This war has been a revelation of womanhood. To see one of these cool, friendly creatures, American and English, shove her motor car into shell-fire, make her rescue of helpless crippled men, and steam back to safety, is to watch a resourceful and disciplined being. They may be, they are, "ministering angels," but there is nothing meek in their demeanor. They have stepped to a vantage from which nothing in man's contemptuous philosophy will ever dislodge them. They have always existed to astonish those who knew them best, and have turned life into a surprise party from Eden to the era of forcible feeding. But assuredly it would make the dogmatists on the essentially feminine nature, like Kipling, rub their eyes, to watch modern women at work under fire. They haven't the slightest fear of being killed. Give them a job under bombardment, and they unfold the stretcher, place the pillow and tuck in the blanket, without a quiver of apprehension. That, too, when some of the men are scampering for cover, and ducking chance pellets from the woolly white cloud that breaks overhead. The women will eat their luncheon with relish within three hundred feet of a French battery in full blaze. Is there a test left to the pride of man that the modern woman does not take lightly and skilfully? Gone are the Victorian nerves and the eighteenth-century fainting. All the old false delicacies have been swamped. She has been held back like a hound from the hunting, till we really believed we had a harmless household pet, who loved security. We had forgotten the pioneer women who struck across frontiers with a hardihood that matched that of their mates. And now the modern woman emerges from her protected home, and pushes forward, careless and curious.

"What are women going to do about this war?" That question my wife and I asked each other at the outbreak of the present conflict. There were several attitudes that they might take. They could deplore war, because it destroyed their own best products. They could form peace leagues and pass resolutions against war. They could return to their ancient job of humble service, and resume their familiar location in the background. They did all these things and did them fervently; but they did something else in this war---they stepped out into the foreground, where the air was thick with danger, and demonstrated their courage. The mother no longer says: "Return, my gallant one, with your shield or on it," and goes back to her baking. She packs her kit and jumps into a motor ambulance headed for the dressing station.

We have had an excellent chance to watch women in this war. Our corps have had access to every line from Nieuport on the sea, down for twenty miles. We were able to run out to skirmishes, to reach the wounded where they had fallen. We have gone where the fighting had been at such close range that in one barnyard in Ramscappelle lay thirteen dead---Germans, French and Belgians. 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. They have no business to be under fire. They ought to be back at the hospitals down at Dunkirk. They don't appreciate danger. That's the trouble with them; they have no imagination."

That's an easy way out. But the real reasons lie deeper than a mental inferiority. These women certainly had quite as good an equipment in mentality as the drivers and stretcher bearers. They could not bear to let immense numbers of men lie in pain. They wished to bring their instinct for help to the place where it was needed.

The other reason is a product of their changed thinking under modern conditions. "I want to see the shells," said a discontented lady at Dunkirk. She was weary of the peace and safety of a town twenty miles back from the front. Women suddenly saw their time had come to strip man of one more of his monopolies. For some thousand years he had been bragging of his carriage and bearing in battle. He had told the women folks at home how admirable he had been under strain, and he went on to claim special privileges as the reward for his gallant behavior. He posed as their protector. He assumed the right to tax them because they did not lend a hand when invasion came. Now women are campaigning in France and Belgium to show that man's much-advertised quality of courage is a race possession.

They had already shown it while peace was still in the land, but their demonstration met with disfavor. Just before the war broke out I saw a woman suffragist thrown into a pond of water at Denmark Hill. I saw another mauled and bruised by a crowd of men in Hyde Park. They were the same sort of women as these hundreds at the front, who are affirming a new value. The argument is hotly contended whether women belong in the war zone. Conservative Englishmen deem them a nuisance, and wish them back in London. Meanwhile, they come and stay. English officials tried to send home the three of our women who had been nursing within thirty yards of the trenches at Pervyse. But the King of the Belgians, and Baron de Broqueville, Prime minister of Belgium, had been watching their work, and refused to move them.

One morning we came into the dining-room of our Convent Hospital at Furnes, and there on a stretcher on the floor was a girl sleeping profoundly. We thought at first we had one more of our innumerable wounded who overflowed the beds and wards during those crowded days. She rested through the morning and through the noon meal. The noise about did not disturb her. She did not stir in her heavy sleep, lying under the window, her face of olive skin, with a touch of red in the right cheek, turned away from the light. She awoke after twenty hours. Silently, she had come in the evening before, wearied to exhaustion after a week of nursing in the Belgian trenches.

That was the thing you were confronted with---woman after woman hurling herself at the war till spent. They wished to share with men the hardship and peril. If risks were right for the men, then they were right for women. If the time had come for nations to risk death, these women refused to claim the exemptions of sex difference. If war was unavoidable, then it was equally proper for women to be present and carry on the work of salvage.

Of a desire to kill they have none. A certain type of man under excitement likes to shoot and reach his mark. I have had soldiers tell me with pride of the number of enemies they have potted. It sounds very much like an Indian score-card of scalps or a grouse hunter's bag of game. Our women did not talk in these terms, nor did they act so. They gave the same care to German wounded as to Belgian, French and English wounded, and that though they knew they would not receive mercy if the enemy came across the fields and stormed the trenches. A couple of machine guns placed on the trench at Pervyse could have raked the ruined village and killed our three nurses. They shared the terms of peril with the soldiers; but they had no desire for retaliation, no wish to wreak their will on human life. Their instinct is to help. The danger does not excite them to a nervous explosion where they grab for a gun and shoot the other fellow.

I was with an English physician one day before he was seasoned. We were under the bank at Grembergen, just across the river from Termonde. The enemy were putting over shells about one hundred yards from where we were crawling toward a machine-shop sheltering wounded men. The obus were noisy and the dirt flew high. Scattered bits of metal struck the bank. As we heard the shell moaning for that second of time when it draws close, we would crawl into one of the trenches scooped out in the green bank, an earthen cave with a roof of boughs.

"Let's get out of this," said the doctor. "It's too hot for our kind of work. If I had a rifle and could shoot back I shouldn't mind it. But this waiting round and doing nothing in return till you are hit, I don't like it."

But that is the very power that women possess. They can wait round without wishing to strike back. Saving life gives them sufficient spiritual resource to stand up to artillery. They have no wish to relieve their nervousness by sighting an alien head and cracking it.

One of our corps was the daughter of an earl. She had all the characteristics of what we like to think is the typical American girl. She had a bonhomie that swept class distinctions aside. Her talk was swift and direct. She was pretty and executive, swift to act and always on the go.

One day, as we were on the road to the dressing stations, the noise of guns broke out. The young Belgian soldier who was driving her stopped his motor and jumped out.

"I do not care to go farther," he said.

Lady ------, who is a skilful driver, climbed to the front seat, drove the car to the dressing station and brought back the wounded. I have seen her drive a touring car, carrying six wounded men, from Nieuport to Furnes at eight o'clock on a pitch-dark night, no lights allowed, over a narrow, muddy road on which the car skidded. She had to thread her way through silent marching troops, turn out for artillery wagons, follow after tired horses.

She was not a trained nurse, but when Dr. Hector Munro was working over a man with a broken leg she prepared a splint and held the leg while he set it and bound it. She drove a motor into Nieuport when the troops were marching out of it. Her guest for the afternoon was a war correspondent.

"This is a retreat," he said. "It is never safe to enter a place when the troops are leaving it. I have had experience."

"We are going in to get the wounded," she replied. They went in.

At Ypres she dodged round the corner because she saw a captain who doesn't believe in women at the front. A shell fell in the place where she had been standing a moment before. It blew the arm from a soldier. Her nerve was unbroken, and she continued her work through the morning.

Her notion of courage is that people have a right to feel frightened, but that they have no right to fail to do the job even if they are frightened. They are entitled to their feelings, but they are not entitled to shirk the necessary work of war. She believes that cowardice is not like other failings of weakness, which are pretty much man's own business. Cowardice is dangerous to the group.

Lady ------'s attitude at a bombardment was that of a child seeing a hailstorm---open-eyed wonder. She was the purest exhibit of careless fearlessness, carrying a buoyancy in danger. Generations of riding to hounds and of big game shooting had educated fear out of her stock. Her ancestors had always faced uncertainty as one of the ingredients of life: they accepted danger in accepting life. The savage accepted fear because he had to. With the English upper class, danger is a fine art, a cult. It is an element in the family honor. One cannot possibly shrink from the test. The English have expressed themselves in sport. People who are good sportsmen are, of course, honorable fighters. The Germans have allowed their craving for adventure to seethe inside themselves, and then have aimed it seriously at human life. But the English have taken off their excess vitality by outdoor contests.

