PRESERVATION PHOTOCOPY: ORIGINAL MATERIAL RESTRICTED

XVIII

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THE WOMAN'S SIDE OF IT.

I was surprised to meet the other day in Paris Dr. —, a children specialist, who had just been sent to Château-Thierry with a Red Cross unit to look after refugees.

"There didn't happen to be many refugees," she said, "and our wounded were simply pouring in. So I turned to, and pretty soon the Medical Officer in charge" - here her eyes twinkle a little; women doctors are not officially recognized in our army - "asked me to bring a boat load of them, as an experiment, down the Marne to Paris."

It was a twenty-four-hour trip; there were 114 wounded and a medical staff of two; one orderly, and this slight little woman with a face as brown as her khaki uniform and a vivid Texas speech. The August sun, reflected from the silver curves of the river, burned on the deck; as she went from one man to the other the doctor pulled off the blankets, spreading a newspaper here and there. After her trailed a boy with shell shock, standing dumbly at her elbow, watching her invent ways to make them comfortable, and saying once in a while:

"Doctor, what is the matter with me?" Through one of the mistakes common to war there were few food supplies in the cabin. Luckily the American Army is never far to seek; here suddenly appeared a unit of troops on the green bank. The Doctor ordered the French captain to steer close, called out her plight to the commanding officer, got everything she needed: "I tell you, everyone of those boys was fed and washed and bandaged and shaved" - yes, she even shaved them - "and happy when we got to Paris."

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The story is more typical than anyone who has not been in France a year and watched the American woman gradually winning the right to share the fortunes of the armies can know. It should be told as she told it, humourously and vigourously, with no emphasis on her personal effort, only a deep sense of the joy it had been to make 114 wounded Americans happy on the deck of a Marne canal boat. Of these women war-workers realize that they have an opportunity here, in the very midst of the conflict, such as the women of no other nation have had; and - if they are at all analytical - that they owe it less to their ability - for French and English women are no less well endowed - than to the indocility to sex discrimination, and the long habit of democratic comradeship bred by their native institutions. It is these institutions that are giving their qualities free scope.

I, at least, had never half understood the worth and thrill of my heritage until I saw it put to the test of the German offensives of the Spring and Summer: first the great army of men in olive drab, unhampered as no Europeans have ever been - that is clear enough when one sees them in relief against this ancient European background - yet ability proving their to stand on the battle-field through a free and self-imposed discipline; then the smaller army of women, no less eager to give all, no less spirited and unself-conscious in the face of any difficulty or danger that found them out in their canteens and hospitals, taking their place inevitably with their countrymen, till the steel-gray Red Cross uniform, the gray and blue of the Y.M.C.A., have come to seem an integral and essentially normal part of the A.E.F.

The Red Cross, the Y.M.C.A., the Y.W.C.A., had now been working actively in France about a year. A recent "Congress of Allied Women On War Service", the initiative for which is due to the latter

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societies, marks the epoch, makes it seem worth while look back to
those less stirring and more experimental days when the value of the
American woman's contribution, except as expressed by the older
societies which antedated our entrance into the war, were still
unproven. The American military authorities were at that time not
only opposed to the mobilization of any women whatever save nurses,
in the A.E.F., but speptical of their usefulness in Y.M.C.A. nuts.
At the Base Ports, perhaps, in towns along the lines of communica-
tion, perhaps, but not in insolated camps, absolutely not at the
front. The serious minted, conscious of this attitude, at and of the
fact that the American Embassy had taken no measures to centralize
a
or analyse the war work of our women felt/great deal of anxiety:
would the numbers who were arriving by every steamer - there were 19,
year old girls amongst them, and war brides frankly indifferent to
their "Committees" - justify the tonnage that their presence represent-
ed? Would those workers cast adrift by the dissolution or reorgan-
isation of the smaller American committees - some of them lived
permanently in France, some had lived there for a number of years -
rise to their obligations?

Doubts proved groundless. The tragic background of the war it-
self and its immense demands; the strength of the fine tradition
already established by the older American societies; the semi-military
surveillance excercised over their workers by the large new societies -
untrustworthy Red Cross and Y.M.C.A. women, like untrustworthy officers
in the army being promptly sent home: these elements combined
automatically to electrify and steady the moral atmosphere. A
voluntary bureau, founded in affiliation with the Red Cross, registered