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Sword of Deborah-F. Tennyson Jesse · The Secret Garden

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  Speaker 1: Chapter one of the Sword of Deborah. This is a
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  Speaker 1: LibriVox recording. All LibriVox recordings are in the public domain.
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  Speaker 1: For more information or to volunteer, please visit LibriVox dot org.
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  Speaker 1: Recording by Mirian Spiegel. The Sword of Deborah. First Hand
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  Speaker 1: Impressions of the British Women's Army in France by F.
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  Speaker 1: Tennyson Jesse. Women are timid, cower and shrink at show
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  Speaker 1: of danger, some folk think. But men there are who
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  Speaker 1: fear for their lives dare not so far asperse their wives.
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  Speaker 1: We let them pass. So much is clear. Though little
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  Speaker 1: dangers they may fear. When greater dangers men environ than
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  Speaker 1: women show affront of iron, and gentle in their manner,
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  Speaker 1: they do bold things in a quiet way. Thomas Dunn,
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  Speaker 1: England forward. This little book was written at the request
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  Speaker 1: of the Ministry of Information in March of nineteen eighteen.
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  Speaker 1: It was only released for publication in spite of the
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  Speaker 1: need for haste in its compiling, which had been impressed
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  Speaker 1: on me and with which I had complied shortly before Christmas.
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  Speaker 1: Hence it may seem somewhat after the fair, But it
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  Speaker 1: appears to me that people should still be told about
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  Speaker 1: the workers of the war and what they did, even now,
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  Speaker 1: when we are struggling back into our chaffons, perhaps now
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  Speaker 1: more than ever, for we should not forget, and how
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  Speaker 1: should we remember if we had never known Chapter one
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  Speaker 1: a b c. This world of initials, in which the
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  Speaker 1: members of the British Expeditionary Force live and move, is
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  Speaker 1: a bewildering place for the outsider, particularly to one who,
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  Speaker 1: like the writer, has never been able to think in
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  Speaker 1: initials any more than in dates or figures. The members
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  Speaker 1: of the b E F And that, at least is
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  Speaker 1: a set of letters that convey something to all of us,
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  Speaker 1: not only live amidst initials, but are themselves embodied initials.
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  Speaker 1: To them. The string of letters they reel off is
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  Speaker 1: no meaningless form, no mere abacadabra to impress the suppliant,
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  Speaker 1: But each is a living thing, colored and definitely patterned,
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  Speaker 1: standing for something in flesh and blood or stone and mortar,
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  Speaker 1: something concrete and present to the mind's eye at the
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  Speaker 1: mere mention. Just as to any one who does not
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  Speaker 1: know New York, it seems as though all the streets
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  Speaker 1: must sound exactly alike, being merely numbered, while to any
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  Speaker 1: one who knows them. The words East sixty first say
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  Speaker 1: are as distinct from East twenty first, distinct from a
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  Speaker 1: whole vivid personality of their own, as half Moon Street
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  Speaker 1: from thread Needle Street. So to the initiate in the game,
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  Speaker 1: the letters so lightly reatd off to designate this or
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  Speaker 1: that official or institution stand for vivid, real, colorable things.
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  Speaker 1: But at first one is reminded, forcibly of that scene
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  Speaker 1: in Anna Karinina where Levin proposes to Kitty for the
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  Speaker 1: second time by means of writing in chalk on a
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  Speaker 1: table the letters W Y T, M I C N
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  Speaker 1: B d T M N O T, and Kitty, with
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  Speaker 1: great intelligence, guesses that they all mean when you told
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  Speaker 1: me it could never be? Did that mean never? Or then, Kitty,
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  Speaker 1: if you remember, replies in initials at almost equal length,
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  Speaker 1: and Levin displays an intelligence equal to hers. I had
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  Speaker 1: always found that scene hard of credence, but I have
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  Speaker 1: come to the conclusion that Levin and Kitty would have
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  Speaker 1: been invaluable at h Q B R C S A
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  Speaker 1: P O three B E F. And the fog of
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  Speaker 1: initials is symbolic in a double manner, For not only
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  Speaker 1: do the initials stand for what they represent, to those
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  Speaker 1: who know, but in their very lack of meaning for
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  Speaker 1: those who do not, they typify with a peculiar aptness
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  Speaker 1: the fact that, after all, we at home in England,
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  Speaker 1: particularly we ladies of England who live at home in ease,
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  Speaker 1: know very little, indeed of even what the letters B,
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  Speaker 1: E F stand for. We have hazy ideas on the subject.
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  Speaker 1: Vaguely we know, for instance, that there are women, lots
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  Speaker 1: of women working out in France, though quite at what
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  Speaker 1: beyond nursing? We do not seem to know. Motor drivers.
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  Speaker 1: Of course, yes we have heard of them. There is
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  Speaker 1: a vague impression that they are having the time of
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  Speaker 1: their lives, probably being quite useful too. But of the
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  Speaker 1: technique of the thing, so to speak, what do we
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  Speaker 1: know about as much as we know when we first
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  Speaker 1: hear the clouds of initials rattling like shrapnel round our heads.
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  Speaker 1: If we go over to France, and if we at
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  Speaker 1: home know so little, how can other countries know, who
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  Speaker 1: have no inner working knowledge of English temperaments and training
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  Speaker 1: to go upon as a rough guide to at least
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  Speaker 1: the probable trend of things, How can we expect them
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  Speaker 1: to know? And yet, knowledge of what every section of
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  Speaker 1: the working community is doing. Was never so vital as
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  Speaker 1: at the present moment, because never before has so much
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  Speaker 1: of the world been working together on the same job,
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  Speaker 1: and the biggest job in history. It is always a
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  Speaker 1: good thing to know what other folk are doing, even
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  Speaker 1: when they are not your sort. And what they are
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  Speaker 1: doing does not affect you, because it teaches proportion and
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  Speaker 1: widens vision. How much more important then when what they
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  Speaker 1: are doing is what you are doing, or what you
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  Speaker 1: may yet come to do. Gentle reader, and even more especially,
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  Speaker 1: ungentle reader, if in these pages I occasionally ask you
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  Speaker 1: to listen to my own personal confession, both of faith
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  Speaker 1: and unfaith, please realize that it is not because I
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  Speaker 1: imagine there is any peculiar interest in my way of
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  Speaker 1: seeing things, but simply because it is only so that
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  Speaker 1: I can make you see them too. You are looking
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  Speaker 1: through my window, that is all, and it is not
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  Speaker 1: even a window that I opened for myself, but that
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  Speaker 1: had to be opened for me. If you will realize
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  Speaker 1: that I went and saw all I did see, not
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  Speaker 1: as myself, but as you, it will give you the
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  Speaker 1: idea I am wishful to convey to you. Anything I
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  Speaker 1: feel is only valuable because my feelings of it may
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  Speaker 1: mean your feelings of it too. Therefore, when you read
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  Speaker 1: I in these pages, don't say here's this person talking
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  Speaker 1: of herself? Again, say here am I myself? This person
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  Speaker 1: only saw these things so that I should see them.
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  Speaker 1: If you don't, it will be nine tenths my fault
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  Speaker 1: and one tenth your own. Just as all the apparently
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  Speaker 1: endless combinations of initials in France are symbols of living
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  Speaker 1: realities to those who understand them, and of their ignorance
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  Speaker 1: to those who don't. Just as the very heading of
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  Speaker 1: A B C. Which I have given this chapter, typifies
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  Speaker 1: both those combinations of initials and the fact that you
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  Speaker 1: and I are beginning at the very beginning. For no
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  Speaker 1: one could have been more blankly ignorant than I was
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  Speaker 1: when I would over to France. So the letter I,
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  Speaker 1: whenever it occurs in this book, is a symbol for you.
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  Speaker 1: Chapter two, The fever Chart of War. The women are splendid.
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  Speaker 1: How tired we are of hearing that, so tired that
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  Speaker 1: we begin to doubt it. And the least hostile emotion
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  Speaker 1: that it evokes is the sense that, after all, the
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  Speaker 1: men are so much more splendid, So far beyond praise
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  Speaker 1: that the less one says of any one else, the
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  Speaker 1: better that sentence is dead. Let us hope fallen into
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  Speaker 1: the same limbo as business as usual and the rest
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  Speaker 1: of the early war gags by the prejudices it aroused,
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  Speaker 1: the feeling of boredom. Have not all died with it.
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  Speaker 1: Words have at least this in common with men, that
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  Speaker 1: the evil they do lives after them. Let me admit
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  Speaker 1: that when those in authority sent for me to go
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  Speaker 1: to France and see what certain sections of the women
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  Speaker 1: there were doing, I didn't want to go. I told
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  Speaker 1: them rather ungraciously that if they wanted the sunny haired
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  Speaker 1: lassies in khaki touch, they had better send somebody else.
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  Speaker 1: I am not, and never have been a feminist or
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  Speaker 1: any other sort of an ist, never having been able
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  Speaker 1: to divide humanity into two different classes labeled men and women. Also,
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  Speaker 1: to tell the truth, the idea of going so far
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  Speaker 1: behind the lines did not appeal. For this. There is
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  Speaker 1: the excuse that in England one grows so sick of
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  Speaker 1: the people who talk of going to the front when
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  Speaker 1: they mean going to some save chateau as a base
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  Speaker 1: for a personally conducted tour or conscientious objectures are the
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  Speaker 1: worst sinners in this latter case, when they are going
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  Speaker 1: to sit at canteens or paint huts a hundred miles
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  Speaker 1: or so behind the last line of trenches. The reaction
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  Speaker 1: from this sort of thing is very apt to make
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  Speaker 1: one say, oh, France, there is no more in being
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  Speaker 1: in France behind the lines than working in England, a
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  Speaker 1: point of view in which I was utterly and completely wrong.
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  Speaker 1: It is a great deal of difference, not in any
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  Speaker 1: increased danger, but in quite other ways, as I shall show,
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  Speaker 1: in the place and order in which it was gradually
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  Speaker 1: made apparent to me. Also, no one who has not
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  Speaker 1: been at the war knows the hideous boredom of it,
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  Speaker 1: a boredom that the soul dreads like a fatal miasma.
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  Speaker 1: And if I had felt it in Belgium in those
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  Speaker 1: terrible gray first weeks of her pain, when at least
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  Speaker 1: one was in the midst of war, as it was
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  Speaker 1: then still fluid and mobile, still full of alarms and excursions,
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  Speaker 1: with all the suffering and death immediately under one's eyes,
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  Speaker 1: still a new thing, if I had felt it again
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  Speaker 1: even more strongly, when I went right up to the
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  Speaker 1: very brink of the front in the French war zone,
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  Speaker 1: for the crew roge, in those poor little hospitals, where
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  Speaker 1: the stretchers are always ready in the wards to hustle
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  Speaker 1: the wounded away, and where in devastated land only lately
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  Speaker 1: vacated by the Germans, I sat and ate with peasants
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  Speaker 1: who were painfully and sadly beginning to return to their
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  Speaker 1: ruined homes and cultivate again a soil that might have
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  Speaker 1: been expected to redden the plowshare. How much the more
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  Speaker 1: then might I dread it Caught in the web of
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  Speaker 1: the lines of communication. I feared that boredom. And there
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  Speaker 1: was another reason both for my disinclination and my lack
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  Speaker 1: of interest. We in England grew so tired in the
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  Speaker 1: early days of the war of the fancy uniforms that
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  Speaker 1: burst out upon women. Every other girl one met had
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  Speaker 1: an attack of cacchiitis, was spotted as the pard with
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  Speaker 1: badges and striped as a zebra. Almost simultaneously with this
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  Speaker 1: eruption came for the other section of the feminine community.
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  Speaker 1: Reaction from it. We others became rather self consciously proud
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  Speaker 1: of our femininity, of being fluffy, in much the same
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  Speaker 1: way that anti suffragists used to be fluffy when they
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  Speaker 1: said they preferred to influence a man's vote, and that
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  Speaker 1: they thought more was done by charm. With official recognition
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  Speaker 1: of bodies such as the v a Ds and the
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  Speaker 1: even more epoch making official founding of the Waacs, the
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  Speaker 1: point of view of the ununiformed changed. The thing was
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  Speaker 1: no longer a game at which women were making silly
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  Speaker 1: asses of themselves and pretending to be men. It had
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  Speaker 1: become regular, ordered, disciplined, and worthy of respect. In short,
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  Speaker 1: uniform was no longer fancy dress, but the feeling of
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  Speaker 1: boredom that had been engendered stayed on. As these things do,
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  Speaker 1: it is yet to be found, partly because there still
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  Speaker 1: are women who have their photographs taken in a new
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  Speaker 1: uniform every week, but more because of our ignorance as
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  Speaker 1: to what the real workers are doing. And like most
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  Speaker 1: ignorant people, I was happy in my ignorance. Well I
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  Speaker 1: went and and most thankful for my prejudice, my disinclination,
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  Speaker 1: and my provision of boredom. For without all these what
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  Speaker 1: would my conversion be worth. Who already convinced of religion
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  Speaker 1: is amazed at detaining some salvation. It is to the
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  Speaker 1: mocker that the miracle is a miracle, and no mere
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  Speaker 1: expected sequence of nature, divine or human. I was often
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  Speaker 1: depressed the wherefore of which you will see, but bored,
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  Speaker 1: never thrilled, ashamed for one's self that one does so
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  Speaker 1: little admiring, critical, amused, depressed, elated. All this gamut and
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  Speaker 1: its gradations were touched, but the string of boredom never
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  Speaker 1: And the only thing that worries any one sent on
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  Speaker 1: such a quest as mine, and with the inevitable message
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  Speaker 1: to deliver at the end of it, is that terrible
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  Speaker 1: feeling that no matter how really one feels enthusiasm, how
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  Speaker 1: genuine one's conversion, there will always be the murmur of oh, yes,
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  Speaker 1: of course she had to say all that. It's all
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  Speaker 1: part of the propaganda. She was sent to do it,
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  Speaker 1: and she has to do it, whether she really believes
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  Speaker 1: it or not. What can one say? I can only
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  Speaker 1: tell you, O superior person, that no matter what I
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  Speaker 1: had been sent to do and told to write, I
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  Speaker 1: not only wouldn't but couldn't have unless I meant it.
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  Speaker 1: I can only tell you so. I can't make you
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  Speaker 1: believe it. But let me also assure you that I too,
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  Speaker 1: am or shall I say was superior, that I too
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  Speaker 1: have laughed the laugh of sophistication at enthusiasm, that I
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  Speaker 1: too know enough to consider vehemence amusing and strenuous effort
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  Speaker 1: ill bred, that doubtless I shall do so again. But
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  Speaker 1: there is one thing that seems to me more ill bred,
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  Speaker 1: and that is lack of appreciation of those who are
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  Speaker 1: doing better than oneself. Lest you should misunderstand me when
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  Speaker 1: I say that I didn't want to go to France
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  Speaker 1: this time, and feared boredom and felt no particular interest
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  Speaker 1: in the work of the women over there, let me
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  Speaker 1: add that I was careful to sponge my mind free
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  Speaker 1: of all preconceived notions, either for or against. When once
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  Speaker 1: it was settled that I should go, I went without enthusiasm,
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  Speaker 1: it is true. But at least I went with a
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  Speaker 1: mind rigorously swept and garnished, so that there might enter
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  Speaker 1: into it visitants of either kind, angelic or otherwise. For
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  Speaker 1: this has always seemed to me in common honesty, a
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  Speaker 1: necessary part of equipment to any one going on a
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  Speaker 1: special mission charged with finding out things as they are,
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  Speaker 1: to be free not only of prejudice against, but predisposition
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  Speaker 1: for and just as a juryman, when he is impaneled,
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  Speaker 1: should try and sweep his mind bare of everything he
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  Speaker 1: has heard about the case before. So should the special missioner,
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  Speaker 1: to coin a most horrible phrase, make his mind at
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  Speaker 1: once blank and sensitized, like a photographic plate, for events
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  Speaker 1: to strike as truly as they may, with as little
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  Speaker 1: help or hindrance from former knowledge as possible. Human nature
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  Speaker 1: being what it is, it is probably almost impossible for
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  Speaker 1: the original attitude to be completely erased. However conscientious one is,
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  Speaker 1: and that is why I am glad that my former
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  Speaker 1: attitude was, if not inimical, at least very unenthusiastic, so
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  Speaker 1: that I am clear of the charge of seeing things
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  Speaker 1: as I or the authorities might have wished me to
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  Speaker 1: see them. And for the first few days, as always
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  Speaker 1: when the mind is plunged headlong into a new world,
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  Speaker 1: even though I saw facts, listen to them, was impressed,
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  Speaker 1: very impressed by their outward show, it still remained outward show.
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  Speaker 1: The soul that informed the whole evaded me, and for
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  Speaker 1: many days I saw things that I only understood later
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  Speaker 1: in view of subsequent knowledge, when I could look back
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  Speaker 1: and see more clearly with the mind's eye what I
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  Speaker 1: before had seen with the physical. Yet even the first
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  Speaker 1: evening I saw something which, though only dimly, showed me
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  Speaker 1: a hint of the spirit of the whole. I was
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  Speaker 1: at the headquarters of the British Red Cross, which is
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  Speaker 1: what the letters h Q b R c S stand for,
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  Speaker 1: and I was being shown some very peculiar and wonderful charts.
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  Speaker 1: They are secret charts, the figures on which if a
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  Speaker 1: man has shown them, he must never disclose. And those figures,
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  Speaker 1: when you read them, bring a contraction at once of
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  Speaker 1: pity and of pride to the heart. For in these
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  Speaker 1: great charts, that are mapped out into squares and look
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  Speaker 1: exactly like temperature charts at a hospital, are drawn curves,
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  Speaker 1: like the curves that show the fever of a patient.
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  Speaker 1: Up in jagged mountains, down into merciful valleys, goes the line,
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  Speaker 1: and at every point there is a number, and that
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  Speaker 1: number is the number of the wounded who were brought
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  Speaker 1: down from the trenches on such a day. Here on
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  Speaker 1: these charts is a complete record in curves of the
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  Speaker 1: rate of the war. Every peak is an offensive, every
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  Speaker 1: valley a comparative lull. Sheet after sheet, all with those
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  Speaker 1: carefully drawn numbered curves zigzagging across them, all showing the
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  Speaker 1: very temperature of war, with this difference that on these
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  Speaker 1: sheets there is no normal. War is abnormal, and there
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  Speaker 1: is not a point of these charts where when the
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  Speaker 1: line touches it, you can say it is well. As
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  Speaker 1: I looked at these records, I began to get a
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  Speaker 1: different vision of that tract of country called lines of
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  Speaker 1: communication which I had come to see. This, where the
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  Speaker 1: war's very pulse was noted day by day, was the
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  Speaker 1: stronghold of war himself. Here he is nursed, rested, fed
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  Speaker 1: with food for the mouths of flesh and blood, and
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  Speaker 1: food for the mouths of iron. Here, the whole time,
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  Speaker 1: night and day, as ceaselessly as in the trenches, the
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  Speaker 1: work goes on the work of strengthening his hands. And
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  Speaker 1: so every man and woman working for that end of
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  Speaker 1: l of C is fighting on our side. Most surely,
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  Speaker 1: something of the hugeness and the importance of it began
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  Speaker 1: to show itself. And as regards that particular portion which
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  Speaker 1: I had come out to see, I began to get
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  Speaker 1: a glimmering of that. Also. When it was told me
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  Speaker 1: that of those thousands of wounded I saw marked on
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  Speaker 1: the charts, a great proportion was convoyed entirely by women.
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  Speaker 1: There are whole districts, such as the Cali District, which
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  Speaker 1: includes many towns and stations, where every ambulance running is
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  Speaker 1: driven by woman. Not only the fever rate of war
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  Speaker 1: is shown on these charts, but just as to the
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  Speaker 1: seeing eye, behind any temperature chart in the hospital is
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  Speaker 1: the whole construction of the great scheme. Doctors, surgeons, nurses, food, drugs, money, devotion,
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  Speaker 1: everything that finds its expression in that simple sheet of paper,
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  Speaker 1: filled in daily as a matter of routine. So behind
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  Speaker 1: these charts of war's temperature kept at h Q is
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  Speaker 1: the whole of the complex organization known as the British
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  Speaker 1: Red Cross. And outstanding, even amongst so much that is splendid,
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  Speaker 1: are certain bands of girls behind the lines who not
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  Speaker 1: for a month or two, but year in, year out,
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  Speaker 1: during nights and days when they have known no rest,
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  Speaker 1: have they also had their fingers on the pulse of war.
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  Speaker 1: End of chapter two, Chapter three of The Sort of
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  Speaker 1: Deborah by F. Tennys and Jesse. This LibriVox recording is
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  Speaker 1: in the public domain. Recording by Marianne Chapter three, Backgrounds
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  Speaker 1: at h Q b r c s. The d of
• 19:18
  Speaker 1: T told me that the first thing for me to
• 19:20
  Speaker 1: see were the f a n y s and the
• 19:22
  Speaker 1: g s v a ds. That is the sort of
• 19:25
  Speaker 1: sentence that was shot at me on my first day.
• 19:29
  Speaker 1: I have told you what h Q b r c
• 19:31
  Speaker 1: S means. The d of T means Director of Transportation,
• 19:35
  Speaker 1: the f a n y is the first Aid nursing yeomanry,
• 19:39
  Speaker 1: and the g S v a d is the General
• 19:41
  Speaker 1: Service Voluntary Aid detachment. Now, the v a D I
• 19:45
  Speaker 1: had heard of and of its members always called v
• 19:49
  Speaker 1: a ds, but g S v a d was something
• 19:51
  Speaker 1: new to me. Yet the importance of the distinction, I
• 19:54
  Speaker 1: soon learned, was great. Four sets of initials representing my
• 19:59
  Speaker 1: chief objectives in France, the f a n wise, the
• 20:02
  Speaker 1: v a d s, the g s v a d s,
• 20:05
  Speaker 1: and the w a a c s. Of these, the
• 20:08
  Speaker 1: former are known as the Fannies, and the last named
• 20:11
  Speaker 1: as the wax, owing to the tendency of the eye
• 20:13
  Speaker 1: to make out of any possible combination of letters, a
• 20:16
  Speaker 1: word that appeals to the ear of these four bodies.
• 20:20
  Speaker 1: The Fannies and the v a d s were in
• 20:22
  Speaker 1: existence before the war, being amongst those who listened to
• 20:25
  Speaker 1: the voice of Lord Robert's crying in the wilderness. They
• 20:28
  Speaker 1: are all unpaid voluntary workers, and they rank officially as
• 20:32
  Speaker 1: officers among ourselves. Of course, they have their own officers,
• 20:37
  Speaker 1: but socially, so to speak, every fanny and v A
• 20:39
  Speaker 1: D is ranked with the officers of the army. But
• 20:43
  Speaker 1: with the g S v A ds and the Wax
• 20:45
  Speaker 1: it is not so. They are paid and are to
• 20:48
  Speaker 1: replace men. G S v A ds work in motor
• 20:51
  Speaker 1: convoys and at the hospitals as cooks, dispensers, clerks, et cetera.
• 20:57
  Speaker 1: And the wax work for the combatant service. Except for
• 21:00
  Speaker 1: their officers, who rank with officers of the army, the
• 21:03
  Speaker 1: members of these two bodies are considered as privates. And
• 21:07
  Speaker 1: as both the fannies and the wax go in khaki,
• 21:10
  Speaker 1: and both the v d s and the gsva ds
• 21:13
  Speaker 1: in dark blue, it will be seen that confusion is
• 21:15
  Speaker 1: very easy to the uninitiate. This is my only excuse
• 21:19
  Speaker 1: for perpetrating the worst blunder that has probably ever been
• 21:22
  Speaker 1: committed in France. Taken to tea at a fanny convoy,
• 21:26
  Speaker 1: I committed the unspeakable sin of asking whether they were wax.
• 21:30
  Speaker 1: They were very kind to me about it, but when
• 21:32
  Speaker 1: I eventually grasped the system, I saw it was as
• 21:35
  Speaker 1: though I had asked a brass hat whether he belonged
• 21:38
  Speaker 1: to the Salvation Army. Yet when I told the sad
• 21:41
  Speaker 1: tale of my gaff to the members of the V
• 21:42
  Speaker 1: A D Convoy, they only seemed to think it must
• 21:45
  Speaker 1: have been quite good for the Fannies, But somehow it
• 21:48
  Speaker 1: wasn't equally good for them when I timidly asked whether
• 21:51
  Speaker 1: they were GSVA ds. Though they were also very kind
• 21:55
  Speaker 1: to me about it, the d of T motored me
• 21:58
  Speaker 1: over to the Fanny's convoy on a pale day of
• 22:01
  Speaker 1: difficult sunlight. Is there anywhere in the world, I wondered
• 22:05
  Speaker 1: more depressing, more morbid landscape than round Khali. It weighs
• 22:10
  Speaker 1: on the soul as a fog upon the senses, and
• 22:13
  Speaker 1: it seemed to me that only people of such a
• 22:15
  Speaker 1: tenacious gayety as the French, or such an independence from
• 22:19
  Speaker 1: environment as the British, could survive there. For long I
• 22:23
  Speaker 1: had seen country far flatter that was yet more wholesome,
• 22:26
  Speaker 1: and I loathe flat country. There was something in the
• 22:29
  Speaker 1: perpetual repetition of form in the country around Khali, the
• 22:33
  Speaker 1: endless sameness of its differences that is particularly oppressive. Pearly
• 22:38
  Speaker 1: skies blotted with paler clouds, endless rows of bare poplars
• 22:43
  Speaker 1: like the skeletons of dead flames, yellowish roads, unwinding forever
• 22:48
  Speaker 1: acres of unbroken and sickly green, of newly turned earth
• 22:51
  Speaker 1: of an equally sad brown, and over all the trail
• 22:55
  Speaker 1: of war, whose footprint is desolation. The occupation, even of
• 22:59
  Speaker 1: an army of defense, means camp after camp, tin huts,
• 23:03
  Speaker 1: wooden huts, zinc roofs, hospitals, barbed wire, mud, and amidst
• 23:09
  Speaker 1: all this, the sudden reminders of more active warfare in
• 23:13
  Speaker 1: houses crumpled to a scatter of rubble by a bomb,
• 23:16
  Speaker 1: there are people working year in, year out, undismayed by
• 23:20
  Speaker 1: the sordid litter of it. The saving of it all
• 23:24
  Speaker 1: to the newcomer, though even that must pall on any
• 23:27
  Speaker 1: one too accustomed. Is that, like Pater's mona Lisa, upon
• 23:31
  Speaker 1: this part of France, the ends of the world are come.