What Lady ------ is the rest of the women are. Miss Smith, an English girl nurse, jumped down from the ambulance that was retreating before the Germans, and walked back into Ghent, held by the Germans, to nurse an English officer till he died. A few days later she escaped, by going in a peasant's cart full of market vegetables, and rejoined us at Furnes.

Sally Macnaughtan is a gray-haired gentlewoman of independent means who writes admirable fiction. She has laid aside her art and for months conducted a soup kitchen in the railway station at Furnes. She has fed thousands of weakened wounded men, working till midnight night after night. She remained until the town was thoroughly shelled.

The order is strict that no officer's wife must be near the front. The idea is that she will divert her husband's mind from the work in hand. He will worry about her safety. But Mrs. B------, a Belgian, joined our women in Pervyse, and did useful work, while her husband, a doctor with the rank of officer, continued his work along the front. She is a girl of twenty-one years.

Recently the Queen of the Belgians went into the trenches at a time when there was danger of artillery and rifle fire breaking loose from the enemy. She had to be besought to keep back where the air was quieter, as her life was of more value to the Belgian troops and the nation than even a gallant death.

One afternoon most of the corps were out on the road searching for wounded. Mairi Chisholm, a Scotch girl eighteen years old, and a young American woman had been left behind in the Furnes Hospital. With them was a stretcher bearer, a man of twenty-eight. A few shells fell into Furnes. The civilian population began running in dismay. The girls climbed up into the tower of the convent to watch the work of the shells. The man ordered the women to leave the town with him and go to Poperinghe. The two girls refused to go.

For weeks Furnes was under artillery fire from beyond Nieuport. One of our hospital nurses was killed as she was walking in the Grand Place.

I saw an American girl covered by the pistol of an Uhlan officer. She did not change color, but regarded the incident as a lark. I happened to be watching her when she was sitting on the front seat of an ambulance at Oudecappelle, eating luncheon. A shell fell thirty yards from her in the road. The roar was loud. The dirt flew high. The metal fragments tinkled on the house walls. The hole it dug was three feet deep. She laughed and continued with her luncheon.

I saw the same girl stand out in a field while this little drama took place: The French artillery in the field were well covered by shrubbery. They had been pounding away from their covert till the Germans grew irritated. A German Taube flew into sight, hovered high overhead and spied the hidden guns. It dropped three smoke bombs. These puffed out their little clouds into the air, and gave the far-away marksmen the location for firing. Their guns broke out and shrapnel shells came overhead, burst into trailing smoke and scattered their hundreds of bullets. The girl stood on the arena itself. Of concern for her personal safety she had none. It was all like a play on the stage to her. You watch the blow and flash but you are not a part of the action.

Each night the Furnes Hospital was full with one hundred wounded. In the morning we carried out one or two or one-half dozen dead. The wounds were severe, the air of the whole countryside was septic from the sour dead in the fields, who kept working to the surface from their shallow burial. There was a morning when we had gone early to the front on a hurry call. In our absence two girl nurses carried out ten dead from the wards into the convent lot, to the edge of the hasty graves made ready for their coming.

There is one woman whom we have watched at work for twelve months. She is a trained nurse, a certified midwife, a licensed motor-car driver, a veterinarian and a woman of property. Her name is Mrs. Elsie Knocker, a widow with one son. She helped to organize our corps. I was with her one evening when a corporal ordered her to go up a difficult road. He was the driver of a high-power touring car which could rise on occasion to seventy miles an hour. He carried a rifle in his car, and told us he had killed over fifty Germans since Liège. He dressed in bottle green, the uniform of a cyclist, and he looked like a rollicking woodlander of the Robin Hood band. It was seven o'clock of the evening. The night was dark. He pitched a bag of bandages into the motor ambulance.

"Take those to the dressing station that lies two miles to the west of Caeskerke," he ordered Mrs. Knocker. I cranked up the machine; Mrs. Knocker sat at the wheel. We were at Oudecappelle. The going was halfway decent as far as the crossroads of Caeskerke. Here we turned west on a road through the fields which had been intermittently shelled for several days. The road had shell holes in it from one to three feet deep. We could not see them because we carried no lights and the sky overhead was black. A mile to our right a village was burning. There were sheets of flame rising from the lowland, and the flame revealed the smoke that was thick over the ruins. We bumped in and out of the holes. All roads in Belgium were scummy with mud. It is like butter on bread. The big brown-canopied ambulance skidded in this paste.

We reached the dressing station and delivered one bag of bandages. In return we received three severely wounded men, who lay at length on the stretched canvas and swung on straps. Then we started back over the same mean road. This was the journey that tested Mrs. Knocker's driving, because now she had helpless men who must not be jerked by the swaying car. Motion tore at their wounds. Above all, they must not be overturned. An overturn would kill a man who was seriously wounded. Driving meant drawing all her nervous forces into her directing brain and her two hands. A village on fire at night is an eerie sight. A dark road, pitted with shell holes and slimy with mud, is chancy. The car with its human freight, swaying, bumping, sliding, is heavy on the wrist. The whole focused drive of it falls on the muscles of the forearm. And when on the skill of that driver depends the lives of three men the situation is one that calls for nerve. It was only luck that the artillery from beyond the Yser did not begin tuning up. The Germans had shelled that road diligently for many days and some evenings. Back to the crossroads Mrs. Knocker brought her cargo, and on to Oudecappelle, and so to the hospital at Furnes, a full ten miles. Safely home in the convent yard, the journey done, the wounded men lifted into the ward, she broke down. She had put over her job, and her nerves were tired. Womanlike she refused to give in till the work was successfully finished.

How would a man have handled such a strain? I will tell you how one man acted. Our corporal drove his touring car toward Dixmude one morning. He ordered Tom, the cockney driver, to follow with the motor ambulance. In it were Mrs. Knocker and Miss Chisholm, sitting with Tom on the front of the car. Things looked thick. The corporal slowed up, and so did Tom just behind him. Now there is one sure rule for rescue work at the front---when you hear the guns close, always turn your car toward home, away from the direction of the enemy. Turn it before you get your wounded, even though they are at the point of death, and leave your power on, even when you are going to stay for a quarter of an hour. Pointed toward safety, and under power, the car can carry you out of range of a sudden shelling or a bayonet charge. The enemy's guns began to place shrapnel over the road. The cloud puffs were hovering about a hundred feet overhead a little farther down the way. The bullets clicked on the roadbed. The corporal jumped out of his touring car.

"Turn my car," he shouted to Tom. Tom climbed from the ambulance, boarded the touring car and turned it. The corporal peered out from his shelter, behind the ambulance, saw the going was good and ran to his own motor. He jumped in and sped out of range at full tilt. The two women sat quietly in the ambulance, watching the shrapnel. Tom came to them, turned the car and brought them beyond the range of fire.

But the steadiest and most useful piece of work done by the women was that at Pervyse. Mrs. Knocker and two women helpers, one Scotch and one American, fitted up a miniature hospital in the cellar of a house in ruined Pervyse. They were within three minutes of the trenches. Here, as soon as the soldiers were wounded, they could be brought for immediate treatment. A young private had received a severe lip wound. Unskilful army medical handling had left it gangrened, and it had swollen. His face was on the way to being marred for life. Mrs. Knocker treated him every few hours for ten days---and brought him back to normal. A man came in with his hand a pulp from splintered shell. The glove he had been wearing was driven into the red flesh. Mrs. Knocker worked over his hand for half an hour, picking out the shredded glove bit by bit.

Except for a short walk in the early morning and another after dark, these women lived immured in their dressing station, which they moved from the cellar to a half-wrecked house. They lived in the smell of straw, blood and antiseptic. The Germans have thrown shells into the wrecked village almost every day. Some days shelling has been vigorous. The churchyard is choked with dead. The fields are dotted with hummocks where men and horses lie buried. Just as I was sailing for America in March, 1915, the house where the women live and work was shelled. They came to La Panne, but later Mrs. Knocker and Miss Chisholm returned to Pervyse to go on with their work, which is famous throughout the Belgian army.

As regiment after regiment serves its turn in the trenches of Pervyse it passes under the hands of these women. "The women of Pervyse" are known alike to generals, colonels and privates who held steady at Liège and who have struggled on ever since. For many months these nurses have endured the noise of shell fire and the smells of the dead and the stricken. The King of the Belgians has with his own hands pinned upon them the Order of Leopold II. The King himself wears the Order of Leopold I. They have eased and saved many hundreds of his men.

