Transcriber’s Notes
Hyphenation has been standardised.
Changes made are noted at the end of the book.
WOMEN WANTED
MABEL POTTER DAGGETT
WOMEN WANTED
_The story written in blood red
letters on the horizon of the
Great World War_
BY
MABEL POTTER DAGGETT
AUTHOR OF “IN LOCKERBIE STREET,” ETC.
_Illustrated_
NEW YORK
GEORGE H. DORAN COMPANY
COPYRIGHT, 1918,
BY GEORGE H. DORAN COMPANY
COPYRIGHT, 1917, 1918,
BY THE PICTORIAL REVIEW COMPANY
PRINTED IN THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA
TO MY FRIEND
KATHERINE LECKIE
THE ILLUMINATION OF
WHOSE PERSONALITY HAS
LIGHTED MY PATHWAY TO
TRUTH, THIS BOOK IS
AFFECTIONATELY
DEDICATED
CONTENTS
CHAPTER PAGE
I GLIMPSING THE GREAT WORLD WAR 13
II CLOSE UP BEHIND THE LINES 48
III HER COUNTRY’S CALL 82
IV WOMEN WHO WEAR WAR JEWELRY 115
V THE NEW WAGE ENVELOPE 147
VI THE OPEN DOOR IN COMMERCE 201
VII TAKING TITLE IN THE PROFESSIONS 239
VIII AT THE GATES OF GOVERNMENT 280
IX THE RISING VALUE OF A BABY 308
X THE RING AND THE WOMAN 338
[Illustration:
_Page 106_
MRS. PANKHURST’S GREATEST PARADE
When she led 40,000 English women through the streets of London in
July, 1915. This procession is the vanguard in the march of all the
women of the world to economic independence.
]
ILLUSTRATIONS
MRS. PANKHURST’S GREATEST PARADE THE
MARCH OF THE ENGLISH WOMEN INTO
INDUSTRY _Frontispiece_
PAGE
THE STAFF OF THE WOMEN’S WAR HOSPITAL, ENDELL
ST. W. C., LONDON 64
MRS. H. J. TENNANT OF LONDON 96
VISCOUNTESS ELIZABETH BENOIT D’AZY OF PARIS IN
THE RED CROSS SERVICE 120
LADY RALPH PAGET, CELEBRATED WAR HEROINE 128
MRS. KATHERINE M. HARLEY OF LONDON, WHO DIED
AT THE FRONT 136
MISS ELIZABETH RACHEL WYLIE OF NEW YORK 202
MLLE. SANUA AT THE HEAD OF THE PARIS SCHOOL OF
COMMERCE FOR WOMEN 224
DR. ELIZABETH GARRETT ANDERSON, ENGLAND’S FIRST
WOMAN PHYSICIAN 256
MISS NANCY NETTLEFORD OF LONDON 264
MME. SUZANNE GRINBERG OF PARIS, FAMOUS LAWYER 272
DR. ROSALIE S. MORTON OF NEW YORK 276
MRS. MILLICENT GARRETT FAWCETT OF LONDON 290
MME. CHARLES LE VERRIER OF PARIS 298
DR. SCHISKINA YAVEIN OF PETROGRAD 304
HER GRACE THE DUCHESS OF MARLBOROUGH 320
WOMEN WANTED
CHAPTER I
GLIMPSING THE GREAT WORLD WAR
“Who goes there?”
I hear it yet, the ringing challenge from the war offices of Europe.
Automatically my hand slides over my left hip. But to-day my tailored
skirt drapes smoothly there.
The chamois bag that for months has bulged beneath is gone. As
regularly as I fastened my garters every morning I have been wont to
buckle the safety belt about my waist and straighten the bag at my side
and feel with careful fingers for its tight shut clasp. You have to be
thoughtful like that when you’re carrying credentials on which at any
moment your personal safety, even your life may depend. As faithfully
as I looked under the bed at night I always counted them over: my
letter of credit for $3,000, my blue enveloped police book, and my
passport criss-crossed with visés in the varied colours of all the
rubber stamps that must officially vouch for me along my way. Ah, they
were still all there. And with a sigh of relief I was wont to retire to
my pillow with the sense of one more day safely done.
The long steel lines I have passed, I cannot forget. “Who goes there?”
These that speak with authority are men with pistols in their belts
and swords at their sides. And there are rows of them, O rows and rows
of them along the way to the front. See the cold glitter of them! I
still look nervously first over one shoulder and then over the other.
This morning at breakfast a waiter only drops a fork. And I jump at the
sound as if a shot had been fired. You know the feeling something’s
going to catch you if you don’t watch out. Well, you have it like
that for a long time after you’ve been in the war zone. Will it be a
submarine or a Zeppelin or a khaki clad line of steel?
It was on a summer’s day in 1916 that I rushed into the office of the
_Pictorial Review_. “Look!” I exclaimed excitedly to the editor at his
desk. “See the message in the sky written in letters of blood above the
battlefields of Europe! There it is, the promise of freedom for women!”
He brushed aside the magazine “lay out” before him, and lifted his eyes
to the horizon of the world. And he too saw. Among the feminists of New
York he has been known as the man with the vision. “Yes,” he agreed,
“you are right. It is the wonder that is coming. Will you go over there
and find out just what this terrible cataclysm of civilisation means to
the woman’s cause?”
And he handed me my European commission. The next morning when I
applied for my passport I began to be written down in the great books
of judgment which the chancelleries of the nations keep to-day. Hear
the leaves rustle as the pages chronicle my record in full. I must
clear myself of the charge of even a German relative-in-law. I must be
able to tell accurately, say, how many blocks intervene between the
Baptist Church and the city hall in the town where I was born. They
want to know the colour of my husband’s eyes. They will ask for all
that is on my grandfather’s tombstone. They must have my genealogy
through all my greatest ancestors. I have learned it that I may tell it
glibly. For I shall scarcely be able to go round the block in Europe,
you see, without meeting some military person who must know.
