February of 1918.
And of these women who "have not been a success," as the mischievous
gossip has had it, how many do you think have proved failures out of six
thousand? In the time mentioned fourteen have been sent home for
incompetence, without any slur on their characters; twenty-three for
lack of discipline, mostly in the early days when the girls did not
realise what being in the Army meant and thought if they wanted to go to
any particular place there was no reason why they shouldn't; and fifteen
who were already _enceinte_ before leaving England and which even the
most censorious can hardly lay to the charge of the B.E.F. And of all
that six thousand what percentage do you suppose has had to be sent back
for what is euphemistically known, I believe, as "getting into trouble,"
since landing in France? No percentage at all, if I may express myself
thus unmathematically, but exactly five cases. Five, out of six
thousand. Compare that with the morality of any village in England, or
anywhere else in the world, and then say, if you dare to be so obviously
dishonest, that there is any reason why the Women's Army should be
aspersed.

These statistics were given to me at the office of the Area Controller,
and later repeated at the Women's Army H.Q. by the Controller in Chief,
but on that first sunny morning amongst the pines and pale golden
sand-dunes it was naturally the human and individual side rather than
any of figures, however startling, that claimed the mind the most. For
one thing, I had the actual organisation and attributes of the Women's
Army to learn. I knew nothing. The actual working knowledge, apart from
impressions and things learnt only by seeing them, that I gathered
during the days I spent at various Waac centres is as follows:

The Women's Army differs from the F.A.N.Y. and the V.A.D. in being a
paid instead of a voluntary body, in being directly under the Army, not
the Red Cross, and in its members being ranked as privates. But it also
differs from the G.S.V.A.D., though that too is paid and its members
rank as privates. The G.S.V.A.D. is far more "mixed"; its members are of
all classes and educations, and are drafted off for work accordingly,
but the bulk of the Waacs are working girls and do manual labour, such
as gardening, cooking, baking, scrubbing, etc., though there are amongst
them girls of a more specialised education who are signallers and
clerks. The officers, of course, are women of education who have
undergone a stiff training and been carefully selected for the posts
they fill. For, as will be seen, nearly everything depends upon the Waac
officers; they have certainly a greater power for good or harm than the
officers in the Regular Army, and never were both the force and danger
of personality more acutely illustrated than in the position of the Waac
leaders.

A Unit Administrator has to know individually every girl in her camp,
though there may be several hundreds. She has to blend with her absolute
authority a maternal interest and supervision. While she has no power to
say whom a girl shall or shall not "walk out" with, she yet makes it her
business to know what choice of men friends the girl makes and to
influence, as far as she can, that choice towards discretion. She must
not nag but must inculcate by subtle methods a realisation of what is
due to the uniform, a sense of the "idea," the "symbol," of it. She
does not actually say to a girl that she is not to walk arm in arm with
a Tommy or pin her collar with her paste brooch, but she conveys to her
that these things are not done in the best uniforms.... And the girl
learns with incredible rapidity. A thing is Not Done--what a potency in
those words; in that attitude of mind! It probably influenced the
earliest savages in the manner of wearing their cowries.

After all, the whole idea of uniform, of distinguishing one caste from
another by bits of different coloured cloth, is based on the instinct
for being superior. Was it not John Selden who said something to the
effect that our rulers have always tried to make themselves as different
from us as possible? Of course they have, and it is exactly the same
thing which the wise Pope Gregory VII had in mind when he definitely
crystallised the measures for celibacy of the priesthood, and it is
exactly the same thing which puts the policeman into a dark blue uniform
and a helmet before he can so much as stop a milkcart. A policeman in
plain clothes is a dethroned monarch. Nothing in the nature of
controlling others was ever done without dressing up. The marvel is that
for so many centuries the principle should have been confined to the
masculine sex, when it has such an obvious appeal to the feminine.

This principle when carried a step further and applied to those
controlled, by giving them also the sensation of being different from
the rest of the world, results in that spirit called _esprit de corps_,
which is really _esprit de l'uniforme_. Towards the rest of the world
the uniformed are proud of being different, amongst themselves proud of
being alike, and the more alike, so to speak, the aliker. It is not a
thing to treat scornfully, for it has the whole of symbolism behind it.
That which makes a man cheerfully die for a piece of bunting which,
prosaically speaking, _is_ only a piece of bunting that happens to be
dyed red, white, and blue, is part of this same spirit. Dull of soul
indeed must he be who can look without a profound emotion on the
tattered "colours" of a regiment, and yet it is only the idea, the
symbol, that makes these things what they are....

And for most of these girls, remember, it is the first time they have
had a symbol held before them.... We of the upper classes are brought up
with many reverences--for our superiors, our elders, for traditions, but
the classes which for want of a better word I must call "lower"--so
please do not cavil at me for doing so or attribute false meanings--are
for the most part brought up to think themselves as good as anyone else,
and their "rights" the chief thing in life; while owing to the
unfortunate curriculum of our Board Schools, which does not insist
nearly enough on history as the fount of the present and of all that is
great and good in the past, they are left without those standards of
impersonal enthusiasms and imaginative daring--which should be the
rightful inheritance of us all.

These girls are now given an abstract idea to live up to, no mere
standard of expediency, but an idea that appeals to the imagination. And
how magnificently they are responding those statistics show, but more
still does the attitude of all the officers and men who have to do with
them. I talked with all ranks on the subject, and never once did I meet
with anything but admiration and enthusiasm. The men are touchingly
grateful to them and value their work and their companionship. For, very
wisely, the girls are encouraged to be friends with the men, are allowed
to walk out with them, to give teas and dances for them in the Y.W.C.A.
huts, and to go to return parties given by the men in the Y.M.C.A. huts.
It is, of course, easy to sneer at the ideal which is held before the
men, of treating these girls as they would their sisters, but the fact
remains that they very beautifully do so.

Another point to be remembered is, that, far from these girls being
exposed to undue temptation, the great majority of them have never been
so well looked after as now. They are mostly girls of a class that knows
few restrictions, who, with the exception of those previously in
domestic service, have always had what they call their "evenings," when
they roamed the streets or went to the cinemas with their "boys."

Now every Waac has to be in by eight, can go nowhere without permission,
is carefully though unostentatiously shepherded, and is provided with
healthy recreation, such as Swedish exercises, Morris dancing, hockey,
and the like. In short, she is now looked after and guarded as young
girls of the educated classes are normally.

And these are the girls, good, honest, hard-working creatures, who have
been maligned in whispers and giggles up and down the country. It is
perhaps needless to say that they are naturally very indignant over it,
that the parents of many write to them agitatedly to demand if it's all
true and to beg them to come back, and that sometimes, when they are
home on leave, instead of their uniforms bringing them the respect and
honour they deserve and which every man overseas accords to them, they
are subjected to insult from people who have nothing better to do than
to betray to the world the pitiable condition of their own nasty minds.




CHAPTER VII

THE BROWN GRAVES


When first one has dealings with the Waacs and their officers, one
imagines distractedly that one has fallen among Royalty. This is because
the word "Ma'am" is always used by a Waac when speaking to another of
superior rank, till you very nearly find yourself bobbing. Later this
impression is strengthened by the memory for faces which every Waac
officer displays in a manner one has always been taught to consider
truly royal. It is only among themselves that any titles exist; to the
outside world, even the Army officers, each Waac officer is mere "Mrs."
or "Miss," whichever she may chance to be. The "putting on of frills"
has been avoided with extraordinary dexterity; there is just enough
ritual to make the girls feel they belong to an organised body, without
the enemy being given occasion to blaspheme by saying that women like
playing at being men. In France, though not in England, the girls salute
their officers, as this helps them to get at the "idea" of the
thing--that feeling of being part of an ordered whole, which is so
valuable.

In the matter of uniforms, someone at the War Office, or wherever these
things are thought out, has really had a rather charming series of
inspirations. At first the women wore the same badges as denote the
ranks of soldiers, but a paternal--or should one not almost say
maternal?--Government evidently thought that not feminine enough, and
now the badges of varying rank are roses, fleur-de-lys and laurel
leaves, a touch which would have delighted old Andrew Marvell.

One of the chief activities of the Waacs is cooking, and when, escorted
by the D.D.M.S., whom I have before mentioned, I arrived at the little
wooden office amidst the pines, it was to hear a one-sided conversation
on the telephone between the Area Controller and various great ones of
the earth who were frantically ringing up for cooks. Also a new
Officers' Club for senior officers wanting a rest from the firing line
is just being opened near E----, and it is to be staffed by Waacs and
the cook is to be of the very best. Punch's immortal advice as to the
treatment of husbands is not forgotten by the Waac controllers when
questions of this kind arise.

After talk of cooks came the seeing of cooks, in a big camp and Small
Arms school near. Kitchens are kitchens and mess-rooms mess-rooms
everywhere you go, and beyond a general impression of extreme
cleanliness, an extraordinarily appealing smell of stew, and the sight
of great branches of mimosa set about the long mess tables, there is
nothing of particular interest to describe. The point is that all the
preparing and the serving of food in this great camp for officers and
men is done by women and that all the male creatures are unreservedly
jubilant at the change. The C.O. expressed his hope that after the war
the W.A.A.C. would continue as a permanent part of the Army, while a
sergeant gave it as his opinion that the women managed to introduce so
much more variety into the preparation of the food than the men had
done. Also, he added that they wasted much less.

In every kitchen there is a forewoman cook--there are these forewomen in
every department of the work of the women, and they correspond rather to
the "noncoms" among the men. At present they are distinguished by a
bronze laurel leaf and always have their own mess-room and sitting-room
as distinct from the rest of the girls, but it is rather an influence
than an authority which is vested in them, though the advisability of
definitely endowing them with more of the latter is being considered.
They "answer," as the rest of the Waac machinery does, extremely well.

