"_Dobro!_"
She nodded recognition of both my "remark" and appreciation of her work.
To show the woman that I knew what I was talking about, I took the plow
out of her hands and drew a furrow myself. It was her turn to say:
"_Dobro!_"
The fact that she limited her conversation to this word, as I was
obliged to do, showed that she was a woman of understanding.
When I was back at the road I shook hands with the woman and her child
and hurried off to Adelsberg, where General Boreovic, commander of the
Austro-Hungarian Fifth Army, expected me for dinner.
"Ah, she is a worker," said the old veteran, as I mentioned the incident
to him. "Her husband is dead, you know. Was killed in the war. She is a
remarkable woman. I have talked to her several times. She is worth a
dozen of anything in skirts you can find in Vienna, or anywhere else,
for that matter."
I thought so, too, and think so yet, and, _Deo volente_, I will picture
the plow-woman better some other time.
In the Manfred Weiss works at Budapest thousands of women are engaged in
the manufacture of ammunition. The little girls and older women who
watched the infantry-ammunition machines did not greatly interest me.
They were all neatly dressed and did no more than watch the mechanical
contrivances that made cartridge-cases out of sheets of brass and
bullet-casings out of sheets of nickel-steel.
In the shell department of the establishment I saw quite another class
of women.
They were large and brawny and strong enough to handle the huge
white-hot steel nuggets with ease. By means of a crane two of them would
seize one of the incandescent ingots, swing it under the trip-hammer,
and then leave the fate of the shell in the making to two others, who
would turn the thing from side to side, while a fifth operated the
hammer itself.
At the far end of the shed, in flame-raked gloom, other women of the
same type were engaged in casting. The ladle was operated by them with a
dexterity that showed that neither strength nor skill were lacking.
These daughters of Vulcan were stripped to the waist. Their labor seemed
to be the only dress they needed. In fact, it never struck me that there
was anything unconventional about this costume--the whole and total of
which was a large leather apron and skirt of something that resembled
burlap. Nor did they seem to mind me.
It is impossible to say to what extent man's place in labor was taken by
woman in Central Europe during the war. On the farms the women had
always done much of the hard work. They had been employed in large
numbers in the factories, stores, and offices, so that it was generally
a case of employing more women instead of surrendering to them
departments which heretofore had been entirely in the hands of men. It
is true that women were working on street-car lines as conductors, and
in a few cases as drivers, and that more of them found employment in the
railroad and postal service, but the work they did was well within the
capacity of any healthy woman. Woman's work during the war was to have
results quite foreign to those immediately in prospect.
[Illustration: Photograph from Henry Ruschin