WOMEN WANTED
CHAPTER I
Glimpsing the Great World War
“Who goes there?”
I hear it yet, the ringing challenge from the war offices of Europe. Automatically my hand slides over my left hip. But to-day my tailored skirt drapes smoothly there.
The chamois bag that for months has bulged beneath is gone. As regularly as I fastened my garters every morning I have been wont to buckle the safety belt about my waist and straighten the bag at my side and feel with careful fingers for its tight shut clasp. You have to be thoughtful like that when you're carrying credentials on which at any moment your personal safety, even your life may depend. As faithfully as I looked under the bed at night I always counted them over: my letter of credit for $3,000, my blue enveloped police book, and my passport criss-crossed with visés in the varied colours of all the rubber stamps that must officially vouch for me along my way. Ah, they were still all there. And with a sigh of relief I was wont to retire to my pillow with the sense of one more day safely done.
The long steel lines I have passed, I cannot forget. "Who goes there?" These that speak with authority are men with pistols in their belts and swords at their sides. And there are rows of them, O rows and rows of them along the way to the front. See the cold glitter of them! I still look nervously first over one shoulder and then over the other. This morning at breakfast a waiter only drops a fork. And I jump at the sound as if a shot had been fired. You know the feeling something's going to catch you if you don't watch out. Well, you have it like that for a long time after you've been in the war zone. Will it be a submarine or a Zeppelin or a khaki clad line of steel?
It was on a summer's day in 1916 that I rushed into the office of the Pictorial Review. "Look!" I exclaimed excitedly to the editor at his desk. "See the message in the sky written in letters of blood above the battlefields of Europe! There it is, the promise of freedom for women!"
He brushed aside the magazine "lay-out" before him, and lifted his eyes to the horizon of the world. And he too saw. Among the feminists ot New York he has been known as the man with the vision. "Yes," he agreed, "you are right. It is the wonder that is coming. Will you go over there and find out just what this terrible cataclysm of civilisation means to the woman's cause?"
And he handed me my European commission. The next morning when I applied for my passport I began to be written down in the great books of judgment which the chancelleries of the nations keep to-day. Hear the leaves rustle as the pages chronicle my record in full. I must clear myself of the charge of even a German relative-in-law. I must be able to tell accurately, say, how many blocks intervene between the Baptist Church and the city hall in the town where I was born. They want to know the colour of my husband's eyes. They will ask for all that is on my grandfather's tombstone. They must have my genealogy through all my greatest ancestors. I have learned it that I may tell it glibly. For I shall scarcely be able to go round the block in Europe, you see, without meeting some military person who must know.
Even in New York, every consul of the countries to which I wish to proceed, puts these inquiries before my passport gets his visé. It is the British consul who is holding his in abeyance. He fixes me with a look, and he charges: "You're not a suffragist, are you? Well," he goes on severely, "they don't want any trouble over there. I don't know what they'll do about you over there." And his voice rises with his disapproval: "I don't at all know that I ought to let you go."
But finally he does. And he leans across his desk and passes me the pen with which to "sign on the dotted line." It is the required documentary evidence. He feels reasonably sure now that the Kaiser and I wouldn't speak if we passed by. And for the rest? Well, all governments demand to know very particularly who goes there when it happens to be a woman. You're wishing trouble on yourself to be a suffragist almost as much as if you should elect to be a pacifist or an alien enemy. There is a prevailing opinion—which is a hang-over from say 1908—that you may break something, if it is only a military rule. Why are you wandering about the world anyhow? You'll take up a man's place in the boat in a submarine incident. You'll be so in the way in a bombardment. And you'll eat as much sugar in a day as a soldier. So, do your dotted lines as you're told.
They dance before my eyes in a dotted itinerary. It stretches away and away into far distant lands, where death may be the passing event in any day's work. I shall face eternity from, say, the time that I awake to step into the bath tub in the morning until, having finished the last one hundredth stroke with the brush at night, I lay my troubled head on the pillow to rest uneasily beneath a heavy magazine assignment. "There's going to be some risk," the editor of the Pictorial Review said to me that day in his office, with just a note of hesitation in his voice. "I'll take it," I agreed.
The gangway lifts in Hoboken. We are cutting adrift from the American shore. Standing at the steamship's rail, I am gazing down into faces that are dear. Slowly, surely they are dimming through the ocean's mists. Shall I ever again look into eyes that look back love into mine?
I think, right here, some of the sparkle begins to fade from the great adventure on which I am embarked. We are steaming steadily out to sea. Whither? It has commenced, that anxious thought for every to-morrow, that is with a war zone traveller even in his dreams. A cold October wind whips full in my face. I shiver and turn up my coat collar. But is it the wind or the pain at my heart? I can no longer see the New York sky line for the tears in my eyes. And I turn in to my stateroom.
