...women and war....
H.G.Wells
All over England now, where the livery of mourning lied been a rare thing to
see, women and children went about in the October sunshine in new black clothes.
Everywhere one met these fresh griefs, mothers who had lost their sons, women
who had lost their men, lives shat-tered and hopes destroyed. The dyers had a
great time turning coloured garments to black. And there was also a growing
multitude of crippled and disabled men. It was so in England, much more was it
so in France and Russia, in all the countries of the Allies, and in Germany and
Austria; away into Asia Minor and Egypt, in India and Japan and Italy there was
mourning, the world was filled with loss and mourning and impoverishment and
distress.
And still the mysterious powers that required these things of mankind were
unappeased, and each day added its quota of heart-stabbing messages and called
for new mourning, and sent home fresh consignments of broken and tormented men.
Some clung to hopes that became at last almost more terrible than black
certainties....
Mrs. Teddy went about the village in a coloured dress bearing herself
confidently. Teddy had been listed now as " missing, since reported
killed," and she had had two letters from his comrades. They said Teddy had
been left behind in the ruins of a farm with one or two other wounded, and that
when the Canadians retook the place these wounded had all been found butchered.
None had been found alive. Afterwards the Canadians had had to fall back. Mr.
Direck had been at great pains to hunt up wounded men from Teddy's company, and
also any likely Canadians both at the base hospital in France and in London, and
to get what he could from them. He had made it a service to Cissie. Only one of
his witnesses was quite clear about Teddy, but he, alas! was dreadfully clear.
There had been only one lieutenant among the men left behind, he said, and
obviously that must have been Teddy. " He had been prodded in half-a-dozen
places. His head was nearly severed from his body."
Direck came down and told the story to Cissie. " Shall I tell it to her ?
" he asked.
Cissie thought. "Not yet," she said....
Letty's face changed in those pitiful weeks when she was denying death. She lost
her pretty colour, she became white; her mouth grew hard and her eyes had a hard
brightness. She never wept, she never gave a sign of sorrow, and she insisted
upon talking about Teddy, in a dry offhand voice. Constantly she referred to his
final return. " Teddy," she said, " will be surprised at
this," or '' Teddy will feel sold when he sees how I have altered
that."
" Presently we shall see his name in a list of prisoners," she said.
" He is a wounded prisoner in Germany."
She adopted that story. She had no justification for it, but she would hear no
doubts upon it. She presently began to prepare parcels to send him. " They
want al-most everything," she told people. " They are treated
abominably. He has not been able to write to me yet, but I do not think I ought
to wait until he asks me."
Cissie was afraid to interfere with this.
After a time Letty grew impatient at the delay in getting any address and took
her first parcel to the post office.
" Unless you know what prison he is at," said the post-mistress.
"Pity!" said Letter. "I don't know that. Must it wait for that ?
I thought the Germans were so systematic that it didn't matter."
The postmistress made tedious explanations that Letty did not seem to hear. She
stared straight in front of her at nothing. Then in a pause in the conversation
she picked up her parcel.
" It's tiresome for him to have to wait," she said.
" But it can't be long before I know."
She took the parcel back to the cottage.
" After all," she said, " it gives us time to get the better sort
of throat lozenges for him-the sort the syndicate shop doesn't keep."
She put the parcel conspicuously upon the dresser in the kitchen where it was
most in the way, and set herself to make a jersey for Teddy against the coming
of the cold weather.
But one night the white mask fell for a moment from her face.
Cissie and she had been sitting in silence before the fire. She had been
knitting-she knitted very badly- and Cissie had been pretending to read, and had
been watching her furtively. Cissie eyed the slow, toilsome growth of the slack
woolwork for a time, and the touch of angry effort in every stroke of the
knitting needles. Then she was stirred to remonstrance.
" Poor Letty ! " she said very softly. " Suppose after all, he is
dead? "
Letty met her with a pitiless stare.
"He is a prisoner," she said. "Isn't that enough? Why do you jab
at me by saying that? ~ wounded prisoner. Isn't that enough despicable trickery
for God even to play on Teddy-our Teddy ? To the very last moment he shall not
be dead. Until the war is over. Until six months after the war....
" I will tell you why, Cissie . . ."
She leant across the table and pointed her remarks with her knitting needles,
speaking in a tone of reasonable remonstrance. " You see," she said,
" if people like Teddy are to be killed, then all our ideas that life is
meant for, honesty and sweetness and happiness, are wrong, and this world is
just a place of devils; just a dirty cruel hell. Getting born would be
getting damned. And so one must not give way to that idea, however much it may
seem likely that he is dead....