Even in New York, every consul of the countries to which I wish to
proceed, puts these inquiries before my passport gets his visé. It is
the British consul who is holding his in abeyance. He fixes me with
a look, and he charges: “You’re not a suffragist, are you? Well,” he
goes on severely, “they don’t want any trouble over there. I don’t know
what they’ll do about you over there.” And his voice rises with his
disapproval: “I don’t at all know that I ought to let you go.”
But finally he does. And he leans across his desk and passes me the pen
with which to “sign on the dotted line.” It is the required documentary
evidence. He feels reasonably sure now that the Kaiser and I wouldn’t
speak if we passed by. And for the rest? Well, all governments demand
to know very particularly who goes there when it happens to be a
woman. You’re wishing trouble on yourself to be a suffragist almost
as much as if you should elect to be a pacifist or an alien enemy.
There is a prevailing opinion—which is a hang-over from say 1908 —that
you may break something, if it is only a military rule. Why are you
wandering about the world anyhow? You’ll take up a man’s place in the
boat in a submarine incident. You’ll be so in the way in a bombardment.
And you’ll eat as much sugar in a day as a soldier. So, do your dotted
lines as you’re told.
They dance before my eyes in a dotted itinerary. It stretches away
and away into far distant lands, where death may be the passing
event in any day’s work. I shall face eternity from, say, the time
that I awake to step into the bath tub in the morning until, having
finished the last one hundredth stroke with the brush at night, I
lay my troubled head on the pillow to rest uneasily beneath a heavy
magazine assignment. “There’s going to be some risk,” the editor of the
_Pictorial Review_ said to me that day in his office, with just a note
of hesitation in his voice. “I’ll take it,” I agreed.
The gangway lifts in Hoboken. We are cutting adrift from the American
shore. Standing at the steamship’s rail, I am gazing down into faces
that are dear. Slowly, surely they are dimming through the ocean’s
mists. Shall I ever again look into eyes that look back love into mine?
I think, right here, some of the sparkle begins to fade from the great
adventure on which I am embarked. We are steaming steadily out to sea.
Whither? It has commenced, that anxious thought for every to-morrow,
that is with a war zone traveller even in his dreams. A cold October
wind whips full in my face. I shiver and turn up my coat collar. But is
it the wind or the pain at my heart? I can no longer see the New York
sky line for the tears in my eyes. And I turn in to my stateroom.
* * * * *
There on the white counterpane of my berth stretches a life-preserver
thoughtfully laid out by my steward. On the wall directly above the
wash-stand, a neatly printed card announces: “The occupant of this
room is assigned to Lifeboat 17 on the starboard side.” It makes quite
definitely clear the circumstances of ocean travel. This is to be no
holiday jaunt. One ought at least to know how to wear a life-preserver.
Before I read my steamer letters, I try mine on. It isn’t a “perfect
36.” “But they don’t come any smaller,” the steward says. “You just
have to fold them over so,” and he ties the strings tight. Will they
hold in the highest sea, I wonder.
The signs above the washstands, I think, have been seen by pretty
nearly every one before lunch time. When we who are taking the Great
Chance together, assemble in the dining-room, each of us has glimpsed
the same shadowy figure at the wheel in the pilot house. We all
earnestly hope it will be the captain who will take us across the
Atlantic. But we know also that it may be the ghostly figure of the
boatman Charon who will take us silently across the Styx.
Whatever else we may do on this voyage, we shall have to be always
going-to-be-drowned. It is a curiously continuously present sensation.
I don’t know just how many of my fellow travellers go to bed at night
with the old nursery prayer in their minds if not on their lips. But I
know that for me it is as vivid as when I was four years old:
Now I lay me down to sleep
I pray the Lord my soul to keep.
And should I die before I wake,
I pray the Lord my soul to take.
Each morning I awake in faint surprise that I am still here in
this same seasick world. The daily promenade begins with a tour of
inspection to one’s personal lifeboat. Everybody does it. You wish
to make sure that it has not sprung a leak over night. Then you lean
over the steamship’s rail to look for the great letters four feet high
and electrically illuminated after dark, for all prowling undersea
German craft to notice that this is the neutral _New Amsterdam_ of the
Holland-American line. Submarine warfare has not yet reached its most
savage climax. Somebody says with confident courage: “Now that makes
us quite safe, don’t you think?” And somebody answers as promptly as
expected. “Oh, I’m sure they wouldn’t sink us when they see that sign.”
And no one speaks the thought that’s plain in every face: “But Huns
make ‘mistakes.’ And remember the _Lusitania_.”
We always are remembering the _Lusitania_. I never dress for dinner at
night without recalling: And they went down in evening clothes. We play
cards. We dance on deck. But never does one completely while away the
recurring thought: Death snatched them as suddenly as from this my next
play or as from the Turkey Trot or the Maxixe that the band is just
beginning.
We read our Mr. Britlings but intermittently. The plot in which we
find ourselves competes with the best seller. Subconsciously I am
always listening for the explosion. If the Germans don’t do it with a
submarine, it may be a floating mine that the last storm has lashed
loose from its moorings.
What is this? Rumour spreads among the steamer chairs. Everybody
rises. Little groups gather with lifted glasses. And—it is a piece of
driftwood sighted on the wide Atlantic. That thrill walks off in about
three times around the deck.
But what is that, out there, beyond the steamer’s path? Right over
there where the fog is lifting? Surely, yes, that shadowy outline.
