This war has been a revelation of womanhood. To see one of these cool, friendly creatures, American and English, shove her motor car into shell-fire, make her rescue of helpless crippled men, and steam back to safety, is to watch a resourceful and disciplined being. They may be, they are, "ministering angels," but there is nothing meek in their demeanor. They have stepped to a vantage from which nothing in man's contemptuous philosophy will ever dislodge them. They have always existed to astonish those who knew them best, and have turned life into a surprise party from Eden to the era of forcible feeding. But assuredly it would make the dogmatists on the essentially feminine nature, like Kipling, rub their eyes, to watch modern women at work under fire. They haven't the slightest fear of being killed. Give them a job under bombardment, and they unfold the stretcher, place the pillow and tuck in the blanket, without a quiver of apprehension. That, too, when some of the men are scampering for cover, and ducking chance pellets from the woolly white cloud that breaks overhead. The women will eat their luncheon with relish within three hundred feet of a French battery in full blaze. Is there a test left to the pride of man that the modern woman does not take lightly and skilfully? Gone are the Victorian nerves and the eighteenth-century fainting. All the old false delicacies have been swamped. She has been held back like a hound from the hunting, till we really believed we had a harmless household pet, who loved security. We had forgotten the pioneer women who struck across frontiers with a hardihood that matched that of their mates. And now the modern woman emerges from her protected home, and pushes forward, careless and curious. "What are women going to do about this war?" That question my wife and I asked each other at the outbreak of the present conflict. There were several attitudes that they might take. They could deplore war, because it destroyed their own best products. They could form peace leagues and pass resolutions against war. They could return to their ancient job of humble service, and resume their familiar location in the background. They did all these things and did them fervently; but they did something else in this war--they stepped out into the foreground, where the air was thick with danger, and demonstrated their courage. The mother no longer says: "Return, my gallant one, with your shield or on it," and goes back to her baking. She packs her kit and jumps into a motor ambulance headed for the dressing station.