such a quality? The world has not waited until now to learn the cost of
war. It was one of the stock arguments urged upon every conference at
The Hague. It was one of the indubitable facts upon which we all relied
to keep the nations at peace. And it has failed us, as materialism
always does fail us in every great national crisis. Germany knows the
cost of war, but she is out for conquest, and the spoils of conquest.
She recalls with pleasure the two hundred million pounds extorted from
France in 1871, she hopes this time to “bleed her white” (Bismarck’s
cruel phrase is a compendium of Prussian policy), she dangles before
German eyes the promise of indemnities which will make good all losses,
and she enjoys a foretaste of bliss by levying ruinous fines upon
French and Flemish towns which have tasted the utmost bitterness of
defeat. France knows the cost of war, and is ill prepared to pay it;
but her alternative is yielding her soil, and all she holds sacred
and dear, to a ruthless invader. Even a nation of Quakers, or, we
hope, a nation with women in “the seat of judgment,” would reject
submission on such terms. England knows the cost of war, but she also
knows the cost of German supremacy. She is at last aware that her
national life is at stake. She must fight to preserve it, or sink into
insignificance,--her glorious past as much a thing of memory as is the
past of Rome.
For all these reasons the nations are spending their money on
armaments, and spilling their blood on the battlefield. The sacredness
of life is being violated; but is it life, or is it the moral worth of
life, which we hold sacred? Life is a thing given us for a few years.
Its only value lies in the use we make of it. Lose it we must, and very
soon. But honour and duty are for all time. Why do we see a “soldiers’
monument” in nearly every town of every state which fought for the
Union? Not because these men lived, but because they died. What must it
have cost Mr. Lincoln, whose heart was big enough for much suffering,
to order from an exhausted country the last draft of half a million
men! And why does an ingenious writer, like Mr. G. Lowes Dickinson,
cudgel his brain to find abstract causes for war? The concrete causes
which have come within the personal experiences of most of us will
answer our rational questionings.
If it were possible that the women of all nations could ever be
brought to think and feel alike,--a miracle of unity never vouchsafed
to men,--then they might run the world harmoniously. If, for example,
a Frau Professor Treitschke, a Frau General von Bernhardi, and the
more august spouse of the Chancellor Bethmann-Hollweg had succeeded
in talking down their martial husbands, and persuading Germany that
her duty was to breed in peace within her own frontier, then a Madame
Poincaré, a Madame Joffre, a Mrs. Asquith, a Lady Kitchener would have
had no difficulty in holding back France and England from war. If the
Kaiserin were an autocratic “peace-lady,” ruling her “war-lord” into
submission, then the Queen of England and the Queen of Belgium might
be drinking tea with her to-day. But unless the good Teuton women had
kept their men at home, how could the good French and Belgian women
have warded off attack? And would the good British women have said,
“We are safe for a little while. Let us stand cringing by, and see
injustice done”?
The “Woman’s Journal” wrote a year ago to a number of more or less
distinguished people, and asked them if they thought that woman
suffrage would abolish, or would lessen war. As none of these more or
less distinguished people had any data upon which to build an opinion,
their answers were interesting, only as expressing personal views of
a singularly untrammelled order. There were those who believed that
the Spartan mother stood for an undying type, and there were those
who believed that she had been finally and happily superseded. Miss
Jane Addams wrote that more women than men “recognize the folly and
wickedness of war,”--an easy generalization. Dr. Stephen S. Wise, an
unblinking enthusiast, held that one great gain will follow the tragic
conditions of to-day. We shall see the end of “man-made government.”
“World peace” and “world welfare” will come with woman’s rule. Miss
Mary Johnston was of the opinion that “war has still a fascination for
most men,” but that few women feel its seduction.