Don’t you see it? Why, it’s growing larger every minute. I believe it
is! Oh, yes, I’m sure they look like that. Wait. Well, if it were, it
does seem as if the torpedo would have been here by now. Ah, we shall
not be sunk this time after all! Our periscope passes. It is clearly
now only a steamship’s funnel against the horizon.
Then one day there is an unusual stir of activity on deck. The sailors
are stripping the canvas from off the lifeboats. The great crane is
hauling the life rafts from out the hold. Oh, what is going to happen?
The most nervous passenger wants right away to know. And the truthful
answer to her query is, that no one can tell. But we are making ready
now for shipwreck. In these days, methodically, like this it is done.
It has to be, as you approach the more intense danger zone of a mined
coast. You see you never can tell.
I go inside once more to try the straps of my life-preserver. But we
are sailing through a sunlit sea. And at dinner the philosopher at our
table—he is a Hindu from Calcutta—says smilingly, “Now this will do
very nicely for shipwreck weather, gentlemen, very nicely for shipwreck
weather.” It is the round-faced Hollander at my right, of orthodox
Presbyterian faith, who protests earnestly, “Ah, but please no. Do not
jest.” The next day when the dishes slide back and forth between the
table racks, none of us laugh when the Hollander says solemnly, “See,
but if God should call us now.” Ah, if he should, our life boats would
never last us to Heaven. They would crumple like floats of paper in
Neptune’s hand. Eating our dessert, we look out on the terrible green
and white sea that licks and slaps at the portholes and all of us are
very still. The lace importer from New York at my left, is the most
quiet of all.
For eight days and nights we have escaped all the perils of the deep.
And now it is the morning of the ninth day. You count them over like
that momentously as God did when he made the world. What will to-morrow
bring forth? Well, one prepares of course for landing.
I sit up late, nervously censoring my note book through. The nearer
we get to the British coast, the more incriminating it appears to be
familiar with so much as the German woman movement. I dig my blue
pencil deep through the name of Frau Cauer. I rip open the package of
my letters of introduction. What will they do to a person who is going
to meet a pacifist by her first name? That’s a narrow escape. Another
letter is signed by a perfectly good loyal American who, however,
has the misfortune to have inherited a Fatherland name from some
generations before. Oh, I cannot afford to be acquainted with either
of my friends. I’ve got to be pro-ally all wool and yard wide clear to
the most inside seams of my soul. I’ve got to avoid even the appearance
of guilt. So, stealthily I tiptoe from my stateroom to drop both
compromising letters into the sea.
Like this a journalist goes through Europe these days editing oneself,
to be acceptable to the rows of men in khaki. So I edit and I edit
and I edit myself until after midnight for the British government’s
inspection. I try to think earnestly. What would a spy do? So that I
may avoid doing it. And I go to bed so anxious lest I act like a spy
that I dream I am one. When I awake on the morning of the tenth day,
all our engines are still. And from bow to stern, our boat is all
a-quiver with glad excitement. We have not been drowned! There beside
us dances the little tender to take us ashore at Falmouth.
FACING THE STEEL LINE OF INQUIRY
The good safe earth is firm beneath our feet before the lace importer
speaks. Then, looking out on the harbor, he says: “On my last business
trip over a few months since, my steamship came in here safely. But the
boat ahead and the next behind each struck a mine.” So the chances of
life are like that, sometimes as close as one in three. But while you
take them as they come, there are lesser difficulties that it’s a great
relief to have some one to do something about. At this very moment I
am devoutly glad for the lace importer near at hand. He is carrying my
bag and holding his umbrella over me in the rain. For, you see, he is
an American man. The more I have travelled, the more certain I have
become that it’s a mistake to be a woman anywhere in the world there
aren’t American men around. In far foreign lands I have found myself
instinctively looking round the landscape for their first aid. The
others, I am sure, mean well. But they aren’t like ours. An Englishman
gave me his card last night at dinner: “Now if I can do anything for
you in London,” he said, and so forth. It was the American man now
holding his umbrella over me in the rain, who came yesterday to my
steamer chair: “It’s going to be dark to-morrow night in London,” he
said, “and the taxicabs are scarce. You must let me see that you reach
your hotel in safety.” And I felt as sure a reliance in him as if we’d
made mud pies together or he’d carried my books to school. You see, you
count on an American man like that.
But the cold line of steel! That you have to do alone, even as
you go each soul singly to the judgment gate of heaven. I grip my
passport hard. It has been removed from its usual place of secure
safety. Chamois bags are the eternal bother of being a woman abroad
in war-time. Men have pockets, easy ones to get at informally. I have
among my “most important credentials”—they are in separate packages
carefully labelled like that—a special “diplomatic letter” commending
me officially by the Secretary of State to the protection of all
United States embassies and consulates. When they handed it to me
in Washington, I remember they told me significantly: “We have just
picked out of prison over there, two American correspondents whose
lives we were able to save by the narrowest chance. We don’t want any
international complications. Now, do be careful.”
I’m going to be. The Tower of London and some modern Bastille on the
banks of the Seine and divers other dark damp places of detention over
here are at this minute clearly outlining themselves as moving pictures
before my mind. I earnestly don’t want to be in any of them.
We have reached the temporary wooden shack through which governments
these days pass all who knock for admission at their frontiers. Inside
the next room there at a long pine table sit the men with pistols in
their belts and swords at their sides, whose business it is to get
spies when they see them. We are to be admitted one by one for the
relentless fire of their cross-questioning. They have taken “British
subjects first.” Now they summon “aliens.”
