Page:Women Wanted.djvu/325

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AT THE GATES OF GOVERNMENT
295

no uncertain terms she announced in Kingsway, "I who have been against the government, am now for it. Our country's war shall be our war."

For a minute after that proclamation, you could have heard a pin drop in the great assembly hall of the smashing suffragettes. Then in a burst of applause she had them with her: they would follow their leader. Some few at first drew back in consternation. Had their late leader lost her mind? The girl in the green sweater looked dazed: "I was in the front ranks of her body guard when we stormed Buckingham Palace," she murmured. A very few were angry: "She's selling out the cause," they exclaimed bitterly.

But she wasn't. The greatest little field marshal the woman movement has ever known, was leading it to final victory.

When Kitchener announced, "We shall not be able to win this war until women are doing nearly everything that men have done," it was the woman who had organised raids on Parliament who now organised the woman labour of a nation. On the day that she led 40,000 women down the Strand to man the factories of England and turned Lincoln's Inn House, her headquarters in Kingsway, into a munitions employment bureau, opponents of the woman's cause the world over began an orderly retirement from their front line trenches. The next morning the London Post announced: "We stand on the threshold of a new age."

We do. You see, you could not have practically