WHEREIN WE CONSIDER THE WOMAN PROPOSITION
It is curious how the human heart throws out homeseeking tendrils.
As we crossed the Italian frontier and came back into France, keen
longing for the Ritz--even the Ritz with its gloomy grandeur came
to me, and Henry confessed that he was glad to get back to a country
where a man could get a good refreshing bowl of onion soup! After
dinner, our first evening at the Ritz, we were looking over the
theatrical offerings advertised upon the wall by the elevator at
the hotel, when whom should we meet but "Auntie," the patrician
relative of the Gilded Youth. She recognized us in our civilian
clothes, and it fell to me to make the fool blunder of complicating
our formal greetings with gaiety. Auntie's troubled face would have
caught Henry's quick sensitive eyes. But Auntie's voice brushed
aside the levity of the opening.
"Haven't you heard--haven't you heard?" she asked. And we knew
instinctively that something had happened to the Gilded Youth. And
when one is in aviation something happening always is serious. It
was Henry's kind voice that conveyed our sympathy to her. And she
told us of the accident. Two mornings before, while making his
first flight alone, from the training camp near Paris, something
went wrong with his engine while he was but a thousand feet in the
air--and over Neuilly. He had to glide down, and being over a town
he could not make a landing. They took him from the wreck of his
plane, to the hospital near by--fortunately an American Red Cross
Hospital, where the people recognized him and sent for his aunt. All
day and all night he had lain unconscious, and at noon had opened
his eyes for a minute to find his aunt beside him. "I brought with
me," said Auntie, in a tone so significantly casual that it arrested
our attention before she added, "that capable young nurse, the
first assistant--" As she spoke she caught Henry's eyes and held
him from looking at me.
"You mean the one--" said Henry in a tone quite as casual as Auntie's
while giving eye for eye.
"Yes, your pretty mid-western girl. She is with him now." Then
Auntie lost Henry's eyes as tears brimmed into her own. "It has
been twenty-six hours since we arrived at Neuilly. I shall return
in an hour, and--"
"I wish," cried Henry, "I wish there was something we could do!"
Auntie caught our embarrassed desire to be of service yet not to
assume. Her strong fine face lighted with something kind enough
for a smile, as she answered: "Couldn't you go out and see him? I
think no one else in Paris would be more welcome than you two!"
That puzzled us. She saw us looking our question at each other,
and went on: "Life means more to him now than it ever has meant."
She really smiled as she quoted: "'It means intensely and it means
good!'" Auntie's tired eyes gathered us in again. "When you left
Landrecourt last month he told me much about the voyage over here
on the Espagne." The tired eyes left us to follow the crippled
elevator boy who went pegging down the corridor as she continued:
"about his days in Paris before he went back to his ambulance unit;
about his meeting you that night near Douaumont,--at the first aid
post and--and I know," she paused a second, pulled herself together
and continued gently. "We must face things as they are. The boy's
hours in this earth are short. He has other friends here, of course--old
friends, but you--" again she stopped. "You will appreciate why
when you see him."
So we gave up the poor travesty upon life that we should have seen
behind the footlights for a glimpse into one of life's real dramas.
It was nearly midnight before we came to Neuilly and stood awkwardly
beside the white cot in the little white room where the Gilded Youth
was lying. How the gilding had fallen off! All white and broken
he lay, a crushed wreck of a man, with the cluttering contrivances
of science swathing him, binding him, encasing him, holding him
miserably together while the tide of life ran out. But when he
wakened he could smile. There was real gilding in that smile, the
gilding of youth, but he only flashed his eyes upon us for a fleeting
second in turning his smile to her--to the Eager Soul, to her who
had brought some new incandescence into his life. Then we knew why
his aunt had said that we should see him. He would have us who had
witnessed the planting of the seed, know how it had flowered. His
smile told us that also. He could lift no hand to us, and could speak
but faintly. Yet his greeting held something princely in it--fine
and sweet and brave. Then he did a curious thing. He began whistling
very softly under his breath and between his teeth a queer little
tune, that reminded one oddly of the theme of Tschaicovski's
Symphony Pathetique--the first movement. As he whistled he turned
from Henry and me and looked at the Eager Soul, who smiled back
intelligently, and when she smiled he stopped. We could not understand
their signals. But whatever it was so far as it pretended to a show
of courage, we knew that it was a gorgeous bluff. In the fleeting
glance that he gave us, he told us the truth; and we knew that he
was pretending to the others that he did not know. We made some
cheerful nothings in our talk, and would have gone but he held us.