An interesting point about army kitchens, as they are run nowadays, is
that after the amount of fats necessary to the cooking has been put
aside, the rest is poured into great tins, graded according to its
quality, and sent home for munitions. We are getting things down to the
fine edge of no-waste at last, and the women are helping to do it.

At another camp I found the C.O. most anxious for the women to start a
Mending Factory--it would be such a help to the men, who, unlike
sailors, are not adept at the repairing of their clothes. Also a
laundry, he intimated, would be necessary really to round off the scheme
satisfactorily. Both these are thoroughly sound suggestions that may
yet, let us hope, come to something, though they would be in a sense
breaking new ground, as the idea of the Waacs is that they actually
replace men. Each cook releases one man, while among the clerks at
present the ratio is four women to three men. And there are already six
thousand Waacs in France.... Does not this give the obvious reason why
slanders, started by enemy agents, have been busy trying to drive the
Women's Army out of France?

Every Waac who goes to France is like the pawn who attains the top of
the chessboard and is exchanged for a more valuable piece. She sends a
fighting man to his job by taking on the jobs that are really a woman's
after all. For is it not woman's earliest job to look after man?

She looks after him to keep him well and strong, she looks after him
when he is ill--and now, in France, she looks after the gallant dead,
who are lying in the soil for which they fought. Between the pines and
the gleaming river with its sandy shoals are the rows of crosses,
sparkling, the ash grey wood of them, in the effulgence of the spring
light, making hundreds of points of brightness above the earth still
brown and bare, that soon, under the gardeners' care, will blossom like
the rose. Not a desert even now--for no place where fighters rest is a
desert--but a place expectant, full of the promise of beauty to come, an
outward beauty which is what it calls for as its right, because it is
holy ground. Not only in the merely technical sense as the consecrated
earth of quiet English cemeteries, where lie all, both those who lived
well and those who lived basely, but holy as a place can only be when it
is held by those who all died perfectly....

Here and there, among the earth-brown graves, stooping above them, are
the earth-brown figures of the gardeners. Every grave is freshly raked,
moulded between wooden frames to a flat, high surface where the flowers
are to overflow, and above every raised daïs of earth the bleached wood
of the cross spreads its arms, throwing a shadow soft and blue like a
dove's feather, a shadow that curves over the mound and laps down its
edge lightly as a benison. On each cross is the little white metal plate
giving the name and regiment of the man who lies beneath and the letters
R.I.P. Here and there is an ugly stiff wreath of artificial immortelles
beneath a glass frame, the pathetic offering of those who came from
England to lay it there.

Sometimes a wreath fresh and green shows that someone who loves the dead
man has sent money with a request that flowers shall be bought and put
upon his grave on the anniversary of his death. Sometimes, when they
come over from England, these poor people break down and turn blindly,
as people will for comfort, to the nearest sympathy, to the women
gardeners who are showing them the grave they came to see. And a sudden
note of that deep undercurrent which at times of stress always turns the
members of either sex to their own sex for comfort sends the women
mourners to the arms of the women who are working beside them.
Sentiment, if you will--but a sentiment that is stirred up from the deep
and which would scorn the apologies of the critical.

And what of the girls who work daily on that sacred earth, who see
before their eyes, bright in the sun, inexpressibly grey and dauntless
in the rain, those serried rows of crosses, all so alike and each
standing for a different individuality, a different heartbreak--Do you
suppose that they will ever again forget the aspect of those silent
witnesses to the splendour and the unselfishness and the utter release
from pettiness of the men who lie there? This is what it is to make good
citizens, and that is what the members of the Women's Army are doing
daily. They are not only doing great things for the men--but they are
making of themselves, come what conditions may after the war, efficient,
big-minded citizens who will be able to meet with them.




CHAPTER VIII

VIGNETTES


The interesting thing about the various places where Waacs are housed,
which I saw, is that no two of them were alike in atmosphere. I had
rather dreaded much seeing of camps, but, as a matter of fact, though I
saw two, they were totally unlike each other, while the other three
places that I saw each had an aspect, a character, unlike the others.
One was a convalescent home for Waacs, set amidst pine-trees, a house of
deep wide stairs, airy rooms, long cushioned chairs, and flowers, where
one might well be content to be just-not-well for a long time; the
others were houses where those Waacs lived who were not in camps.

       *       *       *       *       *

Four jaunty châlets, chalk-white in the sun, hung with painted
galleries, face the rolling sand-dunes, behind them the sea, a darker
blue than any of the shadows of land on such a high-keyed day. They are
little pleasure-villas, these châlets, fancy erections for summer
visitors, built in the days when this little Plage was a resort for
Parisians playing at rusticity. Delicious artificial useless-looking
creations, bearing apparently about as much relation to a normal house
as a boudoir-cap does to a bowler. Yet they are charming as only little
French pleasure-villas can be, and to the receptive mind it is their
artificiality that makes such a delightful note of--well, not decadence,
but dilettantism--in this rolling sandy place, where only the hand of
Nature is to be seen all around, no town, no village even, impinging on
the curving skylines, the very road up to their doors but a track in the
sand.

In these villas live incongruous Waacs, their khaki-clad forms swing up
the wooden stairs to the galleries, and lean from the windows, always
open their widest, night and day. Less incongruous the stout boots and
khaki inside, as, though the chintzes are bright and gay, there is an
aspect of stern utility, combined with an austerity that somehow suits
the blank sandiness of the surroundings. In each little scrubbed room
are two beds, each--for the Waacs live in true Army fashion--with its
dark grey blankets folded up at the head of the bare mattress; in the
sick bay alone the beds are covered with bright blue counterpanes. In
the recreation room and the Forewomen's Mess are easy chairs of wicker
and flowers and pictures. It is all done as charmingly as it can be with
a strict eye to suitability; it is community life, of course, but
brought as nearly as possible to that feeling of individuality which
makes a home with a small "h" instead of with the dreaded capital.

       *       *       *       *       *

This other house was as great a contrast to the bare little châlets as
it well could be. It also was at a Plage, it too had been built for
pleasure, but for pleasure _de luxe_, not of simple bourgeois families.
The wide hall with its polished floor, its great carved mantels, its
dining-room with gleaming woods and glossy table and sparkling glass,
its big lounge with tall windows, where the girls dance and play the
piano--all was as different from the bleached scrubbed wood of the
châlets as it well could be. Yet the spirit informing the whole was the
same, the bedrooms as austere in essence even if they boasted carved
marble-topped chests, and even here the Army had found things to
improve, such as the making of paths at the back of the house of round
tins sunk in the earth, and steps of tin biscuit boxes, ingenious
arrangements to save getting your feet wet on a muddy day as you go in
and out on the endless errands of domesticity. And, as I sat at lunch in
the gleaming dining-room, where the wood fire burned on the wide stone
hearth, I heard the girls practising for a musical play they were
shortly to produce.

       *       *       *       *       *

A camp is, of course, a camp, but there is a certain satisfaction in
seeing how well even a necessary evil can be done. Where all was
excellent, the chief thing that really thrilled me was the bath-rooms.
The Waacs' bath-rooms are the envy and despair of the Army, who rage
vainly in small canvas tubs. The Engineers are by way of spoiling the
Waacs whenever possible, and bath-rooms, electric bells, electric light
and fancy paths of tin, spring up before them. There are in every Waac
camp rows of bath-rooms containing each its full-length bath, and
besides that, each girl has her own private wash-place, in a cubicle for
the purpose. For, as the Chief Controller said to me, "After all, it
does not matter the girls having to sleep together in dormitories if
each has absolute privacy for washing, that is so much more important."
To which it is quite possible to retort that there are those of us who
would not mind bathing in front of the whole world if only we are
allowed to sleep by ourselves. But that is just a different point of
view, and as a matter of fact, for the class from which the greater part
of the Waacs are drawn, privacy in ablutions ranks as a greater thing
than privacy in slumber, so the psychological instinct which planned the
camps is justified.

Besides the bath-rooms and the ablution cubicles, there is in every camp
one or more drying-rooms, which are always heated, and where the wet
clothes of the girls, who of course have to be out in all weathers, are
hung to dry. Laundry, kitchens, recreation rooms, mess-rooms, long
Nissen huts for sleeping, I went the round of them all, and, while
genuinely admiring them, admired still more those who lived in them.

Personally, I don't like a Nissen hut nearly as much as the ordinary
straight-walled sort. I know they are wonderfully easy to erect and to
move, but when it comes to trying to tack a picture on those curved
walls.... And the girls depend so on their little bits of things, such
as pictures and photographs from home. You will always see in every
cubicle, above every bed in a long hut, the girl's own private gallery,
the _lares and penates_ which make of her, in her bed at least, an
individual. In a Nissen hut you have to turn your head upside down to
get a view of the picture gallery at all, though it has its advantages
to the girl herself as she lies in bed and can look at the faces of her
parents, absolutely concave, curving over her nose.

As I was leaving this camp I heard sounds of music and the stamping of
feet, and going to the Y.W.C.A. hut the Unit Administrator and I looked
in. There, to a vigorously pounded piano, an instructress from the
Y.M.C.A. was teaching a dozen or so girls Morris dancing. They beamed at
us from hot glowing faces, these mighty daughters of the plough, and
continued to foot it as merrily, if as heavily, as any Elizabethan
villagers dancing in their Sunday smocks around a Maypole.

