BRAVE WOMEN OF FRANCE.

Colonist, Volume LVII, Issue 13729, 18 March 1915, Page 2

BRAVE WOMEN OF FRANCE.

O. Wilson writes in the Chicago "Tribune" :—

The women of France. But they are brave, these women!

The soldiers in the trenches, the cavalry advancing under the flaming fire of the enemy, the men who face certain death to gain a coveted hillock—not these alone have courage and determination. The entire French nation has developed new and unsuspected traits, and these are patience, endurance, and stoicism. Who, before this war, would have thought of applying any of these three words to the volatile, gay, care-free French nation? And no one who is not here, who has not been with them since the beginning of the war, can properly appreciate and -understand this change.

It applies to the men at the front and to tho women left behind equally. There is in it some of the traditional stoicism of the English, lightened, however, with the leaven of spirituality. It is odd how I come back again, and again to this word "spiritual," which seems best to express the French temperament. It has nothing of tho religi-

ous in it, and yet it possesses religion's most divine quality—faith. They all seem a little like mystics to me, from the aristocratic, slender countess, down on her knees scrubbing a hospital corridor, to the girl of the streets who has left, probably for ever, her careless life of shame and who tends the orphans of French soldiers, for whom she sews hour in, hour out, while she watches them at play.

Even the little midiuettes—-working girls who formerly never had an idea in their silly, empty heads but to read the serial in the morning paper—are training themselves for the front. They take lessons three evenings a week and all day Sunday. Ati the Hospital Boucieault, under the direction of Professor Letulle, 1 saw them engaged in actual hospital work, dressed in their neat little uniforms, which they made themselves. They are learning to be nurses with no other object, than to help their country in its hour of need.

You know already tho- iuur.zing list of women of noble birth and rofineauuiu who are doing the most menial tasks at the various hospitals and refuges. They came, offering everything they possessed in the way of money and clothing, and said simply and frankly, "We know nothing, unfortunately. We have never been taught. We cannot hope to do anything responsible, but we insist on taking- our places by the side of our more.experienced sisters, and we will do whatever there is to be done."

j And they never complain. I sometimes go to see a friend who lives on the Rue Bolssonadp, and I never forget to stop at the concierge's window to ask if she has any good news from her : husband. This last week I stopped as ;-usual, and she said very quietly, "Yes, i I have made my sacrifice, too. There are many of us." And when 1 awkwardly tried to say something consoling sho added "A year ago I should have wept ceaselessly, but now what is my grief among so many?" Another woman has never heard from her son since xlugust 3, when he marched away. And she said to me: "What will you? He has done his duty —I no longer ever hope. And he will have been glad, for the last thing he said to me was, 'Most people die in their beds of overeating or of sitting in a draught, or of some unpleasant disease. If lam killed, it will be well. It is so seldom, these days, that one has a chance to die for a 'cause.' "

Whenever two women meet, after a moment's evasions the sentence you always hear is: "And you? Have you heard recently?"

The other day I was in the post office. A woman without a hat, a shawl wrapped around her thin, little bent shoulders, stood beside me at the desk for some minutes while I wrote a "pneumatique." Finally she said in a low voice, not from embarrassment, "but from sorrow: "I don't know how to write. Will you send a telegram for me?"

"Gladly," I answered, and took down the form. She dictated just three words: "Thy brother dead."

"Is it your son, madame," I asked her, "who has been killed?" "Yes, I wouldn't tell his brother if he were a soldier too. That might discourage him. But this one isn't strong in the lungs and has been reforme." And they have" such gentle hearts, these French women. A Frenchman said to me the other day that the men weren't much better.

A member of the crew of the Glasgow who was in the fight with the Leipzig and the Dresden off Chili says that the enemy fired more than a thousand shells and only scored seven hits.

"Carmen" was recently performed for the five hundredth time in Berlin. An American singer, Florence Eaton, sang the title role.

A gentleman who knows the Kaiser well has summed him up as tho sort of person who "if he attended a christening would like to be the baby, if he attended a wedding wished to be the bridegroom, and if had to go to a funeral would _ wish to provide the

corpse."

Japan is evidently making a big effort to capture Germany's small goods trade, and since the war the "little brown man" is leaving no stone unturned to oust Germany from tho toy business.