PRESERVATION PHOTOCOPY: ORIGINAL MATERIAL RESTRICTED

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in the "Women's War Relief Corps" and advised, women workers of all societies, and soon found its doors besieged not only by those who were working full time or over time, but by the least likely specimens of the ancient resident clamouring for opportunities of service.

And girls and women to whom life had hitherto offered no special training or discipline, and whose motives in coming to France may have been mixed were transformed immediately into workers first-rate both for conscience and efficiency. So many of the young have thus made good that the present 25-year age limit often seems mistaken.

I have a Red Cross secretary in mind of whom her chief said that she had "done more than any ten men" to put over the emergency hospitalization which developed out of the Spring offensive. But long before that violent purgation, and long before the American Embassy began to demand from all organizations, as it has done since March, a monthly report on their personnel - qualifications for work, number of hours of service, etc., thus regulating the renewal of passports - the higher powers, both French and American had decided that the American woman was well worth her place on the ships.

The majority of the older American societies - largely directed and carried on by women - which had been keeping the name of America green in France for three years, had been engaged in relief and reconstruction for the French civilian population; certain of them, founded primarily for the wounded like the A.F.F.W., had largely dropped hospital for reconstruction work in the liberated regions last Autumn. Most of them became merged or associated with the Civilian Affairs Department of the A.R.C. during the Autumn and Winter of 1917-1918; and very naturally a considerable part of the new effort

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of the American women went also into civilian work in the case of the Y.M.C.A., which struck out an entirely line, it took the form of canteens and clubs for the French women of the munitions plants.

The strictly military work in which American women began at once to engage was Y.M.C.A., canteen work for the A.E.F., and A.R.C., canteen work for the French Army. The leaders of the Y.M.C.A., were always convinced of the necessity of sending women into the camps and cantonments, and their gentle insistence was soon backed by an irresistible clamour on the part of the growing A.E.F. But the organization was slow to give them places of first-rate responsibility, and fearful of their incurring risks at the front. In an article written about the 1st of May I urged that they be put on the same plane as the men secretaries. I can say four months later, that they not only are on the same plane of authority but engaged on all the activities, save only mass athletics, in which the Y.M.C.A., men engage, even that of serving chocolate in "abris" at the front. How thoroughly they have won their cause with our army as the following testimony from a Major General commanding a Division in the American Army proves:

"While the men of the Y.M.C.A. were with the troops in the front line the young women of the Y.M.C.A., were detailed with the hospitals, and the medical staff of this division bear testimony of their most efficient help during these two weeks of great strain."

"The conduct of these self-sacrificing and brave men and women who have so unhesitatingly given their services to their country, establishes a standard of prestige, exceptional courage, devotion and resource, which the commanding General particularly commends."

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The Commanding Officer of an important center of the A.E.F., showed last March a letter that he had written to the A.E.C., asking for - well, what he asked for in the way of women's service covered several type-written pages. It included an officers' mess, a hotel for transient officers, and a very large station canteen for troops and men going on leave; and when I went back to this center in July these three institutions at least had been running splendidly for several months. Such service, which was unnecessary until our army began to arrive in force, is now growing at a great pace along the American lines of communication, and the Red Cross is also undertaking at the special desire of the Commanding General of Aviation, canteen work in aviation camps on a large scale.

But the place where Red Cross women got their first army experience was as I gave just noted, in certain large French military railway centers like Chalon and Epernay. This work always made a sprong human appeal both to the "society" women and the college graduate; in the Spring it proved one of the most stern tests of nerve and character. Well before the offensive these centers were bombed every night. Then came the more severe baptism of fire and with it - the laden stretchers of wounded overflowing the hospitals, strewn over the ground in their blood and their dirt and their pain. And the canteeners, inexperienced or not, became nurses perforce.

Indeed there had been a general evolution of Red Cross women towards nursing, (And other types of hospital work, the needs of our wounded suddenly became tremendous both at the front and in Paris; and when all possible trained nurses from the army, from military and civil Red Cross work had been mobilized, relief workers and canteeners

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were transformed into nurses aids, those with a knowledge of French being especially valuable as interpreter aids for American soldiers in French hospitals. The Smith College Unit - theoretically a reconstruction unit - which worked with the American Army for some months in the Amiens region is still nursing and feeding American soldiers in another part of the Advance Zone. Many workers from the small societies have enrolled themselves in the Red Cross to enter the hospitals as aids; many Red Cross and Y.M.C.A., women have spent their Paris leave in the hospitals; and outside of Paris American women, whatever their jobs, have worked overtime doing hospital work, responding to the increasing pressure by drawing on those reserves of energy which William James told us long ago could be sounded when physical reserves were exhausted. Red Cross Women are, in fact growing more and more essential to the Army Medical Corps. And the wounded soldier finds them close at hand all through his long progress rearward - in the "Evacuation tents" where they feed him as he is brought in from the dressing station; in the Sanitary trains where they give him hot chocolate and cigarettes; in the base hospitals where they write his letters and do his errands, and in the canteens, during his convalescence again provide him with tobacco and "Movies".

