I asked a famous war writer, whose breast was gay with the ribbons of
half a dozen campaigns, what was the matter with all these women, that
they did not tremble and go green under fire, as some of us did. He
said:

"They don't belong out here. They have no business to be under fire.
They ought to be back at the hospitals down at Dunkirk. They don't
appreciate danger. That's the trouble with them; they have no
imagination."

That's an easy way out. But the real reasons lie deeper than a mental
inferiority. These women certainly had quite as good an equipment in
mentality as the drivers and stretcher bearers. They could not bear to
let immense numbers of men lie in pain. They wished to bring their
instinct for help to the place where it was needed.

The other reason is a product of their changed thinking under modern
conditions. "I want to see the shells," said a discontented lady at
Dunkirk. She was weary of the peace and safety of a town twenty miles
back from the front. Women suddenly saw their time had come to strip man
of one more of his monopolies. For some thousand years he had been
bragging of his carriage and bearing in battle. He had told the women
folks at home how admirable he had been under strain, and he went on to
claim special privileges as the reward for his gallant behavior. He
posed as their protector. He assumed the right to tax them because they
did not lend a hand when invasion came. Now women are campaigning in
France and Belgium to show that man's much-advertised quality of courage
is a race possession.

They had already shown it while peace was still in the land, but their
demonstration met with disfavor. Just before the war broke out I saw a
woman suffragist thrown into a pond of water at Denmark Hill. I saw
another mauled and bruised by a crowd of men in Hyde Park. They were the
same sort of women as these hundreds at the front, who are affirming a
new value. The argument is hotly contended whether women belong in the
war zone. Conservative Englishmen deem them a nuisance, and wish them
back in London. Meanwhile, they come and stay. English officials tried
to send home the three of our women who had been nursing within thirty
yards of the trenches at Pervyse. But the King of the Belgians, and
Baron de Broqueville, Prime minister of Belgium, had been watching
their work, and refused to move them.

One morning we came into the dining-room of our Convent Hospital at
Furnes, and there on a s