Women Warriors

New Zealand Tablet, Volume 27, Issue 21, 27 May 1909, Page 809

Women Warriors

- The average woman was apparently never intended by nature to throw stones. Yet when a war-scare or a war reaches the acute stage, there are many women both willing and eager to seize a rifle and don a bandolier and essay to score with pellets of lead the bull's-eyes which they seldom achieve with a cobble-stone. And have they not warrant for their martial ardor in Jael, the wife of Heber the Kenite, and in the Amazons of Cappadocia, and in Boadicea and Joan of Arc and Jennie Cameron and Anna Maria Buhler and the women of Limerick? These last made such exceptionally good ' practice' with stones' and broken bottles that King William's doughty veterans had to beat a hasty retreat before the wild vigor of their onslaught. It was one of the cases in which the words, of Hudibras were verified: ' Women, you know, do seldom fail To make the stoutest men turn tail.' * The recent war-scare in England reached the stage at which women are prone to volunteer. So much we learn from an English weekly, which records a ' movement ' to that effect among sundry warlike members of the sex whose gentle native instincts are more inclined to heal than" to make wounds. But now, as during a critical stage of the Anglo-Boer war, the movement is likejjt-4o end where it> began. And the warrior women, instead of starting out on blood-letting expeditions, will return to the more prosaic and accustomed offices of cooking some of* our ' prime Canterbury ' and "mending socks and paying court to His Royal Highness the Baby. Once upon a time, a bevy of Parisian damsels called upon General Trochu in Paris. The Germans had girded the city round about with a ring of iron, the fighting was proceeding vigorously, and hunger was beginning to gnaw at the vitals of the imprisoned population of the largest city that had ever stood a siege. Trochu was in command. And the ladies demanded to be armed and led against the "foe. Now, the General feared that a regiment of armed ladies might possibly be at least as terrible to friend as_to foe. But he did not say so. He (so the story runneth) advised the ladies to settle first about their uniform, and then, come along for their chassepots. The apple of discord was thus thrown among them. The question of the uniform was never settled, and the chassepots remained in store. A somewhat similar ruse is credited -to* the memory of Joaquin Castella, one of the boldly rugged characters in the history of Peru. Castella was a Spanish soldier. He had little education, but, like many of his countrymen, he had courtly manners and great natural ability and forpo of character. He took an active part with the Peruvians in their struggle against Spain for independence, and later

on rose to the position of President of the young republic. ' He had the humor of Sancho Panza,' says a historian. ' Once a delegation of women waited on him. The request they had to make to him related to some matter of administration to which an answer would be embarrassing. The old warrior, though he was of low birth, had all the courtesy of a Castilian hidalgo. " Why, ladies," he said, " you chatter like birds, all trying to talk at once. Now let us have silence and let one of you speak for all." A pause. " Let the oldest lady* speak." The tradition is that the delegation at once filed out and bothered the grim soldier no more.' /