There on the white counterpane of my berth stretches a life preserver thoughtfully laid out by my steward. On the wall directly above the washstand, a neatly printed card announces: "The occupant of this room is assigned to Lifeboat 17 on the starboard side." It makes quite definitely clear the circumstances of ocean travel. This is to be no holiday; aunt. One ought at least to know how to wear a life preserver. Before I read my steamer letters, I try mine on. It isn't a "perfect 36." "But they don't come any smaller," the steward says. "You just have to fold them over so," and he ties the strings tight. Will they hold in the highest sea, I wonder.
The signs above the washstands, I think, have been seen by pretty nearly every one before lunch time. When we who are taking the Great Chance together, assemble in the dining-room, each of us has glimpsed the same shadowy figure at the wheel in the pilot house. We all earnestly hope it will be the captain who will take us across the Atlantic. But we know also that it may be the ghostly figure of the boatman Charon who will take us silently across the Styx.
Whatever else we may do on this voyage, we shall have to be always going-to-be-drowned. It is a curiously continuously present sensation. I don't know just how many of my fellow travellers go to bed at night with the old nursery prayer in their minds if not on their lips. But I know that for me it is as vivid as when I was four years old:
Now I lay me down to sleep
I pray the Lord my soul to keep.
And should I die before I wake,
I pray the Lord my soul to take.
Each morning I awake in faint surprise that I am still here in this same seasick world. The daily promenade begins with a tour of inspection to one's personal lifeboat. Everybody does it. You wish to make sure that it has not sprung a leak over night. Then you lean over the steamship's rail to look for the great letters four feet high and electrically illuminated after dark, for all prowling undersea German craft to notice that this is the neutral New Amsterdam of the Holland-American line. Submarine warfare has not yet reached its most savage climax. Somebody says with confident courage: "Now that makes us quite safe, don't you think?" And somebody answers as promptly as expected. "Oh, I'm sure they wouldn't sink us when they see that sign." And no one speaks the thought that's plain in every face: "But Huns make 'mistakes.' And remember the Lusitania."
We always are remembering the Lusitania. I never dress for dinner at night without recalling: And they went down in evening clothes. We play cards. We dance on deck. But never does one completely while away the recurring thought: Death snatched them as suddenly as from this my next play or as from the Turkey Trot or the Maxixe that the band is just beginning.
We read our Mr. Britlings but intermittently. The plot in which we find ourselves competes with the best seller. Subconsciously I am always listening for the explosion. If the Germans don't do it with a submarine, it may be a floating mine that the last storm has lashed loose from its moorings.
What is this? Rumour spreads among the steamer chairs. Everybody rises. Little groups gather with lifted glasses. And—it is a piece of driftwood sighted on the wide Atlantic. That thrill walks off in about three times around the deck.
But what is that, out there, beyond the steamer's path? Right over there where the fog is lifting? Surely, yes, that shadowy outline. Don't you see it? Why, it's growing larger every minute. I believe it is! Oh, yes, I'm sure they look like that. Wait. Well, if it were, it does seem as if the torpedo would have been here by now. Ah, we shall not be sunk this time after all! Our periscope passes. It is clearly now only a steamship's funnel against the horizon.
Then one day there is an unusual stir of activity on deck. The sailors are stripping the canvas from off the lifeboats. The great crane is hauling the life rafts from out the hold. Oh, what is going to happen? The most nervous passenger wants right away to know. And the truthful answer to her query is, that no one can tell. But we are making ready now for shipwreck. In these days, methodically, like this it is done. It has to be, as you approach the more intense danger zone of a mined coast. You see you never can tell.
I go inside once more to try the straps of my life preserver. But we are sailing through a sunlit sea. And at dinner the philosopher at our table—he is a Hindu from Calcutta—says smilingly, "Now this will do very nicely for shipwreck weather, gentlemen, very nicely for shipwreck weather." It is the round-faced Hollander at my right, of orthodox Presbyterian faith, who protests earnestly, "Ah, but please no. Do not jest." The next day when the dishes slide back and forth between the table racks, none of us laugh when the Hollander says solemnly, "See, but if God should call us now." Ah, if he should, our life boats would never last us to Heaven. They would crumple like floats of paper in Neptune's hand. Eating our dessert, we look out on the terrible green and white sea that licks and slaps at the portholes and all of us are very still. The lace importer from New York at my left, is the most quiet of all.
For eight days and nights we have escaped all the perils of the deep. And now it is the morning of the ninth day. You count them over like that momentously as God did when he made the world. What will to-morrow bring forth? Well, one prepares of course for landing.
I sit up late, nervously censoring my note book through. The nearer we get to the British coast, the more incriminating it appears to be familiar with so much as the German woman movement. I dig my blue pencil deep through the name of Frau Cauer. I rip open the package of my letters of introduction. What will they do to a person who is going to meet a pacifist by her first name? That's a narrow escape. Another letter is signed by a perfectly good loyal American who, however, has the misfortune to have inherited a Fatherland name from some generations before. Oh, I cannot afford to be acquainted with either of my friends. I've got to be pro-ally all wool and yard wide clear to the most inside seams of my soul. I've got to avoid even the appearance of guilt. So, stealthily I tiptoe from my stateroom to drop both compromising letters into the sea.
