- 'Women Under Fire'
- from the book ‘Golden Lads’ by Arthur Gleason 1916
Observations of a Volunteer Ambulance Driver
Mrs. Winterbottom during the siege of Antwerp in her automobile
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 should n'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 Fumes.
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 Fumes 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 Liege. 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 Fumes, 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 Liege 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.
a Belgian woman dealing out nuts to Belgian soldiers on the front lines
