IX

Moreover, this war is bringing a liberty to the French girl which must sometimes give her the impression that she is living in a fantastic dream.  Young people already had begun to rebel at the old order of matrimonial disposition by parental authority, but it is doubtful if they will ever condescend to argument again, or even to the old formal restrictions during the period of the long engagement.  Not only will husbands be too scarce to dicker about, but these girls, too, are living their own lives, going to and coming from hospital work daily (unless at the Front), spending long hours by convalescent cots, corresponding with filleuls, attending half a dozen clubs for work; above all, entertaining their brothers’ friend during those oases known as permission, or six days’ leave.  And very often the friends of their brothers are young men of a lower rank in life, whose valor or talents in the field have given them a quick promotion.

The French army is the one perfect democracy in the world.  Its men, from duke to peasant-farmer, have a contemptuous impatience for social pretense when about the business of war, and recognition is swift and practical.  As the young men of the aristocracy and haute bourgeoisie have lost more and more of their old friends they have replaced them with men they like for good masculine reasons alone, and these they have taken to bringing home, when permissionnaires at the same time.  Nothing can be more certain than that girls, once haughty and exacting, will marry these young men and be glad to get them.

A student of his race said to me one day:  “France is the most conservative country in Europe.  She goes on doing the same thing generation after generation paying no attention to rebellious mutters, hardly hearing them in fact.  She believes herself to have been moulded and solidified long since.  Then, presto!  Something sudden and violent happens.  Old ideas are uprooted.  New ones planted.  Is there a struggle?  Not for a moment.  They turn an intellectual somersault and are immediately as completely at home with the new as the old.”

During the second year of the war a feminist was actually invited to address the graduation class of a fashionable girls’ school.  She told them that the time had come when girls of all classes should be trained to earn their living.  This war had demonstrated the uncertainty of human affairs.  Not a family in France, not even the haute finance, but would have a curtailed income for years to come, and many girls of good family could no longer count on a dot if the war lasted much longer.  Then there was the decrease in men.  Better go out into the world and make any sort of respectable career than be an old maid at home.  She gave them much practical advice, told them that one of the most lucrative employments was retouching photographs, and implored them to cultivate any talent they might have and market it as soon as possible.