       *       *       *       *       *

One more camp I saw, on a later day, and though it was a camp, yet it
had that about it which distinguished it from all others. For it was
built round about a hoary castle, grey with years and lichen, from whose
walls they say Anne Boleyn looked down, standing beside her robust and
rufous lover on that honeymoon which was almost all of happiness she was
to know.

Now it is an Army School, and within its grey walls and towers the
officers are billeted and in its great kitchens the Waacs cook for them
and do all the rest of the domestic work, waiting on the officers' mess
and the sergeants' mess, serving at the canteen, doing all the cleaning,
everything that there is to be done for a whole army school of hungry
men down on a five-weeks' course, to say nothing of all the work for
themselves in their camp at the castle's gates, and there are sixty-six
of them, not counting the three officers who are at every Waac camp--the
Unit Administrator, and the Deputy and Assistant Administrators. It is
hard work, and endless work, and though every Waac gets a few hours off
every day, and though, as you have seen, everything is done for their
healthy recreation that can be done, yet the life is one of work and not
of fun, and though the girls flourish under it, we at home should not
forget that fact when we give them their due meed of appreciation.

But, hard as the life is, it seemed to me that at that camp which has
the happiness to be at this castle, its duress must be assuaged by the
beauty of what is always before the eyes. Buried in woods it is, still
bare when I saw them, but with the greenish yellow buds of daffodils
already beginning to unfold in great clumps through the purple-brown
alleys, and with primroses making drifts of honey-pallor and
honey-sweetness beside the slopes of ground ivy, while from beyond the
curving ramparts of the castle shows the steely-quiet glimmer of a lake.

For war this castle was built, and war she now sees once again, for the
arts of war are taught within her walls. And how Anne Boleyn's roving
eyes would have brightened at the sight of so much youth, at the sound
of so many spurs! Let us hope her sore spirit can still find pleasure in
wandering again over the scenes where she once was happy, and if she has
kept enough of innocent wantonness to love a straight man when she sees
one, ghost though she be, and if her nose turn up ever so daintily at
the clumsily-clad members of her own sex, whose toils she would so
little understand ... why, she is but a ghost, and the modern mind must
contrive to forgive her.

       *       *       *       *       *

These slight vignettes have all been of vision; let me add one of a less
pictorial nature. The Unit Administrators, as I have said, have to act
not only as commanding officers, but very often as mother-confessors as
well. Parents write to them about their daughters, would-be suitors
write to them for permission to marry their charges, and amongst the
letter-bag are often epistles that are not without their unconscious
humour. One day a mother writes to point out that she and the rest of
the family are changing houses, and so may Flossie please come home for
a few days ... another mentions that Gladys's letters of late have been
despondent, and please could she be put to something else that will not
depress her? Then Gladys is had up in front of the Unit Administrator,
and perhaps turns out to be one of the born whiners found everywhere,
perhaps to be merely suffering from a passing fit of what our
ancestresses would have called the megrims. If her work is found to be
really unfitted to her and it is possible to give her a change, then it
is done, but as a rule that is seldom the case, as, rather differently
from what we used to hear was the way in the Army, every Waac Controller
finds out what the girl is best at and what she likes doing most, and
then, as far as possible, arranges her work accordingly.

Perhaps a letter comes from a Tommy in His Majesty's forces, and begins
something like this:--

     "DEAR MADAM,

     "I beg to ask your permission to marry Miss D. Robinson, at
     present under your command...."

The Unit Administrator writes back that she will endeavour to arrange
leave for the marriage; and perhaps all goes well, or perhaps some such
lugubrious letter as this will follow:--

     "DEAR MADAM,

     "_Re_ Miss D. Robinson, at present under your command, take no
     notice of my former letter, as Miss D. Robinson has broken off
     the engagement...."

Human nature will be inhuman, in camps and out of them, and because Miss
D. Robinson is doing a man's work is no reason why she should shed the
privileges of her sex.




CHAPTER IX

EVENING


Grey rain was falling in straight thin lines upon the landscape,
suddenly changed from its splendour of sun-bright sands and blue
gleaming river to a blotted greyness. The rain danced over the trampled
earth at the V.A.D. Motor Convoy Camp, filling the hollows with wrinkled
water and making the great ambulances shine darkly. It was not a
pleasant evening, being very cold withal, and snow fell amid the rain,
but the Commandant took me out in her car to give me as comprehensive a
view of E---- as could be seen in the gathering dusk.

When I say E---- I don't mean the little French fishing village, near
which we did not go, but the whole vast town of huts set up by the
B.E.F. For E---- is become a town of hospitals. We swung round corners,
down long intersecting roads, about and about, and always there were
hospitals, long rows of hospitals, each a little town in itself. I was
reminded of nothing so much as the great temporary townships in the
Canal Zone at Panama. There is just the same look of permanence
combined with the feeling of it all being but temporary, while
materially there is an air about board and tin buildings which is the
same the world over. I almost expected to see a negro slouch along with
his tools slung on his back, or to catch sight of the dark film of a
mosquito-proof screen over doors and windows.

And the Motor Convoy do all of the ambulance work of the whole big
district, which spreads considerably beyond even this great hospital
town. There are about one hundred and thirty members in the camp and
about eighty of the big Buick ambulances. Unlike the Fanny convoy I had
seen, there are at E---- always day and night shifts, a girl being on
night duty for one fortnight and on day duty for the next, except in
times of stress, when everyone works day and night too.

We came in from our drive in the dark and I was shown to the room I was
to have for as much of the night as there would be, considering I was
going out on a convoy at one o'clock. It belonged to a V.A.D. at the
moment home on leave, but she had left a nice selection of bed-books
behind her, for which I was grateful, and there was a little electric
reading lamp perched on the shelf above the bed. It was a tiny place,
but it was all to myself.

At supper in the mess-room, with Mr. Leps, the Great Dane, lying by the
stove and the cat curled between his outflung paws, we were waited on
by a very pretty V.A.D. with dark eyes and a deeply moulded face
compact of soft curves and pallor. Afterwards, the Commandant, a few of
the girls, and I went into her room, which was a trifle larger than the
ordinary run, and could be called a sitting-room at one end, for coffee
and cigarettes. There was a concert on, and I was asked whether I would
like to go to it, and, at the risk of seeming ungracious, I said if they
didn't mind I would rather not. They said that they would rather not,
too. I had seen the camp before dinner, had marvelled again how people
ever got used to living in match-boxes and having to cross a strip of
out-of-doors world to meals, and I was only wanting to sit still,
and--if the Fates were kind--listen.

For all the time, as during the preceding days, I had felt the
depression growing over me, the terror of this communal life which took
all you had and left you--what? What corner of the soul is any refuge
when solitude cannot be yours in which to expand it? What vagrant
impulse can be cherished when liberty is not yours to indulge it?

These girls, these strong, clear-eyed creatures whom I had seen, day
after day, who had at first impressed me only with their youth, their
school-girl gaiety, their--_horribile dictu_--their "brightness"--was it
possible that this life should really content them? I am not talking
now, remember, of Waacs, girls mostly of the working class, or of those
used to the sedentary occupation of clerkships, to whom this life is the
biggest freedom, the greatest adventure, they have known. I am talking
about girls of a class who, in the nature of things, lived their own
lives, before the war, did the usual social round, went hither and
thither with no man to say them nay--except a father, who doesn't count.
Young _femmes du monde_, there is no adequate English for it,
sophisticated human beings.

For women, even the apparently merely out-of-door hunting games-playing
women, have arrived at a high state of sophistication; and this life
they now lead is a community life reduced to its essentials. And a
community life, though the building up of it marked the first stages of
civilisation, is, to the perfected product of civilisation, anathema.
Individuals had to combine to make the world, but now that it is made,
all the instincts of the most highly developed in it are towards
complete liberty as regards the amount of social intercourse in which he
or she wishes to indulge. We have fought through thousands of years for
a state of society so civilised that it is safe to withdraw from it and
be alone without one's enemy tracking one down and hitting one over the
head with an axe.

This right, fought for through the ascending ages, these girls have
deliberately forgone, as every man in the Army has to forgo it also.
Were they aware of this? Or did they, after all, like it, unthinkingly,
without analysis?

I had wondered as I saw my previous convoys and camps, and I had
wondered again as I saw over this convoy--saw the usual tiny cubicles,
with gay chintz curtains and photographs from home, and the shelf of
books, saw the great bare mess-rooms, the sitting-room, bright with
cushions, cosy with screens and long chairs, saw the admirable
bath-rooms, with big enamelled baths and an unlimited supply of hot
water, saw the two parks where the great ambulances were ranged, shadowy
and huge in the growing gloom and thick downpour of rain. Everywhere
smiling faces, uplifted voices, quick steps--yet I wondered.

Was it possible this malaise of community life never weighed on their
souls? And, if possible--was it good that it should be so?

I managed, stumblingly, to convey something of my thought, of the
depression which had been eating at me--not, as I tried to explain, that
I didn't admire them all, Heaven knew, rather that I must be,
personally, such a weak-kneed, backboneless creature to feel I couldn't,
for any cause on earth, have stood it. And I wanted--how I wanted--to
know how it was they did ... whether they really and actually could like
it...? "Of course, I know," I ended apologetically, "some people like a
community life----"

"They must be in love with it to like community life carried to this
extent, then," said one swiftly, and a small, fair creature, with a
ribbon bound round her hair, agreed with her. She interested me, that
fair girl, because she was one of those people who feel round for the
right word until they have found it, however long it takes; impervious
to cries of "Go on, get it off your chest," she still sat quietly and
wrestled until the word came which exactly expressed the fine edge of
her meaning. She knew so well what she wanted to say that she didn't
want to say it any differently.

