Read Ebook: Women wanted: The story written in blood red letters on the horizon of the Great World War by Daggett Mabel Potter

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To be called an alien in a foreign land feels at once like some sort of a charge. You never were convicted of this before. And it seems like the most unfortunate thing you can possibly be now. Besides, I am every moment becoming more acutely conscious of my mission. The rest of these my fellow travellers, it is true, are aliens. I am worse. For a journalist even in peace times appears a most suspiciously inquiring person who wishes to know everything that should not be found out. But in peace times one has only to handle individuals. In war-times one has to handle governments. The burden of proof rests heavier and heavier upon me. How shall I convince England that in spite of all, I can be a most harmless, pleasant person?

A battery of searching eyes is turned on me. I am face to face with my first steel line. The words of the British consul again ring warningly in my ears, "I don't at all know what they'll do about you over there."

No one ever does know these days. It's the tormenting uncertainty that keeps you literally guessing from day to day whether you're going or coming. And on what least incidents does human judgment depend. Perhaps they'd like me better if my hat were blue instead of brown. Thank heaven I didn't economise on the price of my travelling coat. I step bravely forward when the officer at the head of the table reaches out his hand for my passport.

In the upper left hand corner is attached my photograph. The Department of State at Washington requires it for all travellers now before they affix the great red seal that gives authenticity to the personal information recorded in this paper. From the passport photograph to my face, the officer glances sharply, suspiciously, like a bank teller looking for a forgery. I feel him looking straight through me to the very curl at the back of my neck. Ah, apparently it is I!

"Now what have you come over here for?" he inquires in a tone of voice that seems to say, "Nobody asked you to England. We're quite too busy about other things to entertain strangers."

I hold my breath while he reads the letter. Then I have to talk. I tell him, I think, the complete story of my life. I show him all of my credentials. I give him my photograph. You always have to do that. Photographs that are duplicates of the one on your passport, you must carry by the dozen. You have to leave them like visiting cards with gentlemen in khaki all over Europe.

And he looks up suddenly, in his hand the letter from Mrs. Belmont in New York introducing me to the Duchess of Marlborough. He nods down the line to all the other military eyes fixed on me: "She's all right. Let her go."

I sign on the dotted line. And everything is over! In a flashing moment like that, it is accomplished. And a letter to "Our Duchess" has done it. At the magic of the name of the American woman who was Consuelo Vanderbilt, this steel like line of British officers quietly sheathes all opposition!

THE WAY OF JOURNALISM IN WAR TIME NOT EASY

London, when we reached it that night in October, lay under the black pall of darkness in which the cities over here have enveloped themselves against war. Death rides above in the sky. To-night, every to-night, it may be the Zeppelins will come. Over there on the horizon, a searchlight streams suddenly and another and another, their great fingers feeling through the black clouds for the monsters of destruction that may be winging a way above the chimney pots. Every building is tightly shuttered. The street lamps with their globes painted three-quarters black have their pale lights as it were hid beneath an inverted bushel. Pedestrians must develop a protective sense that enables them to find their way at night as a cat does in the dark. "I'm sorry," says an apologetic English voice, and before you know it, you have bumped against another passerby. There is another sudden jolt. And you are scrambling for your balance the other side of the curb you couldn't see was there. If you are familiar with the door knob where you're going to stop, you will be so much the surer where you're at.

Looking out on this darkest London from Paddington railway station at midnight I sit on my trunk and wait. Do you remember the popular song, There's a Little Street in Heaven Called Broadway? Oh, I hope there is.

I sit on my trunk and wait. In my handbag is the card of the Englishman politely ready to look after me in London. It is the American man who is out there in the night endeavouring to commandeer a taxicab. Somehow he has done it. At last the cab comes. He has compelled the chauffeur to take us. I shall not have to sit all night on my trunk.