The Eager Soul looked at her watch, gave him some medicine, which
we took to be a heart stimulant; for he revived under it, and said
to me:
"Remember--that night at Douaumont?"
"Where you whistled the 'Meditation from Thais,' in the moonlight?"
"Yes," he murmured, "and we--watched--the trucks--come out of the
mist--full of life--and go into the mist,--toward death."
"Wonderful--wasn't it!" sighed one of us.
"Symbolic," he whispered. And our eyes followed his to the vivid
face of the Eager Soul, in the halo of her nurse's cap. She was
exceedingly glorious, and animate and beautiful. And he was passing
into the mist, out toward death. He saw that he had got the figure
to me, and smiled. Then suddenly something came into his face from
afar, and he seemed to know that his frail craft had mounted the
out-going tide. Slowly, very slowly life began to fade from his
face. Further and further from shore the tide was bearing him. We
seemed to be on the pier. The Eager Soul even leaned forward and
put out a pretty hand, and waved at him. He signalled back with a
twitch of his lips that was meant for a smile. And then we at the
pier lost the last gleam of life and saw only the broken bark,
wearily riding the racing tide.
And then we turned from the pier and went our several ways back
into the midst of life. We were going home, and getting ready to
go home is a joyous proceeding. And there was another significance
to our packing to leave Paris. It meant something more than a
homeward journey; it meant that for the first time since we left
Wichita and Emporia in midsummer we were turning our backs on war.
It took a tug to make the turn. From all over the earth the war
draws men to it like an insatiable whirlpool. And as we came nearer
and nearer to war we had felt it swallow men into its vortex--men,
customs, institutions, civilizations, indeed the age and epoch
wherein we lived, we had felt moving into chaos--into nothing,
to be reborn some day into we know not what, in the cataclysm out
there on the front. We had seen it. But seeing it had revealed
nothing. For many nights we had heard the distant roar of the
hungry guns ever clamouring for more food, for the blood of youth,
for the dreams of age, for the hopes of a race, for the creed of
an era. And we left them still ravening, mad and unsated. And we
were going away as dazed as we were when we came. But as we packed
our things in Paris, the thrall of it still gripped us and the
consciousness that we were leaving the war was as strong in our
hearts as the joy we felt at turning homeward. But we got aboard
the train and rode during the long lovely morning down the wide
rich valley of the Seine, past Rouen, through Normandy with its
steep hills which seem reflected in the sharp peaked roofs of its
chateaux, and through musty mediaeval towns, in which it was hard
to realize that modern industry was hiving. The hum of industry
seemed badly out of key in a town with a cathedral whose architectural
roots are a thousand years old, and whose streets have not yet
been veined with sewers, and whose walls are gay with the facades
of the fifteenth century. The whole face of the landscape, town and
country side, seemed to us like the back drop of the first act in
a comic opera, and we were forever listening for "The Chimes of
Normandy!" Instead we heard the noon whistle. It was tremendously
incongruous. How American humour cracks into sardonic ribaldry
at the spectacle. The French are the least bit unhappy about this
American humour. They don't entirely see it. Once outside of a
poor French village near the war zone, that had been bombed from
the German lines, bombed from the German airships and ravaged by
fire and sword, some American soldiers, looking at the desolation
and the ruin of the place, so grotesque in its gaping death, so
hopeless in its pitiful finality, painted on a large white board,
and nailed on a sign post just at the edge of the town this slogan:
"Watch Commercy Grow! Boost for the Old Town!"
But in that flash of humour the tragedy of Commercy stood revealed
clearer than in a flood of tears!
We came at the end of the morning "to a port in France." From there
we were to take the boat for England. And it seemed to us that the
whole place was bent on the same errand. English soldiers going home
on leave jammed the streets. They filled the hotels; they crowded
into the shops. And the whole town was made over for them. "French
Spoken Here" was the facetious sign someone had stuck on a postcard
shop near the grey old church on the main thoroughfare. It is
curious how the English put their trade mark upon the places they
occupy. These French ports filled with British soldiers look more
English than England. The English demand their own cooking, their
own merchandise, their own tobacco, their own beer--which is stale,
flat and unprofitable enough these days--and they demand their
native speech. When he gets in sight of his native land the British
Tommy quits saying "Donny mo-i, de tabac! Ma'mselle!" But bellows
forth both loud and long, "I say, Lizz, gimme some makin's! and
look alive, please!" So when we went to bed in our boat in a French
port, and slept through a submarine zone, and waked up in an English
port, there was no vast difference in the places. Today Southampton
and Dover are much like Calais and Havre; for there the English
do most congregate. But back of the French ports it is all France,
and back of the English ports is England, and worlds lie between
them. England, as one rides through it who lives beyond the seas,
and uses the English tongue, always must seem like the unfolding of
an old, old dream. England gives her step-children the impression
that they have seen it all before! And they have; in Mother Goose,
in Dickens, in Shakespeare, in Thackeray, in Trollope, in the songs
of British poets, in the landscapes of British artists! At every
turn of the road, in every face at the window, in every hedgerow
and rural village is the everlasting reminder that we who speak
the English tongue are bound with indissoluble links of our foster
memories from the books and the arts, to ways of thinking and
living and growing in grace that we call English. It is more than
a blood or breed, more even than a civilization, is this spiritual
inheritance that comes from this English soil; it is the realization
in life of a philosophy, the dramatization of a human creed.
