Women wanted: The story written in blood red letters on the horizon of the Great World War — John Shaqi
Women wanted: The story written in blood red letters on the horizon of the Great World WarDaggett, Mabel Potter
History
Women wanted: The story written in blood red letters on the horizon of the Great World War
Daggett, Mabel Potter
Women -- Employment; World War, 1914-1918 -- Women
I turn once more to the task of making ready my data for Maison de la
Presse. Here a too colourful sentence must be rejected. There is a too
flagrantly feministic document that will be safest in the waste basket.
It is the martial mind that I must meet. A press bureau, you see, is
prepared to pass promptly propaganda on the battles of the Somme.
But dare one risk, say, a pamphlet on the breast feeding of infants?
Propaganda about the rising value of a baby! Dear, dear, it might, for
all a man could tell, be treason, seditious material calculated to give
aid and comfort to the enemy! Already to my inquiries about maternity
measures in Paris, have I not been answered suspiciously: “But why do
you ask? This matter it is not of the war.”
My emasculated data at last are ready for review by _le chef du service
de la presse_. He stamps it all over with his signature in red ink. It
is done up in packages and officially sealed in red wax with the seal
of the state of France. At the Post Office in the Rue Etienne Marcel,
I register it and mail it, committing it with a sigh to the mercies of
the great Atlantic.
DEALING WITH GOVERNMENT
Having crossed the Channel once alive, it seems like tempting fate
to try it again. I draw in my breath as one about to plunge into a
cold bath in the morning, and go out to secure from three governments
the necessary permission that will allow me to return to England.
From the police alone it sometimes takes eight days to secure this
concession. But at the Prefecture of Police, they read my letter of
introduction from the French consul in New York. And I have only to
leave my photograph and sign on the dotted line. In five minutes they
have given my passport the necessary visé. The American consul easily
enough adds his. All my journey apparently is going as pleasantly as
a summer holiday planned by a Cook’s Agency, when at length I come up
with a bump against the British Control office in the Rue Cheveaux
Lagarde. And the going away from here requires some negotiations. The
British lieutenant in charge reads my nice French letter and without
comment tosses it aside. “You wish to go to London?” he asks in great
surprise. “Now, why should you wish to go to London?” He gives me
distinctly to understand this is not the open season for tourists in
England. “We don’t care to have people travelling,” he says in a tone
of voice as if that settles it. “Why have you come over here in these
difficult and dangerous times, anyhow?” he asks querulously and a
trifle suspiciously. “The best thing you can do is to go home directly.
And America is right across the water from here.”
“But, Lieutenant,” I gasp, “my trunk is in England and I’ve got to have
a few clothes.”
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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