Part 24

The manner in which they met it during the long and terrible years of 1914, 1915, 1916, 1917 and 1918 was perhaps the greatest revelation the world has ever experienced. Never before have members of the “weaker sex” braved such a catastrophe more heroically and made such supreme sacrifices. In fact, woman’s activity during the World War has been a grand manifestation, which stands out in glorious colors from a black background of man’s hatred, revengefulness, slander, calumniation, treason, avarice, atrocities, and murder.

When the vast armies were mobilized it became necessary to close the innumerable gaps caused by the sudden drafting and departure of so many million men. To refill the positions they had occupied, was the most urgent necessity, as otherwise the whole machinery of national life would become disorganized, and that at the most critical time.

At once immense numbers of women and girls responded to the call. They went into the tramway and railway service to act as ticket sellers and punchers, as conductors, brakemen and motormen. They replaced the letter carriers and chauffeurs; they climbed the lofty seats formerly occupied by cab-drivers and postilions. Mounting motor-cycles they delivered telegrams and performed other urgent errands. They formed street-cleaning and fire-brigades and took care of the sanitation and protection of the cities. In the offices and stores they assumed the duties of the bookkeeper and floor-walker; in the schools they substituted for male teachers who had followed the call of the war trumpet. They repaired telegraph-wires and installed telephones; they became blacksmiths and repaired the roofs of houses. They cleaned windows and chimneys, delivered newspapers and carried the coal from the wagon into the bins and bunkers. They acted as “ice-men” and collected the garbage and ashes. They tilled the fields and vegetable gardens, and brought in the crops and the harvests. They thrashed the wheat and served in the mills as well as in the bakeries. They furnished clothes, and made and mended shoes. They finished the public roads and other works that had been left uncompleted. They built houses and tore down others. In Berlin the excavation for a new underground railway, badly needed, was done by women, and half of the gangs that worked on the railroad tracks were made up of girls.

In England as well as in France and Germany thousands of women could be seen in the ship-yards working side by side with men on the scaffolds, at bolting and riveting, forging and casting, as if they had always done this work. In fact, women did everything that heretofore had been regarded as “man’s work.”

But they did much more. Hundreds of thousands of women entered the gun- and ammunition factories in order that the armies might not lack ample means for the defense of the country.

Donning overalls, oil-cloth caps and gas masks they became engaged in the hazardous manufacture of high explosives, of filling and packing the deadly gas-shells and other projectiles. At the same time millions of busy hands prepared the bandages and other necessities for the treatment of the wounded. Whole brigades of Red Cross nurses were formed and went to the battlefields and hospitals, to attend those who in the grim conflict might lose their limbs, their eye-sight, or become sufferers from the effect of poisonous gases.

All too soon long trains and hospital-ships brought in such unfortunates, at first a few hundred, then in ever increasing numbers, by the thousands and by tens of thousands. Within a few months most of the countries engaged in the dreadful struggle were turned into immense hospitals, filled with moaning and suffering. What noble and indefatigable women did here to alleviate this misery and distress, can never be fully told and will never be forgotten. Whoever was witness of the self-control and perseverance shown year after year by many Red Cross nurses will always think of them with reverence.

There is not a single Army Medical Corps of the many nations engaged in the World War, which does not freely admit, that the immense amount of work could not have been done without the help of women. In a tribute to the Red Cross Major-General Merritte W. Ireland, Surgeon-General U. S. Army, said:

“Probably the greatest single service rendered by the Red Cross home forces was the supply of trained nurses it furnished our hospitals. The Army Medical Corps trains a few nurses, but could never hope to turn out the large number provided through Miss Delano’s department. If we needed a thousand nurses for a given work, we telegraphed the War Department. The War Department notified Miss Delano. And the nurses arrived on schedule.

“An especially notable service rendered by Red Cross nurses occurred during the early American campaign when our men were brigaded with French divisions. When wounded, they were, of course, taken to French hospitals. Unable to answer questions or tell their needs, they were in a very unhappy plight. Scores of Red Cross nurses speaking both French and English were immediately sent to these hospitals—and the problem was solved.

“The work of the Red Cross was often the theme of discussions at American General Headquarters at Chaumont. I remember that it was enlarged upon there in a conversation between General Pershing, Mr. H. P. Davison, the Chairman of the War Council of the American Red Cross, and myself. We were speaking of the value of the service rendered by the millions of our women and how they helped keep the influence of home about the boys at the front. And General Pershing said: “The women of the United States deserve a large share of the credit for the success of the American forces.”