It may be understood, but not defined, yet it is as palpable and
substantial in this earth as any material fact. Germany knows what
this English philosophy means; and for half a century Germany has
been preparing to combat it. Napoleon knew it, and believed in
it, when he declared three-fourths of every fact is its spiritual
value. France has it, new Russia is struggling for it. American
life has it as an ancient inheritance, and as we Americans rode
through the green meadows of England up from the coast to London,
for ever reviewing familiar scenes and faces and aspects of life
that we had never seen before, we realized how much closer than
blood or geography or politics men grow who hold the same creed.
So Henry, feeling that restraints no longer were necessary when
we were as near home as England, began fussing with an Englishman
about something a speaker had said in parliament the day before.
We may love the French, like the ladies, God bless 'em! But we
quarrel only with the English.
When we came to London we saw, even as we whirled through the
grey old streets, surface differences between London and the other
capitals of the Allies, so striking that they were marked contrasts.
These differences marked the different reactions of personal loss
upon the different nations. France expresses her loss in mourning;
she relieves her emotions in visible grief. Italy does this also;
but her losses have been smaller than the French losses and Italy's
sorrow is less in evidence than is the woe of France. But England's
master passion in this war is pride. "In proud and loving memory"
is a phrase that one sees a hundred times every day in the obituary
notices of those who have died for England. Ambassador Page tells
this: He was asking a British matron about her family, severally,
and when he inquired about the son, she replied, "Haven't you
heard of the new honour that has come to us through him?" And to
her friend's negative she returned: "He has been called upon to die
for England!" Now that seems rather French in its dramatics than
British. Yet it reflects exactly the British attitude. The women wear
no mourning. They do not go about in bright colours by any means.
Bright colours in the war distinguish the men. But the women do wear
dark blues, lavenders and purples, dark wine colours and neutral
tints of various hues. The shop windows of London are bright. There
is a faint re-echo of the time when Great Britain said, "Business
as usual." The busy life, the shopping crowds, the street throngs,
and the heavy streams of trade that flow through the highways of
London, prove that London still is a great city--the greatest city
in the world: and even the war, black and dread and horrible as it
is, cannot overcome London, entirely. Something of the fact that
she is the world's metropolis, more permanent than the war, somewhat
apart from the war, and indeed above it, still lingers in the London
consciousness, however remotely.
One must not imagine that London is unchanged. It is greatly changed,
for the men are gone. One sees fewer men in London out of uniform
than in Paris. And the Londoners one does see, all appear to be
hurrying about war work. But it is the women constantly in evidence
who have changed the face of London. Women keep the shops, conduct
the busses, run the street cars, drive the trucks, sit on the seats
of the horse-drays, deliver freight, manage railway trains, sweep
the streets, wait on the tables, pull elevator ropes, smash baggage
at the railway stations, sell tickets, usher at the theaters,
superintend factories, make munitions, lift great burdens before
forges, plough, reap, and stack grain and grass on farms, herd
sheep in waste places, hew wood and draw water, and do all of the
world's work that man has ever done. Now, of course, women are
doing these things elsewhere in the world. But London and England
are man's domain. It seems natural to see the French women, and even
the Italian women at work. Man is more or less the leisure class
on the continent. But London is a man's town if on earth there is
one, and to see women everywhere in London is a curious and baffling
sight.