• 23:35
  Speaker 1: And who shall wonder if in consequence her eyelids are
• 23:38
  Speaker 1: a little weary, inscrutable chinamen, silent as shadows flashing their
• 23:43
  Speaker 1: sudden smiles, even more mysterious than their immobility, turned from
• 23:47
  Speaker 1: their labor to watch the passing of the car Kafirs
• 23:51
  Speaker 1: from South Africa, each with a white man's vote, voluntarily
• 23:55
  Speaker 1: enlisted for the Empire, swung along vividly dark Portuguese cladding
• 23:59
  Speaker 1: g came down to their rest camps. Belgians trotted past,
• 24:04
  Speaker 1: with their little tassels bobbing from their taunty caps, and
• 24:07
  Speaker 1: in great droves along the roads, or sometimes more solitary
• 24:11
  Speaker 1: in the fields, the German prisoners stood at gaze their
• 24:15
  Speaker 1: English escort shepherding. The first time my companion told me
• 24:19
  Speaker 1: that we were coming on German prisoners, I shut my eyes,
• 24:22
  Speaker 1: determined to open them, unprejudiced, with a vision clear of
• 24:25
  Speaker 1: all preconceptions, really at the bottom of my heart, expecting
• 24:30
  Speaker 1: that I should find them extraordinarily like any one else.
• 24:33
  Speaker 1: But they were not. They were all so like each
• 24:36
  Speaker 1: other that by the time you had seen several hundreds
• 24:38
  Speaker 1: you were still wondering, confusedly whether they were all relations.
• 24:42
  Speaker 1: Even my western eye detected more difference between the types
• 24:45
  Speaker 1: of chinamen I met upon the road than in these toeuitens.
• 24:49
  Speaker 1: Of course, the round, brimless cap has something to do
• 24:52
  Speaker 1: with it, as has the close hair crop. But when
• 24:55
  Speaker 1: all is said, how much of a type they are,
• 24:58
  Speaker 1: how amazingly so, as though they had all been bred
• 25:01
  Speaker 1: to one purpose through generations. The outstanding ear placed very
• 25:05
  Speaker 1: low on the wide neck, the great development of cheek
• 25:08
  Speaker 1: bones and of the jaw on a level with the ears,
• 25:12
  Speaker 1: and then the sudden narrowing at the short chin, and
• 25:14
  Speaker 1: the florid bulkiness of them. A detachment of poilus swung
• 25:18
  Speaker 1: past in their horizon blue. And what a different type
• 25:21
  Speaker 1: was flashed up against that background of square jowls. What
• 25:25
  Speaker 1: a thin, nervous, wiry type all animation. The Germans were
• 25:30
  Speaker 1: so exactly like all the photographs of prisoners one has
• 25:33
  Speaker 1: seen in the daily papers, that it was quite satisfying.
• 25:36
  Speaker 1: I remember the same feeling of satisfaction when on first
• 25:39
  Speaker 1: going to New England I saw a frame house and
• 25:41
  Speaker 1: an old man with a goatee beard driving a spider
• 25:44
  Speaker 1: wheeled buggy, exactly like an illustration out of Harpers, all
• 25:50
  Speaker 1: of which, with the exception of the old man out
• 25:52
  Speaker 1: of Harpers, is not as irrelevant as it may appear.
• 25:55
  Speaker 1: In fact, it is not irrelevant at all, for it
• 25:58
  Speaker 1: is these things, this landscape, these varied races, this whole atmosphere,
• 26:03
  Speaker 1: which goes to make live's background for every one quartered hereabouts.
• 26:07
  Speaker 1: And it is the background which, especially to memory in
• 26:10
  Speaker 1: after years, makes so great a part of the whole.
• 26:14
  Speaker 1: As we went, remember, I still knew nothing about the
• 26:17
  Speaker 1: work I had come out to see, or the lives
• 26:20
  Speaker 1: of those employed in it. I could only watch flashing
• 26:23
  Speaker 1: past me the outward setting of those lives, and try
• 26:26
  Speaker 1: from the remarks of my companion to build up something else.
• 26:30
  Speaker 1: Yet what I built up from him, as what I
• 26:32
  Speaker 1: had built up from the talk at my hotel the
• 26:34
  Speaker 1: night before, was more the attitude of the men towards
• 26:37
  Speaker 1: the women than the attitude of the women towards their life,
• 26:40
  Speaker 1: though it was none the less interesting for that. And
• 26:44
  Speaker 1: here I may as well record what I found at
• 26:46
  Speaker 1: the beginning, and I saw no reason to reverse my
• 26:49
  Speaker 1: judgment later on, And that was no trace of sex
• 26:52
  Speaker 1: jealousy in any department whatsoever. I only met genuine, unemotional,
• 26:58
  Speaker 1: level headed admiration on the part of the men towards
• 27:00
  Speaker 1: the women working amongst them. The d of t was
• 27:03
  Speaker 1: no exception, and opined that if the war hadn't done
• 27:06
  Speaker 1: anything else. At least it had killed that irritating masculine
• 27:10
  Speaker 1: gag that women couldn't work together. For that, after all,
• 27:14
  Speaker 1: will always be to some minds the surprise of the thing,
• 27:17
  Speaker 1: not that women can work with men, but that they
• 27:20
  Speaker 1: can work together. People talk a lot, he said, reflectively,
• 27:25
  Speaker 1: about what's to happen after the war, when it's all
• 27:28
  Speaker 1: over and there's nothing left but to go home. What's
• 27:31
  Speaker 1: going to happen to all these girls? How will they
• 27:33
  Speaker 1: settle down? And how do you think? I don't think
• 27:37
  Speaker 1: there'll be any trouble, whether they'll marry or not. They
• 27:40
  Speaker 1: will have had their adventure. I looked at him and thought,
• 27:44
  Speaker 1: what a penetrating remark that was. Later, in view of
• 27:48
  Speaker 1: what I came to think and be told, I wondered
• 27:51
  Speaker 1: whether it were true at all, And later still came
• 27:53
  Speaker 1: to what seems to me the solution of it, or
• 27:56
  Speaker 1: as much of a solution as can be, which still
• 27:58
  Speaker 1: leaves one with and I wonder. He told me tales
• 28:02
  Speaker 1: of the Fannies, who, being now under the Red Cross,
• 28:05
  Speaker 1: came directly under his jurisdiction. He told me of a
• 28:08
  Speaker 1: lonely outpost at the beginning of the war, where there
• 28:11
  Speaker 1: was only one surgeon and two fannies, and how for
• 28:13
  Speaker 1: twenty four hours they all three worked up to the
• 28:16
  Speaker 1: knees in blood, amputating, tying up, bandaging without rest or relief.
• 28:22
  Speaker 1: How the whole of the work of the convoying of
• 28:24
  Speaker 1: the wounded for the enormous Cali district was done entirely
• 28:27
  Speaker 1: by the girls. Of how at this particular fanny convoy
• 28:31
  Speaker 1: to which we were going they were raided practically every
• 28:33
  Speaker 1: fine night, and that their camp was in about the
• 28:36
  Speaker 1: unhealthiest spot as regarded raids in the district. How during
• 28:40
  Speaker 1: the last raid, nine aerial torpedoes fell around the camp
• 28:44
  Speaker 1: and exploded, and one fell right in the middle and
• 28:46
  Speaker 1: did not explode, or there would have been very little
• 28:49
  Speaker 1: Fanny convoy left. But how it made a hole seven
• 28:52
  Speaker 1: feet deep and weighed a hundred and ten pounds and
• 28:55
  Speaker 1: stood higher than a stock sized fanny and crowning touch
• 28:59
  Speaker 1: of jupe relation to the convoy of how the French
• 29:02
  Speaker 1: authorities had promised to present it to them after it
• 29:04
  Speaker 1: was cleaned out and rendered innocuous to their no small
• 29:07
  Speaker 1: contentment as well earned a trophy as ever decorated a
• 29:11
  Speaker 1: mess room. He talked very like a nice father about
• 29:15
  Speaker 1: to show off his girls and back them against the world.
• 29:20
  Speaker 1: Chapter four. My first convoy. We arrived on a great
• 29:24
  Speaker 1: day for the fannies. The famous aerial torpedo had preceded
• 29:27
  Speaker 1: us by a bare hour. There it lay on the
• 29:30
  Speaker 1: floor of the mess room, reminding me with its great
• 29:32
  Speaker 1: steel fins and long rounded nose of a dead shark.
• 29:36
  Speaker 1: The commandant showed it us with pride, and every successive
• 29:40
  Speaker 1: fanny entering was greeted with the two words it's come.
• 29:44
  Speaker 1: The d of t swore he would have it mounted
• 29:46
  Speaker 1: on a brass and mahogany stand with an engraved plate
• 29:49
  Speaker 1: to tell its history. Two strong fannies reared it up
• 29:52
  Speaker 1: for even empty. Its weight was noteworthy, and it stood
• 29:56
  Speaker 1: on its murderous nose with its wicked fins. The solid
• 29:59
  Speaker 1: steal of one of them bent and crumpled like a
• 30:01
  Speaker 1: sheet of paper above my head. A great trophy and
• 30:05
  Speaker 1: a hard earned one. This was the first camp I saw,
• 30:09
  Speaker 1: and a very good one. As camps go. I merely
• 30:11
  Speaker 1: add that latter sentence because personally, I think any form
• 30:14
  Speaker 1: of community life is the most terrible of hardships. It
• 30:18
  Speaker 1: is rather pathetic to see how in all the camps
• 30:21
  Speaker 1: in France the girls have managed to get not only
• 30:24
  Speaker 1: as individual but as feminine touches as possible. I never
• 30:28
  Speaker 1: saw a woman's office anywhere in France that was not
• 30:30
  Speaker 1: a mass of flowers and window boxes, flower beds, basins
• 30:34
  Speaker 1: of bulbs are cultivated everywhere. Every office, too, though strictly
• 30:39
  Speaker 1: business like, has chintz curtains of lovely colors. You can
• 30:43
  Speaker 1: always tell a woman's office from a man's, which is
• 30:45
  Speaker 1: a good sign and should hearten the pessimists who cried
• 30:48
  Speaker 1: that this doing of men's work will defeminize the women.
• 30:52
  Speaker 1: The commandant at this Fanny's camp took me into her office,
• 30:55
  Speaker 1: and she and the d of t, who chimed in
• 30:58
  Speaker 1: whenever he thought she was not saying enough in praise
• 31:01
  Speaker 1: of his admired Fannies told me the rough outlines of
• 31:03
  Speaker 1: the history of the body since the beginning of the war.
• 31:07
  Speaker 1: Though now affiliated with the Red Cross, they were an
• 31:09
  Speaker 1: independent body before the war, and when hostilities broke out
• 31:13
  Speaker 1: were a mounted corps with horse ambulances. They offered themselves
• 31:17
  Speaker 1: to the English authorities, were refused and came out to
• 31:20
  Speaker 1: the war zone and worked for the Belgians. For fourteen
• 31:22
  Speaker 1: months they ran a hospital in Calis, staffed by themselves
• 31:26
  Speaker 1: for nurses and with Belgian doctors and orderlies. Then in
• 31:30
  Speaker 1: the beginning of nineteen sixteen they offered to drive motor
• 31:33
  Speaker 1: ambulances and thus release Red Cross men drivers. And now
• 31:37
  Speaker 1: they are running, with the exception of two ambulances for Chinese,
• 31:41
  Speaker 1: the whole of the Calis district and have released many
• 31:44
  Speaker 1: A s C Men as well. It is a big
• 31:47
  Speaker 1: area with many outlying camps where there are detached units.
• 31:51
  Speaker 1: As a rule there is only one girl to each ambulance,
• 31:54
  Speaker 1: but in very lonely spots the allowance's three girls to
• 31:57
  Speaker 1: two cars. At Saint Omer, the authorities at first objected
• 32:01
  Speaker 1: to having them, but now they have taken over the
• 32:03
  Speaker 1: whole of the Red Cross and the A s C
• 32:06
  Speaker 1: ambulances there. At this camp that I saw, they have
• 32:10
  Speaker 1: no day or night shifts, as there is not much
• 32:12
  Speaker 1: night work except during a push, when every one works
• 32:15
  Speaker 1: night and day without more than a couple hours sleep,
• 32:17
  Speaker 1: snatched with clothes on. Indeed, I heard of a convoy
• 32:21
  Speaker 1: where for a fortnight the girls never took off their clothes,
• 32:24
  Speaker 1: but just kept on with fragmentary rests. The other occasion
• 32:28
  Speaker 1: when there is night work is when there is a raid.
• 32:31
  Speaker 1: As I have said, the camp is in a peculiarly
• 32:33
  Speaker 1: unhealthy spot for bombs, And until just lately the girls
• 32:36
  Speaker 1: had no raid shelter. Now one has been dug for them,
• 32:40
  Speaker 1: roofed with concrete and sand bags and earth, which would
• 32:43
  Speaker 1: stand anything short of a direct hit from some such
• 32:45
  Speaker 1: pleasant little missile, as is now the pride of the camp.
• 32:49
  Speaker 1: But at first, even when the raid shelter was built,
• 32:52
  Speaker 1: there was no telephone extension to it from the office,
• 32:55
  Speaker 1: and therefore the commandant had to stay in the office
• 32:57
  Speaker 1: with one other to take the telephone calls, then had
• 33:00
  Speaker 1: to cross the open in full raid, and going to
• 33:03
  Speaker 1: the mouth of the shelter, call out the names of
• 33:05
  Speaker 1: the girls whose turn it was to drive the ambulances.
• 33:09
  Speaker 1: She told it to me as exemplifying the spirit of
• 33:11
  Speaker 1: the girls, that never once through all the noise and
• 33:14
  Speaker 1: danger did a girl falter always answered to her name,
• 33:17
  Speaker 1: and came coolly and unconcernedly up the steps and went
• 33:20
  Speaker 1: across to her car. But it seemed to me that
• 33:23
  Speaker 1: it was as good to sit quietly in a match
• 33:25
  Speaker 1: board office and await the messages, to say nothing of
• 33:28
  Speaker 1: taking them across that danger zone. Now an order has
• 33:32
  Speaker 1: gone forth that the ambulances are not to start till
• 33:34
  Speaker 1: the raid is over, as they are too precious to
• 33:36
  Speaker 1: be risked. It is not a bad record, this continuous
• 33:40
  Speaker 1: service of the Fanny since the outbreak of war? Is
• 33:42
  Speaker 1: it for Remember, it is not work that can be
• 33:45
  Speaker 1: taken up and dropped. You sign on for six months
• 33:48
  Speaker 1: at a time and only have two fortnights of leave
• 33:51
  Speaker 1: in the year, and the girls sign on again and again.
• 33:55
  Speaker 1: They are nearly all veterans at it, and comfortable as
• 33:59
  Speaker 1: the camp has been made. All the necessities of life
• 34:01
  Speaker 1: are provided by the War Office, and the frills by
• 34:04
  Speaker 1: the Red Cross. And in spite of the tiny supparate
• 34:06
  Speaker 1: cubicles greatest blessing of all decorated to taste by the owner.
• 34:11
  Speaker 1: In spite of everything that can be done to make
• 34:13
  Speaker 1: the girls happy and keep them well, it is still
• 34:15
  Speaker 1: a picnic. And a picnic may be all very well
• 34:19
  Speaker 1: for a week or even a fortnight, but a picnic
• 34:22
  Speaker 1: carried on over the years is not at all the
• 34:24
  Speaker 1: same thing. Certainly, they all seemed very happy and are
• 34:28
  Speaker 1: all very well. Girls who go out rather delicate, soon
• 34:31
  Speaker 1: become strong in the hard open air life, and there
• 34:34
  Speaker 1: has not been a single case of strain from working
• 34:36
  Speaker 1: the heavy ambulances. The girls do all cleaning and oiling
• 34:40
  Speaker 1: of the cars themselves, and all repairs, with the exception
• 34:43
  Speaker 1: of the very complicated cases for which they are allowed
• 34:45
  Speaker 1: to call on the help of two mechanics, but only
• 34:48
  Speaker 1: after the request has gone through those in authority. The
• 34:52
  Speaker 1: domestic staff, with the exception of one frenchwoman in the kitchen,
• 34:55
  Speaker 1: is supplied by the girls themselves. And on this subject
• 34:58
  Speaker 1: of domestic staffs in in France, I shall say more later.
• 35:02
  Speaker 1: Their food is army rations, which are excellent, as I
• 35:05
  Speaker 1: can testify after straightened England, supplemented by milk and fresh vegetables,
• 35:10
  Speaker 1: while the Red Cross gives the extras of life, such
• 35:12
  Speaker 1: as custard, corn, flour, et cetera. When at Tea I
• 35:16
  Speaker 1: saw butter brought forth in lordly dish and was told
• 35:19
  Speaker 1: to take as much as I liked on hot toast,
• 35:22
  Speaker 1: I felt it was a solemn moment. There seemed a
• 35:25
  Speaker 1: very carefree atmosphere about the Fannies, and at this camp
• 35:28
  Speaker 1: the commandant was known as Boss, a respectful familiarity I
• 35:32
  Speaker 1: did not meet with anywhere else. Some irreverent soul had
• 35:36
  Speaker 1: even inscribed it on the door for cubicle. The fannies
• 35:40
  Speaker 1: break out, so to speak, all over the place, even
• 35:43
  Speaker 1: the bathroom is not sacred to them. It is a
• 35:46
  Speaker 1: pathetic sight, that bathroom of the fannies. More pathetic, I
• 35:50
  Speaker 1: thought it after I had seen the rows of big
• 35:52
  Speaker 1: baths in the other camps. The fannies have a limited
• 35:56
  Speaker 1: and capricious water supply, and their bath is so small
• 35:59
  Speaker 1: as to remove forcibly the temptation for one person to
• 36:02
  Speaker 1: use it all up. Perched on two stalks of stone
• 36:05
  Speaker 1: stands a long bath in miniature, long enough to sit
• 36:08
  Speaker 1: in with the knees up, but of no known human size.
• 36:12
  Speaker 1: Inscribed above it under a fresco in black and white
• 36:15
  Speaker 1: of cats in the moonlight. Are these touching words. Do
• 36:19
  Speaker 1: not turn on the hot water when the cold is off,
• 36:21
  Speaker 1: or the boiler will bust. Everything I have been saying
• 36:25
  Speaker 1: and describing as external I know, But you see, I
• 36:28
  Speaker 1: was still grasping at externals, though underneath certain things were
• 36:32
  Speaker 1: beginning to worry me. But I couldn't bring myself to
• 36:34
  Speaker 1: voice anything. I was wondering to these splendid strangers. Later,
• 36:38
  Speaker 1: though I never was with any one convoy more than
• 36:41
  Speaker 1: a night, I still got the feeling that seeing so
• 36:43
  Speaker 1: many of them had made me more familiar with the
• 36:45
  Speaker 1: ones I happened to be with at the time. And
• 36:47
  Speaker 1: so I screwed myself up to the point and was
• 36:49
  Speaker 1: richly rewarded. But that, as mister Kipling would say, is
• 36:53
  Speaker 1: another story. We drove away in the windy evening, past
• 36:57
  Speaker 1: the parked rows of great glossy ambulances, and I bore
• 37:01
  Speaker 1: with me, chiefly an impression of gaiety, of a set purpose,
• 37:04
  Speaker 1: of a certain school girlish humor, and that knack of
• 37:07
  Speaker 1: making the best of everything which community life engenders when
• 37:11
  Speaker 1: it does not do exactly the reverse of long wooden
• 37:14
  Speaker 1: huts that might have been bare, but were decked with pictures,
• 37:17
  Speaker 1: patterned chintzes, book shelves, cushions, and above all, I took
• 37:22
  Speaker 1: an impression of a certain quality that I can only
• 37:24
  Speaker 1: describe as stark in the girls, though that is too
• 37:27
  Speaker 1: bleak a word for what I mean. It is a
• 37:30
  Speaker 1: sort of splendid austerity that pervades their look and their outlook,
• 37:34
  Speaker 1: that spiritually works itself out in this determined sticking at
• 37:38
  Speaker 1: the job. This avoidance of any emotion that interferes with
• 37:41
  Speaker 1: it and in their bodies, expresses itself in a disregard
• 37:44
  Speaker 1: for appearances that one would never have thought to find
• 37:47
  Speaker 1: in a human woodman. It leaves you gasping. They come in,
• 37:52
  Speaker 1: wind blown, reddened hot with exertion, after recklessly abandoning their
• 37:56
  Speaker 1: hands to all the harsh treatment of a car. The
• 37:59
  Speaker 1: sacond device of hands is no small one, and every
• 38:02
  Speaker 1: girl driving a car makes it. They come in, toss
• 38:05
  Speaker 1: their caps down, brush their hair back from their brow
• 38:08
  Speaker 1: in the one gesture that no woman has ever permitted
• 38:11
  Speaker 1: to herself or liked in a lover, and they don't mind.
• 38:15
  Speaker 1: It is amazing that disregard for appearances, But of course
• 38:20
  Speaker 1: it is partly explained by the fact that the natural
• 38:22
  Speaker 1: tendency in young things would be to accentuate anything of
• 38:25
  Speaker 1: that kind once it was discovered. And for the rest
• 38:29
  Speaker 1: I really think they are too intent on what they
• 38:31
  Speaker 1: are doing and care too little about themselves or what
• 38:34
  Speaker 1: any one may be thinking of them. What a blessed freedom, This,
• 38:39
  Speaker 1: at last, is what it is to be as free
• 38:41
  Speaker 1: as a man. End of Chapter four, Chapter five of
• 38:52
  Speaker 1: the sort of Deborah by F Tennyson Jesse. This LibriVox
• 38:56
  Speaker 1: recording is in the public domain recording by Marianne, Chapter
• 39:00
  Speaker 1: five outposts. It is a matter of temperament whether community life,
• 39:06
  Speaker 1: with its enforced lack of individualism, or the intense refraction
• 39:10
  Speaker 1: engendered by the fact of two people only living together
• 39:13
  Speaker 1: in a solitude, is the more trying. In the former state,
• 39:16
  Speaker 1: one may hope to attain isolation from the very superabundance
• 39:19
  Speaker 1: of personalities all around. But for the latter there is
• 39:23
  Speaker 1: at least this to be said, that if the two
• 39:25
  Speaker 1: feel like leaving each other alone, there is no distraction
• 39:28
  Speaker 1: of noise and presences. Either is a test to persons
• 39:31
  Speaker 1: who are sensitive about their right to solitude, a greater
• 39:35
  Speaker 1: one than to those who mix happily with their fellow humans.
• 39:38
  Speaker 1: Both are to be found in their best expression. Among
• 39:40
  Speaker 1: the English girls in France, from the Fanny convoy to
• 39:44
  Speaker 1: a lonely restation was a change that set me thinking
• 39:47
  Speaker 1: over the problem, a problem in which I was a
• 39:49
  Speaker 1: mere observer, but which all these girls had solved, each
• 39:52
  Speaker 1: in her different way, doubtless, but as far as I
• 39:55
  Speaker 1: could tell, to the nicest hair, fine edge of success
• 40:00
  Speaker 1: My first rest station was an out of the way
• 40:01
  Speaker 1: little place, bleak and treeless, and consisted of a wooden
• 40:05
  Speaker 1: hut built alongside the railway line. In this hut lived
• 40:08
  Speaker 1: the two VADs who ran the show, which means that
• 40:11
  Speaker 1: they did the cooking for themselves and for the trains,
• 40:14
  Speaker 1: which they supplied with food. That they dispense medicines for
• 40:17
  Speaker 1: the patients who appear daily at sick parade, and give
• 40:20
  Speaker 1: first aid to accidents, change dressings if any cases on
• 40:23
  Speaker 1: a hospital train need it, Feed stretcher bearers and ambulance
• 40:27
  Speaker 1: drivers whose hours often prevent them getting back to billets
• 40:30
  Speaker 1: for regular meals. Take in nurses who are either arriving
• 40:34
  Speaker 1: or leaving by a night train and would otherwise have
• 40:36
  Speaker 1: nowhere to go, and in their spare time, if you
• 40:38
  Speaker 1: can imagine them having any, grow their own vegetables and
• 40:42
  Speaker 1: make bandages, pillows and other supplies for the troops. Just
• 40:46
  Speaker 1: two girls, voluntary, unpaid workers who are nurses, needlewomen, doctors, chemists, gardeners,
• 40:53
  Speaker 1: and general servants, and whose work can never be done,
• 40:56
  Speaker 1: or when done, has to begin at once all over again,
• 41:01
  Speaker 1: no recreation except what they find in books, and themselves
• 41:04
  Speaker 1: nowhere to go, and that perpetual silhouette of railway trucks,
• 41:08
  Speaker 1: and the hard edge of station roof out of the
• 41:10
  Speaker 1: window of shabby houses, and their own tiny yard at
• 41:13
  Speaker 1: the back, the noise of shunting and train whistling in
• 41:16
  Speaker 1: their ears night and day, and with it all worst
• 41:19
  Speaker 1: touch of the lot to have to do their own
• 41:22
  Speaker 1: work for themselves, to slave for others all day long.
• 41:26
  Speaker 1: As long as you can come in and find things
• 41:27
  Speaker 1: ready for you at night, your hot cocoa in its
• 41:30
  Speaker 1: cup and your hot water bag, that great consolation of
• 41:33
  Speaker 1: the women members of the b E F in your
• 41:35
  Speaker 1: bed is endurable. But to come in and have no
• 41:38
  Speaker 1: cocoa if you don't make it yourself, no bag, if
• 41:41
  Speaker 1: you don't see to it, that is a different affair.
