(By a spectator)

Sonya Levien

The suffragettes at Lincoln’s Inn are skeptical of foreigners’ sympathy. I pleaded with those in authority to be taken in.

“It is real war with us,” I was told, “and we have reached the stage where, even at the sacrifice of being regarded as insane and fools by the world, we cannot stop to explain all over again.” It was not curiosity, I urged, or lack of understanding. I believed in votes, but I believed in women more; I wanted to feel as well as understand their great Purpose.

My earnestness won their faith, and for two weeks my senses were saturated with every emotion that prevailed in the Englishwomen’s fight against their own country and the rest of the world. I saw their ammunition stored in back bedrooms of hidden houses—cotton soaked in kerosene, small bags of stone, bottles filled with queer-smelling liquids, and now and then a small bomb filled with powder or metal. All this I considered very formidable then and marvelled at the women’s courage in handling the material.

Scared and horrified, I witnessed the burning of two famous old churches; I helped in the heckling of public speakers, and remonstrated with the police at their outrages upon unoffending women.

The spiritual urge of the fighting women transmitted itself to me and I found myself supporting them with a courage not natural to me. That the character of their protest might be petty, tactless, unwomanly, or even futile, mattered not—for one felt that they were soldiers fighting in a great cause, the slogan of which was: “Give us a chance to develop a better race of men and women.” And the Englishmen looked on ashamed of their womenkind, and the rest of the world snickered.

And then the cataclysm of war descended upon all Europe and civilized man went mad for murder—wholesale terrible murder without reason or purpose. Sickened by the cry for blood, the women’s fight became holy in its significance to me. I saw England change in five minutes when on the streets of London the first cry of war was heard. In a lightning shift Trafalgar Square became a seething mass of gesticulating people—a mob which seemed instantly to drop its sacred inheritance of “good form” and give way to wild and ominous protest and speak eloquently of “an honor” to be upheld; but just what “the honor” was no one seemed to know.

Berlin sang all night to the tune of “Die Wacht Am Rhein,” in celebration of the opportunity given the fittest of the Vaterland to slaughter and be slaughtered by the pick of the neighboring countries. But the reason and purpose for the slaughter they did not know.

Russia, famous for its barbaric cruelty to the Poles and Jews, asks for the sacrifice of the races and thinks itself a generous Christian if in return it promises to give what is left of them the right to their mother-tongue and the privilege to worship God in their own way.

And what of the women? For the first time I felt the real greatness of the women’s fight and the sad futility of it before man’s ignorance. For the first time I felt the real tragedy of the women of Europe whose business it is to bring up sons for the man’s game of war. And to see them now is to see death—a calm bitter death surrounded by panic and catastrophe.