"No place for a woman," remarked a distinguished Englishman after a flying visit to their home.

"By the law of probabilities, your corps will be wiped out sooner or later," said a war correspondent.

Meantime the women will go on with their cool, expert work. The only way to stop them is to stop the war.

Life at the front is not organized like a business office, with sharply defined duties for each worker. War is raw and chaotic, and you take hold wherever you can lock your grip. We women that joined the Belgian army and spent a year at the front, did duty as ambulance riders, "dirty nurses," in a Red Cross rescue station at the Yser trenches, in relief work for refugees, and in the commissariat department. We tended wounded soldiers, sick soldiers, sick peasants, wounded peasants, mothers, babies, and colonies of refugees.

This war gave women one more chance to prove themselves. For the first time in history, a few of us were allowed through the lines to the front trenches. We needed a man's costume, steady masculine nerves, physical strength. But the work itself became the ancient work of woman---nursing suffering, making a home for lonely, hungry, dirty men. This new thrust of womanhood carried her to the heart of war. But, once arriving there, she resumed her old job, and became the nurse and cook and mother to men. Woman has been rebelling against being put into her place by man. But the minute she wins her freedom in the new dramatic setting, she finds expression in the old ways as caretaker and home-maker. Her rebellion ceases as soon as she is allowed to share the danger. She is willing to make the fires, carry the water, and do the washing, because she believes the men are in the right, and her labor frees them for putting through their work.

It all began for me in Paris. I was studying music, and living in the American Art Students' Club, in the summer of 1914. That war was declared meant nothing to me. There was I in a comfortable room with a delightful garden, the Luxembourg, just over the way. That was the first flash of war. I went down to the Louvre to see the Venus, and found the building "Fermé." I went over to the Luxembourg Galleries---"Fermé," again---and the Catacombs. Then it came into my consciousness that all Paris was closed to me. The treasures had been taken away from me. The things planned couldn't be done. War had snatched something from me personally.

Next, I took solace in the streets. I had to walk. Paris went mad with official speed---commandeered motors flashed officers down the boulevards under martial law. They must get a nation ready, and Paris was the capital. War made itself felt, still more, because we had to go through endless lines,---permis de sejours at little police stations---standing on line all day, dismissed without your paper, returning next morning. Friends began to leave Paris for New York. I was considered queer for wishing to stay on. The chance to study in Paris was the dream of a lifetime. But, now, the sound of the piano was forbidden in the city, and that made the desolation complete. Work and recreation had been taken away, and only war was left. And when Marie, our favorite maid in the club, sent her husband, our doorkeeper, to the front, that brought war inside our household.

As the Germans drew near Paris, many of the club girls thought that they would be endangered. Every one was talking about the French Revolution. People expected the horrors of the Revolution to be repeated. Jaures had just been shot, the syndicalists were wrecking German milk shops, and at night the streets had noisy mobs. People were fearing revolution inside Paris, more than the enemy outside the city gates. War was going to let loose that terrible thing which we believed to be subliminal in the French nature.

Women had to be off the streets before nine o'clock. By day we went up the block to the Boulevard, and there were the troops---a band, the tricolor, the officers, the men in sky blue. Their sweethearts, their wives and children went marching hand in hand with them, all singing the "Marseillaise." In a time like that, where there is song, there is weeping. The marching, singing women were sometimes sobbing without knowing it, and we that were watching them in the street crowd were moved like them.

When I crossed to England, I found that I wanted to go back and have more of the wonder of war, which I had tasted in Paris. The wonder was the sparkle of equipment. It was plain curiosity to see troops line up, to watch the military pageant. There I had been seeing great handsome horses, men in shining helmets with the horsehair tail of the casque flowing from crest to shoulder, the scarlet breeches, the glistening boots with spurs. It was pictures of childhood coming true. I had hardly ever seen a man in military uniform, and nothing so startling as those French cuirassiers. And I knew that gay vivid thing was not a passing street parade, but an array that was going into action. What would the action be? It is what makes me fond of moving pictures---variety, color, motion, and mystery. The story was just beginning. How would the plot come out?

Those pictures of troops and guns, grouping and dissolving, during all the twelve months in Flanders, never failed to grip. But rarely again did I see that display of fine feathers. For the fighting men with whom I lived became mud-covered. Theirs was a dug-in and blown-out existence, with the spatterings of storm and black nights on them. Their clothing took on the soberer colors and weather-worn aspect of the life itself which was no sunny boulevard affair, but an enduring of wet trenches and slimy roads. Those people in Paris needed that high key to send them out, and the early brilliance lifted them to a level which was able to endure the monotony.

I went to the war because those whom I loved were in the war. I wished to go where they were.

Finally, there was real appeal in that a little unprotected lot of people were being trampled.

I crossed in late September to Ostend as a member of the Hector Munro Ambulance Corps. With us were two women, Elsie Knocker, an English trained nurse, and Mairi Chisholm Gooden-Chisholm, a Scotch girl. There were a round dozen of us, doctors, chauffeurs, stretcher bearers. Our idea of what was to be required of women at the front was vague. We thought that we ought to know how to ride horseback, so that we could catch the first loose horse that galloped by and climb on him. What we were to do with the wounded wasn't clear, even in our own minds. We bought funny little tents and had tent practice in a vacant yard. The motor drive from Ostend to Ghent was through autumn sunshine and beauty of field flowers. It was like a dream, and the dream continued in Ghent, where we were tumbled into the Flandria Palace Hotel with a suite of rooms and bath, and two convalescing soldiers to care for us. We looked at ourselves and smiled and wondered if this was war. My first work was the commissariat for our corps.

Then came the English Naval Reserves and Marines en route to Antwerp. They had been herded into the cars for twelve hours. They were happy to have great hunks of hot meat, bread, and cigarettes. Just across the platform, a Belgian Red Cross train pulled in---nine hundred wounded men, bandaged heads with only the eyes showing, stumps of arms flapping a welcome. The Belgians had been shot to pieces, holding the line. And, now, here were the English come to save them.

This looked more like war to us. From the Palace windows we hung out over the balcony to see the Taubes. I knew that at last we were on the fringes of war. Later, we were to be at the heart of it. It was at Melle that I learned I was on the front lines.

We went up the road from Ghent to Melle in blithe ignorance, we three women. The day before, the enemy had held the corner with a machine gun.

"Let's go on foot, and see where the Germans were," suggested "Scotch." We came to burned peasants' houses. Inside the wreckage, soldiers crouched with rifles ready at the peek-holes. A Reckitt's bluing factory was burning, and across the field were the Germans. The cottages without doors and windows were like toothless old women. Piles of used cartridges were strewed around. There stood a gray motor-car, a wounded German in the back seat, his hands riddled, the car shot through, with blood in the bottom from two dead Germans. I realized the power of the bullet, which had penetrated the driver, the padded seat, the sheet metal and splintered the wood of the tonneau. We saw a puff of white smoke over the field from a shrapnel. That was the first shell I had seen close. It meant nothing to me. In those early days, the hum of a shell seemed no more than the chattering of sparrows. That was the way with all my impressions of war---first a flash, a spectacle; later a realization, and experience.

I went into Alost during a mild bombardment. The crashing of timbers was fascinating. It is in human nature to enjoy destruction. I used to love to jump on strawberry boxes in the woodshed and hear them crackle. And with the plunge of the shells, something echoed back to the delight of my childhood. I enjoyed the crash, for something barbaric stirred. There was no connection in my mind between the rumble and wounded men. The curiosity of ignorance wanted to see a large crash. Shell-fire to me was a noise.

I still had no idea of war. Of course I knew that there would be hideous things which I didn't have in home life. I knew I could stand up to dirty monotonous work, but I was afraid I should faint if I saw blood. When very young, I had seen a dog run over, and I had seen a boy playmate mutilate a turtle. I was sickened. Years later, I came on a little child crying, holding up its hand. The wrist was bent back double, and the blood spurting till the little one was drenched. Those shocks had left a horror in me of seeing blood. But this thing that I feared most turned out not to have much importance. I found that the man who bled most heavily lay quiet. It was not the bloodshed that unnerved me. It was the writhing and moaning of men that communicated their pain to me. I seemed to see those whom I loved lying there. I transferred the wound to the ones I love. Sometimes soldiers gave me the address of wife and mother, to have me write that they were well. Then when the wounded came in, I thought of these wives and mothers. I knew how they felt, because I felt so. I knew, as the Belgian and French women know, that the war must be waged without wavering, and yet I always see war as hideous. There was no glory in those stricken men. I had no fear of dying, but I had a fear of being mangled.