• 41:45
  Speaker 1: And that is where these two girls seemed to me
• 41:47
  Speaker 1: to touch a point that of necessity. The others I
• 41:49
  Speaker 1: had seen did not. And now that women are doing
• 41:52
  Speaker 1: men's work, it is to be supposed that they have
• 41:54
  Speaker 1: found out the value of meals, and no longer look
• 41:57
  Speaker 1: on an egg with one's tea as the greatest height
• 42:00
  Speaker 1: to which nourishment need rise. And hence, if honorably to
• 42:03
  Speaker 1: set about cooking for themselves, and there is no woman,
• 42:06
  Speaker 1: but will understand the boredom of that the rations that
• 42:09
  Speaker 1: a paternal army insist on showering upon them under such circumstances.
• 42:14
  Speaker 1: To work is human, but to eat divine. As I
• 42:18
  Speaker 1: stepped out of the car at the door, feeling terribly
• 42:20
  Speaker 1: impertinent at this rolling round in luxury to gaze at
• 42:23
  Speaker 1: the work of my betters, one of the V. A.
• 42:25
  Speaker 1: D's came to the door of the shanty to greet us.
• 42:28
  Speaker 1: She was a fair creature with wind blown yellow hair
• 42:30
  Speaker 1: and a smut which kindly accident had placed exactly like
• 42:33
  Speaker 1: an old time patch upon the curve of one flushed cheek.
• 42:37
  Speaker 1: She was wrapped in a big pinafore of butcher blue,
• 42:40
  Speaker 1: and explained that she was cleaning up. It all looked
• 42:43
  Speaker 1: very clean to me, certainly. The little dispensary, the room
• 42:46
  Speaker 1: into which you first walked, was spotless, Everything ranged ready
• 42:50
  Speaker 1: for sick parade, glass, white enamel, metal shining in the
• 42:54
  Speaker 1: shaft of sunlight which came palely in at the open doorway.
• 42:58
  Speaker 1: To the left was the kitchen, stone floored fitted with
• 43:01
  Speaker 1: an English stove. To the right, the tiny slip of
• 43:04
  Speaker 1: sitting room from which opened the two still narrower little bedrooms.
• 43:08
  Speaker 1: That was all. This is the atmosphere in which the
• 43:12
  Speaker 1: two girls live, but as usual they have done everything
• 43:15
  Speaker 1: that is possible with it. Brilliant curtains, pictures, rows of books.
• 43:20
  Speaker 1: The rest stations keep up a sort of circulating library,
• 43:22
  Speaker 1: exchanging their books from time to time amongst themselves by
• 43:25
  Speaker 1: way of the ambulance trains, which are thus supplied with
• 43:28
  Speaker 1: the library. Also, and charming pottery ranged along the shelves.
• 43:33
  Speaker 1: The rest stations rather make a point of their pottery.
• 43:36
  Speaker 1: It is their tradition always to drink out of bowls
• 43:38
  Speaker 1: instead of cups, and their plates have the triumphant gallic
• 43:41
  Speaker 1: cock in bravery of prismatic plumage striding across them. After
• 43:47
  Speaker 1: I had said good bye to the Golden Girl of
• 43:49
  Speaker 1: the Inspired Smut, I went on to a bigger rest
• 43:52
  Speaker 1: station at a terminus, and was in time to lunch there.
• 43:56
  Speaker 1: It was a more sophisticated affair than that which I
• 43:59
  Speaker 1: had left. Yet, when this rest station was started at
• 44:02
  Speaker 1: the beginning of the war, its habitation was a railway
• 44:05
  Speaker 1: truck for the romance, of which some of those who
• 44:07
  Speaker 1: were there in that first rush when you were never
• 44:10
  Speaker 1: off your feet for twenty four hours at a time,
• 44:12
  Speaker 1: sometimes sigh. Now part of the station buildings has been
• 44:16
  Speaker 1: partitioned off for them, and there is a fairly big
• 44:19
  Speaker 1: dispensary with a bed for dressings and accident cases, of
• 44:23
  Speaker 1: which quite a number are brought in, a kitchen, a
• 44:26
  Speaker 1: little dining room where all the furniture is home made,
• 44:29
  Speaker 1: deep chairs out of barrels and the like, and behind
• 44:32
  Speaker 1: that a big store room crammed from floor to stealing
• 44:34
  Speaker 1: with stores. The girls do not sleep here but in
• 44:38
  Speaker 1: billets at the town, but they have to provide meals
• 44:40
  Speaker 1: at any hour and meet all the ambulance trains with
• 44:43
  Speaker 1: food and extra comforts. We had a very good lunch
• 44:46
  Speaker 1: of stew and onions and potatoes, big bowls of steaming coffee,
• 44:50
  Speaker 1: and a pudding with raisins, all cooked by one of
• 44:53
  Speaker 1: the vad domestic staff, who always had to slip into
• 44:56
  Speaker 1: her place last to eat it and get out of
• 44:58
  Speaker 1: it first to serve the next time. Course I saw
• 45:01
  Speaker 1: only these two rest stations, each typical in its way,
• 45:05
  Speaker 1: the one of the isolated and the other of the
• 45:07
  Speaker 1: central kind. But they are scattered up and down the line,
• 45:10
  Speaker 1: varying in character, according to the needs of the particular place.
• 45:14
  Speaker 1: At one, for instance, there is a small ward attached
• 45:18
  Speaker 1: where slight cases not bad enough to be admitted to
• 45:20
  Speaker 1: the hospital and yet requiring some attention, can be kept
• 45:24
  Speaker 1: for a day or two, thus possibly avoiding serious illness.
• 45:27
  Speaker 1: Near to this same one is a labor battalion, many
• 45:31
  Speaker 1: of the men from whom are out patients, whose medical
• 45:34
  Speaker 1: inspection is held at the rest station. Near another is
• 45:37
  Speaker 1: a large convalescent camp, the oc of which looks to
• 45:41
  Speaker 1: the VADs of the rest station for help in various ways.
• 45:45
  Speaker 1: At them all there is always the work of feeding
• 45:47
  Speaker 1: the stretcher bearers and the ambulance drivers, who, in times
• 45:50
  Speaker 1: of pressure have to spend many hours at their work
• 45:52
  Speaker 1: of unloading the trains without any chance of getting a
• 45:55
  Speaker 1: regular meal. In the early days of the rest stations,
• 45:58
  Speaker 1: when the ambulance trains were often merely improvised, food and
• 46:01
  Speaker 1: dressings had to be provided for all the wounded on board.
• 46:04
  Speaker 1: But now when the work of the British Red Cross
• 46:07
  Speaker 1: is as near perfection as any human organization well can be,
• 46:11
  Speaker 1: the men have every care taken of them on the
• 46:13
  Speaker 1: perfectly fitted trains. Yet there is much attention given to
• 46:16
  Speaker 1: the sick and wounded of every nation who come in
• 46:19
  Speaker 1: on the trains, attention chiefly consisting of the giving of
• 46:22
  Speaker 1: extra comforts cocoa, lemons, shirts, slippers, cigarettes, cushions, and the
• 46:28
  Speaker 1: redressing of wounds, while a great deal as well as
• 46:30
  Speaker 1: feeding them, is done for the staffs of the trains,
• 46:33
  Speaker 1: for whom besides the lending library, an exchange of gramophone
• 46:37
  Speaker 1: records and of laundry has been arranged. Perhaps one of
• 46:41
  Speaker 1: the most interesting things to note about the rest stations
• 46:43
  Speaker 1: is that they are one of the few points of
• 46:45
  Speaker 1: contact between the members of the b e F and
• 46:47
  Speaker 1: the French population. Our camps, our hospitals, our motor convoys
• 46:52
  Speaker 1: are all little Englands in themselves. But every morning to
• 46:56
  Speaker 1: the sick parade of these rest stations come not only
• 46:58
  Speaker 1: the local VADs the ambulance drivers, but the French civilian
• 47:02
  Speaker 1: population as well, and in greater and greater numbers. Accidents
• 47:07
  Speaker 1: are brought to a rest station, very often in preference
• 47:09
  Speaker 1: to being taken anywhere else, and anxious mothers bring Jean
• 47:13
  Speaker 1: or Marie when a mysterious ailment shows itself in untowards
• 47:16
  Speaker 1: spot or sneeze. The Gaelic cock is more than a decoration.
• 47:20
  Speaker 1: As he strides across the pottery of the rest stations,
• 47:24
  Speaker 1: he has become a symbol as well. Chapter six Wax
• 47:31
  Speaker 1: Rumors and Realities. When I spoke at h Q of
• 47:35
  Speaker 1: the depression I found in all the landscape around, and
• 47:37
  Speaker 1: of its peculiar morbid quality, nearly every one assured me
• 47:40
  Speaker 1: that I should find the country round E, whither I
• 47:43
  Speaker 1: was going far more depressing. There is nothing but sand,
• 47:47
  Speaker 1: dunes and huts, miles of huts, hospitals and camps and
• 47:51
  Speaker 1: so on. It did not sound very delightful, But to
• 47:55
  Speaker 1: differing vision, differing effects, and personally I loved E. Terrible
• 47:59
  Speaker 1: as city of huts generally are here, they seemed to
• 48:02
  Speaker 1: me to have lost much of their terror. I loved
• 48:05
  Speaker 1: the long, rippling lines of dunes, the decoration of hundreds
• 48:08
  Speaker 1: of tall pines that came partly against the sandy pollor
• 48:12
  Speaker 1: partly against the vivid, steely blue of the river beyond.
• 48:15
  Speaker 1: I loved the bare woods we passed all along the road,
• 48:19
  Speaker 1: the trees still not perceptibly misted with buds, but giving
• 48:22
  Speaker 1: with their myriads of fine massed twigs an effect of
• 48:25
  Speaker 1: clouded wine color. And was there ever such a countryside
• 48:29
  Speaker 1: for magpies, superstition dies before their numbers, helpless to count them,
• 48:35
  Speaker 1: so far are they beyond the range of sorrow, mirth,
• 48:38
  Speaker 1: marriage and birth. At one glance everywhere through those whiny woods,
• 48:42
  Speaker 1: there went up the fanlike flutter of black and white,
• 48:45
  Speaker 1: the only positive notes in all the delicate universe, compact
• 48:49
  Speaker 1: of pearly skies, dim purples of earth, and pale irridation
• 48:52
  Speaker 1: of the sun. On the roads there was the usual
• 48:56
  Speaker 1: melody of the races of the world, added to as
• 48:58
  Speaker 1: we neared e by Canadian nurses in streaming white veils
• 49:02
  Speaker 1: and uniforms of brilliant blue. And also, for surely the
• 49:05
  Speaker 1: most delightful of creative blessings may rank as a race
• 49:08
  Speaker 1: of the world, by the glossy golden war dogs, who
• 49:11
  Speaker 1: also have their training camp near here, and take their
• 49:14
  Speaker 1: walks abroad, waving their plumy tails and jumping up on
• 49:17
  Speaker 1: their masters like any leisured dog at home. But to
• 49:22
  Speaker 1: my sorrow, I was not sent to look at the
• 49:24
  Speaker 1: war dogs, and so had to pass by and leave
• 49:26
  Speaker 1: the wagging plumes behind. I had several ends in view
• 49:30
  Speaker 1: at e I had to see the large whack camp
• 49:33
  Speaker 1: there its outflung ramifications and the work that the WAX
• 49:37
  Speaker 1: did in the men's camp, and I had to see
• 49:39
  Speaker 1: the V A D motor convoy at which I was
• 49:42
  Speaker 1: to spend a night. Incidentally, I had high hopes of
• 49:45
  Speaker 1: getting permission to go out in an ambulance with the latter,
• 49:49
  Speaker 1: though it is against the most sacred army orders for
• 49:51
  Speaker 1: any one not in uniform to be seen upon an ambulance.
• 49:54
  Speaker 1: Here I may say that the permission was granted by
• 49:57
  Speaker 1: a powerful individual known as the D D M S,
• 50:00
  Speaker 1: though he mentioned that being shot at dawn was the
• 50:03
  Speaker 1: least painful thing that ought to happen to me for
• 50:05
  Speaker 1: doing it. I wish to go first to the Whack
• 50:08
  Speaker 1: headquarters to see the area Controller, who corresponds to an
• 50:11
  Speaker 1: area commandant in the V A DS and whose rank
• 50:15
  Speaker 1: approximates that of a major. She is supreme in her area,
• 50:18
  Speaker 1: and only the Chief Controller of the WAX is above her.
• 50:22
  Speaker 1: Below her are her unit administrators, who are in charge
• 50:25
  Speaker 1: of units and approximate to captains, and have their deputy
• 50:28
  Speaker 1: and assistant administrators, whom, for convenient sake, we can classify
• 50:32
  Speaker 1: as lieutenants and second lieutenants. This is the place to
• 50:36
  Speaker 1: say frankly that I had heard, as had we all
• 50:39
  Speaker 1: the rumors that were flying round about the women's army.
• 50:43
  Speaker 1: They weren't a success. It had been found to be unworkable.
• 50:46
  Speaker 1: And as reason, a more specific charge. Need I say
• 50:51
  Speaker 1: what that specific charge was. What is it that always
• 50:55
  Speaker 1: jumps to the mind of the average materialist, the most
• 50:57
  Speaker 1: innocent thing in the world in itself, and the cause
• 51:00
  Speaker 1: of most of the scandal of civilization a baby. There
• 51:05
  Speaker 1: is a certain type of mind which always jumps to babies,
• 51:08
  Speaker 1: apparently looking on them as the churchmen of the Middle
• 51:10
  Speaker 1: Ages looked on women, as the crowning touch of evil
• 51:14
  Speaker 1: in an evil world. If you remember, there was great
• 51:18
  Speaker 1: agitation in certain quarters at the beginning of the war
• 51:20
  Speaker 1: over war babies. They were going to inundate the country.
• 51:24
  Speaker 1: They were going to be a very serious proposition. Indeed,
• 51:27
  Speaker 1: the Irish question conscription conscientious objectors were going to be
• 51:32
  Speaker 1: as nothing to the matter of the war babies. It is, perhaps,
• 51:36
  Speaker 1: for some points of view, a pity that the war
• 51:38
  Speaker 1: babies didn't materialize, but that, of course is another question altogether.
• 51:43
  Speaker 1: Passions Ultra, as the great master of delicate and indelicate situations,
• 51:47
  Speaker 1: used to say The point as regards the Women's Army
• 51:52
  Speaker 1: is that the whole of the agitation against it is
• 51:54
  Speaker 1: a libel, and one which decent people should be ashamed
• 51:57
  Speaker 1: to circulate, even as subastitious. Quite apart from the evidence
• 52:02
  Speaker 1: of my own ears and eyes at various camps, I
• 52:05
  Speaker 1: was supplied with the official statistics for the Women's Army
• 52:08
  Speaker 1: from March of nineteen seventeen to February of nineteen eighteen.
• 52:12
  Speaker 1: And of those women who have not been a success,
• 52:15
  Speaker 1: as the mischievous gossip has it, how many do you
• 52:18
  Speaker 1: think have proved failures? Out of six thousand in the
• 52:22
  Speaker 1: time mentioned, fourteen have been sent home for incompetence without
• 52:25
  Speaker 1: any slur on their characters, twenty three for lack of discipline,
• 52:29
  Speaker 1: mostly in the early days when the girls did not
• 52:31
  Speaker 1: realize what being in the army meant and thought if
• 52:33
  Speaker 1: they wanted to go to any particular place there was
• 52:36
  Speaker 1: no reason why they shouldn't. And fifteen who were already
• 52:39
  Speaker 1: ENCIENTI before leaving England, and which even the most censorious
• 52:43
  Speaker 1: can hardly lay to the charge of the b E F.
• 52:46
  Speaker 1: And of all that six thousand, what percentage do you
• 52:49
  Speaker 1: suppose has had to be sent back for what is
• 52:51
  Speaker 1: euphemistically known I believe as getting into trouble since landing
• 52:55
  Speaker 1: in France. No percentage at all, If I may express
• 52:59
  Speaker 1: myself thus on mathematically but exactly five cases, five out
• 53:04
  Speaker 1: of six thousand, compare that with the morality of any
• 53:08
  Speaker 1: village in England or anywhere else in the world, and
• 53:11
  Speaker 1: then say, if you dare to be so obviously dishonest
• 53:14
  Speaker 1: that there is any reason why the Women's Army should
• 53:17
  Speaker 1: be aspersed. These statistics were given to me at the
• 53:21
  Speaker 1: office of the Area Controller, and later repeated at the
• 53:24
  Speaker 1: Women's Army h Q by the Controller in chief. But
• 53:28
  Speaker 1: on that first sunny morning amongst the pines and pale
• 53:31
  Speaker 1: golden sand dunes, it was naturally the human and individual side,
• 53:35
  Speaker 1: rather than any of figures, however, startling, that claimed the
• 53:38
  Speaker 1: mind the most. For one thing I had the actual
• 53:42
  Speaker 1: organization and attributes of the Women's Army to learn. I
• 53:45
  Speaker 1: knew nothing the actual working knowledge, apart from impressions and
• 53:49
  Speaker 1: things learnt only by seeing them that I gathered during
• 53:52
  Speaker 1: the days I spent at various wax centers. Is as follows.
• 53:56
  Speaker 1: The Women's Army differs from the f A n Y
• 53:58
  Speaker 1: and the v a D in being a paid instead
• 54:01
  Speaker 1: of a volunteer body, in being directly under the Army,
• 54:04
  Speaker 1: not the Red Cross, and in its members being ranked
• 54:07
  Speaker 1: as privates. But it also differs from the GSVA D,
• 54:11
  Speaker 1: though that too is paid and its members rank as privates.
• 54:14
  Speaker 1: The GSVAD is far more mixed. Its members are of
• 54:18
  Speaker 1: all classes and educations, and are drafted off for work accordingly.
• 54:22
  Speaker 1: But the bulk of the WAX are working girls and
• 54:24
  Speaker 1: do manual labor such as gardening, cooking, baking, scrubbing, et cetera,
• 54:30
  Speaker 1: though there are amongst them girls of a more specialized
• 54:32
  Speaker 1: education who are signallers and clerks. The officers, of course,
• 54:36
  Speaker 1: are women of education who have undergone a stiff training
• 54:39
  Speaker 1: and have been carefully selected for the posts they fill.
• 54:42
  Speaker 1: For as will be seen, nearly everything depends upon whack officers.
• 54:47
  Speaker 1: They have certainly a greater power for good or harm
• 54:49
  Speaker 1: than the officers of the regular army, and never were
• 54:52
  Speaker 1: both the force and danger of personality more acutely illustrated
• 54:56
  Speaker 1: than in the position of the whack leaders. A unit
• 54:59
  Speaker 1: administrator has to know individually every girl in her camp,
• 55:02
  Speaker 1: though there may be several hundreds. She has to blend
• 55:05
  Speaker 1: with her absolute authority, a maternal interest, and supervision. While
• 55:10
  Speaker 1: she has no power to say whom a girl shall
• 55:12
  Speaker 1: or shall not walk out with, yet she makes it
• 55:14
  Speaker 1: her business to know what choice of men friends the
• 55:16
  Speaker 1: girl makes, and to influence as far as she can
• 55:19
  Speaker 1: that choice towards discretion. She must not nag, but must
• 55:23
  Speaker 1: inculcate by subtle methods or realization of what is due
• 55:26
  Speaker 1: to the uniform, a sense of the idea, the symbol
• 55:29
  Speaker 1: of it. She does not actually say to a girl
• 55:32
  Speaker 1: that she is not to walk arm in arm with
• 55:34
  Speaker 1: a tommy, or pin her collar with her paste brooch,
• 55:37
  Speaker 1: but she conveys to her that these things are not
• 55:40
  Speaker 1: done in the best uniforms, and the girl learns with
• 55:43
  Speaker 1: incredible rapidity a thing is not done, what a potency
• 55:48
  Speaker 1: in those words, in that attitude of mind, it probably
• 55:52
  Speaker 1: influenced the earliest savages in the manner of wearing their cowies.
• 55:56
  Speaker 1: After all, the whole idea of uniform, of distinguishing one
• 56:00
  Speaker 1: cast for another by bits of different colored cloth, is
• 56:03
  Speaker 1: based on the instinct for being superior. Was it not
• 56:07
  Speaker 1: John Selden who said something to the effect that our
• 56:09
  Speaker 1: rulers have always tried to make themselves as different from
• 56:12
  Speaker 1: us as possible. Of course they have. And it is
• 56:16
  Speaker 1: exactly the same thing which the wise Pope Gregory the
• 56:19
  Speaker 1: seventh had in mind when he definitely crystallized the measures
• 56:22
  Speaker 1: for celibacy of the priesthood. And it is exactly the
• 56:25
  Speaker 1: same thing which puts the policeman into a dark blue
• 56:27
  Speaker 1: uniform and a helmet before he can so much as
• 56:30
  Speaker 1: stop a milk cart. A policeman in playing clothes is
• 56:34
  Speaker 1: a dethroned monarch. Nothing in the nature of controlling others
• 56:39
  Speaker 1: was ever done without dressing up. The marvel is that
• 56:42
  Speaker 1: for so many centuries the principle should have been confined
• 56:45
  Speaker 1: to the masculine sex, when it has such an obvious
• 56:47
  Speaker 1: appeal to the feminine. This principle, when carried a step
• 56:51
  Speaker 1: further and applied to those controlled by giving them the
• 56:55
  Speaker 1: sensation of being different from the rest of the world,
• 56:58
  Speaker 1: results in that spirit called a spirit, which is really
• 57:01
  Speaker 1: the espierre de la uniform Towards the rest of the world.
• 57:05
  Speaker 1: The uniformed are proud of being different amongst themselves, proud
• 57:08
  Speaker 1: of being alike, and the more alike, so to speak,
• 57:11
  Speaker 1: the aliker. It is not a thing to treat scornfully,
• 57:15
  Speaker 1: for it has the whole symbolism behind it, that which
• 57:18
  Speaker 1: makes a man cheerfully die. For a piece of bunting,
• 57:21
  Speaker 1: which prosaically speaking, is only a piece of bunting that
• 57:24
  Speaker 1: happens to be dyed red, white and blue, is part
• 57:27
  Speaker 1: of this same spirit. Dull of soul, indeed, must he
• 57:31
  Speaker 1: be who can look without a profound emotion on the
• 57:34
  Speaker 1: tattered colors of a regiment. And yet it is only
• 57:37
  Speaker 1: the idea, the symbol, that makes these things what they are.
• 57:42
  Speaker 1: And for most of these girls, remember it is the
• 57:44
  Speaker 1: first time they have had a symbol held before them.
• 57:48
  Speaker 1: We of the upper classes are brought up with many reverences,
• 57:51
  Speaker 1: for our superiors are elders for traditions. But the classes, which,
• 57:55
  Speaker 1: for want of a better word, I must call lower,
• 57:58
  Speaker 1: So please do not cavil at me for doing so,
• 58:01
  Speaker 1: or attribute false meanings, are for the most part brought
• 58:04
  Speaker 1: up to think themselves as good as any one else,
• 58:07
  Speaker 1: and their rights the chief thing in life. While owing
• 58:10
  Speaker 1: to the unfortunate curriculum of our board schools, which does
• 58:13
  Speaker 1: not insist nearly enough on history as the fount of
• 58:15
  Speaker 1: the present and of all that is great and good
• 58:18
  Speaker 1: in the past. They are left without those standards of
• 58:20
  Speaker 1: impersonal enthusiasms and imaginative daring, which should be the rightful
• 58:25
  Speaker 1: inheritance of us. All these girls are now given an
• 58:28
  Speaker 1: abstract idea to live up to, no mere standard of expediency,
• 58:33
  Speaker 1: but an idea that appeals to the imagination. And how
• 58:36
  Speaker 1: magnificently they are responding those statistics show, but more still
• 58:41
  Speaker 1: does the attitude of all the officers and men who
• 58:43
  Speaker 1: have to do with them. I talked with all ranks
• 58:46
  Speaker 1: on the subject, and never once did I meet with
• 58:48
  Speaker 1: anything but admiration and enthusiasm. The men are touchingly grateful
• 58:53
  Speaker 1: to them, and value their work and their companionship. For
• 58:57
  Speaker 1: very wisely, the girls are encouraged to be friends with
• 58:59
  Speaker 1: the men, are allowed to walk out with them, to
• 59:02
  Speaker 1: give teas and dances for them in the y w
• 59:04
  Speaker 1: c A huts, and to go to return parties given
• 59:07
  Speaker 1: by the men in the y m c A huts.
• 59:09
  Speaker 1: It is, of course easy to sneer at the ideal
• 59:13
  Speaker 1: which is held before the men, of treating these girls
• 59:15
  Speaker 1: as they would their sisters, but the fact remains that
• 59:18
  Speaker 1: they very beautifully do so. Another point to be remembered
• 59:23
  Speaker 1: is that far from these girls being exposed to undue temptation,
• 59:27
  Speaker 1: the great majority of them have never been so well
• 59:29
  Speaker 1: looked after as now. They are mostly girls of a
• 59:32
  Speaker 1: class that knows few restrictions, who, with the exception of
• 59:36
  Speaker 1: those previously in domestic service, have always had what they
• 59:40
  Speaker 1: call there evenings when they roamed the streets or went
• 59:43
  Speaker 1: to the cinemas with their boys. Now every whack has
• 59:46
  Speaker 1: to be in by eight, can go nowhere without permission,
• 59:49
  Speaker 1: is carefully though unostentatiously shepherded, and is provided with healthy
• 59:53
  Speaker 1: recreation such as Swedish exercises, morse dancing, hockey and the like.
• 59:59
  Speaker 1: In short, she is now looked after and guarded as
• 1:00:02
  Speaker 1: young girls with the educated classes are normally. And these
• 1:00:05
  Speaker 1: are the girls, good honest, hard working creatures who have
• 1:00:09
  Speaker 1: been maligned in whispers and giggles up and down the country.