“Our Army officers have often admired not only the spirit but the efficiency of the American Red Cross organization. It provided an inexhaustible store of supplies; it possessed a remarkable facility for adapting itself to any emergency, however unexpected; and its personnel always evinced the finest readiness for co-operation. The millions of surgical dressings, knitted articles, refugee garments, and other supplies it contributed—for these things alone it would have deserved the Army’s unstinted praise. All the splints used in all our hospitals in France, both of the Army and of the Red Cross, came from the Red Cross. It furnished more than a quarter of a billion surgical dressings. It sent over enough sweaters for every man in our overseas forces to possess one.”

Similar tributes have been freely extended to the nurses of all other Red Cross branches, which co-operated with the Medical Corps of the various powers engaged in the terrible war.

While performing their merciful work, many women had to bear the depressing anxiety caused by husbands, sons, or brothers, fighting in the trenches or on the ocean; or for those unfortunates who as prisoners had fallen into the hands of the enemy.

The women of the Central powers had to face many additional problems of the most perplexing nature. As the soil of Germany and Austria does not yield enough to support the whole population, and as all imports of foodstuffs were cut off by hostile fleets, provisions became more scarce and more expensive from day to day. There was not sufficient milk to keep the millions of babies alive; and not enough food to save adults from slow starvation. To stretch the scant supplies the most careful and rigid methods of administration had to be invented and applied. Public kitchens were established to reduce the cost of living to the lowest point possible. In Berlin twenty-three committees of the National Women’s Service with several thousand voluntary workers were running such charitable kitchens, from which tens of thousands regularly received their daily meals. The same organizations later on supervised the system of bread-, milk-, grocery- and butter-cards, when the increasing shortage of food forced the governments to the severest restrictions.

Among the many German relief organizations those of the Red Cross took the leading place. Originally divided into five main sections under the general control of a central committee and designed to combat of sickness and destitution in the civil population, it now was increased to twenty-three divisions. Their welfare work assumed such importance during the progress of the war that it had to be subdivided into three groups, the first of which became engaged in fighting tuberculosis and contagious diseases, the second in the protection of infancy and motherhood, the third in family welfare work in the narrower meaning of the term. In all these branches the organization of the Red Cross provided the framework within which the numerous national, state and local social activities of the country grouped themselves naturally in accordance with their separate functions.

The activity of the organizations during the years 1917, 1918, and 1919, the dreadful years of general distress and starvation, forms one of the most pathetic chapters in woman’s history. Not only the food, but the cotton, wool, leather, rubber, fat, oil, soap, and hundreds of other necessities gave out completely. People were compelled to live on substitutes. And as these became too scarce or too expensive, they lived on substitutes for these substitutes. Imagine the heartrending pain mothers were bearing when at the end of 1918 and in 1919 large numbers of mayors of German cities and numerous professors of medicine were compelled to send urgent appeals for help to all medical faculties of the world, stating that since the signing of the truce 800,000 people in Germany had died from starvation. “Many millions of human beings,” one of the appeals reads, “are living on only half or even less than half the quantity of food necessary to sustain life. Utterly exhausted they have lost all power of resistance and succumb to any kind of sickness that may befall them. The worst sufferers are the children and those mothers, who fast for the sake of their children. There are too the neurasthenics of all kinds, the numbers of which have, for four years, increased immensely. Furthermore, there are the overworked, and those who have become sick through the unheard-of monotony of food and from the absolute absence of every stimulant. Their existence becomes more unbearable from day to day. While the physicians of Germany are profoundly impressed with the terrible ravages caused by hunger, they have absolutely no means of combating them.”

* * * * *

While during these dreadful times millions of women devoted themselves to the noble work of healing the terrible wounds and sufferings, other groups eagerly tried to bring about a cessation of hostilities. Immediately after the first declaration of war, the “International Woman Suffrage Alliance” directed an urgent appeal to the British Foreign Office as well as to all Foreign Embassies in London, to leave untried no method of conciliation or arbitration to avert the threatening disaster. Numerous women’s societies in Holland, Sweden, Germany and Switzerland arose simultaneously and joined the good cause. Soon a great movement for peace began to sweep through the women of the entire world.

But women’s efforts to bring the conflict to a standstill lacked as yet the necessary strength. They were overpowered by the influence and machinations of those statesmen, financiers, publishers of newspapers and countless others, who wanted war. And so nothing remained for women but to repeat ever and again their protests against the madness of men.

When in December, 1914, suffering Christianity prepared to celebrate the natal day of the Messiah, the Prince of Peace, a noble-minded woman of London, =Miss Emily Hobhouse=, wrote the following letter:

“To American Women, Friends of Humanity and Peace!