Miss Johnston’s view is the only one which invites comment, because
it is shared by a great many women who have not her excuse. “The Long
Roll” and “Cease Firing” are pretty grim pictures of battle, but there
is a heroic quality about both books; while in that jolly, chivalrous,
piratical romance, “To Have and to Hold,” combat follows combat with
dizzy speed and splendour. Miss Johnston’s heroes take so kindly to
fighting that she naturally believes in the impelling power of war;
but, outside the covers of a historical novel, the martial instinct
is not a common one. It exists, and it crops up where we least expect
to find it,--in professors of political economy, in doctors who have
spent their existence keeping people alive, and in clergymen who preach
the religion of the meek. But it is too rare to be a controlling force,
and it had little or no place in the hearts of the thousands of men who
were marched to their deaths on the battlefields of Poland and Flanders.
It was not the fascination of war that brought the Tyrolean and
Bavarian peasants down from their mountain farms. What did these men
know or care about Belgrade, or Prussia’s wide ambitions? What to them
was “the fate-appointed world-task of Germany, under the sacred dynasty
of the Hohenzollern”? They were summoned, and they obeyed the summons.
If the women who talk so glibly about the pleasure men take in fighting
had seen these conscripts saying good-bye to their wives and children,
and marching off, grave, silent, sad, they might revise their notions
of military enthusiasm. Madame Rosika Schwimmer of Budapest said before
a convention in Nashville that, had her countrywomen been represented
in the government, there would have been no war. The remark was
received with an enthusiasm which indicates some ignorance concerning
Hungary’s position and power. But did Madame Schwimmer’s audience
believe that _all_ her countrywomen hated war, and _all_ her countrymen
desired it? And how many of these countrymen, did Nashville think, had
any choice in the matter?
When we turn from the attack to the defence, from the assailants to
the assailed, we find as little room for “fascination” as for peace.
The war was carried with incredible vigour and speed to the thresholds
of French and Belgian homes. It was not precisely a tournament, in
which battle-loving knights rode prancing and curveting to the fray.
It was the older and simpler story of a land swept by invasion, and of
men fighting and dying for all that belonged to them on earth. Do the
American women who prate about the wrong done to womanhood by war ever
reflect that it is for wife and child, as well as for home and country,
that men are bound to die? What history do they read which does not
teach them this truth, which does not tell it over and over again, to
interpret the story of the nations?
In the town of Lexington, Massachusetts, where was shed the first blood
spilled in the Revolution, there slept peacefully on the morning of
April 19, 1775, a young man named Jonathan Harrington. To him in the
early dawn came his widowed mother, who aroused him, saying, “Jonathan,
Jonathan, wake up! The Regulars are coming, and something must be
done.” The something to be done was plain to this young American, who
had never fought, nor seen fighting, in his life. He rose, dressed,
took his musket, joined the little group of townsmen on the Common,
and fell before the first volley fired by the British soldiers. His
wife (he had been married less than a year) ran to the door. He crawled
across the Common, bleeding heavily, and died on his threshold at her
feet.
It is a very simple incident, and it holds all the elements which make
for national life. A cause to support, a man to support it, a woman to
call for help when the supreme moment comes. Something like it must
have happened over and over again in the blood-soaked land of Belgium.
Yet we find women to-day talking and writing as if none of their sex
had anything at stake in the defence of their violated homes, as if
they had no sacred rights bound up with the sacred rights of men.
The National American Woman Suffrage Association sent an appeal to
organized suffragists all over the world, urging them to “arise in
protest, and show war-crazed men that between the contending armies
there stand thousands of women and children who are the innocent
victims of man’s unbridled ambitions.”
There was no word in this appeal to indicate that any nobler--and
humbler--sentiment than unbridled ambition (which, after all, is for
the very few) animates the soldier’s heart. There was no distinction
drawn between aggressive and defensive warfare. There was no hint
that men bear their full share of the sufferings caused by war. The
assumption that women endure all the pain is in accordance with the
assumption that men enjoy all the pleasure. To write as though battle
were a game, played by men at the expense of women, is childish and
irrational. We Americans are happily spared the sight of mangled
soldiers lying in undreamed-of agony on the frozen field. We do not
see the ghastly ambulance trains jolting along with their load of
broken, tortured men; or the hospitals where these wrecks are nursed
back to some poor remnant of life, or escape through the merciful gates
of death. But we might read of these things; we might visualize them
in moments of comfortable leisure, and take shame to our souls at the
platform eloquence which so readily assumes that the sorrows of war
are hidden in women’s hearts, that the burdens of war are laid upon
women’s shoulders, that women are sacrificed in their helplessness to
the hatred and the ambitions, the greed and the glory of men.