Like this a journalist goes through Europe these days editing oneself, to be acceptable to the rows of men in khaki. So I edit and I edit and I edit myself until after midnight for the British government's inspection. I try to think earnestly, What would a spy do? So that I may avoid doing it. And I go to bed so anxious lest I act like a spy that I dream I am one. When I awake on the morning of the tenth day, all our engines are still. And from bow to stern, our boat is all a-quiver with glad excitement. We have not been drowned! There beside us dances the little tender to take us ashore at Falmouth.
FACING THE STEEL LINE OF INQUIRY
The good safe earth is firm beneath our feet before the lace importer speaks. Then, looking out on the harbor, he says: "On my last business trip over a few months since, my steamship came in here safely. But the boat ahead and the next behind each struck a mine." So the chances of life are like that, sometimes as close as one in three. But while you take them as they come, there are lesser difficulties that it's a great relief to have some one to do something about. At this very moment I am devoutly glad for the lace importer near at hand. He is carrying my bag and holding his umbrella over me in the rain. For, you see, he is an American man. The more I have travelled, the more certain I have become that it's a mistake to be a woman anywhere in the world there aren't American men around. In far foreign lands I have found myself instinctively looking round the landscape for their first aid. The others, I am sure, mean well. But they aren't like ours. An Englishman gave me his card last night at dinner: "Now if I can do anything for you in London," he said, and so forth. It was the American man now holding his umbrella over me in the rain, who came yesterday to my steamer chair: "It's going to be dark to-morrow night in London," he said, "and the taxicabs are scarce. You must let me see that you reach your hotel in safety." And I felt as sure a reliance in him as if we'd made mud pies together or he'd carried my books to school. You see, you count on an American man like that.
But the cold line of steel! That you have to do alone, even as you go each soul singly to the judgment gate of heaven. I grip my passport hard. It has been removed from its usual place of secure safety. Chamois bags are the eternal bother of being a woman abroad in war time. Men have pockets, easy ones to get at informally. I have among my "most important credentials"—they are in separate packages carefully labelled like that—a special "diplomatic letter" commending me officially by the Secretary of State to the protection of all United States embassies and consulates. When they handed it to me in Washington, I remember they told me significantly: "We have just picked out of prison over there, two American correspondents whose lives we were able to save by the narrowest chance. We don't want any international complications. Now, do be careful."
I'm going to be. The Tower of London and some modern Bastille on the banks of the Seine and divers other dark damp places of detention over here are at this minute clearly outlining themselves as moving pictures before my mind. I earnestly don't want to be in any of them.
We have reached the temporary wooden shack through which governments these days pass all who knock for admission at their frontiers. Inside the next room there at a long pine table sit the men with pistols in their belts and swords at their sides, whose business it is to get spies when they see them. We are to be admitted one by one for the relentless fire of their cross-questioning. They have taken "British subjects first." Now they summon "aliens."
To be called an alien in a foreign land feels at once like some sort of a charge. You never were convicted of this before. And it seems like the most unfortunate thing you can possibly be now. Besides, I am every moment becoming more acutely conscious of my mission. The rest of these my fellow travellers, it is true, are aliens. I am worse. For a journalist even in peace times appears a most suspiciously inquiring person who wishes to know everything that should not be found out. But in peace times one has only to handle individuals. In war times one has to handle governments. The burden of proof rests heavier and heavier upon me. How shall I convince England that in spite of all, I can be a most harmless, pleasant person?
From the decision the other side of that door, there will be no appeal. The men in khaki there have authority to confiscate my notes—or me! And they are so particular about journalists. One friend of mine back from the front a month ago had his clothes turned inside out and they ripped the lining from his coat. Then there is the lemon acid bath, lest you carry notes in invisible writing on your skin. They do it, rumor says, in Germany. But who can tell when other War Offices will have adopted this efficiency method? Oh, dear, what is the use not to have been drowned if one must face an inquisition? And they may turn me back on the next boat. My thoughts are with the lemon acid bath. How many lemons will it take to fill the tub, I am speculatively computing, when "Next," says the soldier. And it is I.
A battery of searching eyes is turned on me. I am face to face with my first steel line. The words of the British consul again ring warningly in my ears, "I don't at all know what they'll do about you over there."
No one ever does know these days. It's the tormenting uncertainty that keeps you literally guessing from day to day whether you're going or coming. And on what least incidents does human judgment depend. Perhaps they'd like me better if my hat were blue instead of brown. Thank heaven I didn't economise on the price of my travelling coat. I step bravely forward when the officer at the head of the table reaches out his hand for my passport.
