“It appears then,” brusquely decided Kitchener, “that these women surgeons are too good to be wasted on France.” And promptly their country and the War Office invited them to London. It was England’s crack regiment after the great drive on the Somme that was tucked under the covers for repairs at Endell Street. The issue was no longer in doubt. “Major” Anderson and the Women’s Hospital Corps held the fort for the professional woman’s cause in England. WINNING ON THE FRENCH FRONT Dr. Nicole Gerard-Mangan, fascinating little French feminist, meanwhile was executing a brilliant coup in demonstration to her government. France, it was true, had seen that British women could be military doctors and surgeons. But the French woman doctor, oh, every one was sure that the French woman doctor’s place was the home. And if ever there was a woman whom God made just to be “protected,” you’d say positively it was Nicole Gerard-Mangin. She stood before me as she came from her operating room, curling tendrils of bright brown hair escaping from the surgeon’s white cap set firmly on her pretty head, a surgeon’s white apron tied closely back over her hips accentuating all their loveliness of line. She is soft and round and dainty and charming. She has small shapely hands, as exquisitely done as if modelled by a sculptor. I looked at her hands in the most amazement, the hands that have had men’s lives in their keeping, little hands that by the sure swift skill of them have brought thousands of men back from death’s door. You’d easily think of her as belonging in a pink satin boudoir or leading a cotillion with a King of France. And she’s been at the war front instead. “Madame la petite Major” she is lovingly known to the soldiers of France. She too has that rank. You will notice on one of the sleeves of her uniform the gold stripe that denotes a wound and on her right pink cheek you will see the scar of it. On her other coat sleeve are the gold bars for three years of military service. This was the way it happened. In August, 1914, Dr. Gerard-Mangin was in charge of the tuberculosis sanitarium, Hôpital Beaugou, in Paris. When the call came for volunteers for army doctors, she signed and sent in an application, carefully omitting however to write her first name. The War Office, hurrying down the lists, just drafted Dr. Gerard-Mangin as any other man. One night at twelve o’clock her _concierge_ stood before her door with a government command ordering the doctor to report at once at the Vosges front. The next morning with a suit case in one hand and a surgeon’s kit in the other, she was on her way. The astonished military _medecin-en-chef_, before whom she arrived, threw up his hands: “A woman surgeon for the French army! It could not be.” She held out her government order: “_N’est ce pas?_” He examined it more closely. “But yet,” he insisted, “it must be a mistake.”