If by any chance a word of regret is expressed for the soldier who dies
for his country, it is always because he is the son of his mother,
or the husband of his wife, or the father of his child. He is never
permitted an entity of his own. It is curious that the same women who
clamour for a recognition of their individual freedom should assume
these property rights in men. Dr. Anna Shaw has commented sarcastically
upon a habit (one of many bad habits) which she has observed in
the unregenerate sex. They speak of their womenkind in terms of
relationship; they use the possessive case. They say, “my wife,” “my
sister,” “my daughter,” “my mother,” “my aunt,” instead of “Jane,”
“Susan,” “Mary Ann,” “Mrs. Smith,” “Miss Jones.” Apparently Dr. Shaw
does not hear women say, “my husband,” “my brother,” “my son,” “my
father,” “my uncle”; or, if she does, this sounds less feudal in her
ears. Advanced feminists have protested against the custom of “branding
a woman at marriage with her husband’s name.” Even the convenience of
such an arrangement fails to excuse its arrogance.
Yet we are bidden to protest against the wickedness of all war, not
because men die, but because wives are widowed; not because men slay,
but because mothers are childless; not because men do evil, or suffer
wrong, but because, in either case, women share the consequences. For
the sake of these women, war must cease, is the cry; as though the vast
majority of men would not be glad enough to be rid of war for their own
sake. They do not covet loss of income and destruction of property.
They do not gladly aspire to an armless or legless future. Not one of
them really wants a shattered thigh, or a bullet in his abdomen. And,
in addition to these (perhaps selfish) considerations, we might do
them the justice to remember that they are not destitute of natural
affection for their wives and children; but that, on the contrary,
the safeguarding of the family is, and has always been, a powerful
factor in war. It lent a desperate courage to the Belgian soldier who
saw his home destroyed; it nerved the arm of the French soldier who
knew his home in peril. The killing of the first women and children at
Scarborough sent a host of tardy volunteers into the British army. Such
indiscriminate slaughter, though it represents a negligible loss to a
nation, is about the only thing on earth which the least valiant men
cannot stomach.
“The Turk, not squeamish as a rule,
No special glee betrayed,
And even Mr. Bernard Shaw
Failed to commend the raid.”
The Lusitania children, lying in pitiful rows to await identification
in Queenstown, little meek and sodden corpses buffeted out of
comeliness by the waves, awoke in the hearts of the men who looked at
them a passion of anger and hate which life is too short to appease.
The brutal shooting of an English nurse was followed by an illogical
rush of young Englishmen to the colours. And the mere fact that scores
of writers, commenting on Edith Cavell’s death, harkened back to the
beheading of Alice Lisle, proves the imperishable nature of the infamy
attached to a deed, which to Judge Jeffreys, as to General Baron von
Bissing, seemed the most reasonable thing in the world.
The outbreak of the war was seized upon as a strong argument for
diametrically opposite views. A small and hardy minority kicked up
its heels and shouted, “Women cannot fight. Why should they control a
land they are powerless to defend?” A large and sentimental majority
lifted up its eyes to Heaven, and answered, “If women had possessed
their rights, all would now be smiling and at peace.” And neither of
these contending factions took any trouble to ascertain and understand
the rights and wrongs of the conflict. People who pin their faith to a
catchword never feel the necessity of understanding anything.
Here, for example, is a violent pacifist in the “Woman’s Journal,”
who, to the oft-repeated assertion that women, when they have the
vote, “will compel governments to settle their disputes before an
international court of arbitration,” adds this unwarranted statement:
“The women of the world have no quarrel with one another. They do not
care whether or not Austria maintains its power over the Balkan States;
whether or not France obtains revenge for the defeats of 1870; whether
Germany or England gains supremacy in the world market.”