To be called an alien in a foreign land feels at once like some sort
of a charge. You never were convicted of this before. And it seems
like the most unfortunate thing you can possibly be now. Besides, I am
every moment becoming more acutely conscious of my mission. The rest
of these my fellow travellers, it is true, are aliens. I am worse. For
a journalist even in peace times appears a most suspiciously inquiring
person who wishes to know everything that should not be found out. But
in peace times one has only to handle individuals. In war-times one has
to handle governments. The burden of proof rests heavier and heavier
upon me. How shall I convince England that in spite of all, I can be a
most harmless, pleasant person?
From the decision the other side of that door, there will be no appeal.
The men in khaki there have authority to confiscate my notes—or me! And
they are so particular about journalists. One friend of mine back from
the front a month ago had his clothes turned inside out and they ripped
the lining from his coat. Then there is the lemon acid bath, lest you
carry notes in invisible writing on your skin. They do it, rumor says,
in Germany. But who can tell when other War Offices will have adopted
this efficiency method? Oh, dear, what is the use not to have been
drowned if one must face an inquisition? And they may turn me back
on the next boat. My thoughts are with the lemon acid bath. How many
lemons will it take to fill the tub, I am speculatively computing, when
“Next,” says the soldier. And it is I.
A battery of searching eyes is turned on me. I am face to face with my
first steel line. The words of the British consul again ring warningly
in my ears, “I don’t at all know what they’ll do about you over there.”
No one ever does know these days. It’s the tormenting uncertainty that
keeps you literally guessing from day to day whether you’re going or
coming. And on what least incidents does human judgment depend. Perhaps
they’d like me better if my hat were blue instead of brown. Thank
heaven I didn’t economise on the price of my travelling coat. I step
bravely forward when the officer at the head of the table reaches out
his hand for my passport.
In the upper left hand corner is attached my photograph. The Department
of State at Washington requires it for all travellers now before they
affix the great red seal that gives authenticity to the personal
information recorded in this paper. From the passport photograph to my
face, the officer glances sharply, suspiciously, like a bank teller
looking for a forgery. I feel him looking straight through me to the
very curl at the back of my neck. Ah, apparently it is I!
“Now what have you come over here for?” he inquires in a tone of voice
that seems to say, “Nobody asked you to England. We’re quite too busy
about other things to entertain strangers.”
I hand him my official journalistic letter addressed “To Whom it may
Concern.” Signed by the editor of the _Pictorial Review_, it states
that I am delegated to study the new position of women due to the war.
Will he want me to? He may be as sensitive as the British consul in New
York about the woman movement. He may prefer that it should not move at
all.
I hold my breath while he reads the letter. Then I have to talk. I
tell him, I think, the complete story of my life. I show him all of
my credentials. I give him my photograph. You always have to do that.
Photographs that are duplicates of the one on your passport, you must
carry by the dozen. You have to leave them like visiting cards with
gentlemen in khaki all over Europe.
Well, what is he going to do about me? I get out my letters of social
introduction. There are 84! I strew them on the table for him to read.
There is a door just behind his head. Will it be in there, the search
and the confiscation and the lemon acid bath? I wonder, and I wonder.
But I try to stand very still. If I move one foot, it might jar the
decision that is forming in the officer’s mind. I am watching alertly
for his expression. But there isn’t any. I can’t tell at all whether
he likes me. An Englishman is always like that, completely shut up
behind his face. It may be at this very moment he has made up his mind
that I am a spy. He has read only four letters——
And he looks up suddenly, in his hand the letter from Mrs. Belmont in
New York introducing me to the Duchess of Marlborough. He nods down the
line to all the other military eyes fixed on me: “She’s all right. Let
her go.”
I sign on the dotted line. And everything is over! In a flashing moment
like that, it is accomplished. And a letter to “Our Duchess” has done
it. At the magic of the name of the American woman who was Consuelo
Vanderbilt, this steel like line of British officers quietly sheathes
all opposition!
The soldier at the other end of the room opens a little wooden door in
a wooden wall that lets me into England. My baggage is already being
chalk marked “passed.” I am here! I clutch my passport happily and
convulsively in my hand. You have to do that until you can restore it
to the safer place. It’s the most important item in what the French
call your “_pieces de identité_.” At any moment a policeman in the
Strand, a gendarme in the Avenue de l’Opéra may tap an alien on the
shoulder with the pertinent inquiry, Who are you?
THE WAY OF JOURNALISM IN WAR TIME NOT EASY
London, when we reached it that night in October, lay under the
black pall of darkness in which the cities over here have enveloped
themselves against war. Death rides above in the sky. To-night,
every to-night, it may be the Zeppelins will come. Over there on the
horizon, a searchlight streams suddenly and another and another, their
great fingers feeling through the black clouds for the monsters of
destruction that may be winging a way above the chimney pots. Every
building is tightly shuttered. The street lamps with their globes
painted three-quarters black have their pale lights as it were hid
beneath an inverted bushel. Pedestrians must develop a protective sense
that enables them to find their way at night as a cat does in the dark.
“I’m sorry,” says an apologetic English voice, and before you know it,
you have bumped against another passerby. There is another sudden jolt.
And you are scrambling for your balance the other side of the curb you
couldn’t see was there. If you are familiar with the door knob where
you’re going to stop, you will be so much the surer where you’re at.
Looking out on this darkest London from Paddington railway station at
midnight I sit on my trunk and wait. Do you remember the popular song,
There’s a Little Street in Heaven Called Broadway? Oh, I hope there is.
I sit on my trunk and wait. In my handbag is the card of the Englishman
politely ready to look after me in London. It is the American man who
is out there in the night endeavouring to commandeer a taxicab. Somehow
he has done it. At last the cab comes. He has compelled the chauffeur
to take us. I shall not have to sit all night on my trunk.
