We brought back three wounded Germans from the
stable. We were in Dixmude on the afternoon when the Germans destroyed
the town by artillery fire. We were in Ypres on November first, the day
after the most terrible battle in history, when fifty thousand English
out of a hundred and twenty thousand fell. For three months my wife
lived in Pervyse, with two British women. Not one house in the town
itself is left untouched by shell-fire. The women lived in a cellar for
the first weeks. Then they moved into a partially demolished house, and
a little later a shell exploded in the kitchen. The women were at work
in the next room. We have had opportunity for observing women in war,
for we have seen several hundred of them--nurses, helpers, chauffeurs,
writers--under varying degrees of strain and danger.
The women whom I met in Belgium were all alike. They refused to take
"their place." They were not interested in their personal welfare. There
have been individual men, a few of them--English, French and Belgian,
soldiers, chauffeurs and civilians--who have turned tail when the danger
was acute. But the women we have watched are strangely lacking in fear.
I asked a famous war writer, whose breast was gay with the ribbons of
half a dozen campaigns, what was the matter with all these women, that
they did not tremble and go green under fire, as some of us did. He
said:
"They don't belong out here.
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