In the upper left hand corner is attached my photograph. The Department of State at Washington requires it for all travellers now before they affix the great red seal that gives authenticity to the personal information recorded in this paper. From the passport photograph to my face, the officer glances sharply, suspiciously, like a bank teller looking for a forgery. I feel him looking straight through me to the very curl at the back of my neck. Ah, apparently it is I!
"Now what have you come over here for?" he inquires in a tone of voice that seems to say, "Nobody asked you to England. We're quite too busy about other things to entertain strangers."
I hand him my official journalistic letter addressed "To Whom it may Concern." Signed by the editor of the Pictorial Review, it states that I am delegated to study the new position of women due to the war. Will he want me to? He may be as sensitive as the British consul in New York about the woman movement. He may prefer that it should not move at all.
I hold my breath while he reads the letter. Then I have to talk. I tell him, I think, the complete story of my life. I show him all of my credentials. I give him my photograph. You always have to do that. Photographs that are duplicates of the one on your passport, you must carry by the dozen. You have to leave them like visiting cards with gentlemen in khaki all over Europe.
Well, what is he going to do about me? I get out my letters of social introduction. There are 84! I strew them on the table for him to read. There is a door just behind his head. Will it be in there, the search and the confiscation and the lemon acid bath? I wonder, and I wonder. But I try to stand very still. If I move one foot, it might jar the decision that is forming in the officer's mind. I am watching alertly for his expression. But there isn't any. I can't tell at all whether he likes me. An Englishman is always like that, completely shut up behind his face. It may be at this very moment he has made up his mind that I am a spy. He has read only four letters—
And he looks up suddenly, in his hand the letter from Mrs. Belmont in New York introducing me to the Duchess of Marlborough. He nods down the line to all the other military eyes fixed on me: "She's all right. Let her go."
I sign on the dotted line. And everything is over! In a flashing moment like that, it is accomplished. And a letter to "Our Duchess" has done it. At the magic of the name of the American woman who was Consuelo Vanderbilt, this steel like line of British officers quietly sheathes all opposition!
The soldier at the other end of the room opens a little wooden door in a wooden wall that lets me into England. My baggage is already being chalk marked "passed." I am here! I clutch my passport happily and convulsively in my hand. You have to do that until you can restore it to the safer place. It's the most important item in what the French call your "pieces de identitie." At any moment a policeman in the Strand, a gendarme in the Avenue de l'Opera may tap an alien on the shoulder with the pertinent inquiry, Who are you?
THE WAY OF JOURNALISM IN WAR TIME NOT EASY
London, when we reached it that night in October, lay under the black pall of darkness in which the cities over here have enveloped themselves against war. Death rides above in the sky. To-night, every to-night, it may be the Zeppelins will come. Over there on the horizon, a searchlight streams suddenly and another and another, their great fingers feeling through the black clouds for the monsters of destruction that may be winging a way above the chimney pots. Every building is tightly shuttered. The street lamps with their globes painted three quarters black have their pale lights as it were hid beneath an inverted bushel. Pedestrians must develop a protective sense that enables them to find their way at night as a cat does in the dark. "I'm sorry," says an apologetic English voice, and before you know it, you have bumped against another passerby. There is another sudden jolt. And you are scrambling for your balance the other side of the curb you couldn't see was there. If you are familiar with the door knob where you're going to stop, you will be so much the surer where you're at.
Looking out on this darkest London from Paddington railway station at midnight I sit on my trunk and wait. Do you remember the popular song, There's a Little Street in Heaven Called Broadway? Oh, I hope there is.
I sit on my trunk and wait. In my handbag is the card of the Englishman politely ready to look after me in London. It is the American man who is out there in the night endeavouring to commandeer a taxicab. Somehow he has done it. At last the cab comes. He has compelled the chauffeur to take us. I shall not have to sit all night on my trunk.
A small green light within the hooded entrance, picks the Ritz Hotel out of the Piccadilly blackness. Inside, after the gloom through which we have come, I gasp with relief. It is as if one discovers suddenly in a place that has seemed a graveyard, Why, people still live here! Right then at the hotel register, the voice of Scotland Yard speaks for the War Office. And before the Ritz can be permitted to give me refuge from the night, I must answer. The "registration blank" presented for me to fill in, demands certain definite information: "(1) Surname. (2) Christian names. (3) Nationality. (4) Birthplace. (5) Year of birth. (6) Sex. (7) Full residential address: Full business address. (8) Trade or occupation. (9) Served in what army, navy or police force. (10) Full address where arrived from. (11) Date of signing. (12) Signature." And a little below, "(13) Full address of destination. (14) Date of departure. (15) Signature." A last line in conspicuous italics admonishes: "Penalty for failing to give this information correctly 100 pounds or six months imprisonment." Well, of course a threat like that will make even a woman tell her age as many times as she is asked. But I do it rebelliously against the Kaiser and all his Prussians. For the "registration blank" was made in Germany. I remember it before the war, at the Hotel Adlon in Berlin.