One evening I walked into the Convent Hospital where the wounded lay so thickly that I had to step over the stretcher loads. The beds were full, the floor blocked, only one door open. There was a smell of foul blood, medicines, the stench of trench clothes. It came on an empty stomach, at the end of a tired day.

"Sister, will you hold this lamp?" a nurse said to me.

I held it over a man with a yawning hole in his abdomen. He lay unmurmuring. When the doctor pressed, the muscles twitched. I asked some one to hold the lamp. I went into the courtyard, and fainted. Hard work would have saved me.

One other time, there had been a persistent fire all day. A boy of nineteen was brought in screaming. He wanted water and he wanted his mother. In our dressing station room were crowded two doctors, three women, two stretcher bearers, a chauffeur, and ten soldiers. They cut away his uniform and boots. His legs were jelly, with red mouths of wounds. His leg gave at the knee, like a piece of limp twine. I went into the next room, and recovered myself. Then I returned, and stayed with the wounded. The greatest comfort was a doctor, who said it was a matter of stomach, not of nerve. A sound woman doesn't faint at the sight of blood any quicker than a man does. Those two experiences were the only times when the horror was too much for me. I saw terrible things and was able to see them. With the dead it seems different. They are at peace. It is motion in the wounded that transfers suffering to oneself. A red quiver is worse than a red calm.

Antwerp fell. The retreating Belgian army swarmed around us, passed us. In the excitement every one lost her kit and before two days of actual warfare were over we had completely forgotten those little tents that we had practised pitching so carefully, and that we had meant to sleep in at night. Little, dirty, unkempt, broken-hearted men came shuffling in the dust of the road by day, shambling along the road at night. Thousands of them passed. No sound, save the fall of footsteps. No contrast, save where a huddle of refugees passed, their children beside them, their household goods, or their old people, on their backs. We picked up the wounded. There was no time for the dead. In and out and among that army of ants, retreating to the edge of Belgium and the sea, we went. There seemed nothing but to return to England.

The war minister of Belgium saw us. He placed his son, Lieutenant Robert de Broqueville, in military command of us. We had access to every line, all the way to the trench and battlefield. We became a part of the Belgian army. We made our headquarters at Furnes. Luckily, a physician's house had been deserted, with china and silver on the table, apples, jellies and wines in the cellar. We commandeered it.

Winter came. The soldiers needed a dressing station somewhere along the front from Nieuport to Dixmude. Mrs. Knocker established one thirty yards behind the front line of trenches at Pervyse. Miss Chisholm and I joined her. In its cellar we found a rough bedstead of two pieces of unplaned lumber, with clean straw for a mattress, awaiting us. Any Englishwoman is respected in the Belgian lines. The two soldiers who had been living in our room had given it up cheerily. They had searched the village for a clean sheet, and showed it to us with pride. They lumped the straw for our pillows, and stood outside through the night, guarding our home with fixed bayonets. It was the most moving courtesy we had in the twelve months of war. The air in the little room was both foul and chilly. We took off our boots, and that was the extent of our undressing.

The dreariness of war never came on us till we went out there to live behind the trenches. To me it was getting up before dawn, and washing in ice-cold water, no time to comb the hair, always carrying a feeling of personal mussiness, with an adjustment to dirt. It is hard to sleep in one's clothes, week after week, to look at hands that have become permanently filthy. One morning our chauffeur woke up, feeling grumpy. He had slept with a visiting doctor. He said the doctor's revolver had poked him all night long in the back. The doctor had worn his entire equipment for warmth, like the rest of us. I suffered from cold wet feet. I hated it that there was never a moment I could be alone. The toothbrush was the one article of decency clung to. I seemed never to go into the back garden to clean my teeth without bringing on shell-fire. I got a sense of there being a connection between brushing the teeth and the enemy's guns. You find in roughing it that a coating of dirt seems to keep out chill. We women suffered, but we knew that the boys in tennis shoes suffered more in that wet season, and the soldiers without socks, just the bare feet in boots.

In the late fall, we rooted around in the deserted barns for potatoes. Once, creeping into a farm, which was islanded by water, "Jane Pervyse," our homeless dog, led us up to the wrecked bedroom. A bonnet and best dress were in the cupboard. A soldier put on the bonnet and grimaced. Always after that, in passing the house, "Jane Pervyse" trembled and whined as if it had been her home till the destruction came.

In our house, we cleaned vegetables. There was nothing romantic about our work in these first days. It was mostly cooking, peeling hundreds of potatoes, slicing bushels of onions, cutting up chunks of meat, until our arms were aching. These bits were boiled together in great black pots. Our job, when it wasn't to cook the stew, was to take buckets of it to the trenches. Here we ladled it out to each soldier. Always we went early, while mist still hung over the ground, for we could see the Germans on clear days. It was an adventure, tramping in the freezing cold of night to the outposts and in early morning to the trenches, back to the house to refill the buckets, back to the trenches. The mornings were bitterly cold. Very early in my career as a nurse, I rid myself of skirts. Boots, covered with rubber boots to the knees in wet weather, or bound with puttees in warm; breeches; a leather coat and as many jerseys as I could walk in---these were my clothes. But, as I slept in them, they didn't keep me very warm in the early morning.

We had one real luxury in the dressing station---a piano. While we cooked and scrubbed and pared potatoes, men from the lines played for us.

There were other things, necessities, that we lacked. Water, except for the stagnant green liquid that lay in the ditches where dead men and dead horses rotted, we went without---once for as long as three days. During that time we boiled the ditch water and made tea of it. Even then, it was a deep purplish black and tasted bitter.

All we could do to help the wounded was to wash off mud and apply the simplest of first-aids, iodine and bandages. We burned bloody clothing and scoured mackintoshes and scrubbed floors. The odors were bad, a mixture of decaying matter and raw flesh and cooking food and disinfectant.

Pervyse was one more dear little Flemish village, with yawning holes in the houses, and through the holes you saw into the home, the precious intimate things which revealed how the household lived---the pump, muffled for winter, the furniture placed for occupancy, a home lately inhabited. In the burgomaster's house, there were two old mahogany frames with rare prints, his store of medicines, the excellent piano which cheered us, in his attic a skeleton. So you saw him in his home life as a quiet, scholarly man of taste and education. You entered another gaping house, with two or three bits of inherited mahogany---clearly, the heirlooms of an old family. Another house revealed bran new commonplace trinkets. Always the status of the family was plain to see---their mental life, their tastes, and ambitions. You would peek in through a broken front and see a cupboard with crotched mahogany trimmings, one door splintered, the other perfect. You would catch a glimpse of a round center table with shapely legs, a sofa drawn up in front of a fireplace. When we went, Pervyse was still partly upstanding, but the steady shelling of the winter months slowly flattened it into a wreck. It is the sense of sight through which war makes its strongest impression on me.

The year falls into a series of pictures, evenings of song when a boy soldier would improvise verses to our head nurse; a fight between a Belgian corporal and an English nurse with seltzer bottles; the night when our soldiers were short of ammunition and we sat up till dawn awaiting the attack that might send us running for our lives; the black nights when some spy back of our lines flashed electric messages to the enemy and directed their fire on our ammunition wagons.

And deeper than those pictures is the consciousness of how adaptable is the human spirit. Human nature insists on creating something. Under hunger and danger, it develops a wealth of resource---in art and music, and carving, making finger-rings of shrapnel, playing songs of the Yser. Something artistic and playful comes to the rescue. Instead of war getting us as Andreieff's "Red Laugh" says it does, making regiments of men mad, we "got" war, and remained sane. If we hadn't conquered it by spells of laughing relief, we shouldn't have had nerve when the time came. Too much strain would break down the bravest Belgian and the gayest Fusilier Marin.

I came to feel I would rather get "pinked" in Pervyse than retire to Furnes, seven miles back of the trenches. Pervyse seemed home, because we belonged there with necessary work to do. Then, too, there was a certain regularity in the German gun-fire. If they started shelling from the Château de Vicoigne, they were likely to continue shelling from that point. So we lived that day in the front bedroom. If they shelled from Ramscappelle, the back kitchen became the better room, for we had a house in between. We were so near their guns, that we could plot the arc of flight. Pervyse seemed to visitors full of death, simply because it received a daily dose of shell-fire, like a little child sitting up and gulping its medicine. With what unconcern in those days we went out by ambulance to some tight angle, and waited for something to happen.

