V
A WOMAN'S VOICE FROM OUT THE TUMULT[1]
A WOMAN with compassion and who dares to avow it; a woman who dares to avow her horror of war, her pity for the victims, for all the victims; a woman who refuses to add her voice to the chorus of murderous passions; a woman genuinely French who does not endeavour to ape the heroines of Corneille. What a solace!
I wish to avoid saying anything which could hurt wounded souls. I know how much grief, how much suppressed tenderness, are hidden, in thousands of women, beneath the armour of a dogged enthusiasm. They stiffen their sinews for fear of falling. They walk, they talk, they laugh, with an open wound in the side through which the heart's blood is gushing. No prophetic faculty is needed to foresee that the time is at hand when they will throw off this inhuman constraint, and when the world, surfeited with bloody heroism, will not hesitate to proclaim its disgust and its execration.
From childhood onwards our minds are distorted by a state education which instills into us a rhetorical ideal, a compost of fragments torn from the vast field of classical thought, revivified by the genius of Corneille and the glories of the revolution. It is an ideal which exultantly sacrifices the individual to the state, which sacrifices common sense to crazy ideas. For the minds of those who have undergone this discipline, life becomes a pretentious and
- ↑ Introduction to Marcelle Capy's book Une voix de femme dans la mêlée, Ollendorff, Paris, 1916. The italicised passages were suppressed by the censor in the original publication.