" You see, if he is dead, then Cruelty is the Law, and some one must pay me
for his death.... Some one must pay me.... I shall wait for six months after the
war, dear, and then I shall go off to Germany and learn my way about there. And
I will murder some German. Not just a common German, but a German who belongs to
the guilty kind. A sacrifice. It ought, for instance, to be comparatively easy
to kill some of the children of the Crown Prince or some of the Bavarian
princes. I shall prefer German children. I shall sacrifice them to Teddy. It
ought not to be difficult to find people who can be made directly responsible,
the people who invented the poison gas, for instance, and kill them, or to kill
people who are dear to them. Or necessary to them.... Women can do that so much
more easily than men....
" That perhaps is the only way in which wars of this kind will ever be
brought to an end. By women insisting on killing the kind of people who make
them. Rooting them out. By a campaign of pursuit and assassination that will go
on for years and years after the war itself is over.... Murder is such a little
gentle punishment for the crime of war.... It would be hardly more than a
reproach for what has happened. Falling like snow. Death after death. Flake by
flake. This prince. That statesman. The count who writes so fiercely for war. .
. . That is what I am going to do. If Teddy is really dead.... We women were
ready enough a year or so Do to starve and die for the Vote, and that was quite
a little thing in comparison with this business.... Don't you see what I mean ~
It's so plain and sensible, Cissie.
Whenever a man sits and thinks whether he will make a war or not, then he will
think too of women, women with daggers, bombs; of a vengeance that will never
tire nor rest; of consecrated patient women ready to start out upon a pilgrimage
that will only end with his death.... I wouldn't hurt these war makers. No. In
spite of the poison gas. In spite of trench feet and the men who have been made
blind and the wounded who have lain for days, dying slowly in the wet. Women
ought not to hurt. But I would kill. Like killing dangerous vermin. It would go
on year by year. Balkan kings, German princes, chancellors, they would have
schemed for so much -and come to just a rattle in the throat.... And if
presently other kings and emperors began to prance about and review armies, they
too would go....
" Until all the world understood that women would not stand war any more
forever....
" Of course I shall do something of the sort. What else is there to do now
for me ? "
Letty's eyes were bright and intense, but her voice was soft and subdued. She
went on after a pause in the same casual voice. " You see now, Cissie, why
I cling to the idea that Teddy is alive. If Teddy is alive, then even if he is
wounded, he will get some happiness out of it- and all this won't be-just rot.
If he is dead then everything is so desperately silly and cruel from top to
bottom "
She smiled wanly to finish her sentence.
" But, Betty ! " said Cissie, " there is the boy ! "
" I shall leave the boy to you. Compared with Teddy I don't care that for
the boy. I never did. What is the good of pretending' Some women are made like
that."
She surveyed her knitting. " Poor stitches," she said....
"I'm hard staff, Cissie. I take after mother more than father. Teddy is my
darling. All the tenderness of my life is Teddy. If it goes, it goes.... I won't
crawl about the world like all these other snivelling widows. If they've killed
my man I shall kill. Blood for blood and loss for loss. I shall get just as
close to the particular Germans who made this war as I can, and I shall kin them
and theirs....
" The Women's Association for the Extirpation of the whole breed of War
Lords," she threw out. " If I do happen to hurt-does it matter ?
"
She looked at her sister's chocked face and smiled again.
"You think I go about staring at nothing," she remarked.... " Not
a bit of it! I have been planning all sorts of things.... I have been thinking
how I could get to Germany.... Or one might catch them in Switzerland.... I've
had all sorts of plans. They can't go guarded for ever....
" Oh, it makes me despise humanity to see how many soldiers and how few
assassins there are in the world. . . . After the things we have seen. If people
did their duty by the dagger there wouldn't be such a thing as a War Lord in the
world. Got one.... The :Kaiser and his sons and his sons' sons would know
nothing but fear now for all their lives. Fear would only cease to pursue as the
coffin went down into the grave. Fear by sea, fear by land, for the vessel he
sailed in, the train he travelled in, fear when he slept for the death in his
dreams, fear when he waked for the death in every shadow; fear in every crowd,
fear whenever he was alone. Fear would stalk him through the trees, hide in the
corner of the stair-case; make all his food taste perplexingly, so that he would
want to spit it out...."
She sat very still brooding on that idea for a time, and then stood up.
" What nonsense one talks ! " she cried, and yawned. " I wonder
why poor Teddy doesn't send me a post card or something to tell me his address.
I tell you what I am afraid of sometimes about him, Cissie."Yes ? "
said Cissie.
" Loss of memory. Suppose a beastly lump of shell or something whacked him
on the head.... I had a dream of him looking strange about the eyes and not
knowing me. That, you know, really may have happened. ... It would be beastly,
of course...."
Cissie's eyes were critical, but she had nothing ready to say.
There were some moments of silence.
" Oh ! bed," said Letty. " Though I shall just lie
scheming."
From: H.G.Wells, Mr. Britling Sees It Through (New York: Macmillan, 1916), pp. 383-89.