• 1:00:13
  Speaker 1: It is perhaps needless to say that they are naturally
• 1:00:15
  Speaker 1: very indignant over it, and that parents of many write
• 1:00:19
  Speaker 1: to them agitatedly to demand if it's all true, and
• 1:00:21
  Speaker 1: to beg them to come back, and that sometimes when
• 1:00:24
  Speaker 1: they are home on leave, instead of their uniforms bringing
• 1:00:27
  Speaker 1: them the respect and honor they deserve, and which every
• 1:00:30
  Speaker 1: man oversees accords to them. They are subjected to insult
• 1:00:33
  Speaker 1: from people who have nothing better to do than to
• 1:00:36
  Speaker 1: betray to the world the pitiable condition of their own
• 1:00:38
  Speaker 1: nasty minds. End of chapter six, chapter seven of The
• 1:00:50
  Speaker 1: Sword of Deborah by F. Tennys and Jesse. This LibriVox
• 1:00:54
  Speaker 1: recording is in the Public domean recording by Marianne, Chapter seven,
• 1:00:59
  Speaker 1: The Brown Gray. When first one has dealings with the
• 1:01:03
  Speaker 1: whax and their officers, one imagines distractedly that one has
• 1:01:07
  Speaker 1: fallen among royalty. This is because the word ma'am is
• 1:01:10
  Speaker 1: always used by a whack when speaking to another of
• 1:01:12
  Speaker 1: superior rank, till you very nearly find yourself bobbing Later.
• 1:01:17
  Speaker 1: This impression is strengthened by the memory for faces, which
• 1:01:20
  Speaker 1: every whack officer displays in a manner one has always
• 1:01:23
  Speaker 1: been taught to consider truly royal. It is only among
• 1:01:26
  Speaker 1: themselves that any titles exist. To the outside world, even
• 1:01:30
  Speaker 1: the army officers. Each whack officer is mere missus or
• 1:01:34
  Speaker 1: miss whichever she may chance to be. The putting on
• 1:01:38
  Speaker 1: of frills has been avoided with extraordinary dexterity. There's just
• 1:01:42
  Speaker 1: enough ritual to make the girls feel they belong to
• 1:01:44
  Speaker 1: an organized body, without the enemy being given occasion to
• 1:01:47
  Speaker 1: blaspheme by saying that women like playing at being men.
• 1:01:51
  Speaker 1: In France, though not in England, the girls salute their officers,
• 1:01:55
  Speaker 1: as this helps them to get at the idea of
• 1:01:57
  Speaker 1: the thing, that feeling of being part of an ordered whole,
• 1:02:01
  Speaker 1: which is so valuable in the matter of uniforms. Someone
• 1:02:04
  Speaker 1: at the War Office, or wherever these things are thought out,
• 1:02:08
  Speaker 1: has really had a rather charming series of inspirations. At first,
• 1:02:12
  Speaker 1: the women wore the same badges as denote the ranks
• 1:02:14
  Speaker 1: of soldiers. But a paternal or should one not almost
• 1:02:18
  Speaker 1: say maternal government evidently thought that not feminine enough, and
• 1:02:23
  Speaker 1: now the badges of varying rank are roses, fleur de
• 1:02:25
  Speaker 1: lis and laurel leaves, a touch which would have delighted
• 1:02:28
  Speaker 1: Old Andrew Marvel. One of the chief activities of the
• 1:02:33
  Speaker 1: wax is cooking. And when escorted by the d d MS,
• 1:02:37
  Speaker 1: whom I have before mentioned, I arrived at the little
• 1:02:39
  Speaker 1: Wooden office amidst the pines. It was to hear a
• 1:02:42
  Speaker 1: one sided conversation on the telephone between the area controller
• 1:02:46
  Speaker 1: and various great ones of the Earth. Who are frantically
• 1:02:48
  Speaker 1: ringing up for cooks. Also, a new officers club for
• 1:02:52
  Speaker 1: senior officers wanting a rest from the firing line is
• 1:02:55
  Speaker 1: just being opened near e and it is to be
• 1:02:57
  Speaker 1: staffed by Wax, and the cook is to be of
• 1:02:59
  Speaker 1: the very best. Punch's immortal advice as to the treatment
• 1:03:04
  Speaker 1: of husbands is not forgotten by the whack controllers when
• 1:03:07
  Speaker 1: questions of this kind arise. After talk of cooks came
• 1:03:11
  Speaker 1: the seeing of cooks in a big camp and small
• 1:03:14
  Speaker 1: arms school near kitchens are kitchens and mess rooms, mess
• 1:03:18
  Speaker 1: rooms everywhere you go, And beyond a general impression of
• 1:03:21
  Speaker 1: extreme cleanliness, an extraordinarily appealing smell of stew, and the
• 1:03:25
  Speaker 1: sight of great branches of mimosa set about the long
• 1:03:28
  Speaker 1: mess tables, there is nothing of particular interest to describe.
• 1:03:33
  Speaker 1: The point is that all the preparing and the serving
• 1:03:35
  Speaker 1: of food in this great camp for officers and men
• 1:03:38
  Speaker 1: is done by women, and that all the male creatures
• 1:03:40
  Speaker 1: are unreservedly jubilant at the change. The CEO expressed his
• 1:03:45
  Speaker 1: hope that after the war the WAAC would continue as
• 1:03:48
  Speaker 1: a permanent part of the army, while a sergeant gave
• 1:03:51
  Speaker 1: it as his opinion that the women managed to introduce
• 1:03:53
  Speaker 1: so much more variety into the preparation of food than
• 1:03:56
  Speaker 1: the men had done. Also, he added that they wasted
• 1:03:59
  Speaker 1: mind less. In every kitchen there is a fore woman cook.
• 1:04:04
  Speaker 1: There are these fore women in every department of the
• 1:04:06
  Speaker 1: work of the women, and they correspond rather to the
• 1:04:09
  Speaker 1: non combs among the men. At present they are distinguished
• 1:04:13
  Speaker 1: by a bronze laurel leaf, and always have their own
• 1:04:15
  Speaker 1: mess room and sitting room, as distinct from the rest
• 1:04:17
  Speaker 1: of the girls. But it is rather an influence than
• 1:04:20
  Speaker 1: an authority, which is vested in them. Though the advisability
• 1:04:24
  Speaker 1: of definitely endowing them with more of the latter is
• 1:04:26
  Speaker 1: being considered. They answer, as the rest of the whack
• 1:04:29
  Speaker 1: machinery does extremely well. An interesting point about the army
• 1:04:34
  Speaker 1: kitchens as they are run nowadays is that after the
• 1:04:37
  Speaker 1: amount of fats necessary to the cooking has been put aside,
• 1:04:41
  Speaker 1: the rest is poured into great tins, graded according to
• 1:04:44
  Speaker 1: its quality, and sent home for munitions. We are getting
• 1:04:48
  Speaker 1: things down to the fine edge of no waste at last,
• 1:04:51
  Speaker 1: and the women are helping to do it. At another camp,
• 1:04:55
  Speaker 1: I found the co most anxious for the women to
• 1:04:57
  Speaker 1: start a mending factory. It would be so such a
• 1:05:00
  Speaker 1: help to the men, who, unlike sailors, are not adept
• 1:05:03
  Speaker 1: at repairing their own clothes. Also, a laundry, he intimated,
• 1:05:07
  Speaker 1: would be necessary really to round off the scheme satisfactorily.
• 1:05:11
  Speaker 1: Both these are thoroughly sound suggestions that may, yet, let
• 1:05:14
  Speaker 1: us hope, come to something, though they would be in
• 1:05:17
  Speaker 1: a sense breaking new ground, as the idea of the
• 1:05:19
  Speaker 1: wax is that they actually replace men. Each cook releases
• 1:05:23
  Speaker 1: one man, while among the clerks at present the ratio
• 1:05:26
  Speaker 1: is four women to three men, and there are already
• 1:05:29
  Speaker 1: six thousand whax in France. Does not this give the
• 1:05:32
  Speaker 1: obvious reason why slanders started by the enemy agents have
• 1:05:36
  Speaker 1: been busy trying to drive the Women's Army out of France.
• 1:05:40
  Speaker 1: Every whack who goes to France is like the pawn
• 1:05:43
  Speaker 1: who attains the top of the chessboard and is exchanged
• 1:05:45
  Speaker 1: for more valuable peace. She sends a fighting man to
• 1:05:49
  Speaker 1: his job by taking on the jobs that are really
• 1:05:51
  Speaker 1: a woman's after all, For is it not a woman's
• 1:05:53
  Speaker 1: earliest job to look after man. She looks after him
• 1:05:57
  Speaker 1: to keep him well and strong. She looks after him
• 1:06:00
  Speaker 1: when he is ill and now in France, she looks
• 1:06:03
  Speaker 1: after the gallant dead, who are lying in the soil
• 1:06:06
  Speaker 1: for which they fought. Between the pines and the gleaming
• 1:06:09
  Speaker 1: river with its sandy shoals are the rows of crosses,
• 1:06:12
  Speaker 1: sparkling the ash gray wood of them in the effulgence
• 1:06:16
  Speaker 1: of the spring light, making hundreds of points of brightness
• 1:06:19
  Speaker 1: above the earth, still brown and bare, that soon, under
• 1:06:22
  Speaker 1: the gardener's care, will blossom like the rose. Not a
• 1:06:26
  Speaker 1: desert even now, For no place where Fiers rest is
• 1:06:29
  Speaker 1: a desert, but a place of expectant full of the
• 1:06:32
  Speaker 1: promise of beauty to come, an outward beauty, which is
• 1:06:36
  Speaker 1: what it calls for as its right, because it is
• 1:06:38
  Speaker 1: wholly ground, not only in the merely technical sense as
• 1:06:43
  Speaker 1: the consecrated earth of quiet English cemeteries, where lie all
• 1:06:46
  Speaker 1: though those who lived well and those who live basely,
• 1:06:50
  Speaker 1: but wholly as a place can only be when it
• 1:06:52
  Speaker 1: is held by those who all died perfectly. Here and there,
• 1:06:57
  Speaker 1: among the earth brown graves stooping above them are the
• 1:07:00
  Speaker 1: earth brown figures of the gardeners. Every grave is freshly raked,
• 1:07:05
  Speaker 1: molded between wood and frames, to a flat, high surface,
• 1:07:08
  Speaker 1: where the flowers are to overflow, and above every raised
• 1:07:11
  Speaker 1: dais of earth. The bleached wood of the cross spreads
• 1:07:14
  Speaker 1: its arm, throwing a shadow, soft and blue like a
• 1:07:16
  Speaker 1: dove's feather, a shadow that curves over the mold and
• 1:07:20
  Speaker 1: laps down its edge lightly as a benison. On each
• 1:07:24
  Speaker 1: cross is the little white metal plate giving the name
• 1:07:26
  Speaker 1: and regiment of the man who lies beneath, and the
• 1:07:29
  Speaker 1: letters R I p here. And then is an ugly
• 1:07:33
  Speaker 1: stiff wreath of artificial immortellus beneath a glass frame, the
• 1:07:38
  Speaker 1: pathetic offering of those who came from England to lay
• 1:07:40
  Speaker 1: it there. Sometimes a wreath, fresh and green shows that
• 1:07:44
  Speaker 1: some one who loves the dead man has sent money
• 1:07:46
  Speaker 1: with a request that flowers shall be bought and put
• 1:07:48
  Speaker 1: upon his grave on the anniversary of his death. Sometimes,
• 1:07:53
  Speaker 1: when they come over from England, these poor people break
• 1:07:55
  Speaker 1: down and turn blindly as people will, for comfort to
• 1:07:58
  Speaker 1: the nearest sympathy to the women gardeners who are showing
• 1:08:01
  Speaker 1: them the grave they came to see. And a sudden
• 1:08:04
  Speaker 1: note of that deep under current which at times of
• 1:08:06
  Speaker 1: stress always turns the members of either sex to their
• 1:08:09
  Speaker 1: own sex for comfort, sends the women mourners to the
• 1:08:13
  Speaker 1: arms of the women who are working beside them. Sentiment,
• 1:08:16
  Speaker 1: if you will, but a sentiment that is stirred up
• 1:08:19
  Speaker 1: from the deep, and which would scorn the apologies of
• 1:08:22
  Speaker 1: the critical. And what of the girls who work daily
• 1:08:25
  Speaker 1: on that sacred earth, who see before their eyes bright
• 1:08:28
  Speaker 1: in the sun, inexpressibly gray and dauntless in the rain,
• 1:08:32
  Speaker 1: those serried rows of crosses, all so alike, and each
• 1:08:35
  Speaker 1: standing for a different individuality, a different heart break. Do
• 1:08:40
  Speaker 1: you suppose that they will ever again forget the aspect
• 1:08:42
  Speaker 1: of those silent witnesses to the splendor and unselfishness and
• 1:08:46
  Speaker 1: the utter release from pettiness of the men who lie there.
• 1:08:50
  Speaker 1: This is what it is to make good citizens, And
• 1:08:53
  Speaker 1: that is what the members of the Women's Army are
• 1:08:55
  Speaker 1: doing daily. They are not only doing great things for
• 1:08:59
  Speaker 1: the men that they are making of themselves, Come what
• 1:09:02
  Speaker 1: conditions may after the war, efficient big minded citizens who
• 1:09:06
  Speaker 1: will be able to meet with them. Chapter eight, vignettes.
• 1:09:13
  Speaker 1: The interesting thing about the various places where wax are
• 1:09:15
  Speaker 1: housed which I saw, is that no two of them
• 1:09:18
  Speaker 1: are alike in atmosphere. I had rather dreaded much seeing
• 1:09:21
  Speaker 1: of camps. But as a matter of fact, though I
• 1:09:24
  Speaker 1: saw two. They were totally unlike each other, while the
• 1:09:27
  Speaker 1: other three places that I saw each had an aspect
• 1:09:29
  Speaker 1: a characteristic unlike the others. One was a convalescent home
• 1:09:34
  Speaker 1: for wax set amidst pine trees, a house of deep,
• 1:09:37
  Speaker 1: wide stairs, airy rooms, long cushioned chairs, and flowers, where
• 1:09:42
  Speaker 1: one might well be content to be just not well
• 1:09:44
  Speaker 1: for a long time. The others were houses where those
• 1:09:47
  Speaker 1: wax lived who were not in camps. Four jaunty chalets,
• 1:09:52
  Speaker 1: chalk white in the sun, hung with painted galleries, faced
• 1:09:56
  Speaker 1: the rolling sand dunes behind them, the sea a darker
• 1:09:59
  Speaker 1: blue than any of the shadows of land on such
• 1:10:01
  Speaker 1: a high key day. They are the pleasure villas. These chalets,
• 1:10:06
  Speaker 1: fancy erections for summer visitors, built in the days when
• 1:10:09
  Speaker 1: this little plage was a resort for Parisians playing at rusticity, delicious, artificial,
• 1:10:15
  Speaker 1: useless looking creations, bearing apparently about as much relation to
• 1:10:18
  Speaker 1: a normal house as a bourdoir cap does to a bowler.
• 1:10:22
  Speaker 1: Yet they are charming as only little French pleasure villas
• 1:10:25
  Speaker 1: can be, and to the receptive mind, it is their
• 1:10:28
  Speaker 1: artificiality that makes such a delightful note of well, not decadence,
• 1:10:33
  Speaker 1: but dilettantism in this rolling, sandy place where only the
• 1:10:37
  Speaker 1: hand of nature is to be seen. All around, no town,
• 1:10:41
  Speaker 1: no village, even impinging on the curving sky lines. The
• 1:10:45
  Speaker 1: very road up to their doors, but a track in
• 1:10:47
  Speaker 1: the sand. In these villas live incongruous wax. Their khaki
• 1:10:52
  Speaker 1: clad forms swing up the wooden stairs to the galleries
• 1:10:55
  Speaker 1: and lean from the windows, always open their widest night
• 1:10:59
  Speaker 1: and day less incongruous, the stout boots and khaki inside.
• 1:11:04
  Speaker 1: As though the chintzes are bright and gay. There is
• 1:11:07
  Speaker 1: an aspect of stern utility combined with an austerity that
• 1:11:10
  Speaker 1: somehow suits the blank sandiness of the surroundings. In each
• 1:11:14
  Speaker 1: little scrubbed room are two beds each for the wax,
• 1:11:18
  Speaker 1: live in true army fashion, with its dark gray blankets
• 1:11:21
  Speaker 1: folded up at the head of the bare mattress. In
• 1:11:24
  Speaker 1: the sick bay alone, the beds are covered with bright
• 1:11:26
  Speaker 1: blue counterpanes. In the recreation room and the four women's
• 1:11:31
  Speaker 1: mess are easy chairs of wicker and flowers and pictures.
• 1:11:34
  Speaker 1: It is all done as charmingly as it can be,
• 1:11:36
  Speaker 1: with a strict eye to suitability. It is community life,
• 1:11:40
  Speaker 1: of course, but brought as nearly as possible to that
• 1:11:43
  Speaker 1: feeling of individuality which makes a home with a small
• 1:11:46
  Speaker 1: h instead of the dreaded capital. This other house was
• 1:11:52
  Speaker 1: as great a contrast to the bare little chalaise as
• 1:11:54
  Speaker 1: it well could be. It also was at Plage. It
• 1:11:58
  Speaker 1: too had been built for pleasure, but for the pleasure
• 1:12:00
  Speaker 1: de luxe, not as simple bourgeois families. The wide hall,
• 1:12:04
  Speaker 1: with its polished floor, its great carved mantles, its dining
• 1:12:08
  Speaker 1: room with gleaming woods and glossy table and sparkling glass,
• 1:12:12
  Speaker 1: its big lounge with tall windows where the girls dance
• 1:12:15
  Speaker 1: and play the piano, all was as different from the bleached,
• 1:12:18
  Speaker 1: scrubbed wood of the chalets as it well could be.
• 1:12:22
  Speaker 1: Yet the spirit informing the whole was the same. The
• 1:12:25
  Speaker 1: bedrooms as austere in essence, even if they boasted carved
• 1:12:28
  Speaker 1: marble top chests. And even here the army had found
• 1:12:31
  Speaker 1: things to improve, such as the making of paths at
• 1:12:35
  Speaker 1: the back of the house, of round tins sunk in
• 1:12:37
  Speaker 1: the earth, and steps of tin biscuit boxes ingeniously arranged
• 1:12:41
  Speaker 1: to save getting your feet wet on a muddy day
• 1:12:43
  Speaker 1: as you go in and out on the endless errands
• 1:12:46
  Speaker 1: of domesticity. And as I sat at lunch in the
• 1:12:50
  Speaker 1: gleaming dining room, where the wood fire burned on the
• 1:12:52
  Speaker 1: wide stone hearth, I heard the girls practicing for a
• 1:12:55
  Speaker 1: musical play they were shortly to produce. A camp is is,
• 1:13:00
  Speaker 1: of course a camp. But there is a certain satisfaction
• 1:13:03
  Speaker 1: in seeing how well even unnecessary evil can be done
• 1:13:06
  Speaker 1: where all was excellent. The chief thing that really thrilled
• 1:13:09
  Speaker 1: me was the bathrooms. The wax bathrooms are the envy
• 1:13:13
  Speaker 1: and despair of the army, who rage vainly in small
• 1:13:16
  Speaker 1: canvas tubs. The engineers are by way of spoiling the
• 1:13:19
  Speaker 1: wax whenever possible, and bathrooms electric bells, electric light, and
• 1:13:24
  Speaker 1: fancy paths of tin spring up before them. There are
• 1:13:28
  Speaker 1: in every whack camp rows of bathrooms, containing each its
• 1:13:32
  Speaker 1: full length bath. And besides that, each girl has her
• 1:13:35
  Speaker 1: own private wash place in a cubicle for the purpose.
• 1:13:38
  Speaker 1: For as the chief Controller said to me, after all,
• 1:13:42
  Speaker 1: it does not matter the girls having to sleep together
• 1:13:44
  Speaker 1: in dormitories. If each has absolute privacy for washing, that
• 1:13:48
  Speaker 1: is so much more important, to which it is quite
• 1:13:51
  Speaker 1: possible to retort that there are those of us who
• 1:13:53
  Speaker 1: would not mind bathing in front of the whole world
• 1:13:56
  Speaker 1: if only we were allowed to sleep by ourselves. But
• 1:13:59
  Speaker 1: that is just a different point of view. And as
• 1:14:01
  Speaker 1: a matter of fact, for the class from whom the
• 1:14:04
  Speaker 1: greater part of the wax are drawn, privacy and ablutions
• 1:14:07
  Speaker 1: ranks as a greater thing than privacy and slumber. So
• 1:14:10
  Speaker 1: the psychological instinct which plan the camps is justified. Besides
• 1:14:15
  Speaker 1: the bathrooms and the ablution cubicles, there is in every
• 1:14:19
  Speaker 1: camp one or more drawing rooms, which are always heated,
• 1:14:23
  Speaker 1: and where the wet clothes of the girls, who of
• 1:14:25
  Speaker 1: course have to be out in all weathers, are hung
• 1:14:27
  Speaker 1: to dry. Laundry kitchens, recreation rooms, mess rooms, long Nissan
• 1:14:33
  Speaker 1: huts for sleeping. I went the round of them all,
• 1:14:37
  Speaker 1: and while genuinely admiring them, admired still more those who
• 1:14:40
  Speaker 1: lived in them. Personally, I don't like a Nissan hut
• 1:14:43
  Speaker 1: nearly as much as the ordinary straight walled sort. I
• 1:14:47
  Speaker 1: know they are wonderfully easy to erect and to move,
• 1:14:49
  Speaker 1: but when it comes to trying to tack a picture
• 1:14:51
  Speaker 1: on those curved walls, and the girls depend so on
• 1:14:54
  Speaker 1: their little bits of things, such as pictures and photographs
• 1:14:57
  Speaker 1: from home, you will always see in every cubicle above
• 1:15:01
  Speaker 1: every bed in a long hut the girl's own private gallery,
• 1:15:04
  Speaker 1: the laire and pennae which make of her in her bed.
• 1:15:07
  Speaker 1: At least an individual in a nissan hut, you have
• 1:15:11
  Speaker 1: to turn your head upside down to get a view
• 1:15:13
  Speaker 1: of the picture gallery at all, though it has its
• 1:15:15
  Speaker 1: advantages to the girl herself, as she lies in bed
• 1:15:18
  Speaker 1: and can look on the faces of her parents, absolutely
• 1:15:21
  Speaker 1: concave curving over her nose. As I was leaving this camp,
• 1:15:26
  Speaker 1: I heard sounds of music and the stamping of feet,
• 1:15:29
  Speaker 1: and going to the y w c A hut the
• 1:15:31
  Speaker 1: unit administrator and I looked in there to a vigorously
• 1:15:34
  Speaker 1: pounded piano. An instructress from the y m c A
• 1:15:38
  Speaker 1: was teaching a dozen or so girls Morris dancing. They
• 1:15:41
  Speaker 1: beamed at us from hot, glowing faces, these mighty daughters
• 1:15:44
  Speaker 1: of the plow, and continued to foot it as merrily,
• 1:15:48
  Speaker 1: if as heavily, as any Elisabethan villagers dancing in their
• 1:15:51
  Speaker 1: Sunday smocks around a may pole. One more camp I
• 1:15:57
  Speaker 1: saw on a later day, and though it was a camp,
• 1:16:00
  Speaker 1: yet it had about it that which distinguished it from
• 1:16:02
  Speaker 1: all others, for it was built round about a hoary castle,
• 1:16:06
  Speaker 1: gray with years and lichen, from whose walls, they say
• 1:16:09
  Speaker 1: Anne Boleyn looked down, standing beside her robust and rufus
• 1:16:13
  Speaker 1: lover on that honeymoon, which was almost all of happiness
• 1:16:16
  Speaker 1: she was to know. Now it is an army school,
• 1:16:19
  Speaker 1: and within its gray walls and towers, the officers are billeted,
• 1:16:23
  Speaker 1: and in its great kitchens the wax cook for them,
• 1:16:25
  Speaker 1: and do all the rest of the domestic work, waiting
• 1:16:28
  Speaker 1: on the officer's mess and the sergeant's mess, serving at
• 1:16:30
  Speaker 1: the canteen, doing all the cleaning, everything that there is
• 1:16:33
  Speaker 1: to be done for a whole army school of hungry
• 1:16:35
  Speaker 1: men down on a five weeks course, to say nothing
• 1:16:38
  Speaker 1: of all the work for themselves in their camp at
• 1:16:40
  Speaker 1: the castle's gates. And there are sixty six of them,
• 1:16:43
  Speaker 1: not counting the three officers who are at every whack camp,
• 1:16:47
  Speaker 1: the unit administrator and the deputy and assistant administrators. It
• 1:16:51
  Speaker 1: is hard work and endless work. And though every whack
• 1:16:55
  Speaker 1: is a few hours off every day, and though as
• 1:16:57
  Speaker 1: you have seen, everything is done for their healthy recreation
• 1:17:00
  Speaker 1: that can be done, yet the life is one of
• 1:17:02
  Speaker 1: work and not of fun. And though the girls flourish
• 1:17:06
  Speaker 1: under it. We at home should not forget that fact
• 1:17:09
  Speaker 1: when we give them their due meed of appreciation. But
• 1:17:13
  Speaker 1: hard as the life is, it seemed to me that
• 1:17:16
  Speaker 1: at that camp which has the happiness to be at
• 1:17:18
  Speaker 1: this castle, its dress must be assuaged by the beauty
• 1:17:21
  Speaker 1: of what is always before the eyes buried in woods.
