It is not alone in Flanders or on the North Sea that our country’s battle is being fought, and when I think I hear the hammering on ten thousand anvils in the forges of Woolwich, Newcastle, and Glasgow, and the thud of picks in the coal and iron mines of Cardiff, Wigan, and Cleator Moor, where hundreds of thousands of men are working long shifts day and night, half-naked under the fierce heat of furnaces, sometimes half choked by the escaping fumes of fire-damp, I tell myself it is not for me, too old for active service and only able to use a pen, to dishonour England, and her Empire, in the presence of her Allies, or weaken her in the face of her enemies, by one word of complaint against the young manhood of my country. THE PART PLAYED BY WOMAN The latest and perhaps the most vivid of the flashes as of lightning which have revealed the drama of the past 365 days has shown us the part played by woman. What a part that has been! Nearly always in the histories of the great world-wars of the past the sympathy of the spectator has been more or less diverted from the unrecorded martyrdom of the myriads of forgotten women who have lost sons and husbands by the machinations of the few vain and selfish women who have governed continents by playing upon the passions of men. Thank God, there has been nothing of that kind in this case. On the contrary, woman’s part in this red year of the war has been one of purity, sacrifice, and undivided glory. Towards the end of it we saw a procession through the streets of London of 30,000 women who had come out to ask for the right to serve the State. I do not envy the man who, having eyes to see, a heart to feel, and a mind to comprehend, was able to look on that sight unmoved. Every class of woman was represented there, the gently-born, the educated, and the tenderly-nurtured, as well as the humbly-born, the uneducated, and the heavily-burdened, the woman with the delicate, spiritual face, as well as the woman with the face hardened by toil. And they were marching together, side by side, with all the barriers broken down. It was not so much a procession of British women as a demonstration of British womanhood, and it seemed to say, “We hate war as no man can ever hate it, but it has been forced upon us all, so we, too, want to take our share in it.” THE WORD OF WOMAN But long before July 17, 1915, woman’s part in this war began. It began on August 5, 1914, when the first hundred thousand of our voluntary army sprang into being as by a miracle. The miracle (if I am asked to account for it) had its origin in the word of woman. Without that word we should have had no Kitchener’s Army, for “on the decision of the women, above everything else, lay the issues of the men’s choice.” {*} * The Times.