Now, thinking it all over, it seemed to me that somewhere midway lay Truth. These girls have had, in a certain sense, their adventure, but when it is all over, they will have a reaction from it, and I believe that reaction will be pleasant to them, that it will be the reaction, and not the memory of adventure, which will content them. It is certain that to anyone who has worked as these girls work a considerable period of doing nothing in particular will be very acceptable. They will all have to become themselves again, which will be interesting.... Dear, wonderful girls ... you who wash dishes and scrub and sweep, you girls of the Women's Army who replace men and who do it so thoroughly, you drivers who are out in all weathers, night and day, sometimes for a week or more on end, who face hardships such as were faced in those three weeks at T---- when there were no fires and no water, how glad I am to have met you.... So I sat and thought, and then I picked up a copy of _The Times_ which had just come over. And in the "Personal" column this caught my eye: "Lady wants war-work, preferably motor-driving, from three to five p.m." And I saw that it was not only those far removed from the war who misunderstood both what it demands and that which has arisen to meet those demands. Do we not nearly all fail to realise the magnitude and import of what is being done by these unspectacular workers behind the lines, who are yet part of war itself, and daily and nightly strengthen the hands of the fighters? Some of us in England realise as little as you in far-off countries, and yet it should be our business to know, because the least we can do is to understand so that we, in our much less fine way, can help them a little, one tithe of the amount they help our fighting men. Not because of any desire of theirs for praise is it necessary--I never saw a healthier disregard, amounting to a kindly contempt, for what those at home think or don't think, than among the women working in France--but because it is only by knowing that we can respond generously enough to the needs of their work, and only by understanding that we can save our own souls from that fat and contented ignorance which induces a sleep uncommonly like death. Nor, as long as we listen to the girls themselves, are we in any danger of thinking too much of them or of their work. Not a woman I met, English or American, working in France, but said something like this, and meant it: "What, after all, is anything we can do, except inasmuch as it may help the men a little? How could we bear to do nothing when the men are doing the most wonderful thing that has ever been done in the world?" THE END * * * * * Transcriber's Note: Punctuation has been normalised. End of Project Gutenberg's The Sword of Deborah, by F. Tennyson Jesse