exact
geography upon this point--against a man at Essen which has tipped the
balance of this war.

Those women have won the vote. Not the most frantic outbursts of
militancy after this war can prevent them getting it. The girls who have
faced death and wounds so gallantly in our cordite factories--there is a
not inconsiderable list of dead and wounded from those places--have
killed for ever the poor argument that women should not vote because
they had no military value. Indeed, they have killed every argument
against their subjection. And while they do these things, that paragon
of the virtues of the old type, that miracle of domestic obedience, the
German _haus-frau_, the faithful Gretchen, riots for butter.

And as I have before remarked, the Germans counted on the suffragettes
as one of the great forces that were to paralyse England in this war.

It is not simply that the British women have so bountifully produced
intelligence and industry; that does not begin their record. They have
been willing to go dowdy. The mass of women in Great Britain are wearing
the clothes of 1914. In 1913 every girl and woman one saw in the streets
of London had an air of doing her best to keep in the fashion. Now they
are for the most part as carelessly dressed as a busy business man or a
clever young student might have been. They are none the less pretty for
that, and far more beautiful. But the fashions have floated away to
absurdity. Every now and then through the austere bustle of London in
war time drifts a last practitioner of the "eternal feminine"--with the
air of a foreign visitor, with the air of devotion to some peculiar
cult. She has very high-heeled boots; she shows a leg, she has a short
skirt with a peculiar hang, due no doubt to mysteries about the waist;
she wears a comic little hat over one brow; there is something of
Columbine about her, something of the Watteau shepherdess, something of
a vivandiere, something of every age but the present age. Her face,
subject to the strange dictates of the mode, is smooth like the back of
a spoon, with small features and little whisker-like curls before the
ears such as butcher-boys used to wear half a century ago. Even so, she
dare not do this thing alone. Something in khaki is with her, to justify
her. You are to understand that this strange rig is for seeing him off
or giving him a good time during his leave. Sometimes she is quite
elderly, sometimes nothing khaki is to be got,