They all talked, each throwing in a sentence to the discussion now and
again, but not one of them grumbled. Yet they all showed plainly that it
was not a blind enjoyment--or, indeed, much enjoyment at all--that they
found in the life. They were reasoning, critical, analytic, and
extraordinarily dispassionate.

I can't put that conversation down for two reasons, the first being that
one doesn't print the talk of one's hostesses, and the second that it
would be too difficult to catch all those little half-uttered sentences,
those little alleys of argument that led to understanding, but led
elliptically, as is the way of either sex when it is unencumbered by the
necessity of dotting its i's for the comprehension of the other. But out
of that hour emerged, shining, several things which we in England ought
to realise better, and which lifted for me that cloud of depression
which had lowered over me all the days in France.

These are not bouncing school-girls, "good fellows" having the time of
their lives, as vaguely those in England consider them, they are, thank
goodness, finely-evolved human beings who no more enjoy "brightness"
than you or I would. And it was the terrible feeling that everyone was
so "bright" which had oppressed me more than anything else. The joy of
finding that it wasn't so, that what I had feared I should be forced to
take as the unreflecting school-girl humour of overgrown school-girls
was only a protective aspect, that behind it the eyes of not only sane
but subtle young women looked out with amusement and patience upon a
world determined to see in them, first and last, "brightness"!

Perhaps five per cent.--such was the estimate flung out into the
talk--of the girls really do enjoy it, the ghastly, prolonged,
cold-blooded picnic of it, perhaps five per cent. really are having the
"time of their lives," but the rest of them have moments when it hardly
seems possible to stick it. Yet they stick it, and stick it in good
comradeship, which is the greatest test of the lot. Their salvation lies
in the separate rooms--small, cold, but a retreat from the octopus of
community life....

[Illustration: WAACS IN THE BAKERY]

[Illustration: WAAC COOKS PREPARING VEGETABLES]

[Illustration: WAAC ENCAMPMENT PROTECTED BY SANDBAGS]

That concert which I had felt so apologetic not to attend--what a relief
it had been to them that I didn't want to, didn't want to get "local
colour" and write of them as being so jolly, so gay! For this again is
typical--there are perhaps five girls out of every hundred who enjoy
being amused, to whom it is all part of the life which they actually
love, but from the greater part goes up the cry, "Work us as hard as you
like, but for Heaven's sake don't try and amuse us!"

For, of course, it takes differing temperaments differently. To some
community life is little short of a nightmare, but to all there come
moments when it is exceedingly maddening. In those moments your own room
or a big hot bath are wonderful ways of salvation.

As we talked, from A. came the theory that she was only afraid it would
prevent her ever loving motors again; and she had always adored motors
as the chief pleasure of life, before they became the chief business. B.
could not agree to that. C., who did agree, pointed out that it was on
the same principle as never wanting to go back to a place, no matter how
beautiful it was, if you had been very unhappy there. Even after your
unhappiness was dead and buried it would always spoil that place for
you.... B. said "Yes" to that, but argued that it would not spoil the
beauty of other places for you, which would be the equivalent of this
life spoiling all motors for A., after the war.

The flaws in the analogy were not pursued, for D. advanced an
interesting theory that the hardest part of it was that you were so
afraid of what you might be missing all the time somewhere else. She
argued that the difficulty with her had always been to make up her mind
to any one course of action, because it shut off all the others, and,
like so many of us, she wanted everything....

A. said that shilly-shalliers never got anywhere, but I maintained with
D. that it wasn't shilly-shallying, which is another sort of thing
altogether, it was the passionate desire to get the most out of life, to
discover what was most worth while. "I want to spend ten years in the
heart of China more than to do any one thing," I pointed out, "but I
sha'n't do it because when I came out I shouldn't be young any more.
Therefore the ten years in China will have to go to a man, because it
doesn't matter so much to a man." This life in the B.E.F. was D.'s ten
years in China, not because--heaven forbid--it is going to last ten
actual years, or even that, as far as I could see, it was ageing her at
all, but simply because while she was doing it she couldn't be doing
anything else. She had had to burn her boats.

Now that, to a certain temperament, means a great deal, and it is one of
the things, if not the chief thing, that marks service in France off
from equally hard work at home, and makes it, for reasons outside the
work, so much harder.

All natures are not the same as D.'s, of course. To one girl a certain
thing is the hardship, to another a different thing. But the point is
that the hardship is there, not physical, but mental, and to me it was
the most exquisite discovery I could have made in the whole of France.
For the finer the instrument, the more fine it is of it to perform the
work, and the more finely will that work, in the long run, be done.




CHAPTER X

NIGHT


Not being among the lucky creatures who can fall happily to sleep when
they know they are to be called at one o'clock, I lay in my tiny bed and
revelled in that wonderful story of "The Bridge Builders" out of "The
Day's Work," till the sound of the storm without became the voice of
Mother Gunga. Then I turned out the light and lay and listened to the
truly fiendish train whistles which no reading could have transmuted,
and wondered why it is that French engine drivers apparently pay no
attention to signals, but just go on whistling till they are answered,
like someone who goes on ringing a bell till at length the door is
opened. The rain was turning to snow, so there was less of that steady
tinkling from without with which running water fills the world. I lay
and listened; and the whistles and the bellying of the chintz curtain
and the occasional swish of a heavy gust against the side of the hut
were at last beginning to blend in one blur in my mind when a girl came
softly into my room and whispered that it was time to dress.

That utter quietness of the girls was a thing that had impressed me
after staying in hotels full of the British Army, which goes to bed at
midnight, bangs its doors, throws its boots outside, shouts from room to
room, and begins the whole process, reversed, at about six o'clock the
next morning. Here the girls wore soundless slippers, so that those who
had to be about should not disturb those who slept, and doors were
opened and shut with a cotton-wool care which appealed to me, or would
have, if I hadn't had to get up.

When I was dressed I found my way down endless blowy corridors, for the
doors at the ends are always kept open, to the room of the girl who had
called me. She looked at my fur coat and said it would get spoilt. I
replied with great truth that it was past spoiling, but she took it off
me, whipped my cap from my head, and the girls proceeded to dress me.
They pulled a leather cap with ear-pieces down on my head and stuffed me
into woolly jackets and wound my neck up in a comforter and finished up
with a huge leather coat and a pair of fur gloves like bear's paws, so
that when all was done I couldn't bend and had to be hoisted quite stiff
up to the front of the ambulance.

But first we all went into the kitchen, where part of the domestic staff
sits up all night to prepare food for the night drivers. There we drank
the loveliest cocoa I ever met, the sort the spoon would stand up in,
piping hot, out of huge bowls. Then my driver and the section leader for
the night led me across the soaking park to where, in almost total
darkness, girls were busy with their ambulances. I was hoisted up beside
my driver and endeavoured clumsily with my bear's paws to fasten the
canvas flap back across the side as I was bidden. I may say that I felt
extraordinarily clumsy amongst these girls, most of whom could have put
me in their pockets. They knew so exactly what to do, their movements
were all so perfectly adjusted to their needs, they knew where
everything was, while I fumbled for steps and hoped for the best....
They made me feel, in the beautiful way they shepherded me, that I was a
silly useless female and that they were grave chivalrous young men; they
watched over me with just that matter-of-fact care.

To me it was all wonderful, that experience. To the girls, who do it
every night, every alternate fortnight, year in, year out, the thrill of
it has naturally gone long since; the wonder is that to them all remains
the pity of it. We swung out of the park into the road. There was no
moon, the stars were mostly hidden by the heavy clouds, the sleet blew
in gusts against the wind screen. We went at a good pace, bound for a
Canadian hospital, and then for a station beyond E----, where the train
was waiting, for this was what is called an "evacuation" that I was
going to see. No train of wounded was due in that night, and the
Convoy's business was to take men who were being sent elsewhere from the
hospitals to the train.

We stopped in front of a shadow hospital, set in a town of shadow-huts,
and a door opened to show an oblong of orange light, and send a paler
shaft widening out into the night towards the sleek side of our
ambulance.

We heard the men being placed in the ambulance, the word was given, and
again we set off through the night, this time so slowly, so carefully,
for we carried that which must not be jarred one hair's breadth more
than could be helped. We crept along the roads, past the pines that
showed as patches of denser blackness against the sky, past the
sand-dunes that glimmered ghostly, past the blots of shadow made by
every shrub and tree-trunk, and behind and before us crawled other
ambulances, laden even as we.

The station was wrapped in darkness, save for a hanging light here and
there, and an occasional uncurtained window in the waiting train. We
drew up under a light, where a sergeant was waiting.

"Four from No. 7 Canadian," said my driver crisply. The sergeant
repeated, looked at a list he carried and marked our cases off it duly,
then told us the number of the compartment where we should stop. The
ambulance slid on, very slowly, beside the train and slowly came to
rest.

I could see into the white-painted interior of the train, could see the
shelves running along its sides, and on the shelves, making oblong
shapes of darkness against all the white, men laid straightly ... in
front of us the Red Cross orderlies were sliding men down on stretchers
from the shelves of an ambulance, slipping them out, carrying them up
into the train and packing them on the shelves like fragile and precious
parcels.

And suddenly it seemed to me there was something profoundly touching
about the sight of a man lying flat and helpless, shoved here and there,
in spite of all the care and kindness with which it was accomplished. It
is a thing wrong in essence, it seems an outrage on Nature--I got an odd
feeling that there was something wrong and unnatural about the mere
posture of lying-down that I never thought of before. The world seemed
suddenly to have become deformed, as a monster is deformed who is born
distorted. It shouldn't be possible to slide men on to shelves like
this....

