Women of England

JANUARY, 1916

BY REBECCA WEST

I

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

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

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

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

It is wonderful that they should have been allowed to help. Before the war Lord Kitchener delighted to maintain his reputation as the strong silent man who despised women, — a reputation which he created several years ago in the Sudan by telling the War Office that if they insisted on sending him women nurses he would duck them in the Nile. The British Red Cross Society is controlled by peeresses and other powerful women of the parasite class, and by the type of fashionable doctor whose career is a personal triumph over the rich rather than the impersonal triumph of the man of science over truth; and so as a body it showed AntiFeminist tendencies. Yet to-day the khaki ambulances with the red cross on the sides draw up at hospitals which are wholly staffed by women, and the men who are left there are not sorry. ‘They give a man a chance,’ they say. It is an inarticulate testimony that the Victorians were wrong, and that a woman is more and not less valuable as a worker because of the slight permanent glow of sympathy which accompanies her capacity for motherhood.

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

And that there can be even satire in the kindness of women is shown by that most beautiful and unanswerable of feminist arguments, — the hospital organized by Mrs. St. Clair Stobart. Wherever men gather together to kill one another, the white tents of this hospital appear on the high ground above to mock the governors of men. ‘When you slaves have quite finished knocking each other about, we weaklings will come and remedy your might.’ A man doctor is as forbidden in this hospital as a tabby-cat on Mount Athos: it is conducted with a brave punctilio by women surgeons, women nurses, women orderlies, all trained above the average and not to be driven from their posts by the forgings of any arsenal. They acquired their war-nerve in the protracted filth and famine of the Balkan Wars, and it has not failed them throughout this worse campaign, where horrors are not the writhings of misery hungry in the mud, but have been coldly and efficiently planned in cleanness and plenty. Every woman stayed at her post in Antwerp, though the shattered glass of the windows fell about them as they worked and one of their nurses was killed by a shell before their eyes. And when all kindness was driven out of Belgium, they turned to Serbia and joined with the British Red Cross Society and that other exclusively feminine hospital organized by the Scottish woman suffrage societies in the victory that is the most resplendent of the war because it meant the saving and not the losing of life.

The work of these Englishwomen in Serbia makes the blood leap like the death of Byron at Missolonghi or the legion of Englishmen who fought for Garibaldi. At the beginning of the war, Serbia was a place of vermin where wounded men lay on the straw and thirsted and hungered until their wounds festered into fever and they died. To those horrors Englishwomen went out just as fast as they could find organizations to take them. They dwelt in the filth and breathed in the pestilence and did not care how close they came to Death, so long as they could strike at him. It was because of this reserve of intelligent and fearless labor that the Sanitary Commission was able to go to a country where one sixth of the population of certain districts had been wiped out by typhus in three months, and the rest were the prey of wounds, famine, enteric and relapsing fever, and was able to scrub it clean of disease. Because these women were brave and adventurous and trained and disciplined and everything that it is quite unnecessary for a woman to be, they acquired a mastery over pain and stopped one of the leaks through which there gushed out the life of Europe.

II

Feminism has not invented this courage, for there have always been brave women; but it has let it strike its roots into the earth. For this work is precious above most of the good deeds done by their sex in the past because it was performed by women who were not set apart from life by any peculiar passion of service or renunciation. Madge Neill Fraser spent a great part of her life in the unspiritual and useless pastime of playing golf with distinction. Mrs. Percy Dearmer was a large, kind, dancing sort of woman, flushed with a naïve passion for getting up things, for ‘getting up’ anything from a mothers’ meeting to a theatrical season. And both of them went out to Serbia, and caught fever, and are now members of the communion of heroes.

It is ordinary people too who conduct the privateering expeditions that are made upon Belgium — which, being most in need, is most inclined to accept untrained and isolated helpers — by women working in twos or threes or alone.

