ring a
burden of hard work. She went to Woolwich Arsenal and toiled twelve
hours a day. She broke under the strain, recuperated, and took up
munition work again. She became expert, and was in time an overseer told
off to train other women. But she was never satisfied, and always
anxious to be nearer the great struggle. She broke away one day and went
to Southampton for a Waac examination, and found herself one of a group
of a hundred and fifty gentlewomen all anxious to enter active service
and all prepared for some definite work. They stood their tests, and
Dolly--that's the little niece's pet name, given to her because she is
so tiny--is now working as an "engine fitter" just behind the fighting
lines. Dainty Dolly, whom we have always treated as a fragile bit of
Sevres china, clad in breeches and puttees, under the booming of the
great guns, is fitting patiently, part to part, the beating engine which
will lift on wings some English boy in his flight through the blue skies
of France.

But it must not be supposed that the magnificent service of British
women, devoted, efficient and well-organized from top to bottom,
realized itself without friction, any more than it will here. There were
certainly two wars going on in Great Britain for a long time, and the
internal strife was little less bitter than the international conflict.
The most active center of this contest of which we have heard so little
was in industry, and the combatants were the government, trade unions
and women. The unions were doing battle because of fear of unskilled
workers, especially when intelligent and easily trained; the government,
in sore need of munition hands, was bargaining with the unskilled for
long hours and low pay. Finally the government and the unions
reluctantly agreed that women must be employed; both wanted them to be
skillful, but not too skillful, and above all, to remain amenable. It
has been made clear, too, that women enter their new positions "for the
war only." At the end of hostilities--international hostilities--women
are to hand over their work and wages to men and go home and be content.
Will the program be fulfilled?

The wishes of women themselves may play some part. How do they feel?
Obviously, every day the war lasts they get wider experience of the
sorrows and pleasures of financial independence. Women are called the
practical sex, and I certainly found them in England facing the fact
that peace will mean an insuf