• 1:17:25
  Speaker 1: It is still bare when I saw them, but with
• 1:17:28
  Speaker 1: the greenish yellow buds of daffodils already beginning to unfold
• 1:17:31
  Speaker 1: in great clumps through the purple brown alleys, and with
• 1:17:34
  Speaker 1: primroses making drifts of honey pallor and honey sweetness. Beside
• 1:17:38
  Speaker 1: the slopes of ground ivy or from beyond the curving
• 1:17:41
  Speaker 1: ramparts of the castle shows the steely, quiet glimmer of
• 1:17:44
  Speaker 1: a lake for war this castle was built, and war
• 1:17:48
  Speaker 1: she now sees once again, for the arts of war
• 1:17:51
  Speaker 1: are taught within her walls. And how Anne Boleyn's roving
• 1:17:54
  Speaker 1: eyes would have brightened at the sight of so much youth,
• 1:17:57
  Speaker 1: at the sound of so many spurs. Let us hope
• 1:18:00
  Speaker 1: her sore spirit can still find pleasure in wandering again
• 1:18:03
  Speaker 1: over the scenes where she once was happy. And if
• 1:18:06
  Speaker 1: she has kept enough of innocent wantonness to love a
• 1:18:09
  Speaker 1: straight man when she sees one, ghosts though she be,
• 1:18:13
  Speaker 1: and if her nose turn up ever so daintily at
• 1:18:15
  Speaker 1: the clumsily clad members of her own sex, whose toils
• 1:18:18
  Speaker 1: she would so little understand, why she is but a ghost,
• 1:18:23
  Speaker 1: and the modern mind must contrive to forgive her. These
• 1:18:28
  Speaker 1: light vignettes have all been of vision. Let me add
• 1:18:31
  Speaker 1: one of the less pictorial nature. The unit administrators, as
• 1:18:35
  Speaker 1: I have said, have to act not only as commanding officers,
• 1:18:38
  Speaker 1: but very often as mother confessors as well. Parents write
• 1:18:42
  Speaker 1: to them about their daughters would be suitors, write to
• 1:18:45
  Speaker 1: them for permission to marry their charges, and amongst the
• 1:18:48
  Speaker 1: letter bag are often epistles that are not without their
• 1:18:50
  Speaker 1: unconscious humor. One day, a mother writes to point out
• 1:18:54
  Speaker 1: that she and the rest of the family are changing houses,
• 1:18:57
  Speaker 1: and so may FLOSSI please come home for a few days.
• 1:19:00
  Speaker 1: Another mentions that Gladys's letters of late have been despondent,
• 1:19:03
  Speaker 1: and please could she be put to something else that
• 1:19:05
  Speaker 1: will not depress her. Then Gladys is had up in
• 1:19:09
  Speaker 1: front of the unit administrator, and perhaps turns out to
• 1:19:12
  Speaker 1: be one of the born whiners found everywhere, perhaps to
• 1:19:15
  Speaker 1: be merely suffering from a passing fit of what our
• 1:19:17
  Speaker 1: ancestresses would have called the megrims. If her work is
• 1:19:22
  Speaker 1: found to be really unfitted to her, and it is
• 1:19:24
  Speaker 1: possible to give her a change, then it is done.
• 1:19:27
  Speaker 1: But as a rule that is seldom the case, as
• 1:19:29
  Speaker 1: rather differently from what we used to hear was the
• 1:19:32
  Speaker 1: way in the army. Every whack controller finds out what
• 1:19:35
  Speaker 1: the girl is best at and what she likes doing most,
• 1:19:38
  Speaker 1: and then as far as possible, arranges her work accordingly.
• 1:19:42
  Speaker 1: Perhaps a letter comes from a Tommy in his Majesty's
• 1:19:44
  Speaker 1: forces and begins something like this, Dear Madam, I beg
• 1:19:49
  Speaker 1: to ask your permission to marry Miss d Robinson at
• 1:19:51
  Speaker 1: present under your command. The unit administrator writes back that
• 1:19:55
  Speaker 1: she will endeavor to arrange leave for the marriage, and
• 1:19:58
  Speaker 1: perhaps all goes well, or perhaps some such lugubrious letter
• 1:20:01
  Speaker 1: as this will follow. Dear Madam, read Miss d Robinson
• 1:20:06
  Speaker 1: at present under your command. Take no notice of my
• 1:20:08
  Speaker 1: former letter, as Miss d Robinson has broken off the engagement.
• 1:20:13
  Speaker 1: Human nature will be inhuman in campsend out of them,
• 1:20:16
  Speaker 1: And because Miss d Robinson is doing a man's work,
• 1:20:19
  Speaker 1: is no reason why she should shed the privileges of
• 1:20:21
  Speaker 1: her sex. End of chapter eight Chapter nine of the
• 1:20:31
  Speaker 1: Sword of Deborah by F. Tennys and Jesse. This LibriVox
• 1:20:35
  Speaker 1: recording is in the public domain. Recording by Marianne. Chapter
• 1:20:39
  Speaker 1: nine evening, gray rain was falling in straight, thin lines
• 1:20:45
  Speaker 1: upon the landscape suddenly changed from its splendor of sun
• 1:20:48
  Speaker 1: bright sands and blue gleaming river into a blotted grayness.
• 1:20:52
  Speaker 1: The rain danced over the trampled earth at the V
• 1:20:55
  Speaker 1: A D Motor convoy camp, filling the hollows with wrinkled
• 1:20:58
  Speaker 1: water and making the gray ambulances shine darkly. It was
• 1:21:02
  Speaker 1: not a pleasant evening, being very cold withal and snow
• 1:21:06
  Speaker 1: fell amid the rain. But the commandant took me out
• 1:21:08
  Speaker 1: in her car to give me as comprehensive a view
• 1:21:10
  Speaker 1: of e as could be seen in the gathering dusk.
• 1:21:14
  Speaker 1: When I say E, I don't mean the little French
• 1:21:16
  Speaker 1: fishing village near which we did not go, but the
• 1:21:19
  Speaker 1: whole vast town of huts set up by the b
• 1:21:21
  Speaker 1: E f for e Is become a town of hospitals.
• 1:21:26
  Speaker 1: We swung round corners, down long intersecting roads about and about,
• 1:21:30
  Speaker 1: and always there were hospitals long rows of hospitals, each
• 1:21:33
  Speaker 1: a little town to itself. I was reminded of nothing
• 1:21:37
  Speaker 1: so much as the great temporary townships in the canal zone.
• 1:21:40
  Speaker 1: At Panama. There is just the same look of permanence,
• 1:21:43
  Speaker 1: combined with the feeling of it all being but temporary,
• 1:21:46
  Speaker 1: while materially there is an air about board and tin
• 1:21:49
  Speaker 1: buildings which is the same the world over. I almost
• 1:21:52
  Speaker 1: expected to see a negro slouch along with his tools
• 1:21:54
  Speaker 1: slung on his back, or to catch sight of the
• 1:21:57
  Speaker 1: dark film of a mosquito proof screen over doors and
• 1:21:59
  Speaker 1: wind windows. And the motor convoy do all the ambulance
• 1:22:03
  Speaker 1: work of the whole big district, which spreads considerably beyond
• 1:22:06
  Speaker 1: even this great hospital town. There are about one hundred
• 1:22:09
  Speaker 1: and thirty members in the camp and about eighty of
• 1:22:12
  Speaker 1: the big buick ambulances. Unlike the Fanny convoy I had seen,
• 1:22:17
  Speaker 1: there are at e always day and night shifts, a
• 1:22:20
  Speaker 1: girl being on night duty for one fortnight and on
• 1:22:23
  Speaker 1: day duty for the next, except in times of stress,
• 1:22:26
  Speaker 1: when everyone works day and night too. We came in
• 1:22:30
  Speaker 1: from our drive in the dark, and I was shown
• 1:22:32
  Speaker 1: to the room I was to have for as much
• 1:22:34
  Speaker 1: of the night as there would be, considering I was
• 1:22:36
  Speaker 1: going out on a convoy at one o'clock. It belonged
• 1:22:39
  Speaker 1: to a v A D at the moment home on leave,
• 1:22:42
  Speaker 1: but she had left a nice selection of bed books
• 1:22:44
  Speaker 1: behind her, for which I was grateful, and there was
• 1:22:46
  Speaker 1: a little electric reading lamp perched on the shelf above
• 1:22:49
  Speaker 1: the bed. It was a tiny place, but it was
• 1:22:52
  Speaker 1: all to myself. At supper in the mess room, with
• 1:22:55
  Speaker 1: mister Lapps, the great Dane, lying by the stove and
• 1:22:59
  Speaker 1: the cat curled between his outflung paws, we were waited
• 1:23:02
  Speaker 1: on by a very pretty va D with dark eyes
• 1:23:05
  Speaker 1: and a deeply molded face compacked of soft curves and pallor. Afterwards,
• 1:23:10
  Speaker 1: the commandant, a few of the girls and I went
• 1:23:12
  Speaker 1: into her room, which was a trifle larger than the
• 1:23:15
  Speaker 1: ordinary run and could be called a sitting room at
• 1:23:17
  Speaker 1: one end for coffee and cigarettes. There was a concert on,
• 1:23:21
  Speaker 1: and I was asked whether I would like to go
• 1:23:22
  Speaker 1: to it, and, at the risk of seeming ungracious, I said,
• 1:23:26
  Speaker 1: if they didn't mind, I would rather not. They said
• 1:23:29
  Speaker 1: that they would rather not too. I had seen the
• 1:23:32
  Speaker 1: camp before dinner, had marveled again at how people, ever,
• 1:23:35
  Speaker 1: got used to living in match boxes and having to
• 1:23:38
  Speaker 1: cross a strip of out of doors world to meals.
• 1:23:40
  Speaker 1: And I was only wanting to sit still, and if
• 1:23:43
  Speaker 1: the fates were kind, listen For all the time, as
• 1:23:47
  Speaker 1: during the preceding days, I had felt the depression growing
• 1:23:50
  Speaker 1: over me, the terror of this communal life which took
• 1:23:53
  Speaker 1: all you had and left you what. What corner of
• 1:23:57
  Speaker 1: the soul is any refuge when solitude cannot be yours
• 1:23:59
  Speaker 1: in which to expend it. What vagrant impulse can be
• 1:24:03
  Speaker 1: cherished when liberty is not yours to indulge it. These girls,
• 1:24:08
  Speaker 1: these strong, clear eyed creatures, whom I had seen day
• 1:24:11
  Speaker 1: after day, who had at first impressed me only with
• 1:24:14
  Speaker 1: their youth, their schoolgirl gaiety, their horrible dictu their brightness.
• 1:24:20
  Speaker 1: Was it possible that this life should really content them?
• 1:24:23
  Speaker 1: I'm not talking now, remember of wax girls, mostly of
• 1:24:27
  Speaker 1: the working class, or of those used to the sedentary
• 1:24:30
  Speaker 1: occupation of clerkships, to whom this life is the biggest freedom,
• 1:24:34
  Speaker 1: the greatest adventure they have known. I am talking about
• 1:24:37
  Speaker 1: girls of a class who, in the nature of things,
• 1:24:39
  Speaker 1: lived their own lives before the war. Did the usual
• 1:24:42
  Speaker 1: social round went hither and thither with no man to
• 1:24:45
  Speaker 1: say them nay, except a father who doesn't count young
• 1:24:49
  Speaker 1: fem du monde. There is no adequate English for it.
• 1:24:52
  Speaker 1: Sophisticated human beings for women, even the apparently merely out
• 1:24:58
  Speaker 1: of door hunting games playing women have arrived at a
• 1:25:01
  Speaker 1: high state of sophistication, and this life they now led
• 1:25:04
  Speaker 1: is a community life reduced to its essentials, and a
• 1:25:07
  Speaker 1: community life, though the building up of it marked the
• 1:25:10
  Speaker 1: first stages of civilization, is to the perfected product of
• 1:25:14
  Speaker 1: civilization anathema. Individuals had to combine to make the world.
• 1:25:19
  Speaker 1: But now that it is made, all the instincts of
• 1:25:22
  Speaker 1: the most highly developed in it are towards complete liberty
• 1:25:25
  Speaker 1: as regards the amount of social intercourse in which he
• 1:25:28
  Speaker 1: or she wishes to indulge. We have fought, through thousands
• 1:25:31
  Speaker 1: of years for a state of society so civilized that
• 1:25:34
  Speaker 1: it is safe to withdraw from it and be alone
• 1:25:36
  Speaker 1: with one's enemy, tracking one down and hitting one over
• 1:25:39
  Speaker 1: the head with an axe. This right fought for through
• 1:25:43
  Speaker 1: the ascending ages. These girls have deliberately foregone, as every
• 1:25:47
  Speaker 1: man in the army has to forego it also. Were
• 1:25:50
  Speaker 1: they aware of this, or did they after all, like it?
• 1:25:54
  Speaker 1: Unthinkingly without analysis. I had wondered as I saw my
• 1:25:58
  Speaker 1: previous convoys and camps. And I had wondered again as
• 1:26:01
  Speaker 1: I saw over this convoy. Saw the usual tiny cubicles
• 1:26:05
  Speaker 1: with gay chintz curtains and photographs from home, and the
• 1:26:08
  Speaker 1: shelf of books. Saw the great bare mess rooms, the
• 1:26:11
  Speaker 1: sitting room bright with cushions, cozy with screens and long chairs.
• 1:26:15
  Speaker 1: Saw the admirable bathrooms with big enameled baths and an
• 1:26:19
  Speaker 1: unlimited supply of hot water. Saw the two parks where
• 1:26:22
  Speaker 1: the great ambulances were ranged, shadowy and huge in the
• 1:26:25
  Speaker 1: growing gloom and thick downpour of rain everywhere, smiling faces,
• 1:26:30
  Speaker 1: uplifted voices, quick steps. Yet I wondered, was it possible
• 1:26:36
  Speaker 1: this malays of community life never weighed on their souls?
• 1:26:39
  Speaker 1: And if possible, was it good that it should be? So?
• 1:26:44
  Speaker 1: I managed, stumblingly to convey something of my thought, of
• 1:26:47
  Speaker 1: the depression which had been eating at me. Not as
• 1:26:50
  Speaker 1: I tried to explain that I didn't admire them all,
• 1:26:53
  Speaker 1: heaven knew rather that I must be personally such a weak,
• 1:26:57
  Speaker 1: knead back, boneless creature to feel I couldn't, for any
• 1:27:00
  Speaker 1: cause on earth has stood it, and I wanted how.
• 1:27:04
  Speaker 1: I wanted to know how it was they did, whether
• 1:27:07
  Speaker 1: they really and actually could like it. Of course I know,
• 1:27:12
  Speaker 1: I ended apologetically. Some people like community life. They must
• 1:27:17
  Speaker 1: be in love with it to like community life. Carried
• 1:27:19
  Speaker 1: to this extent, then said one swiftly, and a small,
• 1:27:22
  Speaker 1: fair creature with a ribbon bound round her hair agreed
• 1:27:25
  Speaker 1: with her. She interested me, that fair girl, because she
• 1:27:29
  Speaker 1: was one of those people who feel round for the
• 1:27:31
  Speaker 1: right word until they have found it, however long it takes.
• 1:27:35
  Speaker 1: Impervious to the cries of go on, get it off
• 1:27:37
  Speaker 1: your chest, she sat quietly and wrestled until the word came,
• 1:27:41
  Speaker 1: which exactly expressed the fine edge of her meaning. She
• 1:27:44
  Speaker 1: knew so well what she wanted to say that she
• 1:27:46
  Speaker 1: didn't want to say it any differently. They all talked,
• 1:27:50
  Speaker 1: each throwing in a sentence to the discussion now and again,
• 1:27:53
  Speaker 1: but not one of them grumbled. Yet they all showed
• 1:27:56
  Speaker 1: plainly that it was not a blind enjoyment, or indeed
• 1:28:00
  Speaker 1: much enjoyment at all, that they found in the life.
• 1:28:03
  Speaker 1: They were reasoning, critical, analytic, and extraordinarily dispassionate. I can't
• 1:28:09
  Speaker 1: put that conversation down for two reasons, the first being
• 1:28:12
  Speaker 1: that one doesn't print the talk of one's hostesses, and
• 1:28:15
  Speaker 1: the second that it would be too difficult to catch
• 1:28:17
  Speaker 1: all those little, half uttered sentences, those little alleys of
• 1:28:20
  Speaker 1: argument that led to understanding. But let elliptically, as is
• 1:28:24
  Speaker 1: the way of either sex when it is encumbered by
• 1:28:27
  Speaker 1: the necessity of dotting its eyes for the comprehension of
• 1:28:30
  Speaker 1: the other. But out of that hour emerged shining several
• 1:28:34
  Speaker 1: things which we in England ought to realize better, and
• 1:28:37
  Speaker 1: which lifted for me that cloud of depression which had
• 1:28:39
  Speaker 1: lowered over me all the days in France. These are
• 1:28:43
  Speaker 1: not bouncing school girls, good fellows having the time of
• 1:28:46
  Speaker 1: their lives, as vaguely those in England consider them. They are,
• 1:28:50
  Speaker 1: thank goodness, finally evolved, human beings who no more enjoy
• 1:28:54
  Speaker 1: brightness than you or I would. And it was the
• 1:28:57
  Speaker 1: terrible feeling that every one was so bright which had
• 1:29:00
  Speaker 1: oppressed me more than anything else. The joy of finding
• 1:29:03
  Speaker 1: that it wasn't so that what I had feared I
• 1:29:06
  Speaker 1: should be forced to take as the unreflecting schoolgirl humor
• 1:29:09
  Speaker 1: of overgrown schoolgirls was only a protective aspect that behind
• 1:29:14
  Speaker 1: it the eyes of not only sane but subtle, young
• 1:29:16
  Speaker 1: women looked out with amusement and patience upon a world
• 1:29:19
  Speaker 1: determined to see in them first and last brightness. Perhaps
• 1:29:24
  Speaker 1: five percent, such was the estimate flung out into the
• 1:29:27
  Speaker 1: talk of the girls really do enjoy it, the ghastly prolonged,
• 1:29:31
  Speaker 1: cold blooded picnic of it. Perhaps five percent really are
• 1:29:35
  Speaker 1: having the time of their lives. But the rest of
• 1:29:37
  Speaker 1: them have moments when it hardly seems possible to stick it,
• 1:29:41
  Speaker 1: and yet they stick it. They stick it in good comradeship,
• 1:29:45
  Speaker 1: which is the greatest test of their lot. Their salvation
• 1:29:49
  Speaker 1: lies in the separate rooms, small, cold, but a retreat
• 1:29:53
  Speaker 1: from the octopus of community life. That concert which I
• 1:29:57
  Speaker 1: had felt so apologetic not to attend, to relief, it
• 1:30:00
  Speaker 1: had been to them that I didn't want to, didn't
• 1:30:03
  Speaker 1: want to get local color, and right of them as
• 1:30:05
  Speaker 1: being so jolly, so gay. For this again is typical.
• 1:30:09
  Speaker 1: There are perhaps five girls out of every hundred who
• 1:30:12
  Speaker 1: enjoy being amused, to whom it is all part of
• 1:30:14
  Speaker 1: the life which they actually love. But from the greater
• 1:30:17
  Speaker 1: part goes up the cry work us as hard as
• 1:30:20
  Speaker 1: you like, but for heaven's sake, don't try and amuse us.
• 1:30:24
  Speaker 1: For of course, it takes differing temperaments differently. To some community,
• 1:30:29
  Speaker 1: life is little short of a nightmare, But to all
• 1:30:32
  Speaker 1: there come moments when it is exceedingly maddening. In those moments,
• 1:30:36
  Speaker 1: your own room or a big, hot bath are wonderful
• 1:30:39
  Speaker 1: ways of salvation. As we talked, from A, came the
• 1:30:43
  Speaker 1: theory that she was only afraid it would prevent her
• 1:30:45
  Speaker 1: ever loving motors again, and she had always adored motors
• 1:30:48
  Speaker 1: as the chief pleasure of life before they became the
• 1:30:51
  Speaker 1: chief business. B could not agree to that. C, who
• 1:30:55
  Speaker 1: did agree, pointed out that it was on the same
• 1:30:57
  Speaker 1: principle as never wanting to go back to a place,
• 1:30:59
  Speaker 1: no matter how beautiful it was, if you had been
• 1:31:01
  Speaker 1: very unhappy there, even after your unhappiness was dead and buried,
• 1:31:06
  Speaker 1: it would always spoil that place for you. B said
• 1:31:10
  Speaker 1: yes to that, but argued that it would not spoil
• 1:31:12
  Speaker 1: the beauty of other places for you, which would be
• 1:31:14
  Speaker 1: the equivalent of this life spoiling all motors for a
• 1:31:17
  Speaker 1: After the war, the flaws and the analogy were not pursued.
• 1:31:21
  Speaker 1: For D advanced an interesting theory that the hardest part
• 1:31:24
  Speaker 1: of it was that you were so afraid of what
• 1:31:27
  Speaker 1: you might be missing all the time somewhere else. She
• 1:31:30
  Speaker 1: argued that the difficulty with her had always been to
• 1:31:33
  Speaker 1: make up her mind to any one course of action,
• 1:31:36
  Speaker 1: because it shut off all the others, and like so
• 1:31:39
  Speaker 1: many of us, she wanted everything. A said that shillyshalliers
• 1:31:44
  Speaker 1: never got anywhere, but I maintained with D that it
• 1:31:47
  Speaker 1: wasn't shilly shallying, which is another sort of thing. Altogether,
• 1:31:50
  Speaker 1: it was the passionate desire to get the most out
• 1:31:53
  Speaker 1: of life, to discover what was most worth. While I
• 1:31:56
  Speaker 1: want to spend ten years in the heart of China
• 1:31:59
  Speaker 1: more than to do any one thing, I pointed out,
• 1:32:01
  Speaker 1: But I shan'n't do it because when I came out,
• 1:32:03
  Speaker 1: I shouldn't be young any more. Therefore, the ten years
• 1:32:06
  Speaker 1: in China will have to go to a man, because
• 1:32:08
  Speaker 1: it doesn't matter so much to a man. This life
• 1:32:12
  Speaker 1: in the b e F was D's ten years in China,
• 1:32:15
  Speaker 1: not because Heaven forbid it was going to last ten
• 1:32:18
  Speaker 1: actual years, or even that, as far as I could see,
• 1:32:21
  Speaker 1: it was aging her at all, but simply because while
• 1:32:24
  Speaker 1: she was doing it she couldn't be doing anything else.
• 1:32:27
  Speaker 1: She had had to burn her boats. Now that to
• 1:32:31
  Speaker 1: a certain temperament means a great deal, and it is
• 1:32:34
  Speaker 1: one of the things, if not the chief, thing, that
• 1:32:37
  Speaker 1: marks service in France off from equally hard work at home,
• 1:32:40
  Speaker 1: and makes it, for reasons outside the work so much harder.
• 1:32:45
  Speaker 1: All natures are not the same as D's. Of course,
• 1:32:48
  Speaker 1: to one girl a certain thing is the hardship, to
• 1:32:50
  Speaker 1: another a different thing. But the point is that the
• 1:32:53
  Speaker 1: hardship is there, not physical, but mental. And to me
• 1:32:57
  Speaker 1: it was the most exquisite discovery I could have made
• 1:32:59
  Speaker 1: in the whole of France. For the finer the instrument,
• 1:33:02
  Speaker 1: the more fine it is of it to perform the work,
• 1:33:05
  Speaker 1: and the more finely will that work in the long
• 1:33:08
  Speaker 1: run be done. Chapter ten. Night, not being among the
• 1:33:16
  Speaker 1: lucky creatures who can fall happily to sleep when they
• 1:33:18
  Speaker 1: know they are to be called at one o'clock, I
• 1:33:21
  Speaker 1: lay in my tiny bed and reveled in the wonderful
• 1:33:23
  Speaker 1: story of the bridge builders out of the day's work,
• 1:33:27
  Speaker 1: till the sound of the storm without became the voice
• 1:33:29
  Speaker 1: of Mother Gunga. Then I turned out the light and
• 1:33:32
  Speaker 1: lay and listened to the truly fiendish train whistles, which
• 1:33:35
  Speaker 1: no reading could have transmuted, and wondered why it is
• 1:33:38
  Speaker 1: that French engine drivers apparently paid no attention to signals,
• 1:33:41
  Speaker 1: but just go on whistling till they are answered, like
• 1:33:44
  Speaker 1: some one who goes on ringing a bell till at
• 1:33:46
  Speaker 1: length the doors opened. The rain was turning to snow,
• 1:33:50
  Speaker 1: so there was less of that steady tinkling from without
• 1:33:53
  Speaker 1: with which the running water fills the world. I lay
• 1:33:56
  Speaker 1: and listened, and the whistles, and the bellying of the
• 1:33:59
  Speaker 1: chintz curveon, and the occasional swish of a heavy gust
• 1:34:02
  Speaker 1: against the side of the hut were at last beginning
• 1:34:05
  Speaker 1: to blend in one blur in my mind when a
• 1:34:07
  Speaker 1: girl came softly into my room and whispered that it
• 1:34:10
  Speaker 1: was time to dress. That utter quietness of the girls
• 1:34:13
  Speaker 1: was a thing that had impressed me after staying in
• 1:34:15
  Speaker 1: hotels full of the British Army, which goes to bed
• 1:34:18
  Speaker 1: at midnight, bangs its doors, throws its boots outside, shouts
• 1:34:22
  Speaker 1: from room to room, and begins the whole process reversed
• 1:34:25
  Speaker 1: at about six o'clock the next morning. Here the girls
• 1:34:29
  Speaker 1: wore soundless slippers, so that those who had to be
• 1:34:31
  Speaker 1: about should not disturb those who slept and doors were
• 1:34:34
  Speaker 1: opened and shut with a cotton wool care, which appealed
• 1:34:36
  Speaker 1: to me, or would have if I hadn't had to
• 1:34:39
  Speaker 1: get up. When I was dressed, I found my way
• 1:34:42
  Speaker 1: down endless blowy corridors, for the doors at the ends
• 1:34:45
  Speaker 1: are always kept open, to the room of the girl
• 1:34:47
  Speaker 1: who had called me. She looked at my fur coat
• 1:34:50
  Speaker 1: and said it would get spoilt. I replied with great
• 1:34:52
  Speaker 1: truth that it was past spoiling, but she took it
• 1:34:55
  Speaker 1: off me, whipped my cap from my head, and the
• 1:34:57
  Speaker 1: girls proceeded to dress me. They pulled a leather cap
• 1:35:01
  Speaker 1: with ear pieces down on my head and stuffed me
• 1:35:03
  Speaker 1: into wooly jackets, and wound my neck up in a comforter,
• 1:35:07
  Speaker 1: and finished up with a huge leather coat and a
• 1:35:09
  Speaker 1: pair of fur gloves like bear's paws, so that when
• 1:35:11
  Speaker 1: all was done, I couldn't bend and had to be
• 1:35:13
  Speaker 1: hoisted quite stiff up to the front of the ambulance.