A small green light within the hooded entrance, picks the Ritz Hotel
out of the Piccadilly blackness. Inside, after the gloom through which
we have come, I gasp with relief. It is as if one discovers suddenly
in a place that has seemed a graveyard, Why, people still live here!
Right then at the hotel register, the voice of Scotland Yard speaks for
the War Office. And before the Ritz can be permitted to give me refuge
from the night, I must answer. The “registration blank” presented for
me to fill in, demands certain definite information: “(1) Surname. (2)
Christian names. (3) Nationality. (4) Birthplace. (5) Year of birth.
(6) Sex. (7) Full residential address: Full business address. (8)
Trade or occupation. (9) Served in what army, navy or police force.
(10) Full address where arrived from. (11) Date of signing. (12)
Signature.” And a little below, “(13) Full address of destination. (14)
Date of departure. (15) Signature.” A last line in conspicuous italics
admonishes: “Penalty for failing to give this information correctly 100
pounds or six months imprisonment.” Well, of course a threat like that
will make even a woman tell her age as many times as she is asked. But
I do it rebelliously against the Kaiser and all his Prussians. For the
“registration blank” was made in Germany. I remember it before the war,
at the Hotel Adlon in Berlin.
I must sign now on the dotted line before I can even go to bed. I
arrange my clothing carefully on a chair within reach of my hand. You
rest that way in a warring city, always ready to run. The Zeppelins
may come so swiftly. In London you know your nearest cellar. In France
you have selected your high vaulted entrance arch under which to take
refuge when the sirens go screaming down the street, “_Gardez vous,
Gardez vous._”
The sense of depression that had enwrapped me in the first darkness of
London was not gone when I closed my eyes in sleep. One does not throw
it off. You may not be of those who are wearing crêpe. But you cannot
escape the woe of the world which will enfold you like a garment.
In the morning the ordinary business of living has become one of
strenuous detail. The law requires that an alien shall register with
the police within 24 hours of arrival. When I have thus established
a calling acquaintance at the Vine Street station, I go out into
Piccadilly feeling like a prisoner politely on parole. And I face
an environment strung all over with barbed wire restrictions on my
movements. Every letter that comes for me from America will be read
before I receive it, marked “Opened by the Censor.” If I wish to go
away from this country, I must ask the permission of the Foreign
Office, the consulate of the country to which I wish to proceed and
my own consulate before I can so much as purchase a ticket. I may not
leave London for any “restricted area” where there has been an Irish
revolution or a German bombardment without the consent of Scotland
Yard. I may not even leave the Ritz Hotel, which is registered as my
official place of residence, for more steam-heat at the Savoy, without
notifying the Vine Street Station of my departure and the Bow Street
Station of my arrival. The Defence of the Realm and the Trading with
the Enemy Acts and others in a land at war are lying around like bombs
all over the place. Have a care that you don’t run into them!
I am alone one evening at the International Suffrage Headquarters in
Adam Street, deep lost in a sociological study of carefully filed
data. Do you believe in subconscious warnings? Anyhow, I am bending
over a box of manila envelopes when suddenly, out of the silence of
this top floor room, I am impressed with a sense of danger. It is as
plain and clear as if a voice over my shoulder said “Look out.” I do
look up quickly. And there on the wall before my eyes, I read Order
4 from the Defence of the Realm Act, commonly enough posted all over
London, I discover later. But this is the first time I have seen it. It
reads: “The curtains of this room must be drawn at sundown.” And from
two windows with wide open curtains, my brilliant electric light is
streaming out on the London darkness, oh, as far as Trafalgar Square
for all the German Zeppelins and Scotland Yard to see! Just for an
instant I am paralysed with the fear of them all. Then my hand finds
the electric button and I hastily switch myself into the protecting
darkness. Somehow I grope my way through the hall and down the
staircase. And I slam the outer door hurriedly. There, when the police
arrive, I shall be gone! In the morning paper a week or so afterward
I read one day of an earl’s daughter even, who had been arrested and
fined 25 pounds for “permitting a beam of light to escape from her
window.”
The government is regulating everything, the icing a housewife may not
put on a cake, the number of courses one may have for dinner, even
the conversation at table. Let an American with the habit of free
speech beware! Notices conspicuously posted in public places advise,
“Silence.” In France they put it most picturesquely, “Say nothing. Be
suspicious. The ears of the enemy are always open.” Absolutely the only
safe rule, then, is to learn to hold your tongue. Everybody’s doing
it over here. Very well, I will not talk. But what about all the rest
of this silent world that will not, either? For those under military
orders, the rule is absolute. And you’ve no idea how many people are
under military orders. This is a war with even the women in khaki. I
begin to feel that to get into so much as a drawing-room, I ought to
have my merely social letter of introduction crossed with some kind of
a visé. Wouldn’t a hostess, even the Duchess of Marlborough, be able to
be more cordial if she knew that I had seen the Government before I saw
her? Even the girl conductor on the ’bus this morning, when I essayed
to ask her as Exhibit 1 in the new-woman-in-industry I was looking for,
how she liked her job, turned and scurried down her staircase like a
frightened rabbit.
So, this is not to be the simple life for research work. And though
I come through all the submarines and the lines of steel, and the
Zeppelins have not got me yet, what shall it profit me to save my
life and lose my assignment? I am bound for the front and for certain
information I am to gather on the way. Now, what should a journalist do?
Well, a journalist, I discovered, should get one’s self personally
conducted by Lord Northcliffe. There were those of my masculine
contemporaries already headed for the front whom he was said on arrival
here to have received into the bosom of his newspaper office and put to
bed to rest from the nervous exhaustion of travel, and sent a secretary
and a check and anything else to make them happy. And then he asked
them only to name the day they wanted to see Woolwich or to cross to
France. But nothing like that was happening to me. So what else should
a journalist do?