"We're right by a battery." But the battery was interesting.

"If this is danger, all right. It's great to be in danger." I have sat all day writing letters by our artillery. Every time a gun went off my pencil slid. The shock was so sudden, my nerves never took it on. Yet I was able to sleep a few yards in front of a battery. It would pound through the night, and I never heard it. The nervous equipment of an American would ravel out, if it were not for sound sleep. If shells came no nearer than four hundred yards, we considered it a quiet day.

One day I learned the full meaning of fear. We had had several quiet safe hours. Night was coming on, and we were putting up the shutters, when a shell fell close by in the trench. Next, our floor was covered with dripping men, five of them unbandaged. Shells and wounds were connected in my mind by that close succession.

No one was secure in that wrecked village of Pervyse. Along the streets, homeless dogs prowled, pigeons circled, hungry cats howled. Behind the trenches, the men had buried their dead and had left great mounds where they had tried to bury the horses. Shells dropped every day, some days all day. I have seen men running along the streets, flattening themselves against a house whenever they heard the whirr of a shell.

It is not easy to eat, and sleep, and live together in close quarters, sometimes with rush work, sometimes through severer hours of aimless waiting. Again and again, we became weary of one another, impatient over trifles.

What war does is to reveal human nature. It does not alter it. It heightens the brutality and the heroism. Selfishness shines out nakedly and kindliness is seen clearer than in routine peace days. War brings out what is inside the person. Sentimental pacifists sit around three thousand miles away and say, "War brutalizes men," and when I hear them I think of the English Tommies giving me their little stock of cigarettes for the Belgian soldiers. Then I read the militarists and they say, "Be hard. Live dangerously. War is beneficent," and I see the wrecked villages of Belgium, with the homeless peasants and the orphaned babies. War ennobles some men by sacrifice, by heroism. It debases other men by handing over the weak to them for torture and murder. What is in the man comes out under the supreme test, where there are no courts of appeal, no public opinion, no social restraint; only the soldier alone with helpless victims.

You can't share the chances of life and death with people, without feeling a something in common with them, that you do not have even with life-long friends. The high officer and the cockney Tommy have that linking up. There was one person whom I couldn't grow to like. But with him I have shared a ticklish time, and there is that cord of connection. Then, too, one is glad of a record of oneself. There is some one to verify what you say. You have passed through an unbelievable thing together, and you have a witness.

Henri, our Belgian orderly, has that feeling for us, and we for him. It isn't respect, nor fondness, alone. Companionship meant for him new shirts, dry boots, more chocolate, a daily supply of cigarettes. It meant our seeing the picture of wife and child in Liège, hearing about his home. It was the sharing of danger, the facing together of the horror that underlies life, and which we try to forget in soft peace days. The friendships of war are based on a more fundamental thing than the friendships of safe living. In the supreme experience of motherhood, the woman goes down alone into the place of suffering, leaving the man, however dear, far away. But in this supreme experience of facing death to save life, you go together. The little Belgian soldier is at your side. Together you sit tight under fire, put the bandages on the wounded, and speed back to a safer place.

Once I went to the farthest outpost. A Belgian soldier stepped out of the darkness.

"Come along, miss, I've a good gun. I'll take you."

Walking up the road, not in the middle where machine guns could rake us, but huddled up by the trees at the siding, we went. It will be a different thing to meet him one day in Antwerp, than it will be to greet again the desk-clerk of the La Salle Hotel in Chicago. It lies deeper than doing you favors, and assigning a sunny room.

The men are not impersonal units in an army machine. They become individuals to us, with sharply marked traits. It is impossible to see them as cases. Out of the individuals, we built our types---we constructed our Belgian soldier, out of the hundreds who had told us of their work and home.

"You must have met so many you never came to know their stories."

It was the opposite. Paul Collaer, who played beautifully; Gilson, the mystic; Henri of Liège; the son of Ysaye, they were all clear to us. There was a splendid fat doctor who felt physical fear, but never shirked his job. He used to go and hide behind the barn, with his pipe, till there was work for him. His wasn't the fear that spreads disaster through a crowd. He was fat and funny. A fat man is comfortable to have around, at any time, even when he is unhappy. No one lost respect for this man. Every one enjoyed him thoroughly.

Commandant Gilson of the Belgian army was one of our firm friends. My introduction to him was when I heard a bit of a Liszt rhapsody floating into the kitchen from our piano, the fingers rapid and fluent, and long nails audible on the keys. I remember the first meal with him, a luncheon of fried sardines, fruit cake, bread and cheese. The doctor across the way had sent a bottle of champagne. After luncheon he received word of an attack. He kissed the hand of each of us, said good-by, and went out to clean his gun. We did not think we should see him again. He retook the outpost and had many more meals with us. He would rise from broken English into swift French---stories of the Congo, one night till 2 a.m. Always smoking a cigarette---his mustache sometimes singed from the fire of the diminishing butt. For orderly, he had a black fat Congo boy, in dark blue Belgian uniform, flat-nosed, with wrinkles down the forehead. He was Gilson's man, never looking at him in speaking, and using an open vowel dialect. Before one of the attacks, a soldier came to Gilson with his wife's picture, watch, ring, and money, and his home address.

"I'm not going to come out," said the soldier.

It happened so.

The Commandant's pockets were heavy with these mementoes of the predestined---the letters of boys to their mothers. He had that tenderness and agreeable sentiment which seem to go with bravery. He filled his uniform with souvenirs of pleasant times, a china slipper---our dinner favor to him---a roadside weed, a paper napkin from a happy luncheon---a score or more little pieces of sentimental value. When he went into dangerous action, he never ordered any one to follow him. He called for volunteers, and was grieved that it was the lads of sixteen and seventeen years that were always the first to offer.

We had grown to care for these men. From the first, soldiers of France and Belgium had given us courtesy. In Paris, it was a soldier who stood in line for me, and got the paper. It was a soldier who shared his food and wine on the fourteen-hour trip from Paris to Dieppe---four hours in peace days, fourteen hours in mobilization. It was a soldier who left the car and found out the change of train and the hour---always a soldier who did the helpful thing. It did not require war to create their quality of friendliness and unselfish courtesy.

How could Red Cross work be impersonal? No one would go over to be shot at on an impersonal errand of mercy. You risk yourself for individual men, for men in whose cause you believe. Surely, the loyal brave German women feel as we felt. Red Cross work is not only a service to suffering flesh. It is work to remake a soldier, who will make right prevail. The Red Cross worker is aiming her rifle at the enemy by every bandage she ties on wounded Belgians. She is rebuilding the army. She is as efficient and as deadly as the workman that makes the powder, the chauffeur that drives it to the trench in transports, and the gunner that shoots it into the hostile line. The mother does not extend her motherliness to the destroyer of her family. There is no hater like the mother when she faces that which violates her brood. The same mother instinct makes you take care of your own, and fight for your own. We all of us would go for a Belgian first, and tend to a Belgian first. We would take one of our own by the roadside in preference, if there was room only for one. But if you brought in a German, wounded, he became an individual in need of help. There was a high pride in doing well by him. We would show them of what stuff the Allies were made. Clear of hate and bitterness, we had nothing but good will for the gallant little German boys, who smiled at us from their cots in Furnes hospital. And who could be anything but kindly for the patient German fathers of middle age, who lay in pain and showed pictures of "Frau" and the home country, where some of them would never return. Two or three times, the Queen of the Belgians stopped at our base hospital. She talked with the wounded Germans exactly as she talked to her own Belgians---the same modest courtesy and gift of personal caring.

I think the key to our experience was the mother instinct in the three women. What we tried to do was to make a home out of an emergency station at the heart of war. We took hold of a room knee-high with battered furniture and wet plaster, cleaned it, spread army blankets on springs, found a bowl and jug, and made a den for the chauffeur. In our own room, we arranged an old lamp, then a shade to soften the light. On a mantel, were puttees, cold cream and a couple of books; in the wall, nails for coats and scarfs. The soldiers, entering, said it was homelike. It was a rest after the dreariness of the trench. We brought glass from Furnes, and patched the windows. We dined, slept, lived, and tended wounded men in the one room. In another room, a shell had sprayed the ceiling, so we had to pull the plaster down to the bare lathing. We commandeered a stove from a ruined house. Night after night, we carried a sick man there and had a fire for him. We treated him for a bad throat, and put him to bed. A man dripping from the inundations, we dried out. For a soldier with bruised feet, we prepared a pail of hot water, and gave a thorough soaking.

