Page:Our Girls.pdf/115

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TOMMY'S SISTER
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to take any part in this hellish if inevitable business, she, the giver of life, to be set to the making of the weapons of death!

Yet who shall say but that the unconquerable impulse of woman's sex which says "Thou shall not kill" may be operating even here? Perhaps it was the greatest of all thoughts to bring woman into the war. No one with eyes to see and ears to hear, and a heart to feel, can go through the great munition factories without realizing that there is always thrilling through them a mysterious call to the battlefields, and that a kind of invisible hand-clasp is constantly being made between the women at the lathes and the men in the trenches. This mysterious call is the spirit of our race, the spirit that keeps it alive, telling our women, who are bearing within them the future of our nation, that our men are being destroyed out there in France—their husbands who are, their husbands who are to be—and therefore they must kill if they would not be killed, or much

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