's work on necessary articles for the men in the
trenches: underclothing, sleeping bags, felt slippers, night garments;
sheets and pillow-cases for the hospitals. As the vast majority of
the peasant farmers and petite bourgeoisie had been used to sleeping
in airtight rooms they suffered bitterly during that first long winter
and spring in the open. If it had not been for these bee-hive ouvroirs
and their enormous output there would have been far more deaths from
pneumonia and bronchitis, and far more cases of tuberculosis than
there were.

A good many of these ouvroirs are still in existence, but many have
been closed; for as the shops reopened the women not only went back to
their former situations but by degrees either applied for or were
invited to fill those left vacant by men of fighting age.

III

And then there were the munition factories! The manager of one of
these _Usines de Guerre_ in Paris told me that he made the experiment
of employing women with the deepest misgiving. Those seeking positions
were just the sort of women he would have rejected if the sturdy women
of the farms had applied and given him any choice. They were girls or
young married women who had spent all the working years of their lives
stooping over sewing-machines; sunken chested workers in artificial
flowers; confectioners; florists; waitresses; clerks. One and all
looked on the verge of a decline with not an ounce of reserve vitality
for work that taxed the endurance of men. But as they protested that
they not only wished to support themselves instead of living on
charity, but were passionately desirous of doing their bit while their
men were enduring the dangers and privations of active warfare, and as
his men were being withdrawn daily for service at the Front, he made
up his mind to employ them and refill their places as rapidly as they
collapsed.

He took me over his great establishment and showed me the result. It
was one of the astonishing examples not only of the grim courage of
women under pressure but of that nine-lived endowment of the female in
which the male never can bring himself to believe save only when
confronted by practical demonstration.

In the correspondence and card-indexing room there was a little army
of young and middle-aged women whose superior education enabled them
to do a long day's work with the minimum output of physical energy,
and these for the most part came from solid middle-class families
wh