bands and the banners, the stars and medals and monuments and maybe the glorious death. Women die, and see their babies die, but theirs is no glory; nothing but horror and shame unspeakable, the slaying of those for whom they willingly risked their lives, when they brought them into the world, the destruction of all that is most precious to them. When men go to war, who remain behind to administer affairs, to be father and mother in one? When the men are killed, are their "responsibilities" killed with them? When the flower of manhood is destroyed, who are worthy to be the mates of the women and beget the men of the future?
"The children are tying the sheaves, the women winnow the ear,
The children are plucking the grapes, the women yoking the steer,
Doing men's tasks, and thinking men's thoughts, with no time for a tear."
These are only some few of the questions that surge up in a woman's mind when men talk as if war concerned men only. But after all, in a modern civilised state, is war the only thing that counts? Is soldiering the only national service? Mr. Kipling's grandiloquent phrase about woman's hindering hand on the warrior's bridle rein makes men and women who are mentally alive smile at its ludicrous inappropriateness to the greater part of life as we live it. And if we admit that, fighting being a man's business, the details of how best to fight are properly left to men to determine, can we