Well, evidently a journalist should get in good standing with a war
office which alone can press the button to everywhere she wants to
go. The short cut to a war office is through a press bureau. But a
press bureau modestly shrinks from the publicity that it purveys.
You do not find it on Main Street with a lettered signboard and a
hand pointing: “Journalists, right this way.” And you can’t run right
up the front steps of a war office and ring the bell. It would be
a what-do-you-call-it, a _faux pas_ if you did. Even for a private
residence it would be that. There isn’t anywhere that I know of over
here even in peace time that as soon as you reach town you can call a
hostess up on the telephone and have her say, “Oh, you’re the friend
of Sallie Smith that she’s written me about. Come right along up to
dinner.” Why, the butler would tell you her ladyship or her grace or
something like that was not at home. It just can’t be done like that
outside of America. You don’t rush into the best English circles that
way, much less the English government. Absolutely your only way around
is through a formal correspondence.
One day I wrap myself in the rose satin down bed-quilt at the Ritz and
spread out my letters of introduction to choose a journalistic lead.
There are carved cupids on the walls of this bedroom, and a lovely rose
velvet carpet on the floor and heavy rose silk hanging at the windows.
But there isn’t any place to be warm. The tiny open grate holds six or
it may be seven coals—you see why Dickens always writes of “coals” in
the plural—and you put them on delicately with things like the sugar
tongs. It isn’t good form to be warm in England. The best families
aren’t. It’s plebeian and American even to want to be.
My soul is all curled up with the cold while I am trying to determine
which letter. This to Sir Gilbert Parker was the 84th letter handed me
by the editor of the _Pictorial Review_ as I stepped on the boat. It is
the one I now select first, quite by chance, without the least idea of
where it is to lead me. The next evening at 6 o’clock I am on my way to
Wellington House. “Sir Gilbert,” speaks the attendant in resplendent
livery. And I find myself in a stately English room. There, down the
length of the red velvet carpet beneath the glow of a red shaded
electric lamp, a man with very quiet eyes is rising from his chair. “Do
you know where you are?” he asks with a smile, glancing at the letter
of introduction on his desk that tells of my mission. “This,” he says,
“is the headquarters of the English government’s press bureau for the
war and I am in charge of the American publicity.” Who cares for Lord
Northcliffe now! Or even the King of England! Of all the inhabitants
of this land, here was the man a journalist would wish to meet. The
man who has written “The Seats of the Mighty” sits in them. From his
desk here in the red room he can touch the button that will open all
the right doors to me. He can’t do it immediately, in war-time. One
has to make sure first. I must come often to Wellington House. There
are days when we talk of many things, of life and of New York. He is
less and less of a formal Englishman. His title is slipping away. He
is beginning to be just Gilbert Parker, who might have belonged to the
Authors’ League up on Forty-second Street. I half suspect he does. “I
do know my America rather well,” he says at length. “I married a girl
from Fifty-seventh Street. And I have a brother who lives in St. Paul.”
It is the way his voice thrills on “my America.” I am sure any American
correspondent hearing it would have been ready even in the fall of
1916 to clasp hands across the sea in the Anglo-American compact to
win this war. Gilbert Parker is in tune with the American temperament.
He doesn’t wear a monocle. And he says to a woman “Now, what can I do
for you?” in just the tone of voice that an American man would use
when everything is going to be all right. I remember the red room
just before he said it. Everything hung in the balance for me at this
moment: “I have confidence in Mr. Vance, your editor. I know him,”
reflects the man who is deciding. “But—are you in ‘Who’s Who’?” Just
for the lack of a line in a book, a government’s good favour might
have been lost! But he reached for the copy above his desk. “Any more
credentials?” he asks. I cast desperately about in my mind—and drop a
Phi Beta key in his hand. “I won’t take that up on you,” he says with a
smile. And my cause is won.
THE WAY IT IS DONE
Long important envelopes lettered across the top “On His Majesty’s
Service” begin to arrive in my mail. All the government offices will be
“at home” and helpful—when a personal interview has further convinced
each that I am clearly not at all a German person nor the dangerous
species of the suffragist. Where are the slippers that will match this
gown? And which are the beads that will be best? Mine is a hazardous
undertaking, you see, that requires all of the art at the command of
a woman: I must so state the mission on which I have come that _my_
woman movement may seem pleasing in the eyes of a man—why, possibly a
man whose country house even may have been burned in behalf of votes
for women! Clearly I must mind my phrases, to get my permits. And if
you’re a journalist in war-time, you need the permit as you do your
daily bread.
To get it, you write about it and call about it and write about it some
more. And then it comes like this:
FOREIGN OFFICE, Nov. 6, 1917.
_Dear Mrs. Daggett_:—
If you will call to-morrow Wednesday at 3 o’clock at the main entrance
to Woolwich Arsenal and ask for Miss Barker, presenting the attached
paper, you will find that arrangements have been made for your visit.
Yours very truly,
G. S. B.
Or it comes like this:
HEADQUARTERS, LONDON DISTRICT,
Horse Guards, S.W., Nov. 7, 1917.
MRS. M. P. DAGGETT,
Room 464 Ritz Hotel,
_Dear Madam_:—
I have pleasure in informing you that under War Office instructions
I have arranged with the officer commanding 3rd London General
Hospital, Wandsworth Common, S.W., for you to visit his hospital at 11
A. M. on Friday next, the 9th instant.
I am, dear Madam
Yours faithfully,
O. ——
COLONEL D.A.D.M.S.
London District.
