"AND THE BRIGHT EYES OF DANGER"
Since the beginning of things women have been mixed up in war, and it is
only as the world has become more civilised (if in view of the present
one can make that assertion) that their place in it has been questioned.
The whole question of the civilian population has taken on a different
aspect since the outbreak of this war, owing to the extraordinary and
unprecedented penalties attached to the civilian status by Germany, but
the sub-division labelled "Women" has perhaps undergone more revision
than any. It has undergone so much revision, in fact, that women have,
in large masses, ceased to be civilians and are ranked as the Army.
If it be frankly conceded that it is as natural for women to want to get
to the war as men, one clears the way for profitable discussion without
wasting time while the outworn epithets of "unwomanly" and
"sensation-hunters" are flung through the air to the great obscuring
thereof. The delight in danger for its own sake is common to all human
beings, to the young as an intoxicant, to the old as a drug. It is not
the least of the tragedies of woman that this is a delight in which she
is so seldom able to indulge.
When the war broke, everyone wanted to go and see what it was like, and
it is merely useless to observe that this was treating it as a huge
picnic. Before the tightening-up process began, in the wonderful days
when the war was still fluid, it was possible to get out to the
front--the real front--on all sorts of excuses. The tightening-up was
necessary, and all too slow, but let us not, because of that, fall into
the error of calling the instinct which urged non-combatants "mere"
curiosity, as though that were not the greatest of the gifts of the
gods, without which nothing is done.
Among these non-combatants who wanted to see the war were many women,
and if, mixed with their patriotism and desire to help, went a streak of
that love of danger which is no disgrace to a man--why, I maintain that
it is no disgrace to a woman either, but as natural an instinct as that
which drives one to a wayside orchard if one is hungry.
There is nothing sooner slaked, for the time being, than this inherent
love of danger. Men who wanted the fun of it at the beginning of the war
are heartily sick of it now, though they wouldn't be out of it for
worlds. But most of the women haven't been allowed enough danger to get
sick of it, and so, in patches of young women you meet working in
France, the old craving still lifts its head. I came across a delightful
streak of it at T----, the oldest big convoy in France.
The garage, over which the girls live, for their camp is still
a-building, is set in the eye of the cold winter winds on the top of a
hill overlooking the sea. It was snowing heavily as I drove up, great
fat flakes of snow that wove and interwove in the air in the way that
only snowflakes can, so that sometimes they look as though they were
falling upwards. The long line of the wooden garage showed dark in the
background, in the space before it the ambulances stood about, but the
girls were fox-trotting in couples all about them, their big rubber
boots shuffling up little clouds of snow; on the head of one girl was
swathed a greenish-blue handkerchief, which made a lovely note of colour
against the swirling whiteness.
I was taken in through the garage, where two drivers were painting their
cars--for all painting is done by the girls, sometimes with unexpected
effects, as on one car which I saw, where "Eve" from the _Tatler_ and
her little dog were depicted in front of the body--and up a flight of
wooden stairs with an out-of-doors landing on top, to the cubicles,
which opened off on either side of the open-ended passage for the whole
length of the building. Here, in one of the little bedrooms for two, we
had a meal of cocoa and cake, known as the "elevener," for the obvious
reason that it is consumed at eleven every morning. It was all quite
different from my evening at the convoy at E----, but equally
stimulating.
The great plaint of the girls was that they weren't allowed nearer the
fighting line, and I heard a story of how, in the early days, two cars
had managed to get right through to Poperinghe, when that town was the
centre of the Boche's attentions, by the simple expedient of the
girl-drivers turning up their coat collars, pulling their peaked caps
well down over their eyes, and just going ahead. They had a lovely time
in Poperinghe and lunched under shell-fire, and when the military,
including the Staff, were sitting in cellars, the "Chaufferettes"
sallied forth and bought picture post-cards.
"It's a shame they won't let us go up to the line now----"
"Yes, indeed," put in another very seriously, as though she were adding
the last uncontrovertible proof to the perfidy of the authorities--"They
let the sisters get shelled, so why shouldn't they let us?"
Isn't that a delightful spirit, and, I beg leave to insist, a perfectly
natural and proper one? Any decent human being would like to be
shelled--who hasn't been shelled too much. It is like being in love--a
thing that ought to happen at least once to everybody.
One of my hostesses was a violinist and plays at all the concerts for
the wounded which take place thereabouts. I asked her whether she didn't
find the work ruination to her fingers for the violin, but all she said
carelessly was that they had been ruined for three years now, but it
didn't matter, as anyway she couldn't have practised even if she had the
time, since there were always some girls trying to sleep.
