ing each other about, we weaklings will come and remedy your might.' A man doctor is as forbidden in this hospital as a tabby-cat on Mount Athos: it is conducted with a brave punctilio by women surgeons, women nurses, women orderlies, all trained above the average and not to be driven from their posts by the forgings of any arsenal. They acquired their war-nerve in the protracted filth and famine of the Balkan Wars, and it has not failed them throughout this worse campaign, where horrors are not the writhings of misery hungry in the mud, but have been coldly and efficiently planned in cleanness and plenty. Every woman stayed at her post in Antwerp, though the shattered glass of the windows fell about them as they worked and one of their nurses was killed by a shell before their eyes. And when all kindness was driven out of Belgium, they turned to Serbia and joined with the British Red Cross Society and that other exclusively feminine hospital organized by the Scottish woman suffrage societies in the victory that is the most resplendent of the war because it meant the saving and not the losing of life.

The work of these Englishwomen in Serbia makes the blood leap like the death of Byron at Missolonghi or the legion of Englishmen who fought for Garibaldi. At the beginning of the war, Serbia was a place of vermin where wounded men lay on the straw and thirsted and hungered until their wounds festered into fever and they died. To those horrors Englishwomen went out just as fast as they could find organizations to take them. They dwelt in the filth and breathed in the pestilence and did not care how close they came to Death, so long as they could strike at him. It was because of this reserve of intelligent and fearless labor that the Sanitary Commission was able to go to a country where

one sixth of the population of certain districts had been wiped out by typhus in three months, and the rest were the prey of wounds, famine, enteric and relapsing fever, and was able to scrub it clean of disease. Because these women were brave and adventurous and trained and disciplined and everything that it is quite unnecessary for a woman to be, they acquired a mastery over pain and stopped one of the leaks through which there gushed out the life of Europe.

II

Feminism has not invented this courage, for there have always been brave women; but it has let it strike its roots into the earth. For this work is precious above most of the good deeds done by their sex in the past because it was performed by women who were not set apart from life by any peculiar passion of service or renunciation. Madge Neill Fraser spent a great part of her life in the unspiritual and useless pastime of playing golf with distinction. Mrs. Percy Dearmer was a large, kind, dancing sort of woman, flushed with a naïve passion for getting up things, for 'getting up' anything from a mothers' meeting to a theatrical season. And both of them went out to Serbia, and caught fever, and are now members of the communion of heroes.

It is ordinary people too who conduct the privateering expeditions that are made upon Belgium-which, being most in need, is most inclined to accept untrained and isolated helpers - by women working in twos or threes or alone.

There is one woman who visits all those battered Belgian villages where peasants still huddle in their bulletriddled homes, and takes with her truckloads of a patent infants' food. Wherever there is a Belgian baby she

goes, even if it means pushing a barrow full of tins to some stranded hamlet a quarter of a mile along a road raked by German fire. It is a work that is beautiful in courage and charity, and it supplies the overwhelming pacifist argument. Those gray babies whining in their cradles prove that the commonplace remark that the world is too far advanced for war is wrong. On the contrary we have not yet arrived at the stage of civilization where war becomes a possibility. For it is a cad's trick to declare war until one is absolutely certain that one is not cheating one single helpless baby out of its feeding-bottle. If there were to be on some high place a record of this bravery, one can imagine how the picture would show a figure of the smooth surface and stillness which is found only in saints and the dead, moving to some benevolence with the deliberation of one who has fortified and specialized her will to this by prayer. And yet she is a brown and lively thing: a Jewess, one of a race that has forbidden its women to withdraw from the world to sanctify themselves; an actress, pledged to the service of pleasure, and vivid with that intensification of the flesh that comes to wives and mothers.

Now when ordinary people, involved in the ordinary relationships of life, are made mobilizable by the general acceptance of the doctrine that a woman may come out of her home and take upon herself risk and responsibility, they become much more significant workers than could dedicated women who have renounced the things of the world. For when they die, it does not mean that the red-eyed sisters gather in the chantry to sing the mass for the dead. It means that people who have been bound to them by the ties of the flesh and common laughter and excitement, feel as though a part of them had died violently and gloriously and by

the sword, and there enters into their blood the tradition that it is good to face violence and be capable of glory and hate the sword. Instead of lingering ghostly in a convent legend, these dead women become a strain in the breed that will live as long as life.