The girl at the wheel pushed back the little shutter set in the front of
the ambulance and we looked into the dimly-lit interior. I could see the
crowns of four heads, the jut of brow beyond them, the upward peak of
the feet under the grey blankets, pale hands, one pair thin as a
child's, that lay limply along the edge of the stretchers.

The orderlies came to the open door, one man mounted within, and the top
stretcher from one side was slipped along its grooves and disappeared,
tilted into the night. The boy on the top stretcher the other side
turned his head languidly and watched--I could see a pale cheek,
foreshortened from where I sat, a sweep of long dark eyelashes, the
curve of the drooping upper lip. His turn came, and, passive, he too was
slid out, then the two men below were carried away and up into the
train. The ambulance was empty.

We turned in a circle over the muddy yard and started off again,
stopping again by the sergeant to get our orders.

"Number 4," said the sergeant, and we swung, once more at a good pace,
along the heavy roads, took fresh turnings about and about in the city
of hospital huts, and drew up at Number 4.

Again we were loaded, and again we crept back along the roads where we
had a few minutes before gone so swiftly, meeting empty cars, keeping in
line behind those laden like ourselves. Again we slowed down by the
waiting sergeant to say, "Two stretchers and two sitters from Four." He
echoed us, and we crept on to the appointed carriage and stopped. So it
went on through a couple of hours, ambulance after ambulance swiftly
leaving the station, slowly coming back, all drawing up gently by the
train, each, opened, making a faint square of light in the velvet
darkness. And then, at last, when it was all over, the return, swift
again, towards the camp.

We bumped along the road, the dim pines falling away into the shadows
behind, a very mild funnel of light showing us a scrap of the way before
us and of hedge on either side, the twigs of it perpetually springing
out palely to die away once more. The wind was behind us and the screen
clear; far ahead of us on the road was an empty ambulance with its
curtains drawn back, bare but for its empty stretchers and dark
blankets, which made, in the pale glow of the white-painted interior, a
sinister Face--two hollow eyes and a wide mouth--that fled through the
night, always keeping the same distance ahead, grimacing at me, like an
image of the Death's Head of War.... I was glad when it swung round a
turning and was lost to us.

We drove into the unrelieved darkness of the convoy park and drew up
with precision in our place, I wrestled again with the flap, and we got
out into the wet sleet, half-snow, half-rain. My driver covered up the
bonnet with tarpaulin, turned off the lights, and we went across to the
kitchen. It was half-past three, and we were the first to come back; we
asked for bowls of soup and stood sipping them and munching sandwiches
that lay ready cut in piles upon the table.

Then, one after another, the drivers entered ... pulling off their great
gloves as they came, stamping the snow from their boots. They stood
about, drinking from their steaming bowls, bright-eyed, apparently
untired, throwing little quick scraps of talk to each other--about the
slowness of "St. John's" on this particular night, who hadn't their
cases ready and kept one or two ambulances "simply ages"; or the engine
trouble developed by one car which still kept it out somewhere on the
road. And I stood and listened and watched them, and I received an
impression of extraordinary beauty.

These girls, with their leather caps coming down to their brows and over
their ears, looked like splendid young airmen, their clear, bold faces
coming out from between the leather flaps. They were not pretty, they
were touched with something finer, some quality of radiance only
increased by their utter unconsciousness of it. Each girl, with her
clear face, her round, close head, her stamping feet and strong, cold
hands, seemed so intensely alive within the dark globe of the night,
that her life was heightened to a point not earthly, as though she were
a visitant from the snows or fields I had not seen, fields Olympian....
And as each came swinging in--"_vera incessu patuit dea_...."

I could have wished them there for ever, like some sculptured frieze, so
lovely was the rightness and the inspiration of it.

But I went to my bed, and one of the goddesses insisted on refilling my
hot-water bag, though I assured her it would be quite well as it was,
and I was unwound from my swaddling clothes and left to dream.




CHAPTER XI

"AND THE BRIGHT EYES OF DANGER"


Since the beginning of things women have been mixed up in war, and it is
only as the world has become more civilised (if in view of the present
one can make that assertion) that their place in it has been questioned.
The whole question of the civilian population has taken on a different
aspect since the outbreak of this war, owing to the extraordinary and
unprecedented penalties attached to the civilian status by Germany, but
the sub-division labelled "Women" has perhaps undergone more revision
than any. It has undergone so much revision, in fact, that women have,
in large masses, ceased to be civilians and are ranked as the Army.

If it be frankly conceded that it is as natural for women to want to get
to the war as men, one clears the way for profitable discussion without
wasting time while the outworn epithets of "unwomanly" and
"sensation-hunters" are flung through the air to the great obscuring
thereof. The delight in danger for its own sake is common to all human
beings, to the young as an intoxicant, to the old as a drug. It is not
the least of the tragedies of woman that this is a delight in which she
is so seldom able to indulge.

When the war broke, everyone wanted to go and see what it was like, and
it is merely useless to observe that this was treating it as a huge
picnic. Before the tightening-up process began, in the wonderful days
when the war was still fluid, it was possible to get out to the
front--the real front--on all sorts of excuses. The tightening-up was
necessary, and all too slow, but let us not, because of that, fall into
the error of calling the instinct which urged non-combatants "mere"
curiosity, as though that were not the greatest of the gifts of the
gods, without which nothing is done.

Among these non-combatants who wanted to see the war were many women,
and if, mixed with their patriotism and desire to help, went a streak of
that love of danger which is no disgrace to a man--why, I maintain that
it is no disgrace to a woman either, but as natural an instinct as that
which drives one to a wayside orchard if one is hungry.

There is nothing sooner slaked, for the time being, than this inherent
love of danger. Men who wanted the fun of it at the beginning of the war
are heartily sick of it now, though they wouldn't be out of it for
worlds. But most of the women haven't been allowed enough danger to get
sick of it, and so, in patches of young women you meet working in
France, the old craving still lifts its head. I came across a delightful
streak of it at T----, the oldest big convoy in France.

The garage, over which the girls live, for their camp is still
a-building, is set in the eye of the cold winter winds on the top of a
hill overlooking the sea. It was snowing heavily as I drove up, great
fat flakes of snow that wove and interwove in the air in the way that
only snowflakes can, so that sometimes they look as though they were
falling upwards. The long line of the wooden garage showed dark in the
background, in the space before it the ambulances stood about, but the
girls were fox-trotting in couples all about them, their big rubber
boots shuffling up little clouds of snow; on the head of one girl was
swathed a greenish-blue handkerchief, which made a lovely note of colour
against the swirling whiteness.

I was taken in through the garage, where two drivers were painting their
cars--for all painting is done by the girls, sometimes with unexpected
effects, as on one car which I saw, where "Eve" from the _Tatler_ and
her little dog were depicted in front of the body--and up a flight of
wooden stairs with an out-of-doors landing on top, to the cubicles,
which opened off on either side of the open-ended passage for the whole
length of the building. Here, in one of the little bedrooms for two, we
had a meal of cocoa and cake, known as the "elevener," for the obvious
reason that it is consumed at eleven every morning. It was all quite
different from my evening at the convoy at E----, but equally
stimulating.

The great plaint of the girls was that they weren't allowed nearer the
fighting line, and I heard a story of how, in the early days, two cars
had managed to get right through to Poperinghe, when that town was the
centre of the Boche's attentions, by the simple expedient of the
girl-drivers turning up their coat collars, pulling their peaked caps
well down over their eyes, and just going ahead. They had a lovely time
in Poperinghe and lunched under shell-fire, and when the military,
including the Staff, were sitting in cellars, the "Chaufferettes"
sallied forth and bought picture post-cards.

"It's a shame they won't let us go up to the line now----"

"Yes, indeed," put in another very seriously, as though she were adding
the last uncontrovertible proof to the perfidy of the authorities--"They
let the sisters get shelled, so why shouldn't they let us?"

Isn't that a delightful spirit, and, I beg leave to insist, a perfectly
natural and proper one? Any decent human being would like to be
shelled--who hasn't been shelled too much. It is like being in love--a
thing that ought to happen at least once to everybody.

One of my hostesses was a violinist and plays at all the concerts for
the wounded which take place thereabouts. I asked her whether she didn't
find the work ruination to her fingers for the violin, but all she said
carelessly was that they had been ruined for three years now, but it
didn't matter, as anyway she couldn't have practised even if she had the
time, since there were always some girls trying to sleep.

And what do the local French people think of these young girls in their
midst, who work like men and are out in all weathers and drive the
soldiers wounded in the great common cause? They are quite charming to
them, and indeed, when they first came, the French met them at every
station with bouquets of flowers, so that the girls, pleased and
embarrassed, English fashion, had a triumphal progress. But there are
some of the French neighbours who think the life must be very hard on
the poor things, and when, a little while ago, the Convoy organised a
paper chase, the popular belief was that the hares were escaping from
the rigours of life.... When the panting hares asked wayfaring traps for
a lift, it was refused them, as, though the kindly drivers had every
sympathy with the projected escape, they were not going to assist them
to defy authority!

The hardships which this Convoy had undergone I did not hear about from
them, but from their Commandant. She told me of three weeks at the
beginning of things, when there were no fires, no hot water, except a
little always simmering for pouring into the radiators of the cars when
there came a night call--for the snow was frozen on the ground all those
three weeks and the water in the jugs was ice. The girls didn't talk
about that because they were not interested in it, but neither would
they talk about one other thing, though for a very different reason--and
that was of the time when, after the great German gas attacks at
Nieuport, they had to drive the gassed men who came on the hospital
trains.... You can't get them now to describe what that was like, nor
would you have tried, warned by the sudden change of voice in which they
even mentioned it.