I must sign now on the dotted line before I can even go to bed. I arrange my clothing carefully on a chair within reach of my hand. You rest that way in a warring city, always ready to run. The Zeppelins may come so swiftly. In London you know your nearest cellar. In France you have selected your high vaulted entrance arch under which to take refuge when the sirens go screaming down the street, "Gardez vous, Gardez vous."
The sense of depression that had enwrapped me in the first darkness of London was not gone when I closed my eyes in sleep. One does not throw it off. You may not be of those who are wearing crêpe. But you cannot escape the woe of the world which will enfold you like a garment.
In the morning the ordinary business of living has become one of strenuous detail. The law requires that an alien shall register with the police within 24 hours of arrival. When I have thus established a calling acquaintance at the Vine Street station, I go out into Piccadilly feeling like a prisoner politely on parole. And I face an environment strung all over with barbed wire restrictions on my movements. Every letter that comes for me from America will be read before I receive it, marked "Opened by the Censor." If I wish to go away from this country, I must ask the permission of the Foreign Office, the consulate of the country to which I wish to proceed and my own consulate before I can so much as purchase a ticket. I may not leave London for any "restricted area" where there has been an Irish revolution or a German bombardment without the consent of Scotland Yard. I may not even leave the Ritz Hotel, which is registered as my official place of residence, for more steam heat at the Savoy, without notifying the Vine Street Station of my departure and the Bow Street Station of my arrival. The Defence of the Realm and the Trading with the Enemy Acts and others in a land at war are lying around like bombs all over the place. Have a care that you don’t run into them!
I am alone one evening at the International Suffrage Headquarters in Adam Street, deep lost in a sociological study of carefully filed data. Do you believe in subconscious warnings? Anyhow, I am bending over a box of manila envelopes when suddenly, out of the silence of this top floor room, I am impressed with a sense of danger. It is as plain and clear as if a voice over my shoulder said "Look out." I do look up quickly. And there on the wall before my eyes, I read Order 4 from the Defence of the Realm Act, commonly enough posted all over London, I discover later. But this is the first time I have seen it. It reads: "The curtains of this room must be drawn at sundown." And from two windows with wide open curtains, my brilliant electric light is streaming out on the London darkness, oh, as far as Trafalgar Square for all the German Zeppelins and Scotland Yard to see! Just for an instant I am paralysed with the fear of them all. Then my hand finds the electric button and I hastily switch myself into the protecting darkness. Somehow I grope my way through the hall and down the staircase. And I slam the outer door hurriedly. There, when the police arrive, I shall be gone! In the morning paper a week or so afterward I read one day of an earl's daughter even, who had been arrested and fined 25 pounds for "permitting a beam of light to escape from her window."
The government is regulating everything, the icing a housewife may not put on a cake, the number of courses one may have for dinner, even the conversation at table. Let an American with the habit of free speech beware! Notices conspicuously posted in public places advise, "Silence." In France they put it most picturesquely, "Say nothing. Be suspicious. The ears of the enemy are always open." Absolutely the only safe rule, then, is to learn to hold your tongue. Everybody's doing it over here. Very well, I will not talk. But what about all the rest of this silent world that will not, either? For those under military orders, the rule is absolute. And you've no idea how many people are under military orders. This is a war with even the women in khaki. I begin to feel that to get into so much as a drawing-room, I ought to have my merely social letter of introduction crossed with some kind of a visé. Wouldn't a hostess, even the Duchess of Marlborough, be able to be more cordial if she knew that I had seen the Government before I saw her? Even the girl conductor on the 'bus this morning, when I essayed to ask her as Exhibit 1 in the new-woman-in-industry I was looking for, how she liked her job, turned and scurried down her staircase like a frightened rabbit.
So, this is not to be the simple life for research work. And though I come through all the submarines and the lines of steel, and the Zeppelins have not got me yet, what shall it profit me to save my life and lose my assignment? I am bound for the front and for certain information I am to gather on the way. Now, what should a journalist do?
Well, a journalist, I discovered, should get one's self personally conducted by Lord Northcliffe. There were those of my masculine contemporaries already headed for the front whom he was said on arrival here to have received into the bosom of his newspaper office and put to bed to rest from the nervous exhaustion of travel, and sent a secretary and a check and anything else to make them happy. And then he asked them only to name the day they wanted to see Woolwich or to cross to France. But nothing like that was happening to me. So what else should a journalist do?
Well, evidently a journalist should get in good standing with a war office which alone can press the button to everywhere she wants to go. The short cut to a war office is through a press bureau. But a press bureau modestly shrinks from the publicity that it purveys. You do not find it on Main Street with a lettered signboard and a hand pointing: "Journalists, right this way." And you can't run right up the front steps of a war office and ring the bell. It would be a what-do-you-call-it, a faux pas if you did. Even for a private residence it would be that. There isn't anywhere that I know of over here even in peace time that as soon as you reach town you can call a hostess up on the telephone and have her say, "Oh, you're the friend of Sallie Smith that she's written me about. Come right along up to dinner." Why, the butler would tell you her ladyship or her grace or something like that was not at home. It just can't be done like that outside of America. You don't rush into the best English circles that way, much less the English government. Absolutely your only way around is through a formal correspondence.