And what do the local French people think of these young girls in their
midst, who work like men and are out in all weathers and drive the
soldiers wounded in the great common cause? They are quite charming to
them, and indeed, when they first came, the French met them at every
station with bouquets of flowers, so that the girls, pleased and
embarrassed, English fashion, had a triumphal progress. But there are
some of the French neighbours who think the life must be very hard on
the poor things, and when, a little while ago, the Convoy organised a
paper chase, the popular belief was that the hares were escaping from
the rigours of life.... When the panting hares asked wayfaring traps for
a lift, it was refused them, as, though the kindly drivers had every
sympathy with the projected escape, they were not going to assist them
to defy authority!
The hardships which this Convoy had undergone I did not hear about from
them, but from their Commandant. She told me of three weeks at the
beginning of things, when there were no fires, no hot water, except a
little always simmering for pouring into the radiators of the cars when
there came a night call--for the snow was frozen on the ground all those
three weeks and the water in the jugs was ice. The girls didn't talk
about that because they were not interested in it, but neither would
they talk about one other thing, though for a very different reason--and
that was of the time when, after the great German gas attacks at
Nieuport, they had to drive the gassed men who came on the hospital
trains.... You can't get them now to describe what that was like, nor
would you have tried, warned by the sudden change of voice in which they
even mentioned it.
There was one point in which this Convoy seemed to me to touch the
extreme of abnegation attained by the G.S.V.A.D.'s. I had seen much
earlier in my visit a G.S.V.A.D. Convoy, but have not mentioned it
because I saw it before I had really grasped essentials, and it appeared
to me then just a plain Convoy, and as the bare facts of it were not as
spectacular as those relating to the Fannies, I chose the latter to
write about.
The G.S.V.A.D.'s, as I have said, rank as privates, and among them are
workers of every kind--scrubbers, cooks, dispensers, clerks, motor
drivers. This G.S.V.A.D. convoy which I had seen was made up of girls
who had exchanged from V.A.D. convoys, mostly from this very one at
T---- where I now was; and so they happened to be all friends and all
girls of gentle birth. But when I saw their quarters--in a couple of
tall French houses that had been converted to the purpose--I was very
upset by the terrible fact that the girls had to share bedrooms. In all
the camps I had seen since, both of Fannies and V.A.D.'s, each girl had
her own tiny room which she cherished as her own soul--which, indeed, is
what it amounts to. And the Waac officers, of course, have their own
private rooms, though the girls sleep in dormitories. This convoy at
T---- was the only voluntary one I had come across where the inestimable
privilege of solitude was missing, though that will be put right when
the new camp is built.
And here I may mention that, deeply as I admire all the girls who are
working so splendidly in France, I think perhaps my meed of admiration
brims highest for those members of the G.S.V.A.D.'s who are gently born,
for this very reason of the sleeping accommodation. Let us be frank, and
admit that for the generality of working girls, such as the Waacs and a
large proportion of the G.S.V.A.D.'s, it is not nearly so great a
hardship to sleep in dormitories as it is for girls who have, as a
matter of course, always been accustomed to privacy. It is not so bad in
the case of members of a G.S. convoy such as that I have mentioned,
where the girls are all friends, but what of those ladies who live in
the big camps and sleep in long huts with other girls of every class,
all, doubtless, decent good girls, but, in the nature of things, often
girls with whom any ground of meeting must be limited to the barest
commonalities of life? Also sometimes those in authority--those who are
and always were professionals, not amateurs--have been known to use the
power given to them, by the inferior rating of these girls, to make them
rather miserable.
Personally, I have long had a theory, which will doubtless bring down on
me howls of rage from those who will say I am decrying the most noble of
professions, that women are not meant to be nurses. It brings out all
that is worst in them. The love of routine for its own sake, that deadly
snare to which women and Government officials succumb so much more
easily than do men, is fostered in them. And so is the love of authority
for their own sakes, which is almost worse. It has taken nothing less
than this way to show what splendid creatures nurses are under their
starched aprons. In times of peace only amateur women should be nurses;
for it may be observed that the V.A.D. nurses, though they have had long
enough to do it in, have not developed the subtle disease of nursitis.
Evidently nursing is a thing, like love-making, which should never
become a profession.
I was glad to have seen all the different convoys I had, because no two
had been to me alike, and to each I am indebted for a differing
expression of the same vision, which is the vision splendid of a duty
undertaken gladly and sustained with courage. From my first convoys--the
Fannies and the G.S.V.A.D.'s--I got the wonderful facts of it, at the
V.A.D. Convoy at E---- I caught that side of it which I was most glad of
all to encounter, and at the V.A.D. Convoy at T---- I found that
delightful spirit of sheer joy in danger which is too precious to be
allowed to die out of the world just because there happens to be, at
present, such a great deal too much danger let loose upon it.