In the early morning we took down the shutters, carried our own coal, built our own fires, brought water from a ditch, scrubbed table tops and swept the floor, prepared tincture of iodine, the bandages, and cotton wool. We went up the road around 8.30, for the Germans had a habit of shelling at 9 o'clock. Sometimes they broke their rule, and began lopping them in at half-past eight. Then we had to wait till ten. We kept water hot for sterilizing instruments. We sat around, reading, thinking, chatting, letter-writing, waiting for something to happen. There would be long days of waiting. There were days when there was no shelling. Besides the wounded, we had visits from important personages---the Mayor of Paris, the Queen of the Belgians, officers from headquarters, Maxine Elliott. For a very special supper, we would jug a Belgian hare or cook curry and rice, and add beer, jam, and black army bread. An officer gave us an order for one hundred kilos of meat, and we could send daily for it. On Christmas Day, 1914, for eight of us, we had plum puddings, a bottle of port, a bottle of champagne, a tiny pheasant and a small chicken, and a box of candies. We had a steady stream of shells, and a few wounded. It was a day of sunshine on a light fall of snow.

I learned in the Pervyse work that an up-to-date skirt is no good for a man's work. With rain five days out of seven, rubber boots, breeches, raincoat, two pairs of stockings, and three jerseys are the correct costume. We were criticized for going to Dunkirk in breeches. So I put on a skirt one time when I went there for supplies. I fell in alighting from the motor-car, collecting a bigger crowd by sprawling than any of us had collected by our uniform. Later, again in a skirt, I jumped on a military motor-car, and couldn't climb the side. I had to pull my skirt up, and climb over as a man climbs. If women are doing the work of a man, they must have the dress of a man.

That way of dressing and of living released me from the sense of possession, once and for all. When I first went to Belgium with a pair of fleece-lined gloves, I was sure, if I ever lost that pair, that they were irreplaceable. I lost them. I lost article after article, and was freed from the clinging. I lost a pin for the bodice. I left my laundry with a washerwoman. Her village was bombarded, and we had to move on. I lost my kit. A woman has a tie-in with those material things, and the new life brought freedom from that.

I put on a skirt to return to London for a rest. I found there people dressed modishly, and it looked uncomfortable. Styles had been changing: women were in funny shoes and hats. I went wondering that they could dress like that.

And then an overpowering desire for pretty things came on me---for a piece of old lace, a pink ribbon. After sleeping by night in the clothes worn through the day, wearing the same two shirts for four months, no pajamas, no sheets, with spots of grease and blood on all the costume, I had a longing for frivolous things, such as a pink tea gown. Old slippers and a bath and shampoo seemed good. I had a wholesome delight in a modest clean blouse and in buying a new frock.

I returned to Pervyse. The Germans changed their range: an evening, a morning and an afternoon---three separate bombardments with heavy shells. The wounded were brought in. Nearly every one died. We piled them together, anywhere that they wouldn't be tripped over. To the back kitchen we carried the bodies of two boys. One of the orderlies knew them. He went in with us to remove the trinkets from their necks. Every now and then, he went back again, to look at them. They were very beautiful, young, healthy, lying there together in the back kitchen. It was a quiet half hour for us, after luncheon. The doctors and nurses were reading or smoking. I was writing a letter.

A shell drove itself through the back kitchen wall and exploded over the dead boys, bringing rafters and splintered glass and bricks down on them. My pencil slid diagonally across the sheet, and I got up. Our two orderlies and three soldiers rushed in, holding their eyes from the blue fumes of the explosion. When one shell comes, the chances are that it will be followed by three more, aimed at the same place. It had always been my philosophy that it is better to be "pinked" in the house than on the road, but not on this particular day. An army ambulance was standing opposite our door, with its nose turned toward the trenches. The Belgian driver rushed for the door, slammed it shut because of the shells, opened it again. He ran to the car, cranked it, turned it around. We stood in the doorway and waited, watching the shells dropping with a wail, tearing up the road here, then there. After that we moved back to La Panne.

There I stayed on with Miss Georgie Fyfe, who is doing such excellent work among the Belgian refugees. She is chief of the evacuation of civilians who still remain in the bombarded villages and farms. She brings the old and the sick and the children out of shell fire and finds them safe homes. To the Refugee House she takes the little ones to be cared for till there are fifty. Then she sends them to Switzerland, where brothers and sisters are kept unseparated in family groups until the war is over. The Queen busies herself with these children. For the newest generation of Belgians Miss Fyfe has established a Maternity Hospital. Nearly one hundred babies have come to live there.

It was my work to keep track of clothes and supplies. On a flying trip to Paris, I told the American Relief Committee the story of this work, and Geoffrey Dodge sent thirty complete layettes, bran-new, four big cases, four gunny-sack bags, full of clothing for men, women, and children, special brands of milk for young mothers in our maternity hospital. Later, he sent four more sacks and four great wooden cases.

We used to tramp through many fields, over a single plank bridging the ditches, to reach the lonely shelled farm, and persuade the stubborn, unimaginative Flemish parents to give up their children for a safe home. One mother had a yoke around her neck, and two heavy pails.

"When can I send my child?" she asked.

She had already sent two and had received happy letters from them. Other mothers are suspicious of us, and flatly refuse, keeping their children in the danger zone till death comes. During a shelling, the curé would telephone for our ambulance. He would collect the little ones and sick old people. Miss Fyfe could persuade them to come more easily when the shells were falling. At the moment of parting, everybody cries. The children are dressed. The one best thing they own is put on---a pair of shoes from the attic, stiff new shoes, worked on the little feet unused to shoes. Out of a family of ten children we would win perhaps three. Back across the fields they trooped to our car, clean faces, matted dirty hair, their wee bundle tied up in a colored handkerchief, no hats, under the loose dark shirt a tiny Catholic charm. We lifted the little people into the big yellow ambulance---big brother and sister, sitting at the end to pin them in. We carried crackers and chocolate. They are soon happy with the sweets, chattering, enjoying their first motor-car ride, and eager for the new life.

The boy soldier is willing to make any day his last if it is a good day. It is not so with the middle-aged man. He is puzzled by the war. What he has to struggle with more than bodily weakness is the malady of thought. Is the bloody business worth while?

I SAW him first, my middle-aged man, one afternoon on the boards of an improvised stage in the sand-dunes of Belgium. On that last thin strip of the shattered kingdom English and French and Belgians were grimly massed. He was a Frenchman, and he was cheering up his comrades. With shining black hair and volatile face, he played many parts that day. He recited sprightly verses of Parisian life. He carried on amazing twenty-minute dialogues with himself, mimicking the voice of girl and woman, bully and dandy. His audience had come in stale from the everlasting spading and marching. They brightened visibly under his gaiety. If he cared to make that effort in the saddened place, they were ready to respond. When he dismissed them, the last flash of him was of a smiling, rollicking improvisator, bowing himself over to the applause till his black hair was level with our eyes.

And then next day as I sat in my ambulance, waiting orders, he trudged by in his blue, "the color of heaven" once, but musty now from nights under the rain. His head of hair, which the glossy black wig had covered, was gray-white. The sparkling, pantomimic face had dropped into wrinkles. He was patient and old and tired. Perhaps he, too, would have been glad of some one to cheer him up. He was just one more territorial---trench-digger and sentry and filler-in. He became for me the type of all those faithful, plodding soldiers whose first strength is spent. In him was gathered up all that fatigue and sadness of men for whom no glamour remains.

They went past me every day, hundreds of them, padding down the Nieuport road, their feet tired from service and their boots road-worn---crowds of men beyond numbering, as far as one could see into the dry, volleying dust and beyond the dust; men coming toward me, a nation of them. They came at a long, uneven jog, a cluttered walk. Every figure was sprinkled and encircled by dust---dust on their gray temples, and on their wet, streaming faces, dust coming up in puffs from their shuffling feet, too tired to lift clear of the heavy roadbed. There was a hot, pitiless sun, and every man of them was shrouded in the long, heavy winter coat, as soggy as a horse blanket, and with thick leather gaiters, loose, flapping, swathing their legs as if with bandages. On the man's back was a pack, with the huge swell of the blanket rising up beyond the neck and generating heat-waves; a loaf of tough black bread fastened upon the knapsack or tied inside a faded red handkerchief; and a dingy, scarred tin Billy-can. At his shapeless, rolling waist his belt hung heavy with a bayonet in its casing. On the shoulder rested a dirt-caked spade, with a clanking of metal where the bayonet and the Billy-can struck the handle of the spade. Under a peaked cap showed the bearded face and the white of strained eyes gleaming through dust and sweat. The man was too tired to smile and talk. The weight of the pack, the weight of the clothes, the dust, the smiting sun---all weighted down the man, leaving every line in his body sagging and drooping with weariness.