One day I wrap myself in the rose satin down bedquilt at the Ritz and spread out my letters of introduction to choose a journalistic lead. There are carved cupids on the walls of this bedroom, and a lovely rose velvet carpet on the floor and heavy rose silk hanging at the windows. But there isn't any place to be warm. The tiny open grate holds six or it may be seven coals—you see why Dickens always writes of "coals" in the plural—and you put them on delicately with things like the sugar tongs. It isn't good form to be warm in England. The best families aren't. It's plebeian and American even to want to be.
My soul is all curled up with the cold while I am trying to determine which letter. This to Sir Gilbert Parker was the 84th letter handed me by the editor of the Pictorial Review as I stepped on the boat. It is the one I now select first, quite by chance, without the least idea of where it is to lead me. The next evening at 6 o'clock I am on my way to Wellington House. "Sir Gilbert," speaks the attendant in resplendent livery. And I find myself in a stately English room. There, down the length of the red velvet carpet beneath the glow of a red shaded electric lamp, a man with very quiet eyes is rising from his chair. "Do you know where you are?" he asks with a smile, glancing at the letter of introduction on his desk that tells of my mission. "This," he says, "is the headquarters of the English government's press bureau for the war and I am in charge of the American publicity." Who cares for Lord Northcliffe now! Or even the King of England! Of all the inhabitants of this land, here was the man a journalist would wish to meet. The man who has written "The Seats of the Mighty" sits in them. From his desk here in the red room he can touch the button that will open all the right doors to me. He can't do it immediately, in war time. One has to make sure first. I must come often to Wellington House. There are days when we talk of many things, of life and of New York. He is less and less of a formal Englishman. His title is slipping away. He is beginning to be just Gilbert Parker, who might have belonged to the Authors' League up on Forty-second Street. I half suspect he does. "I do know my America rather well," he says at length. "I married a girl from Fifty-seventh Street. And I have a brother who lives in St. Paul."
It is the way his voice thrills on "my America." I am sure any American correspondent hearing it would have been ready even in the fall of 1916 to clasp hands across the sea in the Anglo-American compact to win this war. Gilbert Parker is in tune with the American temperament. He doesn't wear a monocle. And he says to a woman "Now, what can I do for you?" in just the tone of voice that an American man would use when everything is going to be all right. I remember the red room just before he said it. Everything hung in the balance for me at this moment: "I have confidence in Mr. Vance, your editor. I know him," reflects the man who is deciding. "But—are you in 'Who's Who'?" Just for the lack of a line in a book, a government's good favour might have been lost! But he reached for the copy above his desk. "Any more credentials?" he asks. I cast desperately about in my mind—and drop a Phi Beta key in his hand. "I won't take that up on you," he says with a smile. And my cause is won.
THE WAY IT IS DONE
Long important envelopes lettered across the top "On His Majesty's Service" begin to arrive in my mail. All the government offices will be "at home" and helpful—when a personal interview has further convinced each that I am clearly not at all a German person nor the dangerous species of the suffragist. Where are the slippers that will match this gown? And which are the beads that will be best? Mine is a hazardous undertaking, you see, that requires all of the art at the command of a woman: I must so state the mission on which I have come that my woman movement may seem pleasing in the eyes of a man—why, possibly a man whose country house even may have been burned in behalf of votes for women! Clearly I must mind my phrases, to get my permits. And it you're a journalist in war time, you need the permit as you do your daily bread.
To get it, you write about it and call about it and write about it some more. And then it comes like this:
Dear Mrs. Daggett:—
If you will call to-morrow Wednesday at 3 o'clock at the main entrance to Woolwich Arsenal and ask for Miss Barker, presenting the attached paper, you will find that arrangements have been made for your visit.
G.S.B.
Or it comes like this:
Horse Guards, S.W., Nov. 7, 1917.
Mrs. M. P. Daggett,
Room 464 Ritz Hotel,
Dear Madam:—
I have pleasure in informing you that under War Office instructions I have arranged with the officer commanding 3rd London General Hospital, Wandsworth Common, S.W., for you to visit his hospital at 11 a. m. on Friday next, the 9th instant.
Yours faithfully,
O.
Colonel D.A.D.M.S.
London District.
"First consignment," I cabled across the Atlantic, "coming on the St. Louis, if it doesn't strike a mine." I follow it with a registered letter to the editor: "I hope God and you will always be good to Gilbert Parker. And now if I don't get back" And I give him exact directions about the material on the way. For it is no idle imagining that I may not reach home.
I am facing France and the Channel crossing. Here in London it is so long since the Zeppelins have been heard from that we are almost lulled into a sense of security that they will not come again. If they do high government circles usually hear in advance. A friend whose cousin's brother-in-law is in the Admiralty will let me know as soon as he finds out. But now all of these neatly arranged life and death plans must go into the discard. For you see I am changing my danger back again from Zeppelins to submarines.