There was one point in which this Convoy seemed to me to touch the
extreme of abnegation attained by the G.S.V.A.D.'s. I had seen much
earlier in my visit a G.S.V.A.D. Convoy, but have not mentioned it
because I saw it before I had really grasped essentials, and it appeared
to me then just a plain Convoy, and as the bare facts of it were not as
spectacular as those relating to the Fannies, I chose the latter to
write about.

The G.S.V.A.D.'s, as I have said, rank as privates, and among them are
workers of every kind--scrubbers, cooks, dispensers, clerks, motor
drivers. This G.S.V.A.D. convoy which I had seen was made up of girls
who had exchanged from V.A.D. convoys, mostly from this very one at
T---- where I now was; and so they happened to be all friends and all
girls of gentle birth. But when I saw their quarters--in a couple of
tall French houses that had been converted to the purpose--I was very
upset by the terrible fact that the girls had to share bedrooms. In all
the camps I had seen since, both of Fannies and V.A.D.'s, each girl had
her own tiny room which she cherished as her own soul--which, indeed, is
what it amounts to. And the Waac officers, of course, have their own
private rooms, though the girls sleep in dormitories. This convoy at
T---- was the only voluntary one I had come across where the inestimable
privilege of solitude was missing, though that will be put right when
the new camp is built.

And here I may mention that, deeply as I admire all the girls who are
working so splendidly in France, I think perhaps my meed of admiration
brims highest for those members of the G.S.V.A.D.'s who are gently born,
for this very reason of the sleeping accommodation. Let us be frank, and
admit that for the generality of working girls, such as the Waacs and a
large proportion of the G.S.V.A.D.'s, it is not nearly so great a
hardship to sleep in dormitories as it is for girls who have, as a
matter of course, always been accustomed to privacy. It is not so bad in
the case of members of a G.S. convoy such as that I have mentioned,
where the girls are all friends, but what of those ladies who live in
the big camps and sleep in long huts with other girls of every class,
all, doubtless, decent good girls, but, in the nature of things, often
girls with whom any ground of meeting must be limited to the barest
commonalities of life? Also sometimes those in authority--those who are
and always were professionals, not amateurs--have been known to use the
power given to them, by the inferior rating of these girls, to make them
rather miserable.

Personally, I have long had a theory, which will doubtless bring down on
me howls of rage from those who will say I am decrying the most noble of
professions, that women are not meant to be nurses. It brings out all
that is worst in them. The love of routine for its own sake, that deadly
snare to which women and Government officials succumb so much more
easily than do men, is fostered in them. And so is the love of authority
for their own sakes, which is almost worse. It has taken nothing less
than this way to show what splendid creatures nurses are under their
starched aprons. In times of peace only amateur women should be nurses;
for it may be observed that the V.A.D. nurses, though they have had long
enough to do it in, have not developed the subtle disease of nursitis.
Evidently nursing is a thing, like love-making, which should never
become a profession.

I was glad to have seen all the different convoys I had, because no two
had been to me alike, and to each I am indebted for a differing
expression of the same vision, which is the vision splendid of a duty
undertaken gladly and sustained with courage. From my first convoys--the
Fannies and the G.S.V.A.D.'s--I got the wonderful facts of it, at the
V.A.D. Convoy at E---- I caught that side of it which I was most glad of
all to encounter, and at the V.A.D. Convoy at T---- I found that
delightful spirit of sheer joy in danger which is too precious to be
allowed to die out of the world just because there happens to be, at
present, such a great deal too much danger let loose upon it.




CHAPTER XII

REST


The snow danced in a fine white mist over the ploughed fields, and drove
perpetually against the northerly sides of the tall bare tree-trunks
that lined the way for miles, hardly finding a hold upon the smooth
flanks of the planes, but sinking into the rough-barked limes till they
looked dappled with their brown ridges and the white veining, and oddly
as though covered with the pelt of some strange animal. High in the web
of bare branches, the clumps of mistletoe showed as filigree nests for
some race of fairy birds.

Gracious country this, for all the desolate whiteness; it lay in great
rolling slopes with drifts of purplish elms in the folds, and on the
levels winding steel-dark streams along whose banks the upward-springing
willows burned an ardent rust colour. And as the car rocked and bounded
along and the wind screen first starred in one place, then in another,
then fell out altogether, one got a better and better view of it all.

What a wonderful people the French are for agriculture.... Hardly a man
did I see all the days I motored about and about, but I saw mile after
mile of cultivated land, the sombrely-clad women or boys guiding the
slow ploughs, the rough-coated horses pulling patiently--white horses
that looked pale against the bare earth, but a dark yellow when the snow
came to show up the tarnishing that the service of man brings upon
beasts. Several times I saw English soldiers ploughing, and rejoiced.

We came into the town that was our bourn in the grey of the evening,
passed the grey glimmer of the river between its grey stone quays,
passed the grey miracle of the cathedral, and then, in the rapidly
deepening dusk, turned in through great wrought iron gates into a grey
courtyard.

It may have been gathered that, much as I admire both their practical
perfection and their spiritual significance, I am no lover of camps,
which seem to me among all things man-created upon God's earth about the
most depressing. I had lived and moved and had my being in camps it
seemed to me for countless ages, the edges of my soul were frayed with
camps. From the moment of walking into the old house at R---- a
wonderful sense of rest that brooded over the place enveloped me. The
thing had an atmosphere, impossible to exaggerate, though very difficult
to convey, but I shall never forget the miracle that house was to me.

It was a Hostel for the Relations of Wounded, and there are in France
at present some half-dozen of these houses, supported by the Joint War
Committee of the Red Cross and the Order of St. John, and staffed by
V.A.D.'s. At all of them the relations of badly wounded are lodged and
fed free of charge, while cars meet them and also convey them to and
from the hospital. This much I knew as plain facts, what I had not been
prepared for was the breath of exquisite pleasure that emanated from
this house.

The house was originally a butter market, and the entrance room, set
about with little tables where the relations have their meals, has one
side entirely of glass; the lounge beyond, which is for the staff, is
glass-roofed, while that opening on the right hand of the dining-place,
the lounge for the relations, has long windows all down the side; so it
will be seen that light and air are abundant on the ground floor of the
Hostel in spite of the fact that it looks on to a courtyard.

From the relations' lounge, with its slim vermilion pillars ringed about
with seats like those round tree-trunks, there goes up a curving
staircase of red tiles, with a carved baluster of oak greyish with age,
a griffon sitting upright upon the newel. Up this staircase I was taken
to my room, and there the completion of peace came upon me.

One could see at a glance it would be quiet, beautifully quiet. Its
window gave on to the sloping grey flanks of pointed roofs and showed a
filigree spire pricking the pale bubble of the wintry sky, its walls
were panelled from floor to ceiling, its hangings were of white and
vermilion, its floor dark and polished, and on the wide stone hearth
burned a wood fire. And, to crown all, after tiny huts, it was so big a
room that the corners were filled with gracious shadow; and the
firelight flickered up and down on the panelling and glimmered in the
polished floor and set the shadows quivering. I lay back in a
vermilion-painted chair and felt steeped in the bath of restfulness that
the place was.

The whole house was very perfectly "got-up," the maximum of effect
having been attained with the minimum of expense, though not of labour;
it all having been achieved under the direction of a former
superintendent with a genius for decoration, who is now V.A.D. Area
Commandant and still lives at the Hostel. The evening I arrived there,
she and the staff were busy stenciling a buff bedspread with blue
galleons in full sail, varied by gulls. Everything is exceedingly
simple, there is no fussy detail, nothing to catch dirt. The walls are
all panelled, and painted either ivory or dark brown; the furniture is
of wicker and plain wood, painted in gay colours--rich blues and
vermilion; the tablecloths are of red or blue checks. In the spacious
bedrooms are simple colour schemes--in one there are thick, straight
curtains of flaming orange, in another of a deep blue, in another of
red and white checked material. The floors are of polished wood or red
tiles strewn with rugs; vivid-coloured cushions lie in the easy chairs;
and set about in earthen jars are great branches of mimosa and lilac
from the South, boughs of pussy-willow, the tender velvety grey ovals
blossoming into fragile yellow dust; all along the sills are indoor
window-boxes filled with hyacinths of pink and white and a cold faint
blue.

On the walls the only decoration is that of posters, and these create an
extraordinary effect as of a series of windows, opening upon different
climes and strange worlds, windows set in ivory walls. Here is an old
Norman castle, grey against a sky of luminous yellow, there a stream in
Brittany which you can almost hear brawling past the plane-trees with
their freckled trunks, while beyond it, through another window, you see
a pergola of roses whose deep red has turned wine-coloured under the
moonlight, and beyond that again, the white cliffs of England go down
into a peacock sea. And, in the Red Cross dining-room, a poilu, his
mouth open on a yell of encouragement, charges with uplifted hands,
looking over his shoulder at you with bright daring eyes, and you do not
need the inscription underneath of "_On les aura!_" to guess what spirit
urges him.

This, then, is the setting for one of the most merciful of the works of
the Red Cross. That it is appreciated is shown by the fact that at
Christmas, at this house, with its staff of Superintendent, cook,
parlourmaid, housemaid and "tweeny," with one chauffeuse, there were
forty relations of wounded staying. The average number of people for
whom Army and Red Cross rations are drawn three times a week is
twenty-five, but for these rations as for fifteen are drawn, as the food
supply is too generously proportioned for a household consisting so
largely of women. But it will be seen that with a constantly fluctuating
population the task of housekeeping is no easy one, though it is tackled
by the voluntary staff with gaiety and courage.