England in war-time is open for my inspection. I am getting my data
nicely when one day there develops the dilemma of getting away with
it. I open the _Times_ one morning to read a new law: “On and after
Dec. 1,” the newspaper announces, “no one may be permitted to take out
of England any photograph or printed or written material other than
letters.” I have a trunkful. Clearly I can’t get by any khaki line with
that concealed about my person. Sir Gilbert walks twice, three times up
and down the red room. “I’ll see what I can do about it,” he says. “I
don’t know. But I’ll try.” A few days later my data begins to go right
through all the laws.
“First consignment,” I cabled across the Atlantic, “coming on the _St.
Louis_, if it doesn’t strike a mine.” I follow it with a registered
letter to the editor: “I hope God and you will always be good to
Gilbert Parker. And now if I don’t get back—” And I give him exact
directions about the material on the way. For it is no idle imagining
that I may not reach home.
I am facing France and the Channel crossing. Here in London it is so
long since the Zeppelins have been heard from that we are almost lulled
into a sense of security that they will not come again. If they do high
government circles usually hear in advance. A friend whose cousin’s
brother-in-law is in the Admiralty will let me know as soon as he finds
out. But now all of these neatly arranged life and death plans must go
into the discard. For you see I am changing my danger back again from
Zeppelins to submarines.
Let us see about the sinkings. Rumour reports now that about four
out of six boats are getting across. I may get one of the four. On
the night train from London, I wrap myself in my steamer-rug in the
unheated compartment. Travelling is not what you might say encouraged.
This journey to Paris, accomplished ordinarily in four hours, will
now take twenty-four. No two time-tables will anywhere connect. There
are as many difficulties as can possibly be arranged. Governments
don’t want you doing this every day in the week. And there is always a
question whether you will be permitted to do it at all. At Southampton
I must meet the steel line with the challenge, “Who goes there?”
Again I tell all my life to the man with a pistol at his belt and a
sword at his side. He looks a second time at my passport: “You want to
go all sorts of places you’ve no business to,” he says sharply.
“Not all of them now,” I answer humbly, “only France.” “Well, why
even France?” he persists testily. I try to tell him. I present for
a second consideration one of my “most important credentials.” It is
a personal letter from the French consul in New York specially and
cordially recommending me to the “care and protection of all the civil
and military authorities in France.” At last he tosses the letter
inquiringly down his khaki line as much as to say, “Oh, well, if they
want her over there?” It comes back with a nod of acquiescence from the
last man, and a visé in purple ink lets me through to the boat.
Shall I remember the _Sussex_? You don’t so much after you’ve lived
daily with death for a while. Some time during the night I am drowsily
conscious that the boat begins to move. A skilled pilot has taken
the wheel to guide us in and out among mines placed perilously as a
protection against German submarines. Our lives are coming through
dangerous narrows. In the morning we are safe in Havre. The next steel
line, here, is French. And with the letter from the consul at New York
in my hand I am literally and cordially and politely bowed into France.
At my hotel in the Rue de Rivoli, the American man opposite me at the
dinner table the next day is just about to sail, “going back to God’s
country, as far away home as I can get, to the tall pine trees on the
Pacific Coast,” he tells me. He had come to Europe on an assignment
that was to have been accomplished in three months. It has taken him a
year to get to the front. My knife and fork drop in despair on my plate
as he says it. “Cheer up,” he urges. “You just have to remember to take
a Frenchman’s promises as lightly as they’re made. They always aim to
please. And your hopes rise so that you order two cocktails for dinner
to-night. Then to-morrow and to-morrow and to-morrow there will be only
more promises. But you’re an American woman. You’ll dig through. Good
luck,” he says. And a taxicab takes him.
WAR AS YOU FIRST SEE IT
Here in Paris I stand in the boulevards as I stood in the Strand and
Oxford Street, and watch the new woman movement going by. Every time
a man drops dead in the trenches, a woman steps permanently into the
niche he used to hold in industry, in commerce, in the professions, in
world affairs. It is the woman movement for which the ages have waited
in ghastly truth. But, O God in Heaven, the price we pay! The price we
pay! There is Madelaine La Fontaine, whom I saw yesterday in the Rue
Renouard. Her black dress outlined her figure against the yellow garden
wall where she stood in a little doorway. She leaned and kissed her
child on his way to school. As she lifted her head, I saw the grief in
her eyes and the dead man’s picture in the locket at her throat.
They are everywhere through England and France, these women with the
locket at their throats. Yet not for these would your heart ache most.
There are the others, the clear-eyed girls in their ’teens just now
coming up into long dresses. And life may not offer them so much as
the pictured locket! There will be no man’s face to fill it! Love that
would have been, you see, lies slain there with all the bright boyhood
that’s falling on the battlefields. O God, the price we pay!
How far off now seems that summer’s day I walked through 39th Street,
my pulses throbbing pleasantly with the thrill of adventure and this
commission! I wonder if ever life can look like that again. The heavens
arched all blue above New York and the sunshine lay all golden on the
city pavements. But that was before I knew. Oh, I had heard about war,
even as have you and your next door neighbour. War was battle dates
that had to be committed to memory at school. Or if instead of tiresome
pages in history it should mobilise before our eyes, why, of course it
would be flags flying, bands playing, and handsome heroes marching down
Fifth Avenue!
And now I have seen war. Every way I turn I am looking on men with
broken bodies and women with broken hearts. War is not merely the hell
that may pass at Verdun or the Somme in the agony of a day or a night
that ends in death. War is worse. War is that big strong fellow with
eyes burned out when he “went over the top,” whom I saw learning to
walk by a strip of oilcloth laid on the floor of the Home for the Blind
in London. They’re teaching him now to make baskets for a living! War
is that boy in his twenties without any legs whom I met in Regents
Park in a wheel chair for the rest of his life! War is that peasant
from whom to-day I inquired my way in one of the little _banlieues_ of
Paris. There was the _Croix de Guerre_ in his coat lapel. But he had to
set down on the ground his basket of vegetables to point down the Quai
de Bercy with his remaining arm. You know how a Frenchman just has to
gesture when he talks? The stump of the other arm twitched a horrible
accompaniment as he indicated my direction!