There is one woman who visits all those battered Belgian villages where peasants still huddle in their bulletriddled homes, and takes with her truckloads of a patent infants’ food. Wherever there is a Belgian baby she goes, even if it means pushing a barrow full of tins to some stranded hamlet a quarter of a mile along a road raked by German fire. It is a work that is beautiful in courage and charity, and it supplies the overwhelming pacifist argument. Those gray babies whining in their cradles prove that the commonplace remark that the world is too far advanced for war is wrong. On the contrary we have not yet arrived at the stage of civilization where war becomes a possibility. For it is a cad’s trick to declare war until one is absolutely certain that one is not cheating one single helpless baby out of its feeding-bottle. If there were to be on some high place a record of this bravery, one can imagine how the picture would show a figure of the smooth surface and stillness which is found only in saints and the dead, moving to some benevolence with the deliberation of one who has fortified and specialized her will to this by prayer. And yet she is a brown and lively thing: a Jewess, one of a race that has forbidden its women to withdraw from the world to sanctify themselves; an actress, pledged to the service of pleasure, and vivid with that intensification of the flesh that comes to wives and mothers.

Now when ordinary people, involved in the ordinary relationships of life, are made mobilizable by the general acceptance of the doctrine that a woman may come out of her home and take upon herself risk and responsibility, they become much more significant workers than could dedicated women who have renounced the things of the world. For when they die, it does not mean that the red-eyed sisters gather in the chantry to sing the mass for the dead. It means that people who have been bound to them by the ties of the flesh and common laughter and excitement, feel as though a part of them had died violently and gloriously and by the sword, and there enters into their blood the tradition that it is good to face violence and be capable of glory and hate the sword. Instead of lingering ghostly in a convent legend, these dead women become a strain in the breed that will live as long as life.

But even though this work and its significance may have been facilitated by feminism, no woman would present the bill to men and say that we have thereby earned our liberty and citizenship. The professional politicians, who feel that everything is the same as it always was because they are still in power, bargain even now for rights and advantages, and intrigue that if this one is silent about the crimes of the coal-owners, that one shall support conscription. But we common people, who are struggling in a changed and unkindly universe like rabbits in a blownout burrow, no longer try to score off one another. And we admit that our assumption of such risks and responsibilities of the war as we can bear is no self-sacrifice, but a snatch at happiness. For danger is the salt of life. It preserves it from rankness when there is thunder in the skies.

You who think that women ought to be sealed into safety cannot think of a happy ending to the tale of a widow who lost her only son in the wars. You see how she would sit alone in a house that has grown horrible because the pictures on the walls are not of a live boy but of a dead man: how, every day, the little morning breeze of housewifery would spring up and die down into eventless afternoons and long evenings when the lamplit air would stagnate for lack of the movement of youth; how her life would turn rancid for wTant of hope to keep it fresh. Yet we know now that such a tale can end in brightness. A widow who was nursing in Serbia heard that her son had died at Ypres; a week later the languor of enteric fell upon her and she died. Instead of slowly wizening in stale air she ran swiftly at the elbow of her son to the gate of their purpose. She would have no pain for him or for herself, for, having taken part in the ritual of honorable death, she would comprehend its meaning. We rejoice that in a time like this we are allowed such mitigations.

III

But here again we have let the exceptional woman crowd out mankind: for most of these are the deeds of women who, either by spinsterhood, widowhood, extreme youth, or middle age, have been released from the normal lot of childbearing and rearing. The mass of Englishwomen are still bond to that duty, and are busy with men and babies in homes beneath a sky unshaken by gunfire. Yet they too receive from the war their special revelation. All of them are learning now what only the intellectually curious or the distressfully circumstanced knew before: that the wife and mother is not the lady jangling her keys about a castle keep, built to contain the future of the race, but the most helpless straw whirled along on the tide of men’s activities. Humanity has lost its instinct for self-preservation in the desire of the intelligence for adventure, and makes no effort to protect its future. War hits at children as at anybody else, and the mothers are busy beating back the assault.

