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JANUARY, 1916

WOMEN OF ENGLAND

BY REBECCA WEST

I

THE exceptional men always crowd mankind out of history, and that is why we forget from generation to generation what war is. We think of Napoleon staining the snows of Europe with his victories, and we forget the thousands of little French towns, their squares and market-places pensive with bereavement, that waited till he might be replete with triumph and return. We think of Spain magnificent at Salamanca, and we forget that in that guerilla war the nation acquired a habit of the quick spilling of blood in familiar places which made it waste the rest of the century in civil war. We think of a red-coated England charging on the field of Waterloo, and we forget that a ragged England was sweating out its life and the freedom of its class in the factories to make the wealth that paid our way to victory. And now we are blinded by the glories of Flanders and the Dardanelles, and do not see that old things are rotting and new things are being born beneath our feet. Because men are dying to maintain their national life we do not notice that this national life is changing as quickly as they die.

This spectacle of an endless stream of men filing out to die with slow, delib

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erate steps and casual smiles is so wonderful, so infinitely lacerating, that nothing else seems to matter. Indeed we do not count ourselves as living under war conditions at all, even when a Zeppelin flies overhead and drops bombs that plough up the back garden and kill the neighbors' little girl. We have learned a high standard in these matters from a certain lowering army of refugees, tearless and unremorseful in nobility although surly from nostalgia, whom we have the honor of entertaining. Until we see the skies hung with the smoke of burning villages, and have found the hand of a child in a soldier's knapsack, we shall count ourselves as snug in peace. Yet war is as devouring a thing as it always was, and all our English life is changed, and much of it destroyed.

It is the heart of our life that is devoured, the quiet, hidden places where the future is nourished: the part of the world that is the care of women. It goes unrecorded partly because they are the sex bred to inarticulateness, and partly because, when one thinks of women in wartime, the exceptional people come forward as usual to crowd out the rest of mankind. For women have done things in this war that make one glad even under the shadow of the sword.

One does not mean the women who have acquired boots, and spurs and khaki on pretexts, usually connected with nursing, and. who dodge into the firing line as often as the General Staff will let them; for the war has sharply revised one's aspirations, and one knows now that, however well built for adventure a woman may be, if she is neither a doctor nor a nurse she has no right to be at the front. It is not reverent to suffering Europe. The woman journalist who stopped amidst the bursting shells to powder her nose proved the crystal hardness of her nerve: but it is not good to demonstrate one's attractive qualities in the deathchamber of the nations. Moreover, the independent woman at the front prejudices the position of women in the same way that an abnormally skilled workman prejudices the position of his mates by working so quickly that the factory piece-rate is lowered. The spinster, who is an abnormally free woman, has no right to accustom men to the sight of women looking after themselves in danger, since there are women who cannot look after themselves because they are burdened with children. But there are unnumbered women who in that death-chamber are thinking only of the dying, who have taken part in war and yet kept themselves clean from its passion for disorganizing and harshening the fate of all human creatures.

It is wonderful that they should have been allowed to help. Before the war Lord Kitchener delighted to maintain his reputation as the strong silent man who despised women, -a reputation which he created several years ago in the Sudan by telling the War Office that if they insisted on sending him women nurses he would duck them in the Nile. The British Red Cross Society is controlled by peeresses and other powerful women of the parasite class,

and by the type of fashionable doctor whose career is a personal triumph over the rich rather than the impersonal triumph of the man of science over truth; and so as a body it showed AntiFeminist tendencies. Yet to-day the khaki ambulances with the red cross on the sides draw up at hospitals which are wholly staffed by women, and the men who are left there are not sorry. "They give a man a chance,' they say. It is an inarticulate testimony that the Victorians were wrong, and that a woman is more and not less valuable as a worker because of the slight permanent glow of sympathy which accompanies her capacity for motherhood.

And the company of British nurses, pale, school-girlishly unripe, and given to sudden giggling fits like nuns and all women of deprived lives, prove the Victorians wrong again when they conceived women's finest to be a boneless tenderness. It may be tenderness that makes them work so well in our own military hospitals, for our young men who dreamed nothing of war a year ago and now are broken by it are pitiful as a child torn by a hawk. But when they work in a ward that yesterday was a railway coal-shed, or wander on the windy dunes about a typhoid lazaretto of bathing-machines under the direction of French and Belgian doctors whose ideas of asepsis appear to them obscene, then they show themselves soldierly and possessed of hard fortitude and discipline.

And that there can be even satire in the kindness of women is shown by that most beautiful and unanswerable of feminist arguments, the hospital. organized by Mrs. St. Clair Stobart. Wherever men gather together to kill one another, the white tents of this hospital appear on the high ground above to mock the governors of men. 'When you slaves have quite finished knock

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