But even though this work and its significance may have been facilitated by feminism, no woman would present the bill to men and say that we have thereby earned our liberty and citizenship. The professional politicians, who feel that everything is the same as it always was because they are still in power, bargain even now for rights and advantages, and intrigue that if this one is silent about the crimes of the coal-owners, that one shall support conscription. But we common people, who are struggling in a changed and unkindly universe like rabbits in a blownout burrow, no longer try to score off one another. And we admit that our assumption of such risks and responsibilities of the war as we can bear is no self-sacrifice, but a snatch at happiness. For danger is the salt of life. It preserves it from rankness when there is thunder in the skies.

You who think that women ought to be sealed into safety cannot think of a happy ending to the tale of a widow who lost her only son in the wars. You see how she would sit alone in a house that has grown horrible because the pictures on the walls are not of a live boy but of a dead man: how, every day, the little morning breeze of housewifery would spring up and die down into eventless afternoons and long evenings when the lamplit air would stagnate for lack of the movement of youth; how her life would turn rancid for want of hope to keep it fresh. Yet we know now that such a tale can end in brightness. A widow who was nursing in Serbia heard that her son had died at Ypres; a week later the languor of en

teric fell upon her and she died. Instead of slowly wizening in stale air she ran swiftly at the elbow of her son to the gate of their purpose. She would have no pain for him or for herself, for, having taken part in the ritual of honorable death, she would comprehend its meaning. We rejoice that in a time like this we are allowed such mitigations.

III

But here again we have let the exceptional woman crowd out mankind: for most of these are the deeds of women who, either by spinsterhood, widowhood, extreme youth, or middle age, have been released from the normal lot of childbearing and rearing. The mass of Englishwomen are still bond to that duty, and are busy with men and babies in homes beneath a sky unshaken by gunfire. Yet they too receive from the war their special revelation. All of them are learning now what only the intellectually curious or the distressfully circumstanced knew before: that the wife and mother is not the lady jangling her keys about a castle keep, built to contain the future of the race, but the most helpless straw whirled along on the tide of men's activities. Humanity has lost its instinct for self-preservation in the desire of the intelligence for adventure, and makes no effort to protect its future. War hits at children as at anybody else, and the mothers are busy beating back the assault.

These are things not to be seen by the casual observer of social conditions; for England, like a hurt and defiant animal, is pretending that nothing has befallen it. London and the great provincial cities create an illusion that everything is the same as it always has been, by open shops and the familiar peacocking of shopping women. This lie of an inert social organism is assisted by the Powers that Be, who, for

some reason incomprehensible to any one who has traveled through the country and seen how agricultural laborers and engineers are prized as princes, hold recruiting meetings at every corner. Yet the whole illusion falls away like a veil when the band strikes up and marches away with a following of valiant old men who have clipped their moustaches to hide their whiteness, weedy town-bred lads rejected half a dozen times already, and little boys with tin trumpets. And if, with this enlightening vision before one's eyes, one walks into any of the residential districts, significant things suddenly inform one that this life is all gnawed with the war.

In these rows of households there is rarely a householder. Either he is in khaki, or he is working from nine in the morning till midnight in a government office, or burning out his vitality in the factory or office in the attempt to create material and skilled labor out of nothing to fulfill an army contract. It is the householder's wife who is dealing with a world utterly and fantastically changed by the fact that, when she orders goods, the answer is, either, 'I cannot get these goods,' or, 'I will not be able to send you these goods for some days, as nearly all my packers have gone to the front, and the railways are so disorganized that, when I do, I cannot say whether you will get them in a week or a month'; and that when she requires the services of an electrician, a carpenter, a plumber, or a jobbing gardener, she has to wait her turn for the old and incompetent workmen who have crawled from the fireside or the casual ward to fill the gaps left by the fitter men who have gone into the army or into government work.

There is humor in these disorders. It is irritating and yet disarming to wait while an aged plumber, noisily sucking

his last tooth, fumbles with a tap; and when the gardener with his scythe looks like old Father Time, one hovers about him with an uneasy feeling that he ought to be drawn from flower-bed to flower-bed in a bath-chair. But their cumulation is a tragedy. A year ago the wife led the easiest existence on earth, and here and there she was a little wicked with luxury, and greedy to spend the world's wealth on the decoration of the private life. To-day she works hard. Although this business of housewifery is the one occupation the world permitted her to follow without question, here are navies and armies shamelessly ranged to kill the men she has borne and cherished, and conspiring to prevent her from nourishing their nerves with comfort, and she has to stand up to them and keep the war out of her home. She has to organize her resources so that order and cleanliness and all the sweet cultivations of peace can make a last stand in her four walls. While her men are fighting for her life, she has to fight to make that life worth living and insure that children shall grow up to live it.

