The Martial Adventures of Henry and MeWhite, William Allen
History
The Martial Adventures of Henry and Me
White, William Allen
World War, 1914-1918 -- Fiction; World War, 1914-1918 -- Personal narratives
One must not imagine that London is unchanged. It is greatly changed,
for the men are gone. One sees fewer men in London out of uniform
than in Paris. And the Londoners one does see, all appear to be
hurrying about war work. But it is the women constantly in evidence
who have changed the face of London. Women keep the shops, conduct
the busses, run the street cars, drive the trucks, sit on the seats
of the horse-drays, deliver freight, manage railway trains, sweep
the streets, wait on the tables, pull elevator ropes, smash baggage
at the railway stations, sell tickets, usher at the theaters,
superintend factories, make munitions, lift great burdens before
forges, plough, reap, and stack grain and grass on farms, herd
sheep in waste places, hew wood and draw water, and do all of the
world's work that man has ever done. Now, of course, women are
doing these things elsewhere in the world. But London and England
are man's domain. It seems natural to see the French women, and even
the Italian women at work. Man is more or less the leisure class
on the continent. But London is a man's town if on earth there is
one, and to see women everywhere in London is a curious and baffling
sight.
Of course the men are not all dead--"they're just away." And
they come back on leave. But life is not normal. War is abnormal,
and there is an ever-urging desire of life to assume its normal
function. So all over Europe we heard whispers about the moral
break-down among the women of England. In England we were asked
about the dreadful things that were happening in France. The things
that were happening in France were not essentially evil things. One
could imagine that if God thinks war is necessary for the solution
of the world's terrible problems, He will have no trouble forgiving
these lapses that follow in the wake of war in France. And in
England, similarly we found that the moral break-down was not a
moral break-down at all. The abnormal relation of the sexes arising
out of war produced somewhat the same results that one found in
France, but in different ways. In France too many strange men are
billeted in the houses of the people. In England, too many homes
are without men at all. And sheer social lonesomeness produces in
humanity about the same conditions that arise when people are thrown
in too close contact. There is a sort of social balance of nature,
wherein normally desirable results are found. The girl working in
the munition factories, working at top speed eight hours a day,
filled with a big emotional desire to do her full duty to her
country every second of the day, finds it easy in her eight hours
of rest to fall in love with a soldier who is going out to offer
his life for the country for which she is giving her strength
so gladly. She is not a light woman. She is moved by deep and
beautiful emotions. And if a marriage before he goes out to fight
is inconvenient or impossible--the war made it so, and God will
understand.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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