Of course the men are not all dead--"they're just away." And
they come back on leave. But life is not normal. War is abnormal,
and there is an ever-urging desire of life to assume its normal
function. So all over Europe we heard whispers about the moral
break-down among the women of England. In England we were asked
about the dreadful things that were happening in France. The things
that were happening in France were not essentially evil things. One
could imagine that if God thinks war is necessary for the solution
of the world's terrible problems, He will have no trouble forgiving
these lapses that follow in the wake of war in France. And in
England, similarly we found that the moral break-down was not a
moral break-down at all. The abnormal relation of the sexes arising
out of war produced somewhat the same results that one found in
France, but in different ways. In France too many strange men are
billeted in the houses of the people. In England, too many homes
are without men at all. And sheer social lonesomeness produces in
humanity about the same conditions that arise when people are thrown
in too close contact. There is a sort of social balance of nature,
wherein normally desirable results are found. The girl working in
the munition factories, working at top speed eight hours a day,
filled with a big emotional desire to do her full duty to her
country every second of the day, finds it easy in her eight hours
of rest to fall in love with a soldier who is going out to offer
his life for the country for which she is giving her strength
so gladly. She is not a light woman. She is moved by deep and
beautiful emotions. And if a marriage before he goes out to fight
is inconvenient or impossible--the war made it so, and God will
understand. Of course the idle woman, the vain woman, the foolish
woman in these times in England finds ample excuse for her folly
and vast opportunity to indulge her folly in the social turmoil of
the war. And she is going the pace. Her men are gone, who restrain
her, and she has nothing in her head or her heart to hold, and she
is in evidence. Her type always exaggerates its importance, and
fools people into thinking that her name is Legion, and that Mr.
Legion is an extensive polygamist, with a raft of daughters and
sisters and cousins and aunts. But she is small in numbers and she
is not important. She is merely conspicuous, and the moral break-down
in England, that one hears of in the baited breath of the continent,
is an illusion.
The elevator girl at Bucklands Hotel in London was a bright,
black-eyed, good looking woman in her late twenties. She wore a
green uniform with a crimson voile boudoir cap and as the American
stepped inside the slow-going car, she answered his "good morning"
with a respectful, "good morning, sir." Being a good traveller, it
seemed to me wise to prepare to while away the tedium of the long
easy journey to the fourth floor with a friendly chat.
"Any of your relatives in the war?" This from me by way of an
ice-breaker.
"Yes, sir, my husband, sir," she replied as she grasped the cable.
She gave it a pull, and added "--or he was, sir. He's home now,
sir!"
"On leave?"
"O no, sir, he's wounded, sir--he lost his left arm at the shoulder,
sir, and he's going down to Roehampton today, sir, to see if they
can teach him some kind of a trade there, sir," answered the woman.
The wonders of Roehampton where they re-educate the cripples of war
and turn them out equipped with such trades as their maimed bodies
may acquire had been displayed for Henry and me the day before.
"Tell him to try typewriting and stenography, one armed men are
doing wonders with that down at Roehampton. Any children?"
"Two, sir," she answered as the elevator approached the mezzanine
floor, "three and five, sir!"
"Three and five--well, well, isn't that fine! Aren't you lucky!
Tell him to try that stenography; that will put him in an office
and he'll have a fine chance to rise there. You must give them an
education--a good one; send them to College. If they're going to
get on in this new world they will need every ounce of education
you can stuff into them. But it will be a splendid thing for both
of you working for that. Is education expensive in England?"
"Very, sir. I hardly see how we can do it, sir!"
"That's too bad--now in our country education, from the primer to
the university, is absolutely free. The state does the whole business
and in my state they print the school books, and more than that they
give a man a professional education, too, without tuition fees--if
he wants to become a lawyer or a doctor or an engineer or a chemist
or a school teacher!"
"Is that so, sir," the cable was running through her hands as she
spoke. Then she added as the elevator passed the second floor, "If
we could only have that here, sir. If we only could, sir!"
"Well, it will come. That's the next revolution you want to start
when you women get the ballot. Abolish these class schools like
Eton and Harrow and put the money into better board schools. All
the kids in my town, and in my state, and in my whole section of
the country go to the common schools. Children should start life
as equals. There is no snobbery so cruel as the snobbery that marks
off childhood into classes! When you women vote here, the first
thing to do is to smash that nonsense. But in the meantime keep
the kids in school."
"We've talked that all over," she answered. "And we're certainly
going to try. He'll have his pension, and I'll have this job and
he'll learn a trade and I think we can manage, sir!" The "sir" came
belated.
"Go to it, sister, and luck to you," cried her passenger as he rose
from his bench. The car was nearing the fourth floor.