• 1:35:18
  Speaker 1: But first we all went into the kitchen, where part
• 1:35:20
  Speaker 1: of the domestic staff sits up all night to prepare
• 1:35:22
  Speaker 1: food for the night drivers. There we drank the loveliest
• 1:35:25
  Speaker 1: cocoa I ever met, the sort the spoon would stand
• 1:35:28
  Speaker 1: up in piping hot out of huge bowls. Then my
• 1:35:32
  Speaker 1: driver and the section leader for the night led me
• 1:35:34
  Speaker 1: across the soaking park to where, in almost total darkness,
• 1:35:38
  Speaker 1: girls were busy with their ambulances. I was hoisted up
• 1:35:41
  Speaker 1: beside my driver and endeavored clumsily with my bear's paws
• 1:35:44
  Speaker 1: to fasten the canvas flap back across the side as
• 1:35:47
  Speaker 1: I was bidden. I may say that I felt extraordinarily
• 1:35:51
  Speaker 1: clumsy amongst these girls, most of whom could have put
• 1:35:54
  Speaker 1: me in their pockets. They knew so exactly what to do,
• 1:35:57
  Speaker 1: Their movements were all so perfectly adjusted to their needs.
• 1:36:00
  Speaker 1: They knew where everything was, while I fumbled for steps
• 1:36:03
  Speaker 1: and hoped for the best. They made me feel in
• 1:36:06
  Speaker 1: the beautiful way they shepherded me that I was a silly,
• 1:36:09
  Speaker 1: useless female, and that they were grave, chivalrous young men.
• 1:36:13
  Speaker 1: They watched over me with just that matter of fact care.
• 1:36:17
  Speaker 1: To me, it was all wonderful, that experience. To the
• 1:36:20
  Speaker 1: girls who do it every night, every alternate fortnight, year in,
• 1:36:24
  Speaker 1: year out, the thrill of it has naturally gone long since.
• 1:36:28
  Speaker 1: The wonder is that to them all remains the pity
• 1:36:30
  Speaker 1: of it. We swung out of the park into the road.
• 1:36:34
  Speaker 1: There was no moon, The stars were mostly hidden by
• 1:36:37
  Speaker 1: the heavy clouds. The sleet blue and guss against the
• 1:36:40
  Speaker 1: wind screen. We went at a good pace, bound for
• 1:36:43
  Speaker 1: Canadian Hospital, and then for a station beyond e where
• 1:36:47
  Speaker 1: the train was waiting. For this was what is called
• 1:36:49
  Speaker 1: an evacuation that I was going to see. No train
• 1:36:53
  Speaker 1: of wounded was due in that night, and the convoy's
• 1:36:55
  Speaker 1: business was to take men who were being sent elsewhere
• 1:36:57
  Speaker 1: from the hospitals to the train. We stopped in front
• 1:37:01
  Speaker 1: of a shadow hospital set in a town of shadow huts,
• 1:37:04
  Speaker 1: and a door opened to show an oblong of orange
• 1:37:06
  Speaker 1: light and send a paler shaft widening out into the
• 1:37:09
  Speaker 1: night towards the sleek side of our ambulance. We heard
• 1:37:13
  Speaker 1: the men being placed in the ambulance. The word was given,
• 1:37:16
  Speaker 1: and again we set off through the night, this time
• 1:37:19
  Speaker 1: so slowly, so carefully, for we carried that which must
• 1:37:22
  Speaker 1: not be jarred one hair's breath more than could be helped.
• 1:37:25
  Speaker 1: We crept along the roads, past the pines that showed
• 1:37:28
  Speaker 1: as patches of denser blackness against the sky, past the
• 1:37:32
  Speaker 1: sand dunes that glimmered ghostly, past the blots of shadow
• 1:37:35
  Speaker 1: made by every shrub and tree trunk, and behind and
• 1:37:38
  Speaker 1: before us crawled other ambulances laden Even as we the
• 1:37:43
  Speaker 1: station was wrapped in darkness, save for a hanging light
• 1:37:46
  Speaker 1: here and there, and an occasional uncurtained window in the
• 1:37:49
  Speaker 1: waiting train. We drew up under a light where a
• 1:37:52
  Speaker 1: sergeant was waiting. Four from number seven Canadian, said my
• 1:37:56
  Speaker 1: driver crisply. The sergeant repeated, looked at a list he carried,
• 1:38:00
  Speaker 1: and marked our cases off it duly, then told us
• 1:38:03
  Speaker 1: the number of the compartment where we should stop. The
• 1:38:07
  Speaker 1: ambulance slid on very slowly beside the train and slowly
• 1:38:10
  Speaker 1: came to rest. I could see into the white painted
• 1:38:14
  Speaker 1: interior of the train, could see the shelves running along
• 1:38:16
  Speaker 1: its sides, and on the shelves making oblong shapes of
• 1:38:20
  Speaker 1: darkness against all the white men laid straightly in front
• 1:38:24
  Speaker 1: of us. The Red Cross orderlies were sliding men down
• 1:38:27
  Speaker 1: on stretchers from the shelves of an ambulance, slipping them out,
• 1:38:30
  Speaker 1: carrying them up into the train, and packing them on
• 1:38:33
  Speaker 1: the shelves like fragile but precious parcels. And suddenly it
• 1:38:37
  Speaker 1: seemed to me that there was something profoundly touching about
• 1:38:40
  Speaker 1: the sight of a man lying flat and helpless, shoved
• 1:38:43
  Speaker 1: here and there, in spite of all the care and
• 1:38:45
  Speaker 1: kindness with which it was accomplished, It is a thing
• 1:38:49
  Speaker 1: wrong in essence. It seemed an outrage on nature. I
• 1:38:53
  Speaker 1: got an odd feeling that there was something wrong and
• 1:38:55
  Speaker 1: unnatural about the mere posture of lying down that I
• 1:38:58
  Speaker 1: never thought of before. The world seemed suddenly to have
• 1:39:02
  Speaker 1: become deformed, as a monster is deformed. Who was born distorted?
• 1:39:06
  Speaker 1: It shouldn't be possible the slide men onto shelves like this.
• 1:39:10
  Speaker 1: The girl at the wheel pushed back the little shutter
• 1:39:12
  Speaker 1: set in front of the ambulance, and we looked into
• 1:39:15
  Speaker 1: the dimly lit interior. I could see the crowns of
• 1:39:18
  Speaker 1: four heads, the jut of brow beyond them, the upward
• 1:39:22
  Speaker 1: peak of the feet under the gray blankets, pale hands,
• 1:39:26
  Speaker 1: one pair thin as a child's, that lay limply along
• 1:39:28
  Speaker 1: the edge of the stretchers. The orderlies came to open
• 1:39:32
  Speaker 1: the door. One man mounted within, and the top stretcher
• 1:39:35
  Speaker 1: from one side was slipped along its grooves and disappeared,
• 1:39:39
  Speaker 1: tilted into the night. The boy on the top stretcher
• 1:39:42
  Speaker 1: the other side turned his head languidly and watched. I
• 1:39:46
  Speaker 1: could see a pale cheek foreshortened from where I sat,
• 1:39:49
  Speaker 1: a sweep of long dark eyelashes the curve of the
• 1:39:52
  Speaker 1: drooping upper lip. His turn came, and passive, he too,
• 1:39:57
  Speaker 1: was slid out. Then the two men below were carried
• 1:40:00
  Speaker 1: away and up into the train. The ambulance was empty.
• 1:40:04
  Speaker 1: We turned in a circle over the muddy yard and
• 1:40:06
  Speaker 1: started off again, stopping again by the sergeant to get
• 1:40:09
  Speaker 1: our orders. Number four, said the sergeant, and we swung
• 1:40:13
  Speaker 1: once more at a good pace along the heavy roads,
• 1:40:15
  Speaker 1: took fresh turnings about and about in the city of
• 1:40:18
  Speaker 1: hospital huts, and drew up at number four. Again we
• 1:40:21
  Speaker 1: were loaded, and again we crept back along the roads
• 1:40:24
  Speaker 1: where we had a few minutes before gone so swiftly,
• 1:40:27
  Speaker 1: meeting empty cars, keeping in line behind those laden like ourselves,
• 1:40:31
  Speaker 1: and we slowed down by the waiting sergeant to say
• 1:40:35
  Speaker 1: two stretchers and two sitters from four. He echoed us,
• 1:40:39
  Speaker 1: and we crept on to the appointed carriage and stopped.
• 1:40:42
  Speaker 1: So it went on through a couple of hours, ambulance
• 1:40:45
  Speaker 1: after ambulance, swiftly leaving the station, slowly coming back, all
• 1:40:49
  Speaker 1: drawing up gently by the train, each opened, making a
• 1:40:53
  Speaker 1: faint square of light in the velvet darkness, and then
• 1:40:57
  Speaker 1: at last, when it was all over, the return swift
• 1:41:00
  Speaker 1: again towards the camp. We bumped along the road, the
• 1:41:04
  Speaker 1: dim pines falling away into the shadows, behind a very
• 1:41:08
  Speaker 1: mild funnel of light, showing us a scrap of the
• 1:41:10
  Speaker 1: way before us, and of a hedge on either side,
• 1:41:14
  Speaker 1: the twigs of it perpetually swinging out, palely to die
• 1:41:17
  Speaker 1: away once more. The wind was behind us and the
• 1:41:20
  Speaker 1: screen clear. Far ahead of us on the road was
• 1:41:23
  Speaker 1: an empty ambulance with its curtains drawn back, bare but
• 1:41:26
  Speaker 1: for its empty stretchers and dark blankets, which made in
• 1:41:30
  Speaker 1: the pale glow of the white painted interior a sinister face,
• 1:41:34
  Speaker 1: two hollow eyes, and a wide mouth that fled through
• 1:41:37
  Speaker 1: the night, always keeping the same distance ahead, grimacing at
• 1:41:40
  Speaker 1: me like an image of the death's head of war.
• 1:41:44
  Speaker 1: I was glad when it swung round a turning and
• 1:41:46
  Speaker 1: was lost to us. We drove into the unrelieved darkness
• 1:41:50
  Speaker 1: of the convoy park and drew up with precision in
• 1:41:52
  Speaker 1: our place. I wrestled again with a flap, and we
• 1:41:56
  Speaker 1: got out into the wet sleet, half snow half rain.
• 1:42:00
  Speaker 1: My driver covered up the bonnet with a tarpaulin, turned
• 1:42:02
  Speaker 1: off the lights, and we went across to the kitchen.
• 1:42:05
  Speaker 1: It was half past three, and we were the first
• 1:42:07
  Speaker 1: to come back. We asked for bowls of soup and
• 1:42:10
  Speaker 1: stood sipping them and lunching sandwiches that lay ready cut
• 1:42:13
  Speaker 1: in piles upon the table. Then, one after another, the
• 1:42:17
  Speaker 1: drivers entered, pulling off their great gloves as they came,
• 1:42:22
  Speaker 1: stamping the snow from their boots. They stood about drinking
• 1:42:26
  Speaker 1: from their steaming bowls, bright eyed, apparently untired, throwing little
• 1:42:30
  Speaker 1: quick scraps of talk to each other about the slowness
• 1:42:33
  Speaker 1: of Saint John's on this particular night, who hadn't their
• 1:42:36
  Speaker 1: cases ready and kept one or two ambulances simply ages,
• 1:42:40
  Speaker 1: or the engine trouble developed by one car which still
• 1:42:42
  Speaker 1: kept it out somewhere on the road. And I stood
• 1:42:45
  Speaker 1: and listened and watched them, and I received an impression
• 1:42:48
  Speaker 1: of extraordinary beauty. These girls, with their leather caps coming
• 1:42:53
  Speaker 1: down to their brows and over their ears, looked like
• 1:42:56
  Speaker 1: splendid young airmen, their clear, bold faces coming out from
• 1:42:59
  Speaker 1: between the leather flaps. They were not pretty. They were
• 1:43:03
  Speaker 1: touched with something finer, some quality of radiance only increased
• 1:43:07
  Speaker 1: by their utter unconsciousness of it. Each girl, with her
• 1:43:11
  Speaker 1: clear face, her round close head, her stamping feet, and
• 1:43:15
  Speaker 1: strong cold hands, seemed so intensively alive with the dark
• 1:43:19
  Speaker 1: globe of the night that her life was heightened to
• 1:43:22
  Speaker 1: a point not earthly, as though she were a visitant
• 1:43:25
  Speaker 1: from the snows or fields I had seen fields olympian.
• 1:43:29
  Speaker 1: And as each came swinging in vera incessu patuit dea,
• 1:43:35
  Speaker 1: I could have wished them there for ever, like some
• 1:43:38
  Speaker 1: sculptured frieze. So lovely was the rightness and the inspiration
• 1:43:42
  Speaker 1: of it. But I went to my bed, and one
• 1:43:45
  Speaker 1: of the goddesses insisted on refilling my hot water bag,
• 1:43:48
  Speaker 1: though I assured her it would be quite well as
• 1:43:50
  Speaker 1: it was, And I was unwound from my swaddling clothes
• 1:43:54
  Speaker 1: and left to dream. End of chapter ten, Chapter eleven
• 1:44:05
  Speaker 1: of The Sword of Deborah by F. Tennys and Jesse.
• 1:44:08
  Speaker 1: This LibriVox recording is in the public domain recording by Marianne,
• 1:44:13
  Speaker 1: Chapter eleven and the Bright Eyes of Danger. Since the
• 1:44:18
  Speaker 1: beginning of things, women have been mixed up in war,
• 1:44:21
  Speaker 1: and it is only as the world has become more civilized,
• 1:44:24
  Speaker 1: if in view of the present one can make that
• 1:44:26
  Speaker 1: assertion that their place in it has been questioned. The
• 1:44:29
  Speaker 1: whole question of the civilian population has taken on a
• 1:44:32
  Speaker 1: different aspect since the outbreak of this war, owing to
• 1:44:35
  Speaker 1: the extraordinary and unprecedented penalties attached to the civilian status
• 1:44:40
  Speaker 1: by Germany. But the subdivision labeled women has perhaps undergone
• 1:44:44
  Speaker 1: more revision than any It has undergone so much revision,
• 1:44:48
  Speaker 1: in fact, that women have in large masses cease to
• 1:44:51
  Speaker 1: be civilians and are ranked as the army. If it
• 1:44:56
  Speaker 1: be frankly conceded that it is as natural for women
• 1:44:58
  Speaker 1: to want to get to the war as men, one
• 1:45:01
  Speaker 1: clears the way for profitable discussion without wasting time. While
• 1:45:04
  Speaker 1: the outworn epithass of unwomanly and sensation hunters are flung
• 1:45:09
  Speaker 1: through the air to the great obscuring thereof the delight
• 1:45:13
  Speaker 1: in danger for its own sake is common to all
• 1:45:16
  Speaker 1: human beings, to the young as an intoxicant, to the
• 1:45:19
  Speaker 1: old as a drug. It is not the least of
• 1:45:22
  Speaker 1: the tragedies of woman that this is a delight in
• 1:45:25
  Speaker 1: which she is so seldom able to indulge. When the
• 1:45:28
  Speaker 1: war broke out, everyone wanted to go and see what
• 1:45:30
  Speaker 1: it was like, And it is merely useless to observe
• 1:45:33
  Speaker 1: that this was treating it as a huge picnic. Before
• 1:45:37
  Speaker 1: the tightening up process began, in the wonderful days when
• 1:45:40
  Speaker 1: the war was still fluid, it was possible to get
• 1:45:42
  Speaker 1: out to the front, the real front, on all sorts
• 1:45:45
  Speaker 1: of excuses. The tightening up was necessary, and all too slow.
• 1:45:50
  Speaker 1: But let us not, because of that, fall into the
• 1:45:52
  Speaker 1: air of calling the instinct which urges noncombatants mere curiosity,
• 1:45:57
  Speaker 1: as though that were not the greatest of the gifts
• 1:45:59
  Speaker 1: of the gods, without which nothing is done. Among these
• 1:46:03
  Speaker 1: noncombatants who wanted to see the war were many women,
• 1:46:07
  Speaker 1: and if mixed with their patriotism and desire to help,
• 1:46:10
  Speaker 1: went a streak of that love of danger, which is
• 1:46:12
  Speaker 1: no disgrace to a man. Why I maintained that it
• 1:46:16
  Speaker 1: is no disgrace to a woman either, but as natural
• 1:46:18
  Speaker 1: an instinct as that which drives one to a wayside
• 1:46:21
  Speaker 1: orchard if one is hungry. There is nothing sooner slaked
• 1:46:25
  Speaker 1: for the time being than this inherent love of danger.
• 1:46:29
  Speaker 1: Men who wanted the fun of it at the beginning
• 1:46:31
  Speaker 1: of the war are heartily sick of it now, though
• 1:46:33
  Speaker 1: they wouldn't be out of it for worlds. But most
• 1:46:36
  Speaker 1: of the women haven't been allowed enough danger to get
• 1:46:38
  Speaker 1: sick of it, And so in patches of young women
• 1:46:41
  Speaker 1: you meet working in France, the old craving still lifts
• 1:46:44
  Speaker 1: its head. I came across a delightful streak of it
• 1:46:47
  Speaker 1: at Tea, the oldest big convoy in France. The garage
• 1:46:52
  Speaker 1: over which the girls live for their camp is a
• 1:46:54
  Speaker 1: still building is set in the eye of the cold
• 1:46:57
  Speaker 1: winter winds, on the top of a hill overlooking the sea.
• 1:47:01
  Speaker 1: It was snowing heavily as I drove up, great fat
• 1:47:03
  Speaker 1: flakes of snow that wove an interwove in the air
• 1:47:07
  Speaker 1: in the way that only snowflakes can, so that sometimes
• 1:47:10
  Speaker 1: they look as though they were falling upwards. The long
• 1:47:13
  Speaker 1: line of the wooden garage showed dark in the background
• 1:47:16
  Speaker 1: in the space before it. The ambulances stood about, but
• 1:47:19
  Speaker 1: the girls were fox trotting in couples all about them,
• 1:47:22
  Speaker 1: their big rubber boots shuffling up little clouds of snow.
• 1:47:25
  Speaker 1: On the head of one girl was swathed a greenish
• 1:47:28
  Speaker 1: blue handkerchief, which made a lovely note of color against
• 1:47:31
  Speaker 1: the swirling whiteness. I was taken in through the garage
• 1:47:35
  Speaker 1: where two drivers were painting their cars. For all painting
• 1:47:38
  Speaker 1: is done by the girls, sometimes with unexpected effects, as
• 1:47:41
  Speaker 1: one car which I saw, where Eve from the Tatler
• 1:47:44
  Speaker 1: and her little dog were depicted in front of the
• 1:47:46
  Speaker 1: body and up a flight of wooden stairs with an
• 1:47:49
  Speaker 1: out of doors landing on top to the cubicles which
• 1:47:52
  Speaker 1: opened off either side of the open ended passage for
• 1:47:55
  Speaker 1: the whole length of the building. Here in one of
• 1:47:58
  Speaker 1: the little bedrooms for too, we had a meal of
• 1:48:01
  Speaker 1: cocoa and cake, known as the Elevener for the obvious
• 1:48:04
  Speaker 1: reason that it is consumed at eleven every morning. It
• 1:48:08
  Speaker 1: was all quite different from my evening at the convoy
• 1:48:10
  Speaker 1: at e but equally stimulating. The great plaint of the
• 1:48:15
  Speaker 1: girls was that they weren't allowed near the fighting line,
• 1:48:18
  Speaker 1: and I heard a story of how in the early days,
• 1:48:20
  Speaker 1: two cars had managed to get right through to the
• 1:48:22
  Speaker 1: pop Rine when that town was the center of the
• 1:48:24
  Speaker 1: bouche's attentions, by the simple expedient of the girl drivers
• 1:48:28
  Speaker 1: turning up their coat collars, pulling their peaked caps well
• 1:48:31
  Speaker 1: down over their eyes, and just going ahead. They had
• 1:48:34
  Speaker 1: a lovely time in Popo Range and lunched under shell fire.
• 1:48:38
  Speaker 1: And when the military, including the staff, were sitting in cellars,
• 1:48:41
  Speaker 1: the chaufferettes sallied forth them bought picture post cards. It
• 1:48:45
  Speaker 1: is a shame they won't let us go up to
• 1:48:47
  Speaker 1: the line now. Yes, indeed, put in another very seriously,
• 1:48:52
  Speaker 1: as though she were adding the last uncontrovertible proof to
• 1:48:55
  Speaker 1: the perfidity of the authorities. They let the sisters get shelled,
• 1:48:59
  Speaker 1: so why should they let us? Isn't that a delightful spirit?
• 1:49:04
  Speaker 1: And I beg leave to insist a perfectly natural and
• 1:49:07
  Speaker 1: proper one. Any decent human being would like to be
• 1:49:10
  Speaker 1: shelled who hasn't been shelled too much? It's like being
• 1:49:14
  Speaker 1: in love, a thing that ought to happen at least
• 1:49:16
  Speaker 1: once to everybody. One of my hostesses was a violinist
• 1:49:20
  Speaker 1: and plays at all the concerts for the wounded which
• 1:49:22
  Speaker 1: take place thereabouts. I asked her whether she didn't find
• 1:49:25
  Speaker 1: the work ruination to her fingers for the violin, But
• 1:49:28
  Speaker 1: all she said carelessly was that they had been ruined
• 1:49:31
  Speaker 1: for three years now. But it didn't matter. As always,
• 1:49:33
  Speaker 1: she couldn't have practiced even if she had time, since
• 1:49:36
  Speaker 1: there were always some girls trying to sleep. And what
• 1:49:39
  Speaker 1: do the local French people think of these young girls
• 1:49:41
  Speaker 1: in their midst who work like men and are out
• 1:49:43
  Speaker 1: in all weathers and drive the soldiers wounded in the
• 1:49:46
  Speaker 1: great common cause they're quite charming to them. And indeed,
• 1:49:50
  Speaker 1: when they first came, the French met them at every
• 1:49:52
  Speaker 1: station with bouquets of flowers, so that the girls pleased
• 1:49:55
  Speaker 1: and embarrassed. English fashion had a triumphal progress. There are
• 1:50:00
  Speaker 1: some of the French neighbors who think the life must
• 1:50:02
  Speaker 1: be very hard on the poor things. And when a
• 1:50:04
  Speaker 1: little while ago the convoy organized a paper chase, the
• 1:50:08
  Speaker 1: popular belief was that the hares were escaping from the
• 1:50:10
  Speaker 1: rigors of life. When the panting hares asked wayfaring traps
• 1:50:14
  Speaker 1: for a lift, it was refused them, as though the
• 1:50:17
  Speaker 1: kindly drivers had every sympathy with the projected escape, they
• 1:50:20
  Speaker 1: were not going to assist them to defy authority. The
• 1:50:24
  Speaker 1: hardships which this convoy had undergone. I did not hear
• 1:50:27
  Speaker 1: about from them, but from their commandant. She told me
• 1:50:30
  Speaker 1: of three weeks at the beginning of things, when there
• 1:50:32
  Speaker 1: were no fires, no hot water except a little always
• 1:50:35
  Speaker 1: simmering for pouring into the radiators of the cars when
• 1:50:38
  Speaker 1: there came a night call for snow was frozen on
• 1:50:41
  Speaker 1: the ground all those three weeks, and the water in
• 1:50:44
  Speaker 1: the jugs was ice. The girls didn't talk about that
• 1:50:47
  Speaker 1: because they were not interested in it. But neither would
• 1:50:50
  Speaker 1: they talk about one other thing, though for a very
• 1:50:52
  Speaker 1: different reason, and that was of the time when after
• 1:50:55
  Speaker 1: the great German gas attacks at Nueport they had to
• 1:50:58
  Speaker 1: drive the guest men who came on the hospital trains.
• 1:51:02
  Speaker 1: You can't get them now to describe what that was like,
• 1:51:05
  Speaker 1: nor would you have tried. Warned by the sudden change
• 1:51:07
  Speaker 1: of voice in which even they mentioned it. There was
• 1:51:11
  Speaker 1: one point in which this convoy seemed to me to
• 1:51:14
  Speaker 1: touch the extreme of abnegation attained by the g s
• 1:51:17
  Speaker 1: V A DS. I had seen much earlier in my
• 1:51:20
  Speaker 1: visit a GSVA D convoy, but had not mentioned it
• 1:51:23
  Speaker 1: because I saw it before I had really grasped essentials,
• 1:51:26
  Speaker 1: and it appeared to me then just a plain convoy,
• 1:51:28
  Speaker 1: and the bare facts of it were not as spectacular
• 1:51:31
  Speaker 1: as those relating to the Fannies. I chose the latter
• 1:51:34
  Speaker 1: to write about the GSVA DS, as I have said,
• 1:51:38
  Speaker 1: rank as privates, and among them are workers of every kind, scrubbers, cooks, dispensers, clerks,
• 1:51:44
  Speaker 1: motor drivers. This GS V A D convoy which I
• 1:51:48
  Speaker 1: had seen, was made up of girls who had exchanged
• 1:51:50
  Speaker 1: from VAD convoys, mostly from this very one at Tea,
• 1:51:54
  Speaker 1: where I now was, and so they happened to be
• 1:51:58
  Speaker 1: all friends and all girls of gentle birth. But when
• 1:52:01
  Speaker 1: I saw their quarters in a couple of tall French
• 1:52:03
  Speaker 1: houses that had been converted to the purpose, I was
• 1:52:06
  Speaker 1: very upset by the terrible fact that the girls had
• 1:52:08
  Speaker 1: to share bedrooms. In all the camps I had seen,
• 1:52:11
  Speaker 1: since both of Fanny's and V. A. D's, each girl
• 1:52:14
  Speaker 1: had her own tiny room which she cherished as her
• 1:52:16
  Speaker 1: own soul, which indeed is what it amounts to. And
• 1:52:20
  Speaker 1: the whack officers, of course, had their own private rooms,
• 1:52:23
  Speaker 1: though the girls slept in dormitories. This convoy at Tea
• 1:52:27
  Speaker 1: was the only voluntary one I had come across where
• 1:52:29
  Speaker 1: the inestimable privilege of solitude was missing, though that will
• 1:52:33
  Speaker 1: be put right when the new camp is built. And
• 1:52:36
  Speaker 1: here I may mention that as deeply as I admire
• 1:52:39
  Speaker 1: all the girls who are working so splendidly in France.