This good lady does not seem to know what happened in August, 1914.
France did not proclaim war upon Germany. Germany proclaimed war upon
France. France did not attack,--for revenge, or for any other motive.
She was attacked, and has been fighting ever since with her back to the
wall in defence of her own soil.
It is possible for an American woman to have no quarrel with any one,
no knowledge of what Europe is quarrelling about, and no human concern
as to which nations win. But she should not think, and she certainly
should not say, that the women of the warring lands are equally
ignorant, and equally unconcerned. To the Serbian woman the freedom
of Serbia is a precious thing. The French woman cares with her whole
soul for the preservation of France. The Belgian woman can hardly be
indifferent to the ultimate fate of Belgium. It is even possible that
the English and German women are not prepared to clasp one another’s
hands and say, “We are sisters, and it matters nothing to us whether
England or Germany wins.” The pitfall of the feminist is the belief
that the interests of men and women can ever be severed; that what
brings suffering to the one can leave the other unscathed.
What are the qualities demanded of women in every great national
crisis? First of all, intelligence. They should have some accurate
knowledge of what has happened, some clear understanding of the events
they so glibly discuss. There are documents in plenty to enlighten
them. Those tense summer months in which the war was nursed in secrecy,
are now no longer secret. We know where the bantling was cradled, we
know what ambitions speeded it on its evil way, and we have watched
every step of its progress. To condemn all Europe in terms of easy
reprobation, to clamour for peace without recognition of justice,
is but inconsequent chatter. It leaves vital issues untouched, and
rational minds unmoved. The sternest words uttered since the beginning
of the war were spoken by the London “Tablet,” in reprobation of those
American peace-mongers who could not be brought to understand that
the hope of the Englishwoman’s heart is that the man whom she has
lost,--husband, son, or brother,--should not have died in vain.
Next to intelligence, a woman’s most valuable asset is a reasonable
modesty. She is terribly hampered by a conviction of her own goodness.
It gets in her way at every step, clouding her naturally clear
perceptions, and clogging her naturally keen conscientiousness. She is
wrong in assuming with Miss Addams that she feels a “peculiar moral
passion of revolt against both the cruelty and the waste of war.”
She is wrong in assuming with Madame Schwimmer that she “supplants
physical courage with moral courage,” when she calls noisily for peace.
There are men in plenty who feel the moral passion of revolt quite as
keenly as do the most sensitive of women; but who also feel the moral
responsibility of defending the safety of their country, the sacredness
of their homes. The moral courage demanded of every soldier is fully as
great as the physical courage, at which women dare to sneer. It is not
a light thing to give up life,--“Greater love hath no man than this,
that he lay down his life for his friends;”--yet death is the least of
the horrors which soldiers daily face.
The third and most vital thing asked of women in these dread days
is self-sacrifice. They must give their share of help, they must
bear their share of sorrow. They cannot dignify their reluctance to
do this by calling it moral revolt, or moral courage, or any other
high-sounding name. They cannot claim for themselves a loftier virtue
on the score of their lower hardihood. Civic morality consists in
putting the good of the state above the good of the individual. It
has no other test. If women are, as they say, responsible for the
conservation of human life, they should hold themselves responsible
for the ennobling of human life, for the cherishing of some finer
instinct than that of self-preservation. On the body of a young French
lieutenant who was killed at Vermelles, there was found a letter to his
wife, which contained this pregnant sentence: “Promise not to begrudge
me to France, if she takes me altogether.” These few words are an
epitome of patriotism. Husband and wife gave to their country all they
had to give; the one his life, the other her love; and both knew that
there is something better than human life and love.
In the genial reign of Henry the Eighth, a docile Parliament passed,
at the desire of the King, an “Act to abolish Diversity of Opinion.”