They have troubles of their own, too, the members of that staff, and in
the big kitchen, where among the dishes on the table a pink hyacinth
bloomed, the fair-haired cook I saw so busily working was back from a
leave in England that was to have been her marriage-leave, had not her
fiancé been killed the day before he was to join her. Now she is amongst
her pots and pans again and smiling still, as I can testify. The
"tweeny," who also describes herself as a boot-boy, is a young
war-widow. Things like these are almost beyond the admiration of mortals
less severely tested.

The material difficulties are not the worst in a hostel of this kind,
which in its very nature presupposes grief. The relations, of course,
are of all kinds, after every pattern of humanity, and each makes his or
her emotional demand, if not in active appeal to sympathy, yet in the
strain that it entails on the sensitively organised to see others in
sorrow--and unless you are sensitive you are no good for work such as
this. This hostel is blessed in its Superintendent, an American V.A.D.
worker of a personality so _simpatica_--there is no adequate English for
what I mean--that you are aware of it at first meeting with her; and she
is a woman of the world, which is not always the case with women
workers, however excellent.

Shortly before I came to the Hostel a very young wife arrived to see her
husband, who lay desperately ill in one of the hospitals. When he died
she became as a thing distraught and could not be left, and the
Superintendent even had to have her to sleep in her room with her all
the time she was there. Others, again, are aloof in their sorrow, though
it is none the less tragic for that. The first question on the lips of
the Staff when the chauffeuse comes back from taking the relatives to
the hospital is, "Was it good news?"

It was good news for the couple who arrived on the same evening that I
did, the mother and father of a young officer who was very badly
injured. I saw them next morning in the lounge, sitting quietly on
either side of the centre-stove, a business man and his wife, as neat,
he in his serge suit, she in her satin blouse and carefully folded lace
and smooth grey hair, as if they had not been travelling for a day and a
night on end, racked by anxiety, though you could see the deep lines
that the strain had left. He looked at me with those patient eyes of the
elderly which hold the same unconscious pathos as those of animals, and
talked in a low quiet voice, and it seemed almost an impertinence of a
total stranger to assure these gentle, dignified people of her gladness
that their only son was safe, yet how glad one is that any one of these
brief contacts in passing should be of happiness! It is so impossible
not to weep with them that weep that it is a keen joy to be able to
rejoice with them that do rejoice.

"It's so free here ..." he told me, "that's what the wife and I like so.
No rules and regulations, you can do just what you like as though you
were in your own home ... no feeling that as you don't pay you've got to
do what you're told." And there was expressed the spirit of the Hostel
as I discovered it.

There are no rules, and it is always impressed upon the Superintendents
that the relations are not obliged to go there, that they do so because
they choose to, and must be treated as honoured guests. In the
dining-room there are little tables as at an hotel, so that the
different parties can keep to themselves if they prefer it; there are
no times for going out or coming in, no times for "lights out," no need
to have a meal in if the visitor mentions he is going out for it. The
relations who stay at these hostels are guests in every sense of the
word, and there is not one trace of red tape or the faintest feeling of
obligation about the whole thing.

And that must have been what I had felt in the very air of the place
when I arrived, what stole with so precious a balm over me who had been
in camp after camp, institution after institution. This place, with its
quiet walls and its grey shutters wing-wide upon its grey walls, was not
only beautiful and rich with that richness only age can give, it was
instinct as well with freedom and with peace.




CHAPTER XIII

GENERAL SERVANTS AND A GENERAL QUESTION


I have left till the last what to some people will be the dullest and
what is certainly the least spectacular of all the work done by the
women in France, but what is to me perhaps the most wonderful and
admirable of all. I mean that of the Domestic Staffs.

For there is something thrilling about driving wounded, something
eternally picturesque about nursing them, but there is no glamour about
being a general servant.... A general servant, year in, year out, and
with no wages at that, for I talk of the voluntary staffs, girls of
gentle birth and breeding who deliberately undertake to wash dishes and
clean floors and empty slops day after day. I think heroism can no
higher go, and I am not trying to be funny; I mean it.

All the voluntary camps I had seen, all the hostels, the rest stations,
and many hospitals, are staffed by voluntary domestic help; and the
girls they wait upon, the drivers and secretaries and such like, are
eager in recognition of them. But that seems to me about all the
recognition they do get; they get no "snappy pars," no photographs in
the picture papers, no songs are sung of them, no reward is theirs in
the shape of medal or ribbon, nothing but the sense of a dish properly
cleaned or rugs duly swept under. I consider that there ought to be a
special medal for girls who have slaved as general servants during the
war, without a thrill of romance to support them; a "Skivvy's Ribbon" as
one of them laughingly suggested to me when I propounded the idea.

Take, for example, the Headquarters of the British Red Cross, at the
Hotel Christol at Boulogne, to which I returned on my homeward way, as I
had come to it on landing. The staff, counting the Commissioner and
officials, the clerks, typists, secretaries, and Post Office girls,
amount to about a hundred and forty-five people, and the house staff
number seventeen and are all V.A.D.'s. The Hotel Christol is also the
headquarters for all Red Cross people going on leave or arriving
therefrom via Boulogne, and all have to report there; nearly all want a
meal, many want a bed.

The men-workers and many of the women, such as V.A.D. Commandants, etc.,
live out in billets in the town, but the manageress and her assistant,
the Post Office Commandant, the girl driver of the mail-car with her
orderly (these two girls drive about sixty miles daily with the mails),
the girls of the telephone exchange and the rest of the Post Office
girls, all "live in," and in addition to the casual Red Cross workers
who may appeal for a bed any time there are the relations of wounded who
have been put up there whenever possible, though now a hostel is being
opened in Boulogne for the purpose. All the people working in the house
and all Red Cross workers arriving by boat are entitled to take their
meals at the Christol, as are all Red Cross workers in Boulogne, both
officers and privates, and the average number of meals served is 2,500 a
week. Four or five girls act as waitresses in the dining-room, and three
are always in the pantry, which must never be left for a moment during
the day; so it will be seen that the headquarters of the Red Cross is a
sort of hotel, except that nobody pays.

There are French servants to do the roughest work, but the girls have
plenty to do without that. The house staff begin work at seven in the
morning; at seven-thirty in the evening they start to turn out the
forty-two offices, which they sweep and dust every day. They wash all
the tea-things (not the dinner-things), and clean all the silver and
glass, they make the beds and do all the waiting. A pretty good list of
occupations, is it not, carried out on such a huge scale?

The girls are well looked after, for it must not be forgotten that some
of them are not more than eighteen, and their parents in England have a
right to demand that these children should be at once guarded and
cheered. No Red Cross girl is allowed out after half-past nine in a
restaurant, and none is ever allowed to dine out unaccompanied by
another girl. But when a friend of a girl passes through Boulogne, then
it is permitted that she and another girl may go and dine with the
officer in question, always provided they are back by nine-thirty. For
superiors are merciful and human creatures these days, and there is
always the thought that the girl may never see that friend again. And
Heaven--and the superior--knows that these girls need and deserve a
little relaxation and enjoyment.

And would you not think that to girls who work as these do and behave so
well would at least be given the understanding and respect of all of us
who do so much less? Yet how often one hears careless remarks of censure
or--worse--of belittlement. That to other nations our ways may need
explaining is understandable, but we should indeed be ashamed that any
amongst ourselves fail in comprehension.

What do the French think of our women? That is a question that
inevitably arises in the mind of anyone who knows the differences in
French and English education. Let me show the thing as I think it is, by
means of a metaphor.

It is universally conceded that marriage is a more difficult proposition
than friendship, that it is more a test of affection to live under one
roof and share the daily commonplaces of life than it is to meet
occasionally when one can make a feast of the meeting. Yet this is not
to say that marriage is the less admirable state, but only to allow that
it is one requiring greater sacrifices, greater tact, and--greater
affection. Therefore, when it is admitted that the presence in France
for nearly four years of English soldiers, English civilians on
war-work, and the consequent erection of whole temporary townships for
their accommodation, is a greater test--if you will a greater
strain--for the Entente than if intercourse had been limited to an
occasional interchange of a handful of people, one is not saying
anything derogatory either to French hosts or English guests, but merely
frankly conceding that more depth of affection and understanding is
necessary than would otherwise have been the case. To superficial
relationships, superficial knowledge, but to the big partnerships of
life, complete understanding. And, if that is never quite possible in
this world, at least let the corner where knowledge cannot come be
filled by tolerance.

England is no longer on terms of mere friendly intercourse with France;
the bond is deeper, more indissoluble.... And as in marriage the closest
bond of all is the birth of children, so in this pact of nations the
greatest bond is the loss of children--lost for the same cause upon the
same soil....

With a bond as deep as this--a bond always acknowledged and given its
meed of recognition by the most thoughtful brains and sensitive
hearts--yet, as in marriage, there are bound to be minor irritations,
points, not of meeting, but of conflict. Trifles, indeed, these points,
compared with the magnitude of the bond which unites, but nevertheless
trifles which would be better adjusted than ignored.

In the first place, we must recognise that though the things which unite
us, our common ideals, our common needs, are far stronger than any
difference in our modes of thought, yet those differences exist, and
that, in marriage, it is often said that it is the little things which
count.... Heaven forbid that we should so lose sense of proportion as to
say it when the matter in hand is the marriage of nations, but
nevertheless it is well not entirely to forget it.... And, of all the
differences in customs between us, there is probably none more marked
than in our way of treating what is known--loosely and with considerable
banality--as the "sex-problem." This is not the place to discuss those
differences, though, as one who has known and loved France all her life,
I may mention that, personally, I see much to admire in the French
system and could wish that we emulated it, but that is neither here nor
there at the moment.