These are things not to be seen by the casual observer of social conditions; for England, like a hurt and defiant animal, is pretending that nothing has befallen it. London and the great provincial cities create an illusion that everything is the same as it always has been, by open shops and the familiar peacocking of shopping women. This lie of an inert social organism is assisted by the Powers that Be, who, for some reason incomprehensible to any one who has traveled through the country and seen howr agricultural laborers and engineers are prized as princes, hold recruiting meetings at every corner. Yet the whole illusion falls away like a veil when the band strikes up and marches away with a following of valiant old men who have clipped their moustaches to hide their whiteness, weedy towm-bred lads rejected half a dozen times already, and little boys with tin trumpets. And if, with this enlightening vision before one’s eyes, one walks into any of the residential districts, significant things suddenly inform one that this life is all gnawed with the war. *

In these rows of households there is rarely a householder. Either he is in khaki, or he is working from nine in the morning till midnight in a government office, or burning out his vitality in the factory or office in the attempt to create material and skilled labor out of nothing to fulfil! an army contract. It is the householder’s wife who is dealing with a world utterly and fantastically changed by the fact that, when she orders goods, the answer is, either, ’I cannot get these goods,’ or, ‘I will not be able to send you these goods for some days, as nearly all my packers have gone to the front, and the railways are so disorganized that, when I do, I cannot say whether you will get them in a week or a month’; and that when she requires the services of an electrician, a carpenter, a plumber, or a jobbing gardener, she has to wait her turn for the old and incompetent workmen who have crawded from the fireside or the casual ward to fill the gaps left by the fitter men who have gone into the army or into government work.

There is humor in these disorders. It is irritating and yet disarming to wait while an aged plumber, noisily sucking his last tooth, fumbles with a tap; and when the gardener with his scythe looks like old Father Time, one hovers about him with an uneasy feeling that he ought to be drawn from flower-bed to flower-bed in a bath-chair. But their cumulation is a tragedy. A year ago the wife led the easiest existence on earth, and here and there she was a little wicked with luxury, and greedy to spend the world’s wealth on the decoration of the private life. To-day she works hard. Although this business of housewifery is the one occupation the world permitted her to follow without question, here are navies and armies shamelessly ranged to kill the men she has borne and cherished, and conspiring to prevent her from nourishing their nerves with comfort, and she has to stand up to them and keep the war out of her home. She has to organize her resources so that order and cleanliness and all the sweet cultivations of peace can make a last stand in her four walls. While her men are fighting for her life, she has to fight to make that life worth living and insure that children shall grow up to live it.

It is a war of infinite majesty, and yet it is difficult to record because of the triviality of its battles and the incoherence of its soldiers. Instead of a general issuing dispatches concerning a reverse, two ladies in jet bonnets and charwomen’s capes raise their voices as they discuss the rise in the price of sugar under the gas flares. And those few economic students who can decipher this homely text are for the most part followers of the Fabian sect of Socialism, and insist on peering down on the poor dead poor. Now the state of the poor happens to be a patch of dead water in the midst of the whirlpool. At first it seemed as though they were going to bear the full force of the economic blow, and one of the first results of the war was that the babies examined at the clinics and schools for mothers began to lose weight. But now that labor has proved its importance to a staggered public, we are paying out everything we can to keep the country going, and the working classes are enjoying a period of prosperity. It is the middle-class home—so largely dependent on the distributive system which has so entirely broken down for lack of men — that has tumbled down like a house of cards.

Middle-class housewives are not likely to write their own history; and so for the past few months I have been collecting the experiences of women who lived in quiet England and yet found existence defaced by the war. There is one which I think is of special interest because the teller of it had no direct connection with the war. So far as they knew, neither she nor her husband had a single kinsman at the front. Yet the war changed and hurt them.

IV

The woman, who shall be called the Lady to mark a certain remoteness from exterior circumstance which had hitherto been hers, lived in a rawboned house which stood on a cliff facing the Wash and casting a sidewise glance to the North Sea across bents misted with sea-lavender. A lighthouse stood sentinel beside it, and there were little white coastguard cottages with cobblestones and a bleaching-green, and near at hand a wireless station lifted its gaunt arms. It was one of those wholly tedious East Coast districts which hold one simply by a wine-like strength in the air.

But in any case they were not people who made extravagant demands of this visible world. The Lady was a little under thirty, and liked tennis tournaments and golf, and had a considerable amount of intelligence which was quite unlit by any intellectual passion. Her husband was a man of forty-two who dabbled in scientific journalism with results that brought up his private income to £800. They lived a wholesome life in which the events came up so regularly and so completely without the scent of romance that one might liken it to one of those large, white, neatly and firmly convoluted cauliflowers. They thought stability much the best thing in the world, and looked forward to the birth of their child because it would make them more settled than ever.