It is a war of infinite majesty, and yet it is difficult to record because of the triviality of its battles and the incoherence of its soldiers. Instead of a general issuing dispatches concerning a reverse, two ladies in jet bonnets and charwomen's capes raise their voices as they discuss the rise in the price of sugar under the gas flares. And those few economic students who can decipher this homely text are for the most part followers of the Fabian sect of Socialism, and insist on peering down on the poor dead poor. Now the state of the poor happens to be a patch of dead water in the midst of the whirlpool. At first it seemed as though they were going to bear the full force of the economic blow, and one of the first results of the war was that the babies examined

at the clinics and schools for mothers began to lose weight. But now that labor has proved its importance to a staggered public, we are paying out everything we can to keep the country going, and the working classes are enjoying a period of prosperity. It is the middle-class home-so largely dependent on the distributive system which has so entirely broken down for lack of men that has tumbled down like a house of cards.

Middle-class housewives are not likely to write their own history; and so for the past few months I have been collecting the experiences of women who lived in quiet England and yet found existence defaced by the war. There is one which I think is of special interest because the teller of it had no direct connection with the war. So far as they knew, neither she nor her husband had a single kinsman at the front. Yet the war changed and hurt them.

IV

The woman, who shall be called the Lady to mark a certain remoteness from exterior circumstance which had hitherto been hers, lived in a rawboned house which stood on a cliff facing the Wash and casting a sidewise glance to the North Sea across bents misted with sea-lavender. A lighthouse stood sentinel beside it, and there were little white coastguard cottages with cobblestones and a bleaching-green, and near at hand a wireless station lifted its gaunt arms. It was one of those wholly tedious East Coast districts which hold one simply by a wine-like strength in the air.

But in any case they were not people who made extravagant demands of this visible world. The Lady was a little under thirty, and liked tennis tournaments and golf, and had a considerable amount of intelligence which was quite

unlit by any intellectual passion. Her husband was a man of forty-two who dabbled in scientific journalism with results that brought up his private income to £800. They lived a wholesome life in which the events came up so regularly and so completely without the scent of romance that one might liken it to one of those large, white, neatly and firmly convoluted cauliflowers. They thought stability much the best thing in the world, and looked forward to the birth of their child because it would make them more settled than

ever.

Yet on the day their child was born, all this was altered. Even the ordinary circumstances of childbirth were different. For the Lady sat and read the papers. To you who have not been through this war, it may seem incredible that reading a newspaper could blot out the consciousness of personal pain in a much larger and intenser impersonal pain. But we did not know then what had happened to the world; all that we knew was that only a few score miles away a people had been torn to pieces, and that demoniac wickedness was walking the earth and rejoicing in its might. Everything we did in those days was done abstractedly. So you might imagine men buying and selling on the Last Day, casting backward glances at the slip of sky at the door, to see if the great hand be not yet thrust through the clouds. It was thus that the Lady lost, not only the foreboding of extreme peril, but also the delicious sense of importance which is the consolation of her sex on these occasions. This was motherhood with a difference. When the mists of chloroform cleared away and they held out her squealing son, she looked at him, not with the passive contentment of the mother in peace-time, but with the active and passionate intention: 'I must keep this thing safe.'

Almost immediately there were signs, not only that war had begun, but that peace had ended. These things do not always happen together: the comfort of the world went on just the same all the years that English boys were dying uselessly in South Africa. But the very day after the Lady's child was born, the social organization showed what it was up to by omitting to send the milk. The Lady's husband was sent off without his breakfast to fetch it, and found the little tiled dairy full of landladies indignant because the most superior family from Nottingham which had taken the drawing-room floor was waiting for its breakfast. Nobody had got any milk, it seemed, because all the milkmen were Army Reservists and had been called up the night before.

So the Lady's husband took a can in his hand and went in next door to the grocery store, to inquire for some cereals that inexplicably had not been delivered. The shop looked different that day. There were three big automobiles drawn up in front and the chauffeurs were packing them with sacks of flour and eatables. Inside, agitated women with the uppish airs of those who feel themselves rising to an emergency, were buying rice that was doomed to bore their families for a twelvemonth, bacon whose destiny it was to mould in the cellar, and, on the impulse of the moment, even stranger things than that. One woman grasped a bar of yellow soap and a tin of curry powder, and thrust them into her string bag. The Lady's husband perceived that this was a food-panic, and he sat down on a sugar-box and explained to the women that there must be enough food in England to last for at least six months. They appeared uninterested, and the grocer, who had raised his prices two pence in the shilling since he opened his shop that morning, irritated. He then ordered the rice and tapioca and sago