="Over There."= On the other hand, the stories that floated back to us from the war zone illustrate in the most powerful way what the human body can do when necessity forbids the slightest attention to its needs.  One of the best of these stories is Dorothy Canfield’s account of Dr. Girard-Mangin, “France’s Fighting Woman Doctor.”  Better than any abstract discussion of human endurance is this vibrant narrative of that little woman, “not very strong, slightly built, with some serious constitutional weakness,” who lived through hardships and accomplished feats of daring which would have been considered beyond the range of possibility—­before the war.

Think of her out there in her leaky makeshift hospital with her twenty crude helpers and her hundreds of mortally sick typhoid patients; four hundred and seventy days of continuous service with no place to sleep—­when there was a chance—­except a freezing, wind-swept attic in a deserted village.  Think of her in the midst of that terrible Battle of Verdun, during four black nights without a light, among those delirious men, and then during the long, long ride with her dying patients over the shell-swept roads.  Listen to her as she speaks of herself at the end of that ride, without a place to lay her head:  “Oh, then I did feel tired!  That morning for the first time I knew how tired I was, as I went dragging myself from door to door begging for a room and a bed.  It was because I was no longer working, you see.  As long as you have work to do you can go on.”  Then listen to her as she receives her orders to rush to a new post, before she has had time to lay herself on the bed she has finally found.  “Then at once my tiredness went away.  It only lasted while I thought of getting to bed.  When I knew we were going into action once more, I was myself again.”  Watch her as she rides on through the afternoon and the long dangerous night; as she swallows her coffee and plum-cake, and operates for five hours without stopping; as she sleeps in the only place there is—­a “quite comfortable chair” in a corner; and as she keeps up this life for twenty days before she is sent—­not on a vacation, mind you, but to another strenuous post.[51]

[Footnote 51:  Dorothy Canfield:  The Day of Glory.]

This brave little woman is not an isolated example of extraordinary powers.  The human race in the great war tapped new reservoirs of power and discovered itself to be greater than it knew.  Professor James’s assertions are completely proved,—­that “as a rule men habitually use only a small part of the powers which they actually possess,” and that “most of us may learn to push the barrier (of fatigue) further off, and to live in perfect comfort on much higher levels of power.”

=How?= The practical question is:  how may we—­the men and women of ordinary powers, away from the extraordinary stimulus of a crisis like the great war—­attain our maximum and drop off the dreary mantle of fatigue which so often holds us back from our best efforts?  It may be that the first step is simply getting a true conception of physical fatigue as something which needs to be feared only in case of a diseased body, and which is quite likely to disappear under a little judicious neglect.