If Mlle. Gouraud were not the niece of Gen. Gouraud, whose right arm
was blown off by a bursting Turkish shell at the Dardanelles, and who
was in command of the contingent of Russian troops fighting in France,
and who succeeded Gen. Lyautey as Military Governor of Moroccco, she
probably would never have had a chance to suffer from "tank sickness."
And it's because she came so close to proving her point--that men
and women are equal in war work as well as peace pursuits--that
Mlle. Gouraud is discouraged. For to-day she is engaged in the--for
her--exceedingly tame occupation of driving a motor ambulance between
the railroad stations and the various hospitals in Paris.
Mlle. Gouraud has always believed in equal rights for women. When she
was sixteen years old and first interested herself in suffrage she was
hooted and laughed at. Her first speech was delivered in the Place de
la Concorde, in Paris, near the Seine. The crowd deserted her for the
river bank to watch some boys' swimming races.
"I'll show them," said Mlle. Gouraud, and forthwith began swimming.
Eighteen months later she was the champion woman swimmer of France, and
defeated many Belgian, Italian and German swimmers. Once interested
in sports she speedily branched out and became a proficient amateur
boxer. She put on the gloves with Frank Moran and Willie Lewis and
Eugene Mattrot, and even Georges Carpentier, in exhibition bouts. Then
motorcycling became popular, and after she learned the ways and habits
of a gas engine she learned to fly and was brevetted.
The day all France was plastered with mobilization order notices Mlle.
Gouraud gave up sports. She offered herself for the army, but even the
influence of her uncle, Gen. Gouraud, was not enough to win her entree
direct into active service. Instead she obtained the post of ambulance
driver for a certain unit of aviators. But she was never satisfied
with that and finally obtained permission to fly at the front but in a
biplane machine, with a Frenchman as mitrailleuse operator.
And there came the rub. Machine gunners clamored for chances to go up
with the men pilots, but all hung back at going up with Mlle. Gouraud.
It was unlucky, they said, and beside they didn't want to be in on the
deal if she persisted in risking her life when there were plenty of
men for the job. Just as sailors of old were superstitious about women
on board ship, so were the observers and machine gunners superstitious
about having a woman in their airplane. And they tried to prove their
point by citing the fact that in the burned wreckage of the first
Zeppelin brought down inside the French lines were the feet of an
incinerated body clad in filmy silk stockings and tiny black satin
slippers.
But Mlle. Gouraud stuck to aviation, hoping eventually to persuade
some machine gunner to be her team mate and at the same time trying
to find another girl who would enter the service with her, until the
French Army created its "tank" corps. Then she lost no time in setting
to work for a transfer to that arm of the service.
The order for "V. Gouraud" to join the "tanks" was finally put through
and she went off to their base, behind the Champagne front, between
Soissons and Rheims, thankful at last that she had won a berth in the
newest and most dangerous and most exciting and the least understood
and most interesting department of the army.
That was only a couple of weeks before Gen. Nivelle's great offensive
was unleashed in the middle of April. It was just about the time that
Lieut. Charles G. Sweeny of San Francisco and West Point, the only
commissioned American in the French infantry, gave up his post in
charge of a squadron of "tanks" to return to the United States and
offer his services to the United States Army.
The first week of Mlle. Gouraud's training was easy and delightful
to her. Inside the steel walls of the mobile fortress she learned to
swing the little three-pounders and to operate the cartridge belts of
the machine guns that bristled from all sides of the armored car. She
learned how to sight through the periscopes projecting from the roof
and sides to see the way and the enemy, and all the other routine work
of the "tank's" crew.
But the second week, when she began her training in a "tank," spelled
her undoing. The walls and the roof of the "tank" are covered with
leather upholstery, and every projecting bit of mechanism and artillery
in the little chamber was also cushioned with leather, because as
the great steel fort plunged forward across shell craters and over
trenches and up and down great piles of debris--which had once been
French villages--the occupants were tossed about inside like ashes in
a sifter.
But cuts and bruises and knocks and falls didn't weaken Mlle. Gouraud's
determination to stay with the "tank" for the great offensive soon to
be begun when the engines of destruction were to receive their baptism
of fire under the tricolor. So she rigged up a sort of harness, with
a line attached to a ring in the roof of the "tank" and with a belt
around her waist. This left her swaying like a pendulum when the "tank"
was moving but kept her from bumping against the walls, and, what was
more important, from stumbling against other members of the crew and
interfering in the pursuit of their duties.
Then the blow descended. Mlle. Gouraud fell ill of "tank sickness."
Worse than seasickness, worse than any form of sickness which comes
as result of riding in airplane, or on camel, or by any form of
transportation ever invented, "tank sickness" rendered her absolutely
incapable of remaining with the movable forts. So she was drafted out,
sent to hospital as "malade" and in a few days when she was discharged,
was shunted back to Paris as "reforme."
Just one fact consoles Mlle. Gouraud to a certain extent. And that is
that she is not the only victim of "tank sickness."
"I stuck it out three days longer than any of the rest of the crew who
were subject to it," she says.