THE COST TO WOMEN.

Dominion, Volume 6, Issue 1599, 16 November 1912, Page 11

THE COST TO WOMEN.

LESSONS OF THE BALKAN WAR. Every day within the past few weeks one has turned with fascinated horror to the. cable page of tho newspapers, and read there the latest news of the appaling devastation in human life that is going on in Turkey. And every day one asks, "How long is this, woeful waste of life-to continue?" The cables, sketchy and unsatisfactory as they are, in the news they give, have been far too vivid for our peace of mind, far away as we are from the theatre of action. A cablo received in the middle of tho week stated,that so far the number of slain on both sides numbered 150,000.' Most of us can picture what that means to the unhappy woman of whatever country .the combatants belonged—ruin and grief, and haunting pictures of the tortured, mangled, starved, or frozen bodies of the men they , loved, the men who had been gathered together to fight in a war for which one country, at any rate, was utterly unready. Probably no war for many years has-had so appalling a .total of slain in so short a time as this. In the unready -Turkish army were battalions and' brigades of peasants, thousands of w'horn had never handled a rifle, a shortage .of two thousand officers, few surgeons, and an insufficient commissariat—that is how Turkey, so we read, set.out to fight the Balkan States. After that one Would think that every woman in the countries that have no organised and efficient system of defence would advocate With all her heart that it'should at once be brought into force, and support it through all vicissitudes.' In the end it is the women who pay the heaviest price for waT. a - "Thpre is perhaps no woman," said Olive Schreiner, "whether she have borne children, or whether she be merely a potential child-bearer, who could -look upon a battlefield covered with slain, but the thought would arise in her: 'So'many mothers'sons! ' So many bodies brought into.the. world to lie there! So many months* of weariness and pain while fcone and muscle were shaped within; so r'any, hours of anguish and struggle' that breath might be. . . ." No woman who is a woman says of a human' body. "It is nothing/' ' Whether the day will ever come when war will be looked upon as an obsolete way of settling differences remains for far future 'generations to see; It may not, \ because all -nations will not have reachedi at once the

same standard of development, being of different ages in the world's evolution, and there are questions sometimes prising affecting its honour which no country in the world would allow another country or countries to arbitrate upon. Ono would thint the only thing it behoves us to do is to keep our own house in order, and bo ready by supporting to the utmost of our powers (and women can do quite a fair amount in this way) the scheme that ■has been, organised in our'own. country.