• 1:52:41
  Speaker 1: I think perhaps my meed of admiration brims highest for
• 1:52:45
  Speaker 1: these members of the g s v a DS, who
• 1:52:47
  Speaker 1: are gently born for this very reason of the sleeping accommodation.
• 1:52:52
  Speaker 1: Let us be frank and admit, for the generality of
• 1:52:54
  Speaker 1: working girls, such as the Wax and a large proportion
• 1:52:57
  Speaker 1: of the G. S v a DS, it is not
• 1:52:59
  Speaker 1: nearly so great a hardship to sleep in dormitories as
• 1:53:02
  Speaker 1: it is for girls who have, as a matter of course,
• 1:53:04
  Speaker 1: always been accustomed to privacy. It is not so bad
• 1:53:08
  Speaker 1: in the case of members of a GS convoy such
• 1:53:10
  Speaker 1: as that I have mentioned, where the girls are all friends.
• 1:53:13
  Speaker 1: But what of those ladies who live in the big
• 1:53:15
  Speaker 1: camps and sleep in long huts with other girls of
• 1:53:17
  Speaker 1: every class, all doubtless decent, good girls. But in the
• 1:53:22
  Speaker 1: nature of things, often girls with whom any ground of
• 1:53:25
  Speaker 1: meeting must be limited to the barest commonalities of life. Also,
• 1:53:29
  Speaker 1: sometimes those in authority, those who are and always were professionals,
• 1:53:33
  Speaker 1: not amateurs, have been known to use the power given
• 1:53:36
  Speaker 1: to them by the inferior rating of these girls to
• 1:53:39
  Speaker 1: make them rather miserable personally. I have long had a
• 1:53:43
  Speaker 1: theory which will doubtless bring down on me howls of
• 1:53:45
  Speaker 1: rage from those who will say, I am decrying the
• 1:53:48
  Speaker 1: most noble of professions, that women are not meant to
• 1:53:51
  Speaker 1: be nurses. It brings out all that is worse in them.
• 1:53:55
  Speaker 1: The love of routine for its own sake, that deadly
• 1:53:57
  Speaker 1: snare to which women and government officials accum so much
• 1:54:00
  Speaker 1: more easily than do men, is fostered in them. And
• 1:54:04
  Speaker 1: so is the love of authority for their own sakes,
• 1:54:07
  Speaker 1: which is almost worse. It has taken nothing less than
• 1:54:10
  Speaker 1: this way to show what splendid creatures nurses are under
• 1:54:13
  Speaker 1: their starched aprons. In times of peace, only amateur women
• 1:54:17
  Speaker 1: should be nurses. For it may be observed that the
• 1:54:19
  Speaker 1: v A. D. Nurses, though they have had long enough
• 1:54:22
  Speaker 1: to do it in, have not developed the subtle disease
• 1:54:24
  Speaker 1: of nursytis. Evidently, nursing is a thing like love making,
• 1:54:29
  Speaker 1: which should never become a profession. I was glad to
• 1:54:33
  Speaker 1: have seen all the different convoys I had, because no
• 1:54:35
  Speaker 1: two had been to me alike, and to each I
• 1:54:38
  Speaker 1: am indebted for a differing expression of the same vision,
• 1:54:41
  Speaker 1: which is the vision splendid of a duty undertaken gladly
• 1:54:44
  Speaker 1: and sustained with courage from my first convoys, the Fannies
• 1:54:48
  Speaker 1: and the g s v A DS, I got the
• 1:54:50
  Speaker 1: wonderful facts of it. At the v A D convoy
• 1:54:53
  Speaker 1: at E, I caught that side of it which I
• 1:54:55
  Speaker 1: was most glad of all to encounter. And at the
• 1:54:58
  Speaker 1: v A D convoy at T I found that delightful
• 1:55:01
  Speaker 1: spirit of sheer joy in danger, which is too precious
• 1:55:03
  Speaker 1: to be allowed to die out of the world just
• 1:55:06
  Speaker 1: because there happens to be at present such a great
• 1:55:08
  Speaker 1: deal too much danger let loose upon it. Chapter twelve.
• 1:55:15
  Speaker 1: Rest The snow danced in a fine white mist over
• 1:55:19
  Speaker 1: the plowed fields, and drove perpetually against the northerly sides
• 1:55:22
  Speaker 1: of the tall, bare tree trunks that lined the way
• 1:55:25
  Speaker 1: for miles, hardly finding a hold upon the smooth flanks
• 1:55:28
  Speaker 1: of the plains, but sinking into the rough barked limes,
• 1:55:31
  Speaker 1: till they looked dappled with their brown ridges and the
• 1:55:34
  Speaker 1: white veining, and oddly as though covered with the pelt
• 1:55:37
  Speaker 1: of some strange animal. High in the web of bare branches,
• 1:55:42
  Speaker 1: the clumps of mistletoe showed as filigree nests for some
• 1:55:45
  Speaker 1: race of fairy birds. Gracious country. This for all the
• 1:55:49
  Speaker 1: desolate whiteness. It lay in great rolling slopes, with drifts
• 1:55:53
  Speaker 1: of purplish elms in the folds, and on the levels
• 1:55:56
  Speaker 1: winding steel dark streams, along whose banks the upward springing
• 1:55:59
  Speaker 1: willows and an ardent rust color. And as the car
• 1:56:03
  Speaker 1: rocked and bounded along, and the wind screen first starred
• 1:56:06
  Speaker 1: in one place, then in another, then fell out altogether,
• 1:56:10
  Speaker 1: one got a better and better view of it all.
• 1:56:13
  Speaker 1: What a wonderful people the French are for agriculture. Hardly
• 1:56:17
  Speaker 1: a man did I see all the days I motored
• 1:56:19
  Speaker 1: about and about, but I saw mile after mile of
• 1:56:21
  Speaker 1: cultivated land, the somberly clad women or boys guiding the
• 1:56:25
  Speaker 1: snow plows, the rough coated horses pulling patiently, white horses
• 1:56:29
  Speaker 1: that looked pale against the bare earth, but a dark
• 1:56:32
  Speaker 1: yellow when the snow came up, to show the tarnishing
• 1:56:34
  Speaker 1: that the service of man brings upon beasts. Several times
• 1:56:38
  Speaker 1: I saw English soldiers plowing, and rejoiced. We came into
• 1:56:43
  Speaker 1: the town that was our born. In the gray of
• 1:56:45
  Speaker 1: the evening, passed the gray glimmer of the river between
• 1:56:48
  Speaker 1: its gray stone quays, passed the gray miracle of the cathedral,
• 1:56:52
  Speaker 1: and then, in the rapidly deepening dusk, turned in through
• 1:56:56
  Speaker 1: great wrought iron gates into a gray courtyard. It may
• 1:57:00
  Speaker 1: have been gathered that as much as I admired both
• 1:57:02
  Speaker 1: their practical perfection and their spiritual significance, I am no
• 1:57:06
  Speaker 1: lover of camps, which seemed to me, among all things
• 1:57:09
  Speaker 1: Man created upon God's Earth, about the most depressing I
• 1:57:13
  Speaker 1: had lived, and moved, and had my being in camps.
• 1:57:15
  Speaker 1: It seemed to me for countless ages the edges of
• 1:57:18
  Speaker 1: my soul were frayed with camps. From the moment of
• 1:57:21
  Speaker 1: walking into the old house at r a wonderful sense
• 1:57:23
  Speaker 1: of rest that brooded over the place enveloped me. The
• 1:57:26
  Speaker 1: thing had an atmosphere impossible to exaggerate, though very difficult
• 1:57:30
  Speaker 1: to convey. But I shall never forget the miracle that
• 1:57:33
  Speaker 1: house was to me. It was a hostile for the
• 1:57:36
  Speaker 1: relations of wounded, and there are in France at present
• 1:57:39
  Speaker 1: some half dozen of these houses, supported by the Joint
• 1:57:42
  Speaker 1: War Committee of the Red Cross and the Order of
• 1:57:45
  Speaker 1: Saint John, and staffed by v a ds. At all
• 1:57:48
  Speaker 1: of them, the relations of badly wounded are lodged and
• 1:57:51
  Speaker 1: fed free of charge, while cars meet them and also
• 1:57:53
  Speaker 1: convey them to and from the hospital. This much I
• 1:57:56
  Speaker 1: knew is plain facts. What I had not been prepared
• 1:57:59
  Speaker 1: for was the bread of exquisite pleasure that emanated from
• 1:58:02
  Speaker 1: this house. The house was originally a butter market, and
• 1:58:06
  Speaker 1: the entrance room, set about with little tables, where the
• 1:58:08
  Speaker 1: relations have their meals, has one side entirely of glass.
• 1:58:12
  Speaker 1: The lounge beyond, which is for the staff, is glass roofed,
• 1:58:16
  Speaker 1: while that opening on the right hand of the dining room,
• 1:58:18
  Speaker 1: the lounge for the relations, has long windows all down
• 1:58:21
  Speaker 1: the side. So it will be seen that light and
• 1:58:24
  Speaker 1: air are abundant on the ground floor of the hostel,
• 1:58:26
  Speaker 1: in spite of the fact that it looks on to
• 1:58:28
  Speaker 1: a courtyard. From the relations lounge, with its slim vermilion
• 1:58:33
  Speaker 1: pillars ringed about with seats like those round tree trunks,
• 1:58:36
  Speaker 1: there goes up a curving staircase of red tiles with
• 1:58:39
  Speaker 1: a curved baluster of oak, grayish with age a griffin
• 1:58:42
  Speaker 1: sitting upright upon the knewel. Up this staircase, I was
• 1:58:46
  Speaker 1: taken to my room, and there the completion of peace
• 1:58:48
  Speaker 1: came upon me. One could see at a glance it
• 1:58:52
  Speaker 1: would be quiet, beautifully quiet, Its window gave on to
• 1:58:56
  Speaker 1: the sloping gray flanks of pointed roofs, and showed a
• 1:58:59
  Speaker 1: filigree spy prickling the pale bubble of the wintry sky.
• 1:59:04
  Speaker 1: Its walls were paneled from floor to ceiling, its hangings
• 1:59:07
  Speaker 1: of white and vermilion, its floor dark and polished, and
• 1:59:10
  Speaker 1: on the wide stone hearth burndlewood fire and to crown
• 1:59:14
  Speaker 1: all after tiny huts. It was so big a room
• 1:59:17
  Speaker 1: that the corners were filled with gracious shadow, and the
• 1:59:19
  Speaker 1: firelight flickered up and down on the paneling and glimmered
• 1:59:22
  Speaker 1: in the polished floor, and set the shadows quivering. I
• 1:59:26
  Speaker 1: lay back in a vermilion painted chair and felt steeped
• 1:59:29
  Speaker 1: in the bath of restfulness that the place was. The
• 1:59:33
  Speaker 1: whole house was perfectly got up, the maximum of effect
• 1:59:36
  Speaker 1: having been attained with a minimum of expense, though not
• 1:59:39
  Speaker 1: of labor. It all having been achieved under the direction
• 1:59:42
  Speaker 1: of a former superintendent with a genius for decoration, who
• 1:59:46
  Speaker 1: is now v a D Area Commandant and still lives
• 1:59:48
  Speaker 1: at the hostel. The evening I arrived there, she and
• 1:59:52
  Speaker 1: the staff were busy stenciling a buff bedspread with blue
• 1:59:55
  Speaker 1: galleons in full sail varied by gulls. Everything is its
• 2:00:00
  Speaker 1: exceedingly simple. There is no fussy detail, nothing to catch dirt.
• 2:00:04
  Speaker 1: The walls are all paneled and painted either ivory or
• 2:00:06
  Speaker 1: dark brown. The furniture is of wicker and plain wood,
• 2:00:10
  Speaker 1: painted in gay colors, rich blues and vermilion. The table
• 2:00:14
  Speaker 1: claws are of red or blue checks. In the spacious
• 2:00:17
  Speaker 1: bedrooms are simple color schemes. In one there are thick
• 2:00:20
  Speaker 1: straight curtains of flaming orange, in another of a deep blue,
• 2:00:24
  Speaker 1: in another of red and white checked material. The floors
• 2:00:28
  Speaker 1: are polished wood or red tiles, strewn with rugs. Vivid
• 2:00:32
  Speaker 1: colored cushions. Lie in the easy chairs, and set about
• 2:00:35
  Speaker 1: in earthen jars are great branches of mimosa and lilac.
• 2:00:38
  Speaker 1: From the south, boughs of pussy willow, the tender, velvety
• 2:00:42
  Speaker 1: gray ovals blossoming into fragile yellow dust. All along the
• 2:00:46
  Speaker 1: sills are indoor window boxes filled with hyacinths of pink
• 2:00:49
  Speaker 1: and white, and a cold, faint blue. On the walls,
• 2:00:53
  Speaker 1: the only decoration is that of posters, and these create
• 2:00:56
  Speaker 1: an extraordinary effect as of a series of windows opening
• 2:01:00
  Speaker 1: upon different climbs in strange worlds. Windows set in ivory walls.
• 2:01:05
  Speaker 1: Here is an old Norman castle, gray against a sky
• 2:01:07
  Speaker 1: of luminous yellow. There is a stream in Brittany which
• 2:01:11
  Speaker 1: you can almost hear brawling past the plane trees with
• 2:01:13
  Speaker 1: their freckled trunks, while beyond it, through another window you
• 2:01:17
  Speaker 1: see a pergola of roses whose deep red has turned
• 2:01:20
  Speaker 1: wine colored under the moonlight. And beyond that again the
• 2:01:24
  Speaker 1: white cliffs of England go down into a peacock sea.
• 2:01:27
  Speaker 1: And in the Red Cross dining room, the Polu, his
• 2:01:31
  Speaker 1: mouth open on a yellow encouragement, charges with uplifted hands,
• 2:01:35
  Speaker 1: looking over his shoulder at you with bright daring eyes.
• 2:01:39
  Speaker 1: And you do not need the inspiration underneath of on
• 2:01:42
  Speaker 1: les aura to guess what spirit urges him. This, then,
• 2:01:47
  Speaker 1: is the setting for one of the most merciful works
• 2:01:49
  Speaker 1: of the Red Cross. That it is appreciated is shown
• 2:01:52
  Speaker 1: by the fact that at Christmas, at this house, with
• 2:01:55
  Speaker 1: its staff of superintendent, cook, parlor maid, housemaid and tweeny
• 2:02:00
  Speaker 1: with one cheffuse, there were forty relations of wounded staying.
• 2:02:04
  Speaker 1: The average number of people for whom Army and Red
• 2:02:06
  Speaker 1: Cross rations are drawn three times a week is twenty five.
• 2:02:10
  Speaker 1: But for these rations as for fifteen are drawn as
• 2:02:12
  Speaker 1: the food supplies too generously proportioned for a household consisting
• 2:02:16
  Speaker 1: so largely of women. But it will be seen that
• 2:02:19
  Speaker 1: with a constantly fluctuating population, the task of housekeeping is
• 2:02:22
  Speaker 1: no easy one. Though it is tackled by the voluntary
• 2:02:25
  Speaker 1: staff with gayety and courage. They have troubles of their own, too,
• 2:02:29
  Speaker 1: the members of that staff. And in the big kitchen,
• 2:02:32
  Speaker 1: where among the dishes on the table a pink hyacinth bloomed.
• 2:02:35
  Speaker 1: The fair haired cook I saw so busily working, was
• 2:02:38
  Speaker 1: back from a leave in England that was to have
• 2:02:40
  Speaker 1: been her marriage leave, had not her fiancee been killed
• 2:02:43
  Speaker 1: the day before he was to join her. Now she
• 2:02:46
  Speaker 1: is amongst her pots and pans again, and smiling still,
• 2:02:49
  Speaker 1: as I can testify. The tweeny, who also describes herself
• 2:02:53
  Speaker 1: as a boot boy, is a young war widow. Things
• 2:02:56
  Speaker 1: like these are almost beyond the admiration of mortals less
• 2:02:59
  Speaker 1: severely tested. The material difficulties are not the worst in
• 2:03:03
  Speaker 1: a hostile of this kind, which in its very nature
• 2:03:05
  Speaker 1: presupposes grief. The relations, of course, are of all kinds
• 2:03:10
  Speaker 1: after every pattern of humanity, and each makes his or
• 2:03:12
  Speaker 1: her emotional demand if not an active appeal to sympathy,
• 2:03:16
  Speaker 1: yet in the strain that it entails on the sensitively
• 2:03:18
  Speaker 1: organized to see others in sorrow. And unless you are sensitive,
• 2:03:22
  Speaker 1: you are no good for work such as this. This
• 2:03:25
  Speaker 1: hostile is blessed in its superintendent, an American v a
• 2:03:29
  Speaker 1: d worker of a personality so simpatica. There is no
• 2:03:33
  Speaker 1: adequate English word for what I mean. That you are
• 2:03:36
  Speaker 1: aware of it at the first meeting with her. And
• 2:03:38
  Speaker 1: she is a woman of the world, which is not
• 2:03:40
  Speaker 1: always the case with women workers, however, excellent. Shortly before
• 2:03:45
  Speaker 1: I came to the hostel, a very young wife arrived
• 2:03:47
  Speaker 1: to see her husband, who lay desperately ill in one
• 2:03:49
  Speaker 1: of the hospitals. When he died, she became as a
• 2:03:52
  Speaker 1: thing distraught and could not be left, and the superintendent
• 2:03:55
  Speaker 1: even had to have her sleep in her room with
• 2:03:57
  Speaker 1: her all the time she was there. Others, again, are
• 2:04:00
  Speaker 1: aloof in their sorrow, though it is none the less
• 2:04:03
  Speaker 1: tragic for that. The first question on the lips of
• 2:04:05
  Speaker 1: the staff when the chaffeuse comes back from taking the
• 2:04:08
  Speaker 1: relatives to the hospital, is was it good news? It
• 2:04:12
  Speaker 1: was good news for the couple who arrived on the
• 2:04:14
  Speaker 1: same evening, that I did, the mother and father of
• 2:04:17
  Speaker 1: a young officer who was very badly injured. I saw
• 2:04:20
  Speaker 1: them next morning in the lounge, sitting quietly on either
• 2:04:22
  Speaker 1: side of the center stove, a business man and his
• 2:04:26
  Speaker 1: wife as neat, he in his serge suit, she and
• 2:04:29
  Speaker 1: her satin blouse, and carefully folded lace and smooth gray hair,
• 2:04:32
  Speaker 1: as if they had not been traveling for a day
• 2:04:34
  Speaker 1: and a night on end, racked by anxiety, though you
• 2:04:37
  Speaker 1: could see the deep lines that the strain had left.
• 2:04:40
  Speaker 1: He looked at me with those patient eyes of the elderly,
• 2:04:43
  Speaker 1: which hold the same unconscious pathos as those of animals,
• 2:04:47
  Speaker 1: and talked in a low, quiet voice. And it seemed
• 2:04:49
  Speaker 1: almost an impertinence of a total stranger to assure these gentle,
• 2:04:52
  Speaker 1: dignified people of her gladness that their only son was safe. Yet,
• 2:04:57
  Speaker 1: how glad one is that any of these brief contacts
• 2:04:59
  Speaker 1: in passing should be of happiness. It is so impossible
• 2:05:03
  Speaker 1: not to weep with them that weep, that it is
• 2:05:05
  Speaker 1: a keen joy to be able to rejoice with them
• 2:05:07
  Speaker 1: that do rejoice. It's so free here, he told me,
• 2:05:12
  Speaker 1: that's what the wife and I like. So no rules
• 2:05:15
  Speaker 1: and regulations you can do just what you like, as
• 2:05:18
  Speaker 1: though you were in your own home, no feeling that,
• 2:05:20
  Speaker 1: as you don't pay, you've got to do what you're told.
• 2:05:23
  Speaker 1: And there was expressed the spirit of the hostel as
• 2:05:26
  Speaker 1: I discovered it. There are no rules, and it is
• 2:05:29
  Speaker 1: always impressed upon the superintendence that the relations are not
• 2:05:32
  Speaker 1: obliged to go there, that they do so because they
• 2:05:35
  Speaker 1: choose to, and must be treated as honored guests. In
• 2:05:39
  Speaker 1: the dining room there are little tables, as at a hotel,
• 2:05:41
  Speaker 1: so that the different parties can keep to themselves if
• 2:05:44
  Speaker 1: they prefer it. There are no times for going out
• 2:05:46
  Speaker 1: or coming in, no times for lights out, no need
• 2:05:50
  Speaker 1: to have a meal in if the visitor mentions he
• 2:05:52
  Speaker 1: is going out for it. The relations who stay at
• 2:05:55
  Speaker 1: these hostels are guests in every sense of the word.
• 2:05:57
  Speaker 1: There's not one trace of red tape or the faint
• 2:06:00
  Speaker 1: feeling of obligation about the whole thing. And that must
• 2:06:03
  Speaker 1: have been what I felt in the very air of
• 2:06:05
  Speaker 1: the place when I arrived. What still was so precious
• 2:06:07
  Speaker 1: a balm over me who had been in camp after camp,
• 2:06:11
  Speaker 1: institution after institution, This place, with its quiet walls and
• 2:06:15
  Speaker 1: its gray shutters wing wide upon its gray walls. Was
• 2:06:19
  Speaker 1: not only beautiful and rich, with that richness only age
• 2:06:22
  Speaker 1: can give, it was instinct as well, with freedom and
• 2:06:26
  Speaker 1: with peace. End of chapter twelve, Chapter thirteen of the
• 2:06:38
  Speaker 1: Sword of Deborah by F. Tennys and Jesse. This LibriVox
• 2:06:41
  Speaker 1: recording is in the public domain recording by Mirienne, Chapter thirteen.
• 2:06:46
  Speaker 1: General Servants and a general question. I have left till
• 2:06:51
  Speaker 1: the last what to some people will be the dullest
• 2:06:53
  Speaker 1: and what is certainly the least spectacular of all the
• 2:06:56
  Speaker 1: work done by the women in France. But what is
• 2:06:58
  Speaker 1: to me perhaps the most won, wonderful and admirable of all.
• 2:07:02
  Speaker 1: I mean that of the domestic staffs. For there is
• 2:07:05
  Speaker 1: something thrilling about driving wounded, something eternally picturesque about nursing them.
• 2:07:10
  Speaker 1: But there is no glamour about being a general servant,
• 2:07:13
  Speaker 1: a general servant year in, year out, with no wages
• 2:07:17
  Speaker 1: at that. For I talk of the voluntary staffs, girls
• 2:07:20
  Speaker 1: of gentle birth and breeding, who deliberately undertake to wash
• 2:07:23
  Speaker 1: dishes and clean floors and empty slops day after day.
• 2:07:28
  Speaker 1: I think heroism can no higher go. And I am
• 2:07:31
  Speaker 1: not trying to be funny. I mean it all the
• 2:07:34
  Speaker 1: voluntary camps I had seen. All the hostels, the rest stations,
• 2:07:38
  Speaker 1: and many hospitals are staffed by voluntary domestic help. And
• 2:07:42
  Speaker 1: the girls they wait upon. The drivers and secretaries and
• 2:07:45
  Speaker 1: such like, are eager in recognition of them. But that
• 2:07:49
  Speaker 1: seems to me about all the recognition they do get.
• 2:07:51
  Speaker 1: They get no snappy pars, no photographs in the picture papers,
• 2:07:55
  Speaker 1: no songs are sung of them. No reward is theirs
• 2:07:58
  Speaker 1: in the shape of metal or ribbon, nothing but the
• 2:08:01
  Speaker 1: sense of a dish properly cleaned, or rugs duly swept under.
• 2:08:05
  Speaker 1: I consider that there ought to be a special medal
• 2:08:07
  Speaker 1: for girls who have slaved as general servants during the
• 2:08:10
  Speaker 1: war without a thrill of romance to support them, a
• 2:08:13
  Speaker 1: skivies ribbon, as one of them laughingly suggested to me
• 2:08:16
  Speaker 1: when I propounded the idea. Take, for example, the headquarters
• 2:08:21
  Speaker 1: of the British Red Cross at the Hotel Crystal at Boulogne,
• 2:08:24
  Speaker 1: to which I returned on my homeward way, as I
• 2:08:27
  Speaker 1: had come to it on landing. The staff, counting the
• 2:08:30
  Speaker 1: commissioner and officials, the clerks, typists, secretaries and post office girls,
• 2:08:35
  Speaker 1: amount to about a hundred and forty five people, and
• 2:08:38
  Speaker 1: the house staff number seventy and are all v A ds.