Let us see about the sinkings. Rumour reports now that about four out of six boats are getting across. I may get one of the four. On the night train from London, I wrap myself in my steamer rug in the unheated compartment. Travelling is not what you might say encouraged. This journey to Paris, accomplished ordinarily in four hours, will now take twenty-four. No two time-tables will anywhere connect. There are as many difficulties as can possibly be arranged. Governments don't want you doing this every day in the week. And there is always a question whether you will be permitted to do it at all. At Southampton I must meet the steel line with the challenge, "Who goes there?"
Again I tell all my life to the man with a pistol at his belt and a sword at his side. He looks a second time at my passport: "You want to go all sorts of places you've no business to," he says sharply.
"Not all of them now," I answer humbly, "only France." "Well, why even France?" he persists testily. I try to tell him. I present for a second consideration one of my "most important credentials." It is a personal letter from the French consul in New York specially and cordially recommending me to the "care and protection of all the civil and military authorities in France." At last he tosses the letter inquiringly down his khaki line as much as to say, "Oh, well, if they want her over there?" It comes back with a nod of acquiescence from the last man, and a visé in purple ink lets me through to the boat.
Shall I remember the Sussex? You don't so much after you've lived daily with death for a while. Some time during the night I am drowsily conscious that the boat begins to move. A skilled pilot has taken the wheel to guide us in and out among mines placed perilously as a protection against German submarines. Our lives are coming through dangerous narrows. In the morning we are safe in Havre. The next steel line, here, is French. And with the letter from the consul at New York in my hand I am literally and cordially and politely bowed into France.
At my hotel in the Rue de Rivoli, the American man opposite me at the dinner table the next day is just about to sail, "going back to God's country, as far away home as I can get, to the tall pine trees on the Pacific Coast," he tells me. He had come to Europe on an assignment that was to have been accomplished in three months. It has taken him a year to get to the front. My knife and fork drop in despair on my plate as he says it. "Cheer up," he urges. "You just have to remember to take a Frenchman's promises as lightly as they're made. They always aim to please. And your hopes rise so that you order two cocktails for dinner to-night. Then to-morrow and to-morrow and to-morrow there will be only more promises. But you're an American woman. You'll dig through. Good luck," he says. And a taxicab takes him.
WAR AS YOU FIRST SEE IT
Here in Paris I stand in the boulevards as I stood in the Strand and Oxford Street, and watch the new woman movement going by. Every time a man drops dead in the trenches, a woman steps permanently into the niche he used to hold in industry, in commerce, in the professions, in world affairs. It is the woman movement for which the ages have waited in ghastly truth. But, O God in Heaven, the price we pay! The price we pay! There is Madelaine La Fontaine, whom I saw yesterday in the Rue Renouard. Her black dress outlined her figure against the yellow garden wall where she stood in a little doorway. She leaned and kissed her child on his way to school. As she lifted her head, I saw the grief in her eyes and the dead man's picture in the locket at her throat.
They are everywhere through England and France, these women with the locket at their throats. Yet not for these would your heart ache most. There are the others, the clear-eyed girls in their 'teens just now coming up into long dresses. And life may not offer them so much as the pictured locket! There will be no man's face to fill it! Love that would have been, you see, lies slain there with all the bright boyhood that's falling on the battlefields. O God, the price we pay!
How far off now seems that summer's day I walked through 39th Street, my pulses throbbing pleasantly with the thrill of adventure and this commission! I wonder if ever life can look like that again. The heavens arched all blue above New York and the sunshine lay all golden on the city pavements. But that was before I knew. Oh, I had heard about war, even as have you and your next door neighbour. War was battle dates that had to be committed to memory at school. Or if instead of tiresome pages in history it should mobilise before our eyes, why, of course it would be flags flying, bands playing, and handsome heroes marching down Fifth Avenue!
And now I have seen war. Every way I turn I am looking on men with broken bodies and women with broken hearts. War is not merely the hell that may pass at Verdun or the Somme in the agony of a day or a night that ends in death. War is worse. War is that big strong fellow with eyes burned out when he "went over the top," whom I saw learning to walk by a strip of oilcloth laid on the floor of the Home for the Blind in London. They're teaching him now to make baskets for a living! War is that boy in his twenties without any legs whom I met in Regents Park in a wheel chair for the rest of his life! War is that peasant from whom to-day I inquired my way in one of the little banlieues of Paris. There was the Croix de Guerre in his coat lapel. But he had to set down on the ground his basket of vegetables to point down the Quai de Bercy with his remaining arm. You know how a Frenchman just has to gesture when he talks? The stump of the other arm twitched a horrible accompaniment as he indicated my direction!