Those are brave men who are dying on all the battlefields for their
native lands. But oh, the bravery of these men who must live for their
countries! These who have lost their eyes and their arms and their
legs are as common over here as, why, as, say, men with brown hair.
And these are terrible enough. But the men who have lost their faces!
So long as they shall live, in every one’s eyes into which they look,
they must see a shudder of horror reflecting as in a looking glass
their old agony. God in Heaven pity the men who have lost their faces!
The greatest sculptors in the world are busy to-day making faces to be
fastened on.
Like this you’ve got to go through Europe these days with a sob in the
throat. I turn to the difficult details of living for relief from the
awful drama of existence. In Paris there is the nicest United States
ambassador that ever was sent in a black frock coat to represent his
country abroad. In the course of my travels there are embassies I have
met who are about as useful to the wayfaring American in a foreign
land as a Rogers plaster group on a parlour table. But you arrive at
Mr. Sharpe’s embassy in the Rue de Chaillot and it doesn’t matter at
all if it happens to be perhaps 4:33 and his reception hour closed
at, say, 4:31. He says, “Come right in.” Yes, he talks like that, not
at all in the tone of royalty. “When’d you get in town?” he asks as
genially as if it might be Albany or Detroit instead of Paris. By this
time you’re sitting in a chair drawn up to his desk and discussing the
last Democratic victory. “How’s Charlie Murphy standing now with the
administration?” perhaps he asks, and then pretty soon, “But what can I
do for you in Paris?”
And he does it. You don’t have to call his secretary a week later
to ask, How about that letter the embassy was going to give me? And
the week after and the week after ring up some more to recall that
there’s an American running up an expense account at the hotel down the
street. That’s not Mr. Sharpe’s way. Within ten minutes he had handed
me a letter of introduction to M. Briand, Prime Minister of France.
He laughed as he passed it to me. “Honestly, I’d hate to hand any
one a gold brick,” he said. “That document looks imposing enough and
important enough that a limousine should be at your hotel entrance to
take you to the front at 9 A. M. to-morrow. But nothing like
that will happen. In France you have to remember that no one hurries.
And an American can’t.”
You can hear that in every foreign language. It was a spectacled Herr
Professor in Berlin who once said to me severely, “You Americans, this
hurry it is your national vice.” I feel that foreign governments have
duly disciplined me in this direction during the past few months. So
much of my job in serving the _Pictorial Review_ in Europe seems to be
to sit on a chair and wait in a War Office ante room. At the Maison
de la Presse, 3 Rue François 1st, in the Service de l’Information
Diplomatique, whither my Briand letter leads me, I seem to spend hours.
They are going to be charmed, as Frenchmen can be, to take me to the
front. And the days pass and the days pass. “Ah, but you see, for a
lady journalist it is so different and so difficult. The trip must be
specially arranged.” And the weeks go by. And M. Polignac is so polite
and polite and polite—just that and nothing more.
One day he says to me: “And, Mme. Daggett, how long is it you will
be in Paris?” “Why,” I falter, “I hadn’t expected to winter here.
I’m waiting, you know, just waiting until I can go to the front.”
“And how much longer now could you wait?” he inquires. “Oh,” I answer
desperately, “I’ll surely have to go by the 29th. I couldn’t stay
longer than that.”
So in the course of the next few days there comes a letter telling me
how it pains the French government that they should not be able to
“take that trip in hand” before the 29th. And of course if I must leave
them on that date, as I had said I must, oh, they so much regret, etc.,
etc.
If I intend to get to the front, evidently then I must dig through! And
in my room at the Hotel Regina in the Rue de Rivoli, I take my pen in
hand.
To “Maison de la Presse, Service de l’Information Diplomatique,” I
write: “Gentlemen, your favour of the 26th inst. with your regrets
just received. And I hasten to write you that I cannot, for the sake
of France, accept your decision as final, without presenting to your
attention a situation with which you may not be familiar. You see,
gentlemen, in the country from which I come, we have a feminism that
is neither an ideal nor a theory, but a working reality. In America,
there were when I left, four million women citizens, and the State
legislatures every little while making more. These are, gentlemen,
four million citizens with a vote, whose wishes must be consulted by
Congress at Washington in determining the war policy of the United
States. Their sympathies help to determine the amount of the war relief
contributions that may come across the Atlantic. These are four million
women who count, gentlemen, please understand, exactly the same as four
million men.
“Other American publications may offer Maison de la Presse other
facilities for reaching the American public. But none of them can
duplicate the facilities presented by the _Pictorial Review_, the
leading magazine to champion the feminist cause. It is the magazine
that is read by the woman who votes. Is not France interested in what
she shall read there?
“Believe me, gentlemen, the opportunity for propaganda that I offer you
is unparalleled. I beg you therefore to reconsider. I earnestly desire
to go to the front this week. Can you, I ask, permit me to leave this
land without granting the privilege? For the sake of France, gentlemen!
Awaiting your reply, I remain,” etc.
That letter was posted at 11 o’clock at night. Before noon the next
day Maison de la Presse was on the telephone and speaking English. In
France they do not hurry. It is not customary to use the telephone. And
it is at this time against the law to speak English on it. But listen:
“Will Mme. Daggett find herself able to accept the invitation of the
French government to go to the front on Thursday?” inquires the voice
on the wire.