WOMEN WANTED CHAPTER I GLIMPSING THE GREAT WORLD WAR “Who goes there?” I hear it yet, the ringing challenge from the war offices of Europe. Automatically my hand slides over my left hip. But to-day my tailored skirt drapes smoothly there. The chamois bag that for months has bulged beneath is gone. As regularly as I fastened my garters every morning I have been wont to buckle the safety belt about my waist and straighten the bag at my side and feel with careful fingers for its tight shut clasp. You have to be thoughtful like that when you’re carrying credentials on which at any moment your personal safety, even your life may depend. As faithfully as I looked under the bed at night I always counted them over: my letter of credit for $3,000, my blue enveloped police book, and my passport criss-crossed with visés in the varied colours of all the rubber stamps that must officially vouch for me along my way. Ah, they were still all there. And with a sigh of relief I was wont to retire to my pillow with the sense of one more day safely done. The long steel lines I have passed, I cannot forget. “Who goes there?” These that speak with authority are men with pistols in their belts and swords at their sides. And there are rows of them, O rows and rows of them along the way to the front. See the cold glitter of them! I still look nervously first over one shoulder and then over the other. This morning at breakfast a waiter only drops a fork. And I jump at the sound as if a shot had been fired. You know the feeling something’s going to catch you if you don’t watch out. Well, you have it like that for a long time after you’ve been in the war zone. Will it be a submarine or a Zeppelin or a khaki clad line of steel? It was on a summer’s day in 1916 that I rushed into the office of the _Pictorial Review_. “Look!” I exclaimed excitedly to the editor at his desk. “See the message in the sky written in letters of blood above the battlefields of Europe! There it is, the promise of freedom for women!” He brushed aside the magazine “lay out” before him, and lifted his eyes to the horizon of the world. And he too saw. Among the feminists of New York he has been known as the man with the vision. “Yes,” he agreed, “you are right. It is the wonder that is coming. Will you go over there and find out just what this terrible cataclysm of civilisation means to the woman’s cause?”