Those are brave men who are dying on all the battlefields for their native lands. But oh, the bravery of these men who must live for their countries! These who have lost their eyes and their arms and their legs are as common over here as, why, as, say, men with brown hair. And these are terrible enough. But the men who have lost their faces! So long as they shall live, in every one's eyes into which they look, they must see a shudder of horror reflecting as in a looking glass their old agony. God in Heaven pity the men who have lost their faces! The greatest sculptors in the world are busy to-day making faces to be fastened on.
Like this you've got to go through Europe these days with a sob in the throat. I turn to the difficult, details of living for relief from the awful drama of existence. In Paris there is the nicest United States ambassador that ever was sent in a black frock coat to represent his country abroad. In the course of my travels there are embassies I have met who are about as useful to the wayfaring American in a foreign land as a Rogers plaster group on a parlour table. But you arrive at Mr. Sharpe's embassy in the Rue de Chaillot and it doesn't matter at all if it happens to be perhaps 4:33 and his reception hour closed at, say, 4:31. He says, "Come right in." Yes, he talks like that, not at all in the tone of royalty. "When'd you get in town?" he asks as genially as if it might be Albany or Detroit instead of Paris. By this time you're sitting in a chair drawn up to his desk and discussing the last Democratic victory. "How's Charlie Murphy standing now with the administration?" perhaps he asks, and then pretty soon, "But what can I do for you in Paris?"
And he does it. You don't have to call his secretary a week later to ask, How about that letter the embassy was going to give me? And the week after and the week after ring up some more to recall that there's an American running up an expense account at the hotel down the street. That's not Mr. Sharpe's way. Within ten minutes he had handed me a letter of introduction to M. Briand, Prime Minister of France. He laughed as he passed it to me. "Honestly, I'd hate to hand any one a gold brick," he said. "That document looks imposing enough and important enough that a limousine should be at your hotel entrance to take you to the front at 9 a. m. to-morrow. But nothing like that will happen. In France you have to remember that no one hurries. And an American can't."
You can hear that in every foreign language. It was a spectacled Herr Professor in Berlin who once said to me severely, "You Americans, this hurry it is your national vice." I feel that foreign governments have duly disciplined me in this direction during the past few months. So much of my job in serving the Pictorial Review in Europe seems to be to sit on a chair and wait in a War Office ante room. At the Maison de la Presse, 3 Rue François 1st, in the Service de l'Information Diplomatique, whither my Briand letter leads me, I seem to spend hours.
They are going to be charmed, as Frenchmen can be, to take me to the front. And the days pass and the days pass. "Ah, but you see, for a lady journalist it is so different and so difficult. The trip must be specially arranged." And the weeks go by. And M. Polignac is so polite and polite and polite—just that and nothing more.
One day he says to me: "And, Mme. Daggett, how long is it you will be in Paris?" "Why," I falter, "I hadn't expected to winter here. I'm waiting, you know, just waiting until I can go to the front." "And how much longer now could you wait?" he inquires. "Oh," I answer desperately, "I'll surely have to go by the 29th. I couldn't stay longer than that."
So in the course of the next few days there comes a letter telling me how it pains the French government that they should not be able to "take that trip in hand" before the 29th. And of course if I must leave them on that date, as I had said I must, oh, they so much regret, etc., etc.
If I intend to get to the front, evidently then I must dig through! And in my room at the Hotel Regina in the Rue de Rivoli, I take my pen in hand.
To "Maison de la Presse, Service de l'Information Diplomatique," I write: "Gentlemen, your favour of the 26th inst. with your regrets just received. And I hasten to write you that I cannot, for the sake of France, accept your decision as final, without presenting to your attention a situation with which you may not be familiar. You see, gentlemen, in the country from which I come, we have a feminism that is neither an ideal nor a theory, but a working reality. In America, there were when I left, four million women citizens, and the State legislatures every little while making more. These are, gentlemen, four million citizens with a vote, whose wishes must be consulted by Congress at Washington in determining the war policy of the United States. Their sympathies help to determine the amount of the war relief contributions that may come across the Atlantic. These are four million women who count, gentlemen, please understand, exactly the same as four million men.
"Other American publications may offer Maison de la Presse other facilities for reaching the American public. But none of them can duplicate the facilities presented by the Pictorial Review, the leading magazine to champion the feminist cause. It is the magazine that is read by the woman who votes. Is not France interested in what she shall read there?
"Believe me, gentlemen, the opportunity for propaganda that I offer you is unparalleled. I beg you therefore to reconsider. I earnestly desire to go to the front this week. Can you, I ask, permit me to leave this land without granting the privilege? For the sake of France, gentlemen! Awaiting your reply, I remain," etc.
That letter was posted at 11 o'clock at night. Before noon the next day Maison de la Presse was on the telephone and speaking English. In France they do not hurry. It is not customary to use the telephone. And it is at this time against the law to speak English on it. But listen: "Will Mme. Daggett find herself able to accept the invitation of the French government to go to the front on Thursday?" inquires the voice on the wire.