We have had an excellent chance to watch women in this war. Our corps have had access to every line from Nieuport on the sea, down for twenty miles. We were able to run out to skirmishes, to reach the wounded where they had fallen. We have gone where the fighting had been at such close range that in one barnyard in Ramscappelle lay thirteen dead--Germans, French and Belgians. We brought back three wounded Germans from the stable. We were in Dixmude on the afternoon when the Germans destroyed the town by artillery fire. We were in Ypres on November first, the day after the most terrible battle in history, when fifty thousand English out of a hundred and twenty thousand fell. For three months my wife lived in Pervyse, with two British women. Not one house in the town itself is left untouched by shell-fire. The women lived in a cellar for the first weeks. Then they moved into a partially demolished house, and a little later a shell exploded in the kitchen. The women were at work in the next room. We have had opportunity for observing women in war, for we have seen several hundred of them--nurses, helpers, chauffeurs, writers--under varying degrees of strain and danger. The women whom I met in Belgium were all alike. They refused to take "their place." They were not interested in their personal welfare. There have been individual men, a few of them--English, French and Belgian, soldiers, chauffeurs and civilians--who have turned tail when the danger was acute. But the women we have watched are strangely lacking in fear. I asked a famous war writer, whose breast was gay with the ribbons of half a dozen campaigns, what was the matter with all these women, that they did not tremble and go green under fire, as some of us did. He said: "They don't belong out here. They have no business to be under fire. They ought to be back at the hospitals down at Dunkirk. They don't appreciate danger. That's the trouble with them; they have no imagination." That's an easy way out. But the real reasons lie deeper than a mental inferiority. These women certainly had quite as good an equipment in mentality as the drivers and stretcher bearers. They could not bear to let immense numbers of men lie in pain. They wished to bring their instinct for help to the place where it was needed.