France has probably evolved for the happiness and welfare of her
womenkind the sort of life which suits best with their temperament and
circumstances. Women, like water, find their own level, and no one who
knows France, and knows the devotion, the business capacity, and the
good works of her women, imagines them to be the butterfly creatures
that English fancy used to paint them twenty or thirty years ago. As a
matter of fact, the present writer had occasion, two winters ago, to
make a close study of the varied scope of women's work in France--the
hospitals for training of _femmes du monde_, the schools like Le Foyer,
for the training of young girls of the upper classes to help their
poorer sisters, etc., etc., all works carried on unostentatiously long
before the war broke upon us and proved their usefulness. The
"butterfly" Frenchwoman underwent, before the war, a far more serious
social training than did the happy-go-lucky English girl, and was better
equipped in consequence, with a knowledge of economic conditions, than
the untrained Englishwoman could be.

But we too have our quality, and I rather think it is to be found in the
greater freedom which we are allowed. We were not so well trained, but
freedom stepped into the place of custom, and gave the necessary
attitude of mind--that unprejudiced, untrammelled attitude which is
essential to the quick grasping of a fresh _métier_. That is where our
method--or, if you prefer it, our lack of method--helped us, even as
their training helped the French. And the French, with their
extraordinary facility of vision, do, I think, understand that we have
simply pushed our freedom to its logical and legitimate outcome, that we
could not be expected, after being accustomed, for many years past, to
be on terms of simple easy friendship with men as with our own sex,
above all, after working side by side with them since this war began, we
could not be expected to say that we could not work with them in France,
though we could in England, or that perhaps this girl would, and that
girl couldn't....

We naturally proceeded to act _en masse_ as we had acted individually,
to do on a large scale what had been done on a small, to manipulate
great bodies of women where before a few friends had worked together. In
every large body of persons there are bound to be one or two individuals
who fail to come up to the required standard, but that does not alter
the principle that what can safely be done in small quantities can
safely be done in large, provided the conditions are altered to scale.

And that is what we are doing, and what our Government is helping us to
do; that is what our Women's Army and our voluntary workers in France
are--the expression, on a large scale, of what bands of women have been
doing so successfully on a small scale since the beginning of the
war--helping, and even replacing the men. And just as, with our
peculiar training and mode of thought, it is possible for the average
Englishwoman to eliminate sex as a factor in the scheme of things, so it
is possible to eliminate it in greater masses. In other words, it is
perfectly possible, to men and girls brought up with the English method
of free friendly intercourse, to work side by side, to meet, to walk
together, and to remain--merely friends. Whether that is a good thing or
not is another point altogether, as it is whether it makes for charm in
a woman.... Certainly no woman in this world competes with a Frenchwoman
for charm. It is as recognised as an Englishwoman's complexion--and
considerably more lasting!

Probably it is only ourselves and the Americans among the races of the
world who could have instituted such an experiment as that of our
Women's Army, but there is among the nations one which is supreme in
"flair," in sympathy, and a certain ability to comprehend intellectually
what it might not understand emotionally, and that nation is France.

I am confident that it will never have to be said that when Englishwomen
sacrificed so much--and to a Frenchwoman one does not need to point out
what a sacrifice it is when a woman risks youth and looks in hard
unceasing work--that Frenchwomen failed to understand them or to
attribute motives to them other than those that have animated
themselves in their own labours throughout the war.

That it must sometimes look odd to them one knows so well; how can it be
otherwise? They see the girls, khaki-clad, out walking without
"Tommies," hear the sounds of music and dancing coming from the
recreation huts, where the girls are allowed to invite the men, and
_vice versa_. Yet, if you investigate, you will find out that they are
of an extraordinary simplicity, these girls and men, in their
intercourse, in their earnest dancing, taught them by instructors from
our Young Men's Christian Association, inspired by nothing more heady
than lemonade, and chaperoned by the women-officers, who have attained a
mixture of authority and motherly supervision over every individual girl
that reminds me of nothing so much as the care, born of a sort of divine
cunning, of a very dear and clever Mother Superior at a convent I once
stayed at in France. For the interesting point for both the French and
ourselves to note is that in the treatment of our Women's Army in France
we have taken a leaf out of their book. We look after the girls with
something of that love and care which surrounds a girl in France.

For many of the Women's Army are working girls, who have never been
guarded in their lives, whose parents had probably, after the
lower-class English way, very little influence with them, and who,
though good, honest, rough girls, were free to roam the streets of their
native towns with their friends every evening once their work was over.
Now, for what is for many of them the first time in their lives, they
are being watched and guarded in a manner that is more French than
English, and which I find admirable. As for their walks, their
friendships with men, the personal observation of the acute French will
show them that it is merely our Anglo-Saxon way, and the official
statistics will prove to any doubters how well both the girls and the
men can be trusted to behave themselves. We are a cold nation if you
like, but there it is--it has its excellences, if not its charms.

So much for fundamental differences, which, when intelligence and
sympathy go out to meet them, become merely points on which temperaments
agree to differ amicably, each giving its meed of admiration to the
other. And for minor matters, little things of different customs only,
that nevertheless, occasionally, in the strain of this war, ruffle even
friends, I would say something like this, which is in the hearts of us
all....

France--dear lovely France, to so many of us adored for many years, who
has stood to us for the romance of the world, we know that in many
things our ways are not your ways and never will be, nor would we wish
it otherwise. To each nation her distinctiveness, or she loses her
soul. But, when those ways of ours seem to you most alien, say to
yourself: "This is only England's differing way of doing what we are
doing, of fighting for what we are fighting for--the saving of the right
to individualism, the right to be different...." To gain that we are all
having to become alike, just as to win freedom we are having for a time
to give it up, and the great thing to remember is that this terrible
coherent community life is being borne with only that eventually we may
all be free men once more. Let us, for all time, differ in our own ways,
rather than agree in the German! But also let us, while differing,
understand.




CHAPTER XIV

NOTES AND QUERIES


On my last evening I sat and thought about the girls I had seen and
known, in greater and less degrees, in passing. And I saw them, not as
unthinking "sporting" young things, who were having a great adventure,
but as girls who were steadily sticking to their jobs, often without
enjoyment save that of knowledge of good work well done. And I thought
of those prophets who gloomily foretell that the women will never want
to drop into the background again--forgetful of the fact that where a
woman is is never a background to herself. I smiled as I thought of the
eagerness with which these hard workers in mud and snow and heat will
start buying pretty clothes again and going out to parties ... and I was
very thankful to know how unchangedly woman they had all remained, in
spite of the fact that they had had the strength to lay the privileges
and the fun of being a woman aside for a time.

I remembered what the D. of T. had said to me when we discussed the
question of how the girls would settle down when it was all over, and
how he had thought that even if they did not marry all would be well,
because they would have had their adventure.... I remembered too how
that had seemed to me the correct answer at the time. Then later, when
that awful web of depression caught me, and the horror of the
school-girl conditions of life and all the apparent "brightness" had
choked me, I had all the more thought it true, but marvelled; later
still, when I caught glimpses of that wonderful spirit and that deep
sophistication which had so cheered me, I reversed the whole judgment
and thought there was nothing in it.

Now, thinking it all over, it seemed to me that somewhere midway lay
Truth. These girls have had, in a certain sense, their adventure, but
when it is all over, they will have a reaction from it, and I believe
that reaction will be pleasant to them, that it will be the reaction,
and not the memory of adventure, which will content them. It is certain
that to anyone who has worked as these girls work a considerable period
of doing nothing in particular will be very acceptable. They will all
have to become themselves again, which will be interesting....

Dear, wonderful girls ... you who wash dishes and scrub and sweep, you
girls of the Women's Army who replace men and who do it so thoroughly,
you drivers who are out in all weathers, night and day, sometimes for a
week or more on end, who face hardships such as were faced in those
three weeks at T---- when there were no fires and no water, how glad I
am to have met you.... So I sat and thought, and then I picked up a copy
of _The Times_ which had just come over. And in the "Personal" column
this caught my eye:

"Lady wants war-work, preferably motor-driving, from three to five p.m."

And I saw that it was not only those far removed from the war who
misunderstood both what it demands and that which has arisen to meet
those demands.

Do we not nearly all fail to realise the magnitude and import of what is
being done by these unspectacular workers behind the lines, who are yet
part of war itself, and daily and nightly strengthen the hands of the
fighters? Some of us in England realise as little as you in far-off
countries, and yet it should be our business to know, because the least
we can do is to understand so that we, in our much less fine way, can
help them a little, one tithe of the amount they help our fighting men.

Not because of any desire of theirs for praise is it necessary--I never
saw a healthier disregard, amounting to a kindly contempt, for what
those at home think or don't think, than among the women working in
France--but because it is only by knowing that we can respond
generously enough to the needs of their work, and only by understanding
that we can save our own souls from that fat and contented ignorance
which induces a sleep uncommonly like death.

Nor, as long as we listen to the girls themselves, are we in any danger
of thinking too much of them or of their work. Not a woman I met,
English or American, working in France, but said something like this,
and meant it: "What, after all, is anything we can do, except inasmuch
as it may help the men a little? How could we bear to do nothing when
the men are doing the most wonderful thing that has ever been done in
the world?"




THE END




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Transcriber's Note:

Punctuation has been normalised.






End of Project Gutenberg's The Sword of Deborah, by F. Tennyson Jesse