• 2:08:41
  Speaker 1: The Hotel Crystal is also the headquarters for all Red
• 2:08:44
  Speaker 1: Cross people going on leave or arriving there from Boulogne,
• 2:08:47
  Speaker 1: and all have to report there. Nearly all want a meal,
• 2:08:51
  Speaker 1: many want a bed. These men workers and many of
• 2:08:54
  Speaker 1: the women, such as v A D Commandants, et cetera,
• 2:08:57
  Speaker 1: live out in billets in the town, but the Manageerress
• 2:09:00
  Speaker 1: and her assistant, the post office commandant the girl driver
• 2:09:04
  Speaker 1: of the mail car with her orderly. These two girls
• 2:09:06
  Speaker 1: drive about sixty miles daily with the mails. The girls
• 2:09:09
  Speaker 1: of the telephone exchange and the rest of the post
• 2:09:12
  Speaker 1: office girls all live in and in addition to the
• 2:09:15
  Speaker 1: casual Red Cross workers who may appeal for a bed
• 2:09:17
  Speaker 1: any time, there are the relations of wounded who have
• 2:09:20
  Speaker 1: been put up there whenever possible, though now a hostel
• 2:09:24
  Speaker 1: is being opened in Bologne for the purpose. All the
• 2:09:27
  Speaker 1: people working in the house and all Red Cross workers
• 2:09:30
  Speaker 1: arriving by boat are entitled to take their meals at
• 2:09:32
  Speaker 1: the Crystal, as are all Red Cross workers in Boulogne,
• 2:09:35
  Speaker 1: both officers and privates, and the average number of meals
• 2:09:38
  Speaker 1: served is twenty five hundred a week. Four or five
• 2:09:42
  Speaker 1: girls act as waitresses in the dining room, and three
• 2:09:45
  Speaker 1: are always in the pantry, which must never be left
• 2:09:47
  Speaker 1: for a moment during the day. So it will be
• 2:09:49
  Speaker 1: seen that the headquarters of the Red Cross is a
• 2:09:51
  Speaker 1: sort of hotel, except that nobody pays. There are French
• 2:09:55
  Speaker 1: servants to do the roughest work, but the girls have
• 2:09:57
  Speaker 1: plenty to do without that. The house staff begin work
• 2:10:00
  Speaker 1: at seven in the morning. At seven thirty in the
• 2:10:03
  Speaker 1: evening they start to turn out the forty two offices,
• 2:10:06
  Speaker 1: which they sweep in dust every day. They wash all
• 2:10:09
  Speaker 1: the tea things, not the dinner things, and clean all
• 2:10:12
  Speaker 1: the silver and glass. They make the beds and do
• 2:10:15
  Speaker 1: the waiting. A pretty good list of occupations, is it
• 2:10:18
  Speaker 1: not carried out on such a huge scale. The girls
• 2:10:22
  Speaker 1: are well looked after, for it must not be forgotten
• 2:10:24
  Speaker 1: that some of them are not more than eighteen, and
• 2:10:26
  Speaker 1: their parents in England have a right to demand that
• 2:10:28
  Speaker 1: these children should be at once guarded and cheered. No
• 2:10:32
  Speaker 1: Red Cross girl is allowed out after half past nine
• 2:10:34
  Speaker 1: in a restaurant, and none is ever allowed to dine
• 2:10:37
  Speaker 1: out un accompanied by another girl. But when a friend
• 2:10:40
  Speaker 1: of a girl passes through alone, then it is permitted
• 2:10:43
  Speaker 1: that she and the other girl may go and dine
• 2:10:45
  Speaker 1: with the officer in question, always provided that they are
• 2:10:48
  Speaker 1: back by nine thirty. For superiors are merciful and human
• 2:10:51
  Speaker 1: creatures these days, and there is always the thought that
• 2:10:54
  Speaker 1: the girl may never see that friend again, and heaven
• 2:10:57
  Speaker 1: and the superior knows that these girls need and deserve
• 2:11:00
  Speaker 1: a little relaxation and enjoyment. And would you not think
• 2:11:04
  Speaker 1: that to girls who work as these do and behave
• 2:11:07
  Speaker 1: so well, would at least be given the understanding and
• 2:11:09
  Speaker 1: respect of all of us who do so much less.
• 2:11:12
  Speaker 1: Yet how often one hears careless remarks of censure, or worse,
• 2:11:17
  Speaker 1: of belittlement that to other nations our ways may need
• 2:11:20
  Speaker 1: explaining is understandable, But we should indeed be ashamed that
• 2:11:23
  Speaker 1: any amongst ourselves fail in comprehension. What do the French
• 2:11:28
  Speaker 1: think of our women? That is a question that inevitably
• 2:11:31
  Speaker 1: arises in the mind of any one who knows the
• 2:11:33
  Speaker 1: differences in French and English education. Let me show the
• 2:11:36
  Speaker 1: thing as I think it is, by means of a metaphor.
• 2:11:40
  Speaker 1: It is universally conceded that marriage is a more difficult
• 2:11:43
  Speaker 1: proposition than friendship, that it is more a test of
• 2:11:45
  Speaker 1: affection to live under one roof and share the daily
• 2:11:48
  Speaker 1: commonplaces of life than it is to meet occasionally when
• 2:11:51
  Speaker 1: one can make a feast of the meeting. Yet this
• 2:11:54
  Speaker 1: is not to say that marriage is the less admirable state,
• 2:11:57
  Speaker 1: but only to allow that it is the one requiring
• 2:11:59
  Speaker 1: greater sacric devices, greater tact, and greater affection. Therefore, when
• 2:12:04
  Speaker 1: it is admitted that the presence in France for nearly
• 2:12:07
  Speaker 1: four years of English soldiers English civilians on war work,
• 2:12:10
  Speaker 1: and the consequent erection of whole temporary townships for their accommodation,
• 2:12:14
  Speaker 1: is a greater test, if you will, a greater strain
• 2:12:17
  Speaker 1: for the Entente, than if intercourse had been limited to
• 2:12:20
  Speaker 1: an occasional interchange of a handful of people, one is
• 2:12:23
  Speaker 1: not saying anything derogatory, either to French hosts or to
• 2:12:25
  Speaker 1: English guests, but merely frankly conceding that more depth of
• 2:12:29
  Speaker 1: affection and understanding is necessary than would otherwise have been
• 2:12:32
  Speaker 1: the case to superficial relationships superficial knowledge, but to the
• 2:12:37
  Speaker 1: big partnerships of life, complete understanding, and if that is
• 2:12:41
  Speaker 1: never quite possible in this world, at least let the
• 2:12:44
  Speaker 1: corner where knowledge cannot come be filled by tolerance. England
• 2:12:48
  Speaker 1: is no longer on terms of mere friendly intercourse with France.
• 2:12:52
  Speaker 1: The bond is deeper, more indissoluble. And as in marriage,
• 2:12:56
  Speaker 1: the closest bond of all is the birth of children.
• 2:12:58
  Speaker 1: So in this pact of news nations, the greatest bond
• 2:13:01
  Speaker 1: is the loss of children lost for the same cause
• 2:13:04
  Speaker 1: upon the same soil. With a bond as deep as this,
• 2:13:08
  Speaker 1: a bond always acknowledged and given its need of recognition
• 2:13:11
  Speaker 1: by the most thoughtful brains and sensitive hearts. Yet as
• 2:13:15
  Speaker 1: in marriage, there are bound to be minor irritations, points
• 2:13:19
  Speaker 1: not of meeting, but of conflict, trifles. Indeed, these points
• 2:13:23
  Speaker 1: compared with the magnitude of the bond which unites, but
• 2:13:26
  Speaker 1: nevertheless trifles which would be better adjusted than ignored. In
• 2:13:31
  Speaker 1: the first place, we must recognize that though the things
• 2:13:33
  Speaker 1: which unite us, our common ideals are common needs, are
• 2:13:37
  Speaker 1: far stronger than any difference in our modes of thought.
• 2:13:40
  Speaker 1: Yet those differences exist, and that in marriage it is
• 2:13:44
  Speaker 1: often said that it is the little things which count.
• 2:13:47
  Speaker 1: Heaven forbid that we should so lose sense of proportion
• 2:13:51
  Speaker 1: as to say it when the matter in hand is
• 2:13:53
  Speaker 1: the marriage of nations. But nevertheless it is well not
• 2:13:56
  Speaker 1: entirely to forget it. And of all the differences customs
• 2:14:00
  Speaker 1: between us, there is probably none more marked than our
• 2:14:03
  Speaker 1: way of treating what is known loosely and with considerable
• 2:14:06
  Speaker 1: banality as the sex problem. This is not the place
• 2:14:10
  Speaker 1: to discuss those differences, though, as one who has known
• 2:14:13
  Speaker 1: and loved France all her life, I may mention that
• 2:14:16
  Speaker 1: personally I seem much to admire in the French system,
• 2:14:19
  Speaker 1: and could wish that we emulated it. But that is
• 2:14:21
  Speaker 1: neither here nor there. At the moment, France has probably
• 2:14:25
  Speaker 1: evolved for the happiness and welfare of her womenkind, the
• 2:14:29
  Speaker 1: sort of life which suits best with their temperament and circumstances.
• 2:14:33
  Speaker 1: Women like water, find their own level, and no one
• 2:14:36
  Speaker 1: who knows France and knows the devotion, the business capacity
• 2:14:40
  Speaker 1: and the good works of her women, imagines them to
• 2:14:43
  Speaker 1: be the butterfly creatures that English fancy used to paint
• 2:14:45
  Speaker 1: them twenty or thirty years ago. As a matter of fact,
• 2:14:49
  Speaker 1: the present writer had occasion two winters ago to make
• 2:14:52
  Speaker 1: a close study of the varied scope of women's work
• 2:14:54
  Speaker 1: in France. The hospitals for training of Femme Dumont, the
• 2:14:58
  Speaker 1: schools like La Foyer for the t training of young
• 2:15:00
  Speaker 1: girls of the upper classes to help their poorer sisters,
• 2:15:03
  Speaker 1: et cetera, et cetera. All works carried on unostentatiously long
• 2:15:08
  Speaker 1: before the war broke upon us, and proved their usefulness.
• 2:15:11
  Speaker 1: The butterfly French women underwent before the war a far
• 2:15:15
  Speaker 1: more serious social training than did the happy, go lucky
• 2:15:18
  Speaker 1: English girl, and was better equipped in consequence with the
• 2:15:21
  Speaker 1: knowledge of economic conditions than the untrained English woman could be.
• 2:15:26
  Speaker 1: But we too have our quality, and I rather think
• 2:15:29
  Speaker 1: it to be found in the greater freedom which we
• 2:15:30
  Speaker 1: are allowed. We were not so well trained, but freedom
• 2:15:34
  Speaker 1: stepped into the place of custom and gave the necessary
• 2:15:37
  Speaker 1: attitude of mind, that unprejudiced, untrammeled attitude which is essential
• 2:15:41
  Speaker 1: to the quick grasping of a fresh meter. That is
• 2:15:45
  Speaker 1: where our method, or if you prefer it, our lack
• 2:15:48
  Speaker 1: of method, helped us, even as their training helped the French,
• 2:15:53
  Speaker 1: and the French with their extraordinary faculty of vision. Do
• 2:15:56
  Speaker 1: I think understand that we have simply pushed our freedom
• 2:15:59
  Speaker 1: to its logic and legitimate outcome that we could not
• 2:16:02
  Speaker 1: be expected after being accustomed for many years past to
• 2:16:06
  Speaker 1: be on terms of simple easy friendship with men, as
• 2:16:08
  Speaker 1: with our own sex. Above all, after working side by
• 2:16:11
  Speaker 1: side with them since this war began, we could not
• 2:16:13
  Speaker 1: be expected to say that we could not work with
• 2:16:15
  Speaker 1: them in France though we could in England, or that
• 2:16:18
  Speaker 1: perhaps this girl would and that girl couldn't. We naturally
• 2:16:22
  Speaker 1: proceeded to act on Moss as we had acted individually,
• 2:16:26
  Speaker 1: to do on a large scale what had been done
• 2:16:28
  Speaker 1: on a small to manipulate great bodies of women, where
• 2:16:31
  Speaker 1: before a few friends had worked together. In every large
• 2:16:34
  Speaker 1: body of persons, there are bound to be one or
• 2:16:37
  Speaker 1: two individuals who fail to come up to the required standard.
• 2:16:40
  Speaker 1: But that does not alter the principle that what can
• 2:16:42
  Speaker 1: be safely done in small quantities can be safely done
• 2:16:45
  Speaker 1: in large provided the conditions are altered to scale. And
• 2:16:49
  Speaker 1: that is what we are doing and what our government
• 2:16:51
  Speaker 1: is helping us to do. That is what our Women's
• 2:16:54
  Speaker 1: Army and our voluntary workers in France are the expression
• 2:16:58
  Speaker 1: on a large scale of what bands of women here
• 2:17:00
  Speaker 1: have been doing so successfully on a small scale since
• 2:17:03
  Speaker 1: the beginning of the war, helping and even replacing the
• 2:17:06
  Speaker 1: men and just as with our peculiar training and mode
• 2:17:10
  Speaker 1: of thought, it is possible for the average english woman
• 2:17:13
  Speaker 1: to eliminate sex as a factor in the scheme of things,
• 2:17:16
  Speaker 1: so it is possible to eliminate it in greater masses.
• 2:17:19
  Speaker 1: In other words, it is perfectly possible to men and
• 2:17:22
  Speaker 1: girls brought up with the English method of free friendly intercourse,
• 2:17:25
  Speaker 1: to work side by side, to meet, to walk together,
• 2:17:28
  Speaker 1: and to remain merely friends. Whether that is a good
• 2:17:32
  Speaker 1: thing or not is another point altogether, as it is
• 2:17:35
  Speaker 1: whether it makes for charm in a woman. Certainly no
• 2:17:39
  Speaker 1: woman in this world competes with a French woman for charm.
• 2:17:42
  Speaker 1: It is as recognized as an English woman's complexion, and
• 2:17:45
  Speaker 1: considerably more lasting. Probably it is not only ourselves and
• 2:17:49
  Speaker 1: the Americans, among the races of the world, who could
• 2:17:52
  Speaker 1: have instituted such an experiment as that of our women's army.
• 2:17:56
  Speaker 1: But there is among the nations one which is supreme
• 2:17:58
  Speaker 1: in flare, in sympathy and a certain ability to comprehend
• 2:18:02
  Speaker 1: intellectually what it might not understand emotionally, and that nation
• 2:18:06
  Speaker 1: is France. I am confident that it will never have
• 2:18:09
  Speaker 1: to be said that when English women sacrificed so much
• 2:18:12
  Speaker 1: and to a French woman. One does not need to
• 2:18:14
  Speaker 1: point out what a sacrifice it is when a woman
• 2:18:17
  Speaker 1: risks youth and looks in hard, unceasing work. That French
• 2:18:21
  Speaker 1: women fail to understand them or to attribute motives to
• 2:18:24
  Speaker 1: them other than those that have animated themselves in their
• 2:18:27
  Speaker 1: own labors throughout the war. But it must sometimes look
• 2:18:30
  Speaker 1: odd to them, one knows, so well, how can it
• 2:18:33
  Speaker 1: be otherwise? They see the girls khaki clad out walking
• 2:18:38
  Speaker 1: without Tommy's hear the sound of music and dancing coming
• 2:18:41
  Speaker 1: from the recreation huts where the girls are allowed to
• 2:18:44
  Speaker 1: invite men and vice versa. Yet if you investigate, you
• 2:18:48
  Speaker 1: will find out that they are of an extraordinary simplicity,
• 2:18:51
  Speaker 1: these girls and men in their intercourse in their earnest
• 2:18:54
  Speaker 1: dancing taught them by instructors from our young Men's Christian Association,
• 2:18:58
  Speaker 1: inspired by nothing more heady than lemonade and chaperone by
• 2:19:02
  Speaker 1: the women officers who have attained a mixture of authority
• 2:19:04
  Speaker 1: and motherly supervision over every individual girl. That reminds me
• 2:19:08
  Speaker 1: of nothing so much as the care born of a
• 2:19:11
  Speaker 1: sort of divine cunning of a very dear and clever
• 2:19:13
  Speaker 1: mother superior at a convent I once stayed at in France.
• 2:19:18
  Speaker 1: For the interesting point for both the French and ourselves
• 2:19:20
  Speaker 1: to note is that in the treatment of our women's
• 2:19:22
  Speaker 1: army in France, we have taken a leaf out of
• 2:19:25
  Speaker 1: their book. We look after the girls with something of
• 2:19:28
  Speaker 1: that love and care which surrounds a girl in France.
• 2:19:31
  Speaker 1: For many of the women's army are working girls who
• 2:19:34
  Speaker 1: have never been guarded in their lives, whose parents had,
• 2:19:37
  Speaker 1: probably after the lower class English way, had very little
• 2:19:40
  Speaker 1: influence with them, and who, though good, honest, rough girls,
• 2:19:44
  Speaker 1: were free to roam the streets of their native towns
• 2:19:46
  Speaker 1: with their friends every evening once their work was over. Now,
• 2:19:51
  Speaker 1: for what is for many of them the first time
• 2:19:52
  Speaker 1: in their lives, they are being watched and guarded in
• 2:19:55
  Speaker 1: a manner that is more French than English, and which
• 2:19:58
  Speaker 1: I find admirable, for their walks, their friendships with men.
• 2:20:02
  Speaker 1: The personal observation of the acute French will show them
• 2:20:05
  Speaker 1: that it is merely our Anglo Saxon way, and the
• 2:20:08
  Speaker 1: official statistics will prove to any doubters how well both
• 2:20:11
  Speaker 1: the girls and the men can be trusted to behave themselves.
• 2:20:14
  Speaker 1: We are a cold nation if you like, but there
• 2:20:17
  Speaker 1: it is it has its excellencies, if not its charms.
• 2:20:22
  Speaker 1: So much for fundamental differences, which, when intelligence and sympathy
• 2:20:25
  Speaker 1: go out to meet them, become merely points on which
• 2:20:28
  Speaker 1: temperaments agree to differ amicably, each giving its need of
• 2:20:31
  Speaker 1: admiration to the other. And for minor matters, little things
• 2:20:35
  Speaker 1: of different customs, only that, nevertheless, occasionally, in the strain
• 2:20:39
  Speaker 1: of this war roughle even friends, I would say something
• 2:20:43
  Speaker 1: like this, which is in the hearts of us all France,
• 2:20:48
  Speaker 1: dear lovely France, to so many of us, adored for
• 2:20:51
  Speaker 1: many years, who has stood to us for the romance
• 2:20:54
  Speaker 1: of the world. We know that in many things our
• 2:20:57
  Speaker 1: ways are not your ways, and never will be, nor
• 2:21:00
  Speaker 1: would we wish it otherwise. To each nation her distinctiveness
• 2:21:03
  Speaker 1: or she loses her soul. But when those ways of
• 2:21:07
  Speaker 1: ours seem to you most alien, say to yourself, this
• 2:21:11
  Speaker 1: is only England's differing way of doing what we are doing,
• 2:21:14
  Speaker 1: of fighting for what we are fighting for, the saving
• 2:21:17
  Speaker 1: of the right to individualism, the right to be different.
• 2:21:21
  Speaker 1: To gain that, we are all having to become alike.
• 2:21:24
  Speaker 1: Just as to win freedom we are having for a
• 2:21:25
  Speaker 1: time to give it up. And the great thing to
• 2:21:28
  Speaker 1: remember is that this terrible coherent community life is being
• 2:21:31
  Speaker 1: born with only that eventually we may all be free
• 2:21:34
  Speaker 1: men once more, Let us for all time differ in
• 2:21:38
  Speaker 1: our own ways rather than agree in the German. But
• 2:21:42
  Speaker 1: also let us, while differing, understand Chapter fourteen, Notes and Queries.
• 2:21:51
  Speaker 1: On my last evening, I sat and thought about the
• 2:21:53
  Speaker 1: girls I had seen and known in greater and less
• 2:21:55
  Speaker 1: degrees in passing. And I saw them not as unthinkings
• 2:22:00
  Speaker 1: young things who were having a great adventure, but as
• 2:22:03
  Speaker 1: girls who were steadily sticking to their jobs, often without
• 2:22:06
  Speaker 1: enjoyment save that of knowledge of good work well done.
• 2:22:10
  Speaker 1: And I thought of those prophets who gloomily foretell that
• 2:22:13
  Speaker 1: women will never want to drop into the background again,
• 2:22:16
  Speaker 1: forgetful of the fact that where a woman is is
• 2:22:18
  Speaker 1: never a background to herself. I smiled as I thought
• 2:22:22
  Speaker 1: of the eagerness with which these hard workers in mud
• 2:22:24
  Speaker 1: and snow and heat will start buying pretty clothes again
• 2:22:27
  Speaker 1: and going out to parties. And I was very thankful
• 2:22:30
  Speaker 1: to know how unchangeably women they had all remained, in
• 2:22:33
  Speaker 1: spite of the fact that they had had the strength
• 2:22:35
  Speaker 1: to lay the privileges and the fun of being a
• 2:22:37
  Speaker 1: woman aside for a time. I remembered what the d
• 2:22:41
  Speaker 1: of T had said to me when we discussed the
• 2:22:43
  Speaker 1: question of how the girls would settle down when it
• 2:22:44
  Speaker 1: was all over, and how he had thought that even
• 2:22:47
  Speaker 1: if they did not marry, all would be well, because
• 2:22:50
  Speaker 1: they would have had their adventure. I remembered too, how
• 2:22:53
  Speaker 1: that had seemed to me the correct answer at the time.
• 2:22:56
  Speaker 1: Then later, when that awful web of depression caught me,
• 2:23:00
  Speaker 1: and the horror of the schoolgirl conditions of life and
• 2:23:02
  Speaker 1: all the apparent brightness had choked me, I had all
• 2:23:05
  Speaker 1: the more thought it true, but marveled still. Later, when
• 2:23:09
  Speaker 1: I caught glimpses of that wonderful spirit and that deep
• 2:23:12
  Speaker 1: sophistication which had so cheered me, I reversed the whole
• 2:23:15
  Speaker 1: judgment and thought there was nothing in it. Now, thinking
• 2:23:19
  Speaker 1: it all over, it seemed to me that somewhere midway
• 2:23:22
  Speaker 1: lay truth. These girls have had, in a certain sense
• 2:23:26
  Speaker 1: their adventure. But when it is all over, they will
• 2:23:29
  Speaker 1: have a reaction from it, And I believe that reaction
• 2:23:31
  Speaker 1: will be pleasant to them. That it will be the
• 2:23:34
  Speaker 1: reaction and not the memory of adventure, which will content them.
• 2:23:38
  Speaker 1: It is certain to any one who has worked. As
• 2:23:40
  Speaker 1: these girls work, a considerable period of doing nothing in
• 2:23:43
  Speaker 1: particular will be very acceptable. They will all have to
• 2:23:46
  Speaker 1: become themselves again, which will be interesting. Dear wonderful girls,
• 2:23:52
  Speaker 1: you who wash dishes and scrub and sweep, you girls
• 2:23:55
  Speaker 1: of the women's Army, who replace men, and who do
• 2:23:57
  Speaker 1: it so thoroughly. You drivers who were out in all weathers,
• 2:24:01
  Speaker 1: day and night, sometimes for a week or more on end,
• 2:24:05
  Speaker 1: who face hardships such as were faced in those three
• 2:24:08
  Speaker 1: weeks at Tea when there were no fires and no water.
• 2:24:11
  Speaker 1: How glad I am to have met you. So I
• 2:24:14
  Speaker 1: sat and thought, and then I picked up a copy
• 2:24:17
  Speaker 1: of The Times which had just come over, and in
• 2:24:19
  Speaker 1: the personal column, this got my eye. Lady wants war work,
• 2:24:24
  Speaker 1: preferably motor driving from three to five p m. And
• 2:24:28
  Speaker 1: I saw that it was not only those far removed
• 2:24:30
  Speaker 1: from the war who misunderstood both what it demands and
• 2:24:33
  Speaker 1: that which has arisen to meet those demands. Do we
• 2:24:37
  Speaker 1: not nearly all fail to realize the magnitude and import
• 2:24:40
  Speaker 1: of what is being done by these unspectacular workers behind
• 2:24:43
  Speaker 1: the lines, who are yet part of war itself, and
• 2:24:46
  Speaker 1: daily and nightly strengthen the hands of the fighters some
• 2:24:50
  Speaker 1: of us in England realize as little as you in
• 2:24:52
  Speaker 1: far off countries. And yet it should be our business
• 2:24:55
  Speaker 1: to know, because the least we can do is to understand,
• 2:24:57
  Speaker 1: so that we, in our much less fine way, can
• 2:25:00
  Speaker 1: help them a little one tithe of the amount they
• 2:25:03
  Speaker 1: help our fighting men. Not because of any desire of
• 2:25:06
  Speaker 1: theirs for praise. Is it necessary. I never saw a
• 2:25:09
  Speaker 1: healthier disregard amounting to a kindly contempt for what those
• 2:25:13
  Speaker 1: at home think or don't think, than among the women
• 2:25:16
  Speaker 1: working in France. But because it is only by knowing
• 2:25:19
  Speaker 1: that we can respond generously enough to the needs of
• 2:25:21
  Speaker 1: their work, and only by understanding that we can save
• 2:25:24
  Speaker 1: our own souls from that fat and contented ignorance which
• 2:25:28
  Speaker 1: induces asleep uncommonly like death. Nor as long as we
• 2:25:32
  Speaker 1: listen to the girls themselves, are we in any danger
• 2:25:35
  Speaker 1: of thinking too much of them or of their work.
• 2:25:38
  Speaker 1: Not a woman I met English or American working in
• 2:25:41
  Speaker 1: France but said something like this and meant it, what,
• 2:25:45
  Speaker 1: after all, is anything we can do except inasmuch as
• 2:25:49
  Speaker 1: it may help the men a little? How could we
• 2:25:51
  Speaker 1: bear to do nothing when the men are doing the
• 2:25:53
  Speaker 1: most wonderful thing that has ever been done in the world.
• 2:25:58
  Speaker 1: The end, that is the end of Chapter fourteen and
• 2:26:02
  Speaker 1: the end of the Sword of Deborah by F. Tennyson Jesse,
• 2:26:07
  Speaker 1: read by Mariannes Beegel in two thousand fourteen in commemoration
• 2:26:11
  Speaker 1: of the outbreak of the First World War on twentieth
• 2:26:14
  Speaker 1: July nineteen fourteen. Thank you for listening.