Meanwhile, American women are more and more in demand with the French. The Y.M.C.A., whose A.E.F., work is steadily increasing - clubs for nurses at base hospitals, hotels for women war workers; hotels and surveillance of the "Telephone Unit" of the U.S. Signal Corps; social service for French women employed by the A.E.F., - has been asked by the French Minister of War for a large extension of its canteen work in the munitions factories, regarded as having

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a direct connection with the winning of the war. The French army
has been so converted to the presence of American women in the war
zone that one Red Cross unit has for several months been serving hot
drinks in the French trenches - at the request, of course, of the
general of the army concerned. And the American civilian workers
have still important tasks to do, tasks directly affecting the
foundations of the League of Nations.

Imagine, for instance, the emotion of a tiny rustic village lost
in the Southern French mountains, a village where no American of either
sex had ever been seen, where newspapers scarcely penetrate, when
early in April a lovely young daughter of New England arrived there
with some 60 orphan or unfortunate children of the war-zone and a few
simple and bewildered elderly Sisters. Their colony, north of Paris,
had been threatened by the advance: somebody had to guide them the
long way South and establish them in new quarters, which were all
unfurnished and ungarnished; somebody had to stay to teach and play
with the children and give general moral support. Miss — has
stayed far more remote from the events of the last four months than
if she were at home. But the village — and it is only one of many —
knows something about America. "Our peasant women do not speak of
you as "nos Alliées" said the French woman, at a Red Cross dinner, but
as "nos Amies."

The tonnage situation may permanently prevent any such feminisation of the American Bases as has taken place in the British Army, but that sex prejudice as such, is disappearing from the A.E.F., may be argued from the presence of the Telephone Unit, and of the growing force of French working women who are replacing American soldier labour

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in our salvage plants, depots, etc., and the growing force of French stenographers and English W.A.A.C.'s - an experiment due to British cooperation - who, with a certain number of American women field clerks, are replacing male field clerks in the S.O.S. - to the joy of the female clerks, and the relief of reserve officers. How many of these business men used to groan that the war could not be won without women stenographers! No one can predict what changes another six months may bring, but it seems inevitable that the war-work of American women will center more and more about the A.E.F., and that more and more women will be necessary - and those of the very best. If every woman now here had a hundred lives, our organizations could not meet men the present aching needs.

A great body of grave women in uniform marked as surely as any similar body of soldiers by the traces of their exhausting service, met in Paris the third week in August. They were mostly French, English and American, with a few Belgians, Italians, Serbs. Nothing less like a feminist demonstration could be imagined; even the mass meeting was entirely lacking in that sex-consciousness which one associates with large women's meetings at home. Indeed, to some radical Americans the Congress seemed to lead nowhere in particular; others, especially field workers found it greatly inspiring. The most tangible fruit it bore was in any case spiritual -, the communion of several nations in the common purpose to respond to an intensifying material effort and assuage an immeasurable pain.

But when Lord Derby spoke of women's war-work as a "duty" the American faces did not respond. To the American women in France her work is an opportunity, a privilege, and increasingly a special personal

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responsibility to this A.E.F., which lives and fights and dies, so far as
its great masses go, in a vast void, cut off from the family leaves and
daily letters which give a semblance of normality and continuity to the
exile of the European soldier. Every American woman in France has had
some sort of sharp revelation of this void. She may meet it, and some-
times does, with sentimentality or flirtation. She is bound to have
more glimpses of primitive instinct than she ever knew before. But she
finds herself, on the whole, supported in the best American traditions
by a great current of masculine feeling, sub-conscious on the part of the
private, often highly conscious on the part of the officer. It is this
that leaves her free to lead her charmed life of healthy human fellowship
even at the front. "Unbecoming?" said a newly arrived officer, the
other day, in reply to a feminine comment on one of the uniforms he had
been praising. "But you don't notice the *face*, all you see is that nice
colour."

There are, of course, a few irresponsibles among these daughters of
liberty and a few heroines who will go home to talk of snells and boast
of their citations; but they are a small minority. As a journalist who
has access both to the front and to the rear I should like to express my
view that if there are any real heroines, they are less likely to be
found among the women who wear gas-masks - for they are much more than
compensated for discomfort and risk by the enormous human reward inherent
in their work and by their intimate share in the dramatic side of war -
than among those who month after month clean saucepans and serve chocolate,
and create an atmosphere "in a provincial camp, or pound a typewriter from
nine till six in a Paris office. The latter will in the end stand on a
level of endurance with our French and British sisters who have had much