“Friends:—May I appeal to you in the name of Humanity, on behalf of the children of Europe, before whom suffering or death has already taken place, and whose future is fraught with pain? In you lies our hope of help for them, for you are free to speak and act.

“Will you not come to our troubled world, unite with the women of other neutral lands and initiate a crusade—a real ‘holy’ war, fought with the swords of the Spirit?

“Appalling as is this massacre of the manhood of Europe, that is not the worst. As long as men adopt barbaric methods of settling disputes they must abide by the consequences; but for those innocent victims, the non-combatants—women, babes, old and sick—I crave your help. Their names and numbers will never be known. They are multiplying in Poland and Galicia, in Belgium and France, in East Prussia and Holland, and elsewhere. Ponder this vast host, voiceless, suffering, dying, crouching beside their blackened ruins or fleeing from the devastated areas both east and west. Think of disease let loose, of the horrors of cold and famine!

“I know it is not easy to visualize details of conditions so foreign to average experience. It needs a mental effort few can make. It is because I was daily witness of such things in the South African War that I dare not be silent. Disease, devastation, starvation and death were words I then learned as war interprets them. I saw a country burnt and devastated as large parts of Europe are to-day; I saw old and sick, women and children turned out of house and home; I saw them, half clad, starving, lying sick to death upon the bare earth; I saw babies that were born in open, crowded trucks; I saw haggard, endless sick, gaunt skeletons, hourly deaths. There in the Boer States death swept away non-combatants in the proportion of five to one of those who fell in the field.

“It is because I know the brunt of this war, too, is falling and must fall, heaviest upon the weak and young, that I appeal now on their behalf, not merely to those who love peace, but to the great body of women who love children. Little children, more sensitive to exposure, to extremes of heat and cold, to tainted food, to starvation, and to the stench, the poisonous stench of war, quickly fade, quickly die.

“Will you not arise and work for peace?—For peace alone can save the children. It would be, I well know, a struggle against powers of darkness and will need the whole armor of God. Yet every sentiment of pity and of civilization, leave alone Christianity, demands the effort. The victims cannot help themselves; succor must come from without.

“Relief, we know, you pour most generously, but relief cannot meet a want so colossal, neither can it touch the worst ills. Cut at the root of the evil—the war itself. A strong lead is needed. Myriads want peace; they never wanted war. In each country this is true; constant proofs reach us from Germany and France, as well as various parts of England. The press of each nation asserts that the people are unanimous for war. It is not so, but those who have the means of speaking, and who swim with their governmental streams, can speak the loudest and alone are heard. Many dare not, many cannot speak. Others make a truce and save thousands of human lives and receive the blessings of thousands of wives and mothers.

“A union of neutral women could investigate the facts of the sufferings amongst non-combatants, and founded upon acquired personal knowledge they could in the name of Humanity formulate demands persistent, cogent, irresistible, not in favor of any one party or nation, but simply for Peace.

“It seems futile to turn to statesmen, governments or prelates for aid. They are tied and bound by position, custom and mutual fear. They await propitious movements. Famine, disease and death do not wait.

“=Women have this advantage: they are still unfettered by custom and expediency; they need consult only the dictates of humanity. If ever the world needed their intervention on a vast scale, it needs it now!=

“Failure in such a task would have no fears for them; failure in a noble effort is often a measure to success! The greatest have seemed to fail. Judged by human standards, Christ’s life on earth was a failure. =The effort in any case would leave its mark upon the thought and history of the world. Womanhood will have arisen in vindication of a higher humanity—to avenge desolated motherhood and protect martyred children; it will have asserted its right to shield the weak and young from the fatal results of the organized murder called war.=”

The appeal was not made in vain. The day after its receipt a number of prominent American women called a convention in Washington, D. C., on January 10th, 1915. =Miss Jane Addams= of Chicago acted as chairman. The result of this meeting was the organization of the “=Woman’s Peace Party=,” which adopted the following

Preamble and Platform.

“We women of the United States, assembled in behalf of World Peace, grateful for the security of our own country, but sorrowing for the misery of all involved in the present struggle among warring nations, do hereby band ourselves together to demand that war be abolished.

“Equally with men pacifists, we understand that planned-for, legalized, wholesale, human slaughter is to-day the sum of all villainies.

“=As women, we feel a peculiar moral passion of revolt against both the cruelty and the waste of war. As women, we are especially the custodians of the life of the ages.= We will not longer consent to its reckless destruction.

