While in France in the summer of 1916, I heard childless women say:  “Would that I had six sons to give to France!” I heard unmarried women say:  “Thank heaven I never married!” I heard bitterness expressed by bereft mothers, terror and despair by others when the curtain had rung down and they could relax the proud and smiling front they presented to the world.  Not one would have had her son shirk his duty, nor asked for compromise with the enemy, but all prayed for the war to end.  It is true that these men at the front are heroes in the eyes of their women, worshiped by the majority when they come home briefly as permissionnaires, and it is also true that France is an old military nation and that the brain-cells of its women are full of ancestral memories of war.  But never before have women done as much thinking for themselves as they are doing to-day, as they had done for some fifteen or twenty years before the war.  That war has now lasted almost three years.  During this long and terrible period there has been scarcely a woman in France, as in Britain, Russia, Italy, Germany, who has not done her share behind the lines, working, at her self-appointed tasks or at those imposed by the Government, for months on end without a day of rest.  They have had contacts that never would have approached them otherwise, they have been obliged to think for themselves, for thousands of helpless poor, for the men at the Front.  The Frenchwomen particularly have forced men to deal with them as human beings and respect them as such, dissipating in some measure those mists of sex through which the Frenchman loves to stalk in search of the elusive and highly-sophisticated quarry.  As long as a woman was sexually attractive she could never hope to meet man on an equal footing, no matter how entrancing he might find her mental qualities.  She must play hide-and-seek, exercise finesse, seduction, keep the flag of sex flying ever on the ramparts.  It is doubtful if Frenchmen will change in this respect, but it is more than doubtful if women do not.

There is hardly any doubt that if this war lasts long enough women for the first time in the history of civilization will have it in their power to seize one at least of the world’s reins.  But will they do it—­I am now speaking of women in mass, not of the advanced thinkers, or of women of the world who have so recently ascertained that there is a special joy in being free of the tyranny of sex, a tyranny that emanated no less from within than without.

It is to be imagined that all the men who are fighting in this most trying of all wars are heroes in the eyes of European women—­as well they may be—­and that those who survive are likely to be regarded with a passionate admiration not unmixed with awe.  The traditional weakness of women where men are concerned (which after all is but a cunning device of Nature) may swamp their great opportunity.  They may fight over the surviving males like dogs