now the modern woman
emerges from her protected home, and pushes forward, careless and
curious.

"What are women going to do about this war?" That question my wife and I
asked each other at the outbreak of the present conflict. There were
several attitudes that they might take. They could deplore war, because
it destroyed their own best products. They could form peace leagues and
pass resolutions against war. They could return to their ancient job of
humble service, and resume their familiar location in the background.
They did all these things and did them fervently; but they did something
else in this war--they stepped out into the foreground, where the air
was thick with danger, and demonstrated their courage. The mother no
longer says: "Return, my gallant one, with your shield or on it," and
goes back to her baking. She packs her kit and jumps into a motor
ambulance headed for the dressing station.

We have had an excellent chance to watch women in this war. Our corps
have had access to every line from Nieuport on the sea, down for twenty
miles. We were able to run out to skirmishes, to reach the wounded where
they had fallen. We have gone where the fighting had been at such close
range that in one barnyard in Ramscappelle lay thirteen dead--Germans,
French and Belgians. We brought back three wounded Germans from the
stable. We were in Dixmude on the afternoon when the Germans destroyed
the town by artillery fire. We were in Ypres on November first, the day
after the most terrible battle in history, when fifty thousand English
out of a hundred and twenty thousand fell. For three months my wife
lived in Pervyse, with two British women. Not one house in the town
itself is left untouched by shell-fire. The women lived in a cellar for
the first weeks. Then they moved into a partially demolished house, and
a little later a shell exploded in the kitchen. The women were at work
in the next room. We have had opportunity for observing women in war,
for we have seen several hundred of them--nurses, helpers, chauffeurs,
writers--under varying degrees of strain and danger.

The women whom I met in Belgium were all alike. They refused to take
"their place." They were not interested in their personal welfare. There
have been individual men, a few of them--English, French and Belgian,
soldiers, chauffeurs and civilians--who have turned tail when the danger
was acute. But the women we have watched are strangely lacking in fear.