These are the men that spade the trenches, drive the food-transports and ammunition-wagons, and carry through the detail duties of small honor that the army may prosper. When has it happened before that the older generation holds up the hands of the young? At the western front they stand fast that the youth may go forward. They fill in the shell-holes to make a straight path for less-tired feet. They drive up food to give good heart to boys.

War is easy for the young. The boy soldier is willing to make any day his last if it is a good day. It is not so with the middle-aged man. He is puzzled by the war. What he has to struggle with more than bodily weakness is the malady of thought. Is the bloody business worth while? Is there any far-off divine event which his death will hasten? The wines of France are good wines, and his home in fertile Normandy was pleasant.

As we stood in the street in the sun one hot afternoon, four men came carrying a wounded man. The stretcher was growing red under its burden. The man's face was greenish white, with a stubble of beard. The flesh of his body was as white as snow from loss of blood. It was torn at the chest and sides. They carried him to the dressing-station, and half an hour later lifted him into our car. We carried him in for two miles. Four flies fed on the red rim of his closed left eye. He lay silent, motionless. Only a slight flutter of the coverlet, made by his breathing, gave a sign of life. At the Red Cross post we stopped. The coverlet still slightly rose and fell. The doctor, brown-bearded, in white linen, stepped into the car, tapped the man's wrist, tested his pulse, put a hand over his heart. Then the doctor muttered, drew the coverlet over the greenish-white face, and ordered the marines to remove him. In the moment of arrival the wounded man had died.

In the courtyard next our post two men were carrying in long strips of wood. This wood was for coffins, and one of them would be his.

A funeral passes our car, one every day, sometimes two: a wooden cross in front, carried by a soldier; the white-robed chaplain chanting; the box of light wood, on a frame of black; the coffin draped in the tricolor, a squad of twenty soldiers following the dead. That is the funeral of the middle-aged man. There is no time wasted on him in the brisk business of war; but his comrades bury him. One in particular faithful at funerals I had learned to know---M. Le Doze. War itself is so little the respecter of persons that this man had found himself of value in paying the last small honor to the obscure dead as they were carried from his Red Cross post to the burial-ground. One hopes that he will receive no hasty trench burial when his own time comes.

I cannot write of the middle-aged man of the Belgians because he has been killed. That first mixed army, which in thin line opposed its body to an immense machine, was crushed by weight and momentum. Little is left but a memory. But I shall not forget the veteran officer of the first army, near Lokeren, who kept his men under cover while he ran out into the middle of the road to see if the Uhlans were coming. The only Belgian army today is an army of boys. Recently we had a letter from André Simont, of the "Obusiers Lourdes, Beiges," and he wrote:

If you promise me you will come back for next summer, I won't get pinked. If I ever do, it doesn't matter. I have had twenty years of very happy life.

If he were forty-five, he would say, as a French officer at Coxyde said to me:

"Four months, and I haven't heard from my wife and children. We had a pleasant home. I was well to do. I miss the good wines of my cellar. This beer is sour. We have done our best, we French, our utmost, and it isn't quite enough. We have made a supreme effort, but it hasn't cleared the enemy from our country. La guerre---c'est triste."

He, too, fights on, but that overflow of vitality does not visit him, as it comes to the youngsters of the first line. It is easy for the boys of Brittany to die, those sailors with a rifle, the stanch Fusiliers Marins, who, outnumbered, held fast at Melle and Dixmude, and for twelve months made Nieuport, the extreme end of the western battle-line, a great rock. It is easy, because there is a glory in the eyes of boys. But the older man lives with second thoughts, with a subdued philosophy, a love of security. He is married, with a child or two; his garden is warm in the afternoon sun. He turns wistfully to the young, who are so sure, to cheer him. With him it is bloodshed, the moaning of shell-fire, and harsh command.

One afternoon at Coxyde, in the camp of the middle-aged---the territorials---an open-air entertainment was given. Massed up the side of a sand-dune, row on row, were the bearded men, two thousand of them. There were flashes of youth, of course---marines in dark blue, with jaunty round hat with fluffy red centerpiece; Zouaves with dusky Algerian skin, yellow-sorrel jacket, and baggy harem trousers; Belgians in fresh khaki uniform; and Red Cross British Quakers. But the mass of the men were middle-aged---territorials, with the light-blue long-coat, good for all weathers and the sharp night, and the peaked cap. Over the top of the dune where the soldiers sat an observation balloon was suspended in a cloudless blue sky, like a huge yellow caterpillar. Beyond the pasteboard stage, high on a western dune, two sentries stood with their bayonets touched by sunlight. To the south rose a monument to the territorial dead. To the north an aëroplane flashed along the line, full speed, while gun after gun threw shrapnel at it.

As I looked on the people, suddenly I thought of the Sermon on the Mount, with the multitude spread about, tier on tier, hungry for more than bread. It was a scene of summer beauty, with the glory of the sky thrown in, and every now and then the music of the heart. Half the songs of the afternoon were gay, and half were sad with long enduring, and the memory of the dear ones distant and of the many dead. Not in lightness or ignorance were these men making war. When I saw the multitude and how they hungered, I wished that Bernhardt could come to them in the dunes and express in power what is only hinted at by humble voices. I thought how everywhere we wait for some supreme one to gather up the hope of the nations and the anguish of the individual, and make a music that will send us forward to the Rhine.

But a better thing than that took place. One of their own came and shaped their suffering into song. And together, he and they, they made a song that is close to the great experience of war. A Belgian, one of the boy soldiers, came forward to sing to the bearded men. And the song that he sang was "La valse des obus"---"The Dance of the Shells."

"Dear friends, I'm going to sing you some rhymes on the war at the Yser."

The men to whom he was singing had been holding the Yser for ten months.

"I want you to know that life in the trenches, night by night, isn't gay."

Two thousand men, unshaved and tousled, with pain in their joints from those trench nights, were listening.

"As soon as you get there, you must set to work. It doesn't matter whether it's a black night or a full moon; without making a sound, close to the enemy, you must fill the sand-bags for the fortifications."

Every man on the hill had been doing just that thing for a year.

Then came his chorus:

"Every time we are in the trenches, Crack! There breaks the shell."

But his French has a verve that no literal translation will give. Let us take it as he sang it:

"Crack! Il tombe des obus," sang the slight young Belgian, leaning out toward the two thousand men of many colors, many nations; and soon the sky in the north was spotted with white clouds of shrapnel-smoke.

"There we are, all of us, crouching with bent back---Crack! Once more an obus. The shrapnel, which try to stop us at our job, drive us out; but the things that bore us still more---Crack!---are just those obus."

With each "Crack! Il tombe des obus," the big bass-drum boomed like the shell he sang of. His voice was as tense and metallic as a taut string, and he snapped out the lilting line in swift staccato as if he were flaying his audience with a whip. Man after man on the hillside took up the irresistible rhythm in an undertone, and "Cracked" with the singer. In front of me was being created a folk-song. The bitterness and glory of their life were being told to them, and they were hearing the singer gladly. Their leader was lifting the dreary trench night and death itself into a surmounting and joyous thing.

"When you've made your entrenchment, then you must go and guard it without preliminaries. All right; go ahead. But just as you're moving, you have to squat down for a day and a night---yes, for a full twenty-four hours---because things are hot. Somebody gives you half a drop of coffee. Thirst torments you. The powder-fumes choke you."

Here and there in the crowd, listening intently, men were stirring. The lad was speaking to the exact intimate detail of their experience. This was the life they knew. What would he make of it?

"Despite our sufferings, we cherish the hope some day of returning and finding our parents, our wives, and our little ones. Yes, that is my hope, my joyous hope. But to come to that day, so like a dream, we must be of good cheer. It is only by enduring patience, full of confidence, that we shall force back our oppressors. To chase away those cursed Prussians---Crack! We need the obus. My captain calling, 'Crack! More, still more of those obus!' Giving them the bayonet in the bowels, we shall chase them clean beyond the Rhine. And our victory will be won to the waltz of the obus."

It was a song out of the heart of an unconquerable boy. It climbed the hillock to the top. The response was the answer of men moved. His song told them why they fought on. There is a Belgium, not under an alien rule, which the shells have not shattered, and that dear kingdom is still uninvaded. The mother would rather lose her husband and her son than lose the France that made them. Their earthly presence is less precious than the spirit that passed into them out of France. That is why these weary men continue their fight. The issue will rest in something more than a matter of mathematics. It is the last stand of the human spirit.