Yet on the day their child was born, all this was altered. Even the ordinary circumstances of childbirth were different. For the Lady sat and read the papers. To you who have not been through this war, it may seem incredible that reading a newspaper could blot out the consciousness of personal pain in a much larger and intenser impersonal pain. But we did not know then what had happened to the world; all that we knew was that only a few score miles away a people had been torn to pieces, and that demoniac wickedness was walking the earth and rejoicing in its might. Everything we did in those days was done abstractedly. So you might imagine men buying and selling on the Last Day, casting backward glances at the slip of sky at the door, to see if the great hand be not yet thrust through the clouds. It was thus that the Lady lost, not only the foreboding of extreme peril, but also the delicious sense of importance which is the consolation of her sex on these occasions. This was motherhood with a difference. When the mists of chloroform cleared away and they held out her squealing son, she looked at him, not with the passive contentment of the mother in peace-time, but with the active and passionate intention: ‘I must keep this thing safe.’

Almost immediately there were signs, not only that war had begun, but that peace had ended. These things do not always happen together: the comfort of the world went on just the same all the years that English boys were dying uselessly in South Africa. But the very day after the Lady’s child was born, the social organization showed what it was up to by omitting to send the milk. The Lady’s husband was sent off without his breakfast to fetch it, and found the little tiled dairy full of landladies indignant because the most superior family from Nottingham which had taken the drawing-room floor was waiting for its breakfast. Nobody had got any milk, it seemed, because all the milkmen were Army Reservists and had been called up the night before.

So the Lady’s husband took a can in his hand and went in next door to the grocery store, to inquire for some cereals that inexplicably had not been delivered. The shop looked different that day. There were three big automobiles drawn up in front and the chauffeurs were packing them with sacks of flour and eatables. Inside, agitated women with the uppish airs of those who feel themselves rising to an emergency, were buying rice that was doomed to bore their families for a twelvemonth, bacon whose destiny it was to mould in the cellar, and, on the impulse of the moment, even stranger things than that. One woman grasped a bar of yellow soap and a tin of curry powder, and thrust them into her string bag. The Lady’s husband perceived that this was a food-panic, and he sat down on a sugar-box and explained to the women that there must be enough food in England to last for at least six months. They appeared uninterested, and the grocer, who had raised his prices two pence in the shilling since he opened his shop that morning, irritated. He then ordered the rice and tapioca and sago he had been sent to fetch, but was told that the stocks were exhausted; so he had to fill his pockets with tins of a more expensive patent cereal. The grocer refused to give him change for a five-pound note, although he explained clearly that there could be no need for withdrawing gold from currency until the government had issued instructions to that effect. To this the grocer (who had hoarded fifty pounds in his safe) replied that this was no time for theories.

Yet when the Lady’s husband turned homeward, completely breakfastless, with the big milk-can swinging against his legs, and the knobby little tins rattling in his pockets, and arguments against the hoarding of gold boiling over in his head, he was possessed by a white flame of tranquillity. Exaltation poured through his veins like light. I cannot explain the quality of the glory which filled us all on that disordered morning, except by quoting the phrase from one of those articles by which Mr. H. G. Wells expressed as no other writer has done the good intent with which we faced this war. ‘This shall be the war that ends war.’ Such was our early passion. It still lingers. Every time a Cabinet minister appeals for more munition-workers and begs the women to step forward, innumerable women of all sorts—dressmakers, shopkeepers, typists — throw up their businesses, sometimes even raising money enough to defray the cost of their training, and flock to the nearest big town to offer their services — and receive no answer to their applications. The government talks to us private people of thrift, but what extravagance have we ever committed like their waste of our exaltation?

V

But all this unrest died down in about three weeks. As soon as the German advance on Paris was checked the social organization began to recover itself. And when the Lady’s husband got a post in the laboratory of an explosives factory near London, and they rented a farmhouse in a Hertfordshire village, the Lady could stand at her porch under the white creeper and finger the rough sun-crumbled brick and look down the valley of green watermeadows and cherish once more the illusion of stability. She could rejoice again at trivial things — at the beauty of the berries that year, for instance: the hawthorn tree in the middle of the meadow in front of the house was like one of those little coral trees on which old-fashioned ladies hang their rings. It was not that the thought of the war was not perpetually present, that letters did not come to tell the death of their friends, that she did not find tears in her eyes the minute she let her mind stray from the immediate world. But the war was not here. The nearest it came was when the dairy farmer’s wife told her, as she was paying the bill, that her eldest son had seen the Virgin Mary in the trenches — ‘the last person,’ she said in the clipped accents ladies’ maids carry into married life, ‘he was looking for.’ The Lady laughed, imagining a commander ordering a saint off the field because she was giving the range to the enemy, but was impressed to find herself present at the birth of legend.

