ally and
with deliberation, on the duelling-ground. But when a national
danger threatens, they instantly become what they proudly and justly
call themselves--"a warlike nation"--and apply to the business in
hand the ardour, the imagination, the perseverance that have made
them for centuries the great creative force of civilization. Every
French soldier knows why he is fighting, and why, at this moment,
physical courage is the first quality demanded of him; every
Frenchwoman knows why war is being waged, and why her moral courage
is needed to supplement the soldier's contempt of death.

The women of France are supplying this moral courage in act as well
as in word. Frenchwomen, as a rule, are perhaps less instinctively
"courageous," in the elementary sense, than their Anglo-Saxon
sisters. They are afraid of more things, and are less ashamed of
showing their fear. The French mother coddles her children, the boys
as well as the girls: when they tumble and bark their knees they are
expected to cry, and not taught to control themselves as English and
American children are. I have seen big French boys bawling over a
cut or a bruise that an Anglo-Saxon girl of the same age would have
felt compelled to bear without a tear. Frenchwomen are timid for
themselves as well as for their children. They are afraid of the
unexpected, the unknown, the experimental. It is not part of the
Frenchwoman's training to pretend to have physical courage. She has
not the advantage of our discipline in the hypocrisies of "good
form" when she is called on to be brave, she must draw her courage
from her brains. She must first be convinced of the necessity of
heroism; after that she is fit to go bridle to bridle with Jeanne
d'Arc.

The same display of reasoned courage is visible in the hasty
adaptation of the Frenchwoman to all kinds of uncongenial jobs.
Almost every kind of service she has been called to render since the
war began has been fundamentally uncongenial. A French doctor once
remarked to me that Frenchwomen never make really good sick-nurses
except when they are nursing their own people. They are too
personal, too emotional, and too much interested in more interesting
things, to take to the fussy details of good nursing, except when it
can help some one they care for. Even then, as a rule, they are not
systematic or tidy; but they make up for these deficiencies by
inexhaustible willingness and sympathy. And it has been easy for
them to