What is this idea of country, so passionately held, that the women walk to the city gates with son and husband and send them out to die? It is the aspect of nature shared in by folk of one blood, an arrangement of hill and pasture which grew dear from early years, sounds and echoes of sound that come from remembered places. It is the look of a land that is your land, the light that flickers in an English lane, the bells that used to ring in Bruges.

There was a young peasant farmer who went out with his fellows, and stopped the most powerful and perfectly equipped army of history. He saved France, and the cause of gentleness and liberty. He did it by the French blood in him---in gay courage and endurance. He was happy in doing it, or, if not happy, yet glorious. But he paid the price. The enemy artillery sent a splinter of shell that mangled his arm. He lay out through the long night on the rich infected soil. Then the stretcher bearers found him and lifted him to the car, and carried him to the field hospital. There they had to operate swiftly, for infection was spreading. So he was no longer a whole man, but he was still of good spirit, for he had done his bit for France. Then they bore him to a base hospital, where he had white sheets and a wholesome nurse. He lay there weak and content. Every one was good to him. But there came a day when they told him he must leave to make room for the fresher cases of need. So he was turned loose into a world that had no further use for him. A cripple, he couldn't fight and he couldn't work, for his job needed two arms, and he had given one, up yonder on the Marne. He drifted from shop to shop in Paris. But he didn't know a trade. Life was through with him, so one day, he shot himself.

That, we learn from authoritative sources, is the story of more than one broken soldier of Joffre's army.

To be shot clean dead is an easier fate than to be turned loose into life, a cripple, who must beg his way about. Shall these men who have defended France be left to rot? All they ask is to be allowed to work. It is gallant and stirring to fight, and when wounded the soldier is tenderly cared for. But when he comes out, broken, he faces the bitterest thing in war. After the hospital---what? Too bad, he's hurt---but there is no room in the trades for any but a trained man.

Why not train him? Why not teach him a trade? Build a bridge that will lead him from the hospital over into normal life. That is better than throwing him out among the derelicts. Pauperism is an ill reward for the service that shattered him, and it is poor business for a world that needs workers. If these crippled ones are not permitted to reconstruct their working life, the French nation will be dragged down by the multitude of maimed unemployable men, who are being turned loose from the hospitals---unfit to fight, untrained to work: a new and ever-increasing Army of The Miserable. The stout backbone and stanch spirit of even France will be snapped by this dead-weight of suffering.

In our field hospital at Fumes, we had one ward where a wave of gaiety swept the twenty beds each morning. It came when the leg of the bearded man was dressed by the nurse. He thrust it out from under the covering: a raw stump, off above the ankle. It was an old wound, gone sallow with the skin lapped over. The men in the cots close by shouted with laughter at the look of it, and the man himself laughed till he brought pain to the wound. Then he would lay hold of the sides of the bed to control his merriment. The dressing proceeded, with brisk comment from the wardful of men, and swift answers from the patient under treatment. The grim wound had so obviously made an end of the activity of that particular member and, as is war's way, had done it so evilly, with such absence of beauty, that only the human spirit could cover that hurt. So he and his comrades had made it the object of gaiety.

For legless men, there are a dozen trades open, if they are trained. They can be made into tailors, typists, mechanicians. The soldiers' schools, already established, report success in shoemaking, for instance. The director sends us this word:---

"From the first we had foreseen for this the greatest success---the results have surpassed our hopes. We are obliged to double the size of the building, and increase the number of professors.

"Why?

"Because, more than any other profession, that of shoemaking is the most feasible in the country, in the village, in the small hamlet. This is the one desire of most of these wounded soldiers: before everything, they wish to be able to return to their homes. And all the more if a wife and children wait them there, in a little house with a patch of garden. Out of our fifty men now learning shoemaking, twenty-nine were once sturdy farm laborers. The profession is not fatiguing and, in spite of our fears, not one of our leg-amputated men has given up his apprenticeship on account of fatigue or physical inability."

Very many of the soldiers are maimed in hand or arm. On the broad beach of La Panne, in front of the Ocean Hospital of Dr. Depage, a young soldier talked with my wife one afternoon. Early in the war his right arm had been shot through the bicep muscle. He had been sent to London, where a specialist with infinite care linked the nerves together. Daily the wounded boy willed strength into the broken member, till at last he found he could move the little finger. It was his hope to bring action back to the entire hand, finger by finger.

"You can't do anything---you can't even write," they said to him. So he met that, by schooling his left hand to write.

"Your fighting days are over," they said. He went to a shooting gallery, and with his left arm learned how to hold a rifle and aim it. Through the four months of his convalescence he practised to be worthy of the front line. The military authorities could not put up an objection that he did not meet. So he won his way back to the Yser trenches. And there he had received his second hurt and this time the enemy wounded him thoroughly. And now he was sitting on the sands wondering what the future held for him.

Spirit like that does not deserve to be broken by despair. Apparatus has been devised to supply the missing section of the arm, and such a trade as toy-making offers a livelihood. It is carried on with a sense of fun even in the absence of all previous education. One-armed men are largely employed in it. Let us enter the training shop at Lyon, and watch the work. The wood is being shot out from the sawing-machine in thin strips and planed on both sides. This is being done by a man, who used to earn his living as a packer, and suffered an amputation of his right leg. The boards are assembled in thicknesses of twenty, and cut out by a "ribbon saw." This is the occupation of a former tile layer, with his left leg gone. Others employed in the process are one-armed men.

Of carpentry the report from the men is this: "This work seems to generate good humor and liveliness. For this profession two arms are almost necessary. It can be practised by a man whose leg has been amputated, preferably the right leg, for the resting point, in handling the plane, is on the left leg. However, we cannot forget that one-armed men have achieved wonderful results."

The profits of the work are divided in full among the pupils as soon as they have reached the period of production. Each section has its individual fund box. The older members divide among themselves two thirds of the gain. The more recently trained take the remainder. The new apprentices have nothing, because they make no finished product as yet. That was the rule of the shop. But certain sections petitioned that the profits should be equally divided among all, without distinction. They said that among the newcomers there were many as needy as the older apprentices.

The director says:

"This request came from too noble a sentiment not to be granted, especially as in this way we are certain that our pupils will see to the discipline of the workshops, being the first concerned that no one shall shirk."

He adds:

"I wish to cite an incident. One of the pupils of the group of shoemakers, having been obliged to remain over a month in the hospital, had his share fall to nothing. His comrades got together and raised among themselves a sum equal to their earnings, so that his enforced absence would not cause him to suffer any loss. These are features one is happy to note, because they reveal qualities of heart in our pupils, much to be appreciated in those who have suffered, and because they show that our efforts have contributed to keep around them an atmosphere where these qualities can develop."

The war has been ingenious in devising cruel hurts, robbing the painter of his hand, the musician of his arm, the horseman of his leg. It has taken the peasant from his farm, and the mason from his building. Their suffering has enriched them with the very quality that will make them useful citizens, if they can be set to work, if only some one will show them what to do. For each of these men there is an answer for his wrecked life, and the answer is found in these workshops where disabled soldiers can learn the new trade fitted to their crippled condition.

It costs only four to five francs a day to support the man during his period of education. The length of time of his tuition depends on the man and his trade---sometimes three months, sometimes six months. One hundred dollars will meet the average of all cases. The Americans in Paris raised $20,000 immediately on learning of this need. In our country we are starting the "American Committee for Training in Suitable Trades the Maimed Soldiers of France." Mrs. Edmund Lincoln Baylies is chairman for the United States. Her address is Room B, Plaza Hotel, New York.

We have been owing France through a hundred years for that little matter of first aid in our American Revolution. Here is an admirable chance to show we are still warmed by the love and succor she rendered us then.

At this moment 30,000 maimed soldiers are asking for work; 30,000 jobs are ready for them. The employers of France are holding the positions open, because they need these workers. Only the training is lacking. This society to train maimed soldiers is not in competition with any existing form of relief work: it supplements all the others---ambulances and hospitals and dressing stations. They are temporary, bridging the month of calamity. This gives back to the men the ten, twenty, thirty years of life still remaining. They must not remain the victims of their own heroism. They ask only to be permitted to go on with their work for France. They will serve in the shop and the factory as they have served at the Aisne and the Yser. This is a charity to do away with the need of charity. It is help that leads directly to self-help.