"We shall," she answered; "no fear of that." She stopped the car,
and they smiled as friends as she let him out of the door. "Well--good
morning," she said as he turned down the corridor. The "sir" had
left entirely when they reached the fourth floor. And all the women
of Europe, excepting perhaps those still behind the harem curtains
in Turkey and Germany of whom we know nothing, are dropping the
servile "sir" and are emerging into life at the fourth floor as
human beings.
It may be well to digress a moment in this narrative, from our purely
martial adventure, that we may consider for a few pages the woman
question as it is affected by the war. To me, if not to Henry,
who is highly practical, it seemed that in France and Italy, but
particularly in England, the new Heaven and the new earth that is
forming during this war, has created a new woman. Indeed the European
woman of the war is almost American in her liberty.
"European women," said a former American grand dame of the old order,
sipping tea with me at an embassy in the dim lit gorgeousness of
a mediaeval room, "are of two kinds: Those who are being crucified
by the war, and those who are abusing the new found liberties which
war has brought them!"
"Liberties?" asked her colloquitor; not Henry. He had no patience
with these theoretical excursions into speculative realms. "Liberties
rather than privileges?"
"Yes, liberties. Privileges are temporary," purred the lady at
the embassy. "They come and go, but the whole trouble with this
new situation is that it is permanent. That also is part of the
crucifixion of those who suffer under it. These women never again
can return to the lives they have left, to the sheltering positions
from which the awful needs of this war have driven them. The
cultivated European woman, who I think on the whole was the highest
product of our civilization, has gone. She has fallen to the American
level."
"And the continental mistress system," prodded her American
interviewer, ironically, "will it, too, disappear with the departed
superiority of continental womanhood?"
"Yes, the mistress system too--if you want to call it a system--and
I suppose it is an institution--it too will become degraded and
Americanized."
"Americanized?" the middle western eyebrows went up, and possibly
the middle western voice flinched a little. But the wise dowager
from Bridgeport, Connecticut, living in Paris on New York Central
bonds, continued bitterly: "Yes, Americanized and vulgarized. The
continental mistress system is not the nasty arrangement that you
middle class Americans think it is. Of course there are European
men who acquire one woman after another, live with her a few months
or a few years and forget her. Such men are impossible."
She waved away the whole lady-chasing tribe with a contemptuous
hand.
"But the mistress system as we know it in Europe is the by-product
of a leisure class. Men and women marry for business reasons. The
women have their children to love, the man finds his mistress, and
clings to her for a lifetime. He cannot afford to marry her--even
if he could be divorced; for he would have to work to support her,
and be declassed. But he can support her on his wife's money and a
beautiful life-long friendship is thus cherished. It will disappear
when men have to work, and when women may go into the world to work
without losing their social positions. And this new order, this
making the world safe for democracy, as you call it, will rob
civilization of its most perfect flower--the cultivated woman who
has developed under the shelter of our economic system. I might as
well shock your bourgeois morals now as later. So listen to this.
Here is one of the ways the women of Europe are suffering. I talked
to a French mother this morning. Her income is gone--part of it
taxed away, and the rest of it wiped away by the Germans in Northern
France. Her son has only a second lieutenant's income. In this
chaos she can find no suitable wife for him. One who is rich today,
tomorrow may be poor, so the dear fellow may not marry. And he
is looking for a mistress, and his mother fears he will pick up a
fool; for only a fool would take him on a lieutenant's salary. And
the weeping mother told me she would almost as soon that her son
should have no mistress as to have a fool! For a man's mistress does
make such a difference in his life! My friend is almost willing
to let him marry some bright poor girl and go to work! The world
never will know the suffering the women of Europe are enduring in
this war!"
Now we may switch off that record with the snort of woe which
Henry gave when he heard it. He was trying to tell a Duchess about
prohibition in Kansas, who had never heard of either Kansas or
prohibition and who was clearly scandalized at what she heard of
both. But Henry's other ear was open to what the embassy ornament
was saying to me. On the other side of this record of the swan song
of the lady of the embassy is this record. It is a man's voice. The
man has risen from an American farm, hustled his way into a place
where as manager of the London factory of an American concern, he
works several hundred employees.