President Wilson, less despotic, has recommended something of the same
order as a mental process, a soul-smothering, harmony-preserving,
intellectual anodyne. It is called neutrality, and if it has failed
to save us from shameful insults and repeated wrongs, it has kept
us fairly quiet under provocation. The only authorized outlet for
our emotions has been a prayer (conditions not mentioned) for
peace. Because we have schooled ourselves to witness injustice--and
occasionally suffer it--without undue resentment, and without reprisal,
our reward in money has been very great; and we have kept on terms with
our own souls by giving back to desolate Europe a little of the wealth
we drew from her. Our position has always been a tenable one, and no
nation has had any ground on which to censure us; but we have found in
it scant encouragement for self-esteem. Even the flowers of domestic
oratory, the oft-repeated assertion that our prudence and our wealth
make us respected on earth, and blessed in the sight of Heaven, fail
to quicken our sad hearts. For, from over the sea, comes a cry which
sounds like the echo of words with which we were once familiar, of
which we were once proud. “With firmness in the right, as God gives us
to see the right, let us strive on to finish the work we are in.”
This is the potent voice of humanity, never to be silenced while men
stay men. The “work” was bloody work; brother slaying brother on the
battlefield. The women of the North and the women of the South bore
their share of sorrow. They did not assert that they were victims of
men’s unbridled ambition, and they never intimated to one another
that the final victory was to them a matter of unconcern. Theirs was
the “solemn pride” of sacrifice; and that fine phrase, dedicated by
Mr. Lincoln to the woman who had sent five sons to the conflict, is
applicable to thousands of mothers to-day. The writer knows a young
Frenchman who, when the war broke out, had lived for some years in this
country, and hoped to make it his permanent home. To him his mother
wrote: “My son, your two brothers are at the front. Are you not coming
back to fight for France?” The lad had not meant to go. Perhaps he
coveted safety. Perhaps he held life (his life) to be a sacred thing.
Perhaps he thought to comfort his mother’s old age. But when that
letter came, he sailed on the next steamer. It was a summons that few
men, and certainly no Frenchman, could deny.
When the women of France refused to participate in the International
Congress of Women at The Hague, they defined their position in a
document so dignified, so lucid, and so logical, that it deserves to
be handed down to future ages as an illustration of inspired common
sense lifted to the heights of heroism. Let no one who reads it ever
deny that women are capable of clear thinking, of sane and balanced
judgment. In contrast to the vague and formless peace-talk which came
floating over to us from Holland, and has been re-echoed ever since;
talk which starting from no definite premises has reached no just
conclusions, the clear utterances of these French women rang with
insistent exactitude. They rejected all sentimental abstractions, and
presented in a concrete form the circumstances which had pushed France
into the conflict, and which held her still at bay. “It were treason
to think of peace, until that peace can consecrate the principles of
right.”
The rationality of the French mind, the essentially practical nature
of the French genius, are responsible for the form of this historic
document; but back of the form lies the spirit, and the spirit is one
of sustained self-sacrifice. “To-day it is with pride we wear our
weeds; it is with gratitude that we perpetuate the memory of our dead.”
At a time when every franc could buy some sorely needed supply, when
every hour could be filled with some sorely needed service, sensible
Frenchwomen refused to spend both money and time in journeying to
The Hague for the dear delights of talking. But deeper than their
reluctance to do a wasteful thing was their reluctance to do a
treasonable thing, to put the comforts of peace above the sacrifices
entailed by war, to refuse by word or deed their share of a common
burden.
It is absurd to suppose that these brave and suffering women do not
feel a moral revolt against the cruelty and the waste of war quite
as sharply as does Miss Addams, or any Hague delegate, or any one of
Mr. Ford’s tourists. The “basic foundation of home and of peaceful
industry” is as dear to them as to the American women who talk so
much about it. As a matter of fact, it is their devotion which holds
together the shattered homes of France, their industry which preserves
economic safety, and gives food and shelter to the destitute. And
through terrible months of pain and privation, we have heard from the
lips of Frenchwomen no wild and weak complaints. Never once have they
assumed that they were better and nobler than their husbands and sons
who died for the needs of France.