But otherwise, except for the high price of food and the difficulty of getting coal, the war did not seem to touch this life, until one April day when the Lady was working in the garden because the gardener had enlisted and there was not a man left in the district to take his place. She paused in her work of planting beans to look at the beauty about her. A young moon was silver in a primrose sky; a burning of leaves made a gold flame on the crest of some near hill; the valley was full of a liquid evening light in which the pollard willows moved with glassy undulations like seaweed under water. And through the fork of an apple tree she saw the face of her cook, yellow and laughing. The Lady dropped forward on her knees in the wet mould. After a still moment the woman went up the path and crossed the lawn, still laughing. That night she came into the diningroom and put her cheeks against the oak paneling, and began to pour out obscene tales about the nurse and the housemaid in the blotted speech of undecided consonants that comes to the mad. She was certified the next day, and in the evening they took her in the doctor’s automobile to the County Asylum. For a long part of their journey they traveled under the shadow of the high brick wall of Hatfield, that great piece of England so proudly held by the Cecils. It was a Cecil who devised the Treaty of Berlin that caused this war.

This woman had gone mad because she had lost her sweetheart and her three brothers in the war.

The very next evening, as the Lady returned depressed from a day in London registry offices which one and all explained that there were no more servants to be got, as all the girls were making munitions or filling men’s places, a man in khaki came up the path and requisitioned her for Kitchener’s Army. She watched him fascinated as they went round the house selecting rooms in which the billeted soldiers were to sleep; for he was at once brazenly, blaringly not a gentleman and keenly, splendidly an officer. When the Lady banged the door a trifle roughly and said, ‘ I beg your pardon,’ he responded, as no officer ever did before England gathered all sorts to her Army, ‘ Granted, I’m sure.’ Yet he talked of his men and their fitness and comfort with the confidence that he was guarding them so that one day they would follow him into noble danger, and surely that is the fine heart of officership. He billeted eleven soldiers on her, and informed her that, as the commissariat had fallen behind on their journey from the West Country, she would have to find and cook food for them for — oh! ten days, perhaps.

As he swung off down the path, the Lady tried to feel aghast at the prospect before her. But instead she found her heart light and strong like a bird. What had been a tedious domestic crisis had turned suddenly into a tough and invigorating job to be done for the country’s sake. That evening she cycled five miles to get a joint for them, as the news of the coming of a thousand men had already emptied the village of food. She was not bored or exasperated by the morning’s cooking; and when the eleven Hampshire men, their faces dust-colored with fatigue, threw down their packs in the garden and entered the kitchen, she was filled not with apprehension at their weatherbeaten bigness or their encrusted muddiness, but simply with the hope that she might not fail them. And although food was scarce and had often to be fetched from a town six miles away, and the price of beef and mutton rose by twenty-five to thirty-five per cent, she never found the business of keeping these men fit and happy anything but an enjoyment. They were temperate and amiable beings, very helpful at mending lamps and doing up the garden, and given to spending the evening by the fire singing songs like ‘The Rosary.’ And when the Lady contrasted these clear-skinned, kindly men in khaki with the dull-eyed, surly things they would have been in civil life, she suddenly began to understand that Solomon was right when he said that the destruction of the poor was their poverty. It was not until they had been allowed good food, fresh air, and leisure, that they had been able to show how good their essence was. And as she realized that England had given them none of these things until it had need of their lives, she felt ashamed, and worked for them more than ever until she was arrested by a cry from the nursery.