“=As women, we are particularly charged with the future of childhood and with the care of the helpless and the unfortunate.= We will not longer endure without protest that added burden of maimed and invalid men and poverty-stricken widows and orphans which war places upon us.

“=As women, we have builded by the patient drudgery of the past the basic foundation of the home and of peaceful industry.= We will not longer accept without a protest, that must be heard and heeded by men, that hoary evil which in an hour destroys the social structure that centuries of toil have reared.

“=As women, we are called upon to start each generation onward toward a better humanity.= We will not longer tolerate without determined opposition that denial of the sovereignty of reason and justice by which war and all that makes war to-day render impotent the idealism of the race.

“Therefore, as human beings and the mother half of humanity, we demand that our right to be consulted in the settlement of questions concerning not alone the life of individuals but of nations be recognized and respected.

“We demand that women be given a share in deciding between war and peace in all the courts of high debate—within the home, the school, the church, the industrial order, and the state.

“So protesting, and so demanding, we hereby form ourselves into a national organization to be called the =Woman’s Peace Party=.

“We hereby adopt the following as our platform of principles, some of the items of which have been accepted by a majority vote, and more of which have been the unanimous choice of those attending the conference that initiated the formation of this organization. We have sunk all differences of opinion on minor matters and given freedom of expression to a wide divergence of opinion in the details of our platform and in our statement of explanation and information, in a common desire to make our woman’s protest against war and all that makes for war, vocal, commanding and effective. We welcome to our membership all who are in substantial sympathy with that fundamental purpose of our organization, whether or not they can accept in full our detailed statement of principles.

Platform.

“The Purpose of this Organization is to enlist all American women in arousing the nations to respect the sacredness of human life and to abolish war. The following is adopted as our platform:

1. The immediate calling of a convention of neutral nations in the interest of early peace.

2. Limitation of armaments and the nationalization of their manufacture.

3. Organized opposition to militarism in our own country.

4. Education of youth in the ideals of peace.

5. Democratic control of foreign policies.

6. The further humanizing of governments by the extension of the franchise to women.

7. “Concert of Nations” to supersede “Balance of Power.”

8. Action toward the gradual organization of the world to substitute Law for War.

9. The substitution of an international police for rival armies and navies.

10. Removal of the economic causes of war.

11. The appointment by our Government of a commission of men and women, with an adequate appropriation, to promote international peace.”

In the meantime women of other countries had not remained idle. =Dr. Aletta H. Jacobs=, President of the Dutch National Society for Woman Suffrage, directed a letter to the most prominent women societies of various nations, saying that it was of the greatest importance to bring those women, representing the women societies of the world, together in an =international meeting in a neutral country=, to show “that in =these dreadful times, in which so much hate has been spread among the different nations, the women at least retained their solidarity and that they were able to maintain mutual friendship=.” At the same time she suggested to hold this International Congress in Holland, and offered to make the necessary arrangements.

While many women welcomed this first effort to renew international relations it was only natural that, especially in belligerent countries, a fierce criticism should be directed against this daring move. This criticism came even from some of the women’s organizations. “It was to be impossible to hold the Congress! No one would attend! Even if the Congress were held the nationalities would quarrel amongst themselves!” But those who had undertaken the work were not deterred by this criticism, but encouraged by many enthusiastic responses. The announcement that Miss Jane Addams had accepted the invitation to preside at the Congress gave courage to all who were working for it. And so the memorable “=International Congress of Women for Permanent Peace=” came to pass. It was held at the Hague from April 28 to May 1, 1915, and attended by 1136 delegates and a large number of visitors. The countries represented were Austria, Belgium, Canada, Denmark, Germany, Great Britain, Hungary, Italy, Netherlands, Norway, Sweden, and the United States of America.

In her address of Welcome, Dr. Aletta H. Jacobs, the President of the Executive Committee, said: “In arranging this International Congress we have naturally had to put aside all thoughts of a festive reception, we have simply endeavored to receive you in such a way that you may feel assured of our sympathy, our mutual sisterly feelings, our goodwill to link the nations together again in the bonds of fellowship and trustful co-operation.

“With mourning in our hearts we stand united here. We grieve for the many brave young men, who have lost their lives in barbaric fratricide before even attaining their full manhood; we mourn with the poor mothers bereft of their sons; with thousands and thousands of young widows and fatherless children; we will not endure in this Twentieth Century civilization, that governments shall longer tolerate brute force as the only method of solving their international disputes. The culture of centuries standing and the progress of science must no longer be recklessly employed to perfect the implements of modern warfare. The accumulated knowledge, handed down to us through the ages, must no longer be used to kill and to destroy and to annihilate the products of centuries of toil.