"Say, let me tell you something--never again! Never again for mine
do the men come back into our shop. We may let a dozen or so of
'em back to handle the big machines. But the next size, which we
thought that only men could handle--never again. And when they come
back these men will have to work under women foremen. We thought
when the war took our men bosses away that we should have to close
the shop. But say--never again, I tell you. And let me give you a
pointer. You wouldn't know them girls. When the war broke out they
were getting ten shillings--about $2.50 a week, the best of 'em,
and they were mean and slovenly and kind of skinny and dirty, and
every once in awhile one would drop out, and the other girls had
a great joke about her--you know. And they would soak the shop
whenever they got a chance! The boss had to keep right after 'em,
or they'd soldier on the job or break a machine, or slight the
product, and they'd lie--why, man, the whole works would stand up
and lie for each other against the shop. It took five men to boss
them where we have one woman doing it now. And say, it ain't the
woman boss that's done it. We pay 'em more. Them same girls is
getting ten and twelve and fifteen bucks a week now--Lawsee, man--you
ought to see 'em! Dressed up to kill; fat, cheerful, wide-awake!
Goddlemighty, man, you wouldn't know 'em for that same measly bunch
of grouches we had three years ago. And they work for the shop now,
and not against it. They're different girls. I wouldn't-a believed
ten dollars a week would-a turned the trick; but it's sure done
it."
"Perhaps," suggested his acquaintance, "the girls are cheerful and
competent because they aren't afraid of poverty. Maybe they are
motived by hope of getting on in the world and not motived by the
terror of slipping down. Does that not make them stand by the shop
instead of working against it? Isn't it a developed middle class
feeling that accepts the shop as 'their kind of people' now?"
"Search me, Cap--I give it up. I just only know what I know and
see what I see. And never again--you hear me, man--never again does
our shop go back to men. The ten or twelve dollar skirt has made
a hit with me! Have a cigarette?"
The net gain of women in this war, all over the world is, of course,
a gain in fellowship.
But after all fellowship will be futile if it does not bear fruit.
And the first fruit of the fellowship between men and women in
Europe surely will be a wider and deeper influence of women upon
the destinies of the European world. And who can doubt who knows
woman, that her influence will be thrown first and heaviest toward
a just and lasting peace.
Often while we were in London, during the last days of our stay,
when the meaning of the war gradually was forming in our minds we
talked of these things. There are two Henrys--one, the owner of a
ten-story building in Wichita, the editor of a powerful and profitable
newspaper; the other a protagonist, a sentimental idealist. To me
this was his greatest charm--this infinite variety of Henrys that
was forever turning up in our discourse. The owner of the Beacon
building and the publisher of the newspaper had small use for my
theories about the importance of the rise of woman into fellowship
with men in the new democratization of the world. He refused to see
the democratization of the world in the war. To him the war meant
adjustment of boundaries, economic advantages, and realignments of
political and commercial influence on the map of the world. But
to the other Henry, to the crusader whom I had seen many times
setting out on the quest for the grail in politics, throwing away
his political fortunes for a cause and a creed as lightly as a man
would toss aside a cigar stub, the war began to mean something more
than its military expression.
And one night as we sat in our room waiting for dinner a letter
came up from the Eager Soul, with some trinkets she had sent over
to us by messenger to take to her mother in Denver. After telling
us the news of the hospital, and of Auntie and of the wound in the
Young Doctor's hand, she wrote:
"O how I hate war--hate it--hate it! And this war of all wars, I
hate it worst. It is so ruthless, so inexorably cruel; so utterly
meaningless, viewed at close range. Yesterday they brought me into
Northern France, and I spent the twilight last night looking over
the ruins of the local church. It is the most important small church
in Northern France and contains one of the earliest ribbed vaults
in France, they say. It was built about 1100, and now the thing
is smashed. It is what our artillerymen call a one-shot church. O
the waste of it--churches, men, homes, creeds! How many one-shot
creeds have perished in this hell-fire! Still out of the old I
suppose the new will come. But I have talked to women, to peasant
women in their homes, to noble women in hospitals; to women
in their shops and women on the farms, and I know that if the new
world brings them as its heritage, only the enlarged comradeship
they are taking with men in this time of suffering, then one thing
is sure: We women will strike an awful blow at future wars! The
womanhood of the past, someway, is like these sad, broken churches
of France. It is shattered and gone, and in its ruins we see its
exquisite beauty, its ineffable grace, its symbolism of a faith
that once sufficed. But it will not be restored. We shall build
new temples; we shall know new women. The old had to go, that the
new might come. And our new women and our new temples shall be
dedicated, not merely to faith, not merely to beauty, not merely to
adoration but to service, to service and comradeship in the world."
As he finished reading the letter Henry's eyes glistened. Its
emotion had awakened the crusader, who said gently: "Well, Bill,
I presume it is the potential mother in every woman that makes her
worth while. And if this war will only harness motherhood to the
public conscience, the net gain will be worth the war, however it
is settled."