There had happened in this Hertfordshire village what has happened in every district where soldiers are billeted. The dairymen watered the milk to meet the demand. And so the Lady’s lusty child, who had been one of those babies of flushed, abundant flesh, became suddenly froglike and unfriendly, waving hostile, helpless hands and wailing a gathering distress. Everything fell away from it, its fatness, its beauty, even its personality. ‘Why should these — devils be able to tamper with his food ? ’ cried the Lady. ‘ It ought to be like gas — or water — a local authority—and sobbed her way into Socialism. The doctor advised her to go away until the soldiers were moved, and took her in his automobile to look for lodgings. But this country could no longer be kind to them. It looked just the same as always, with the red cattle munching knee-deep in shining buttercups and the fields of young corn a singing green under the moonshine hedges of May, but it had lost its liberty. All the land to the sea was given over to the men in khaki.

So very hastily the Lady had to take her child and the nurse to one of those vulgar Thames-side towns, an idiot’s paradise of geraniumed houseboats and polished punts. And there, once the excitement of feeding the child back into health was over, the Lady found that her heart was full of a sense of emptiness. She wanted to be back in Hertfordshire, getting up at six, burning her face over the kitchen range, working for the soldiers. She wanted passionately, as one wants to be a sailor or to return to one’s home, to be of service. And she did more than feel this: when her husband, who came to her for the week-end with a fatigue and need for comfort that oddly renewed their relationship, said, ‘I must go on doing something useful after the war: one needs it,’ she registered it as one of the emotions that respectable people act upon.

Though decent life has been raised to fineness by the war, base life is baser than it was in peace. The Thames-side hotel, which always was a place of grimed plush hangings and gilt cornices, accepted the scarcity of servants as an excuse for a franker filth; and on the lawns by the river degraded old men and French and Belgian embusques got drunk because there was a war. The Lady longed for the clean order of some country home where summer was not a blowsy female in a motor-launch, but a profitable heat running along the earth to warm it for harvest. But that old, simple, loosely organized life of the countryside, from which she and her kind drew their virtue, was gone. The Army was destructively established upon it as a factory is built upon a meadow. The incalculable movements of troops, the consequent sudden scarcities of food, the impossibility of getting goods through from London on the disordered railways, the difficulties of getting servants, made it dangerous and tedious. Moreover, subscriptions to the War Loan and depreciated investments had brought down their income so that they could not long afford two households, and must have a suburban home to which the Lady’s husband could return every evening after work.

So, as the summer waned, the Lady found herself living, not in an old farmhouse standing among elms on a Roman road and looking itself ancient and living like the trees, but in a villa that looked as though but yesterday its parts had lain unrelated in a builder’s yard. And there she lived a pinched life, saving, placating servants, trying to do all the plumbing and carpentering herself, till one glorious night when the factory hooters cried orchestrally and she was readmitted into that real world she had lived in when she was doing service for Kitchener’s Army. The night was full of light and noise. There was the roar and whistle of the shells, the bang of bombs; and through the white world of brightness cast on the black sky by the searchlights, there fled a fat silver slug which dropped threads of fire into the darkness as it went. It came near, it passed overhead. The Lady felt as though she were lit like a lamp by pride. She was rapt in delight at the mighty power of brain and nerve that were steering that thing. She was radiant with joy at the sudden knowledge that it mattered nothing if they sent down death on her and her dearer part, the child, because they could not break her will. And fear struggled weakly in her, deep and quite disregarded.

Surely it is not a little thing that people who had lived in love with stability should learn all this in a year; that one can find exaltation at impersonal affairs that do not feed one’s appetite; that war is an undignified brute that kills country louts and steals the wits of servant girls; that participation in the collective life by service is a happiness necessary to the human animal; that the careless individualist organization of society may lead to the murder of children; and as for the Zeppelin raid, what more could artist desire than that people should rejoice in tragedy? It may seem to neutrals, when they read of the triumphant greed of the coal-owners and army contractors, and the politicians’ gamblings for leadership, that this war has done nothing to Europe except make it a swill-tub for the capitalist class. But we little private people, like the Lady and her husband, have lately endured many experiences and found them to be revelations that we could never have received in the grossish times of peace that lay on the land before August.

Yet war is an outrageous thing, and we will not pay the price again; when we have recovered peace we must live so intently and intelligently, with eyes made clear by these expensive recent visions, that nevermore will we need to be awakened by the roar of cannon.