A small green light within the hooded entrance, picks the Ritz Hotel out of the Piccadilly blackness. Inside, after the gloom through which we have come, I gasp with relief. It is as if one discovers suddenly in a place that has seemed a graveyard, Why, people still live here! Right then at the hotel register, the voice of Scotland Yard speaks for the War Office. And before the Ritz can be permitted to give me refuge from the night, I must answer. The "registration blank" presented for me to fill in, demands certain definite information: " Surname. Christian names. Nationality. Birthplace. Year of birth. Sex. Full residential address: Full business address. Trade or occupation. Served in what army, navy or police force. Full address where arrived from. Date of signing. Signature." And a little below, " Full address of destination. Date of departure. Signature." A last line in conspicuous italics admonishes: "Penalty for failing to give this information correctly 100 pounds or six months imprisonment." Well, of course a threat like that will make even a woman tell her age as many times as she is asked. But I do it rebelliously against the Kaiser and all his Prussians. For the "registration blank" was made in Germany. I remember it before the war, at the Hotel Adlon in Berlin.

The sense of depression that had enwrapped me in the first darkness of London was not gone when I closed my eyes in sleep. One does not throw it off. You may not be of those who are wearing cr?pe. But you cannot escape the woe of the world which will enfold you like a garment.

In the morning the ordinary business of living has become one of strenuous detail. The law requires that an alien shall register with the police within 24 hours of arrival. When I have thus established a calling acquaintance at the Vine Street station, I go out into Piccadilly feeling like a prisoner politely on parole. And I face an environment strung all over with barbed wire restrictions on my movements. Every letter that comes for me from America will be read before I receive it, marked "Opened by the Censor." If I wish to go away from this country, I must ask the permission of the Foreign Office, the consulate of the country to which I wish to proceed and my own consulate before I can so much as purchase a ticket. I may not leave London for any "restricted area" where there has been an Irish revolution or a German bombardment without the consent of Scotland Yard. I may not even leave the Ritz Hotel, which is registered as my official place of residence, for more steam-heat at the Savoy, without notifying the Vine Street Station of my departure and the Bow Street Station of my arrival. The Defence of the Realm and the Trading with the Enemy Acts and others in a land at war are lying around like bombs all over the place. Have a care that you don't run into them!

I am alone one evening at the International Suffrage Headquarters in Adam Street, deep lost in a sociological study of carefully filed data. Do you believe in subconscious warnings? Anyhow, I am bending over a box of manila envelopes when suddenly, out of the silence of this top floor room, I am impressed with a sense of danger. It is as plain and clear as if a voice over my shoulder said "Look out." I do look up quickly. And there on the wall before my eyes, I read Order 4 from the Defence of the Realm Act, commonly enough posted all over London, I discover later. But this is the first time I have seen it. It reads: "The curtains of this room must be drawn at sundown." And from two windows with wide open curtains, my brilliant electric light is streaming out on the London darkness, oh, as far as Trafalgar Square for all the German Zeppelins and Scotland Yard to see! Just for an instant I am paralysed with the fear of them all. Then my hand finds the electric button and I hastily switch myself into the protecting darkness. Somehow I grope my way through the hall and down the staircase. And I slam the outer door hurriedly. There, when the police arrive, I shall be gone! In the morning paper a week or so afterward I read one day of an earl's daughter even, who had been arrested and fined 25 pounds for "permitting a beam of light to escape from her window."

The government is regulating everything, the icing a housewife may not put on a cake, the number of courses one may have for dinner, even the conversation at table. Let an American with the habit of free speech beware! Notices conspicuously posted in public places advise, "Silence." In France they put it most picturesquely, "Say nothing. Be suspicious. The ears of the enemy are always open." Absolutely the only safe rule, then, is to learn to hold your tongue. Everybody's doing it over here. Very well, I will not talk. But what about all the rest of this silent world that will not, either? For those under military orders, the rule is absolute. And you've no idea how many people are under military orders. This is a war with even the women in khaki. I begin to feel that to get into so much as a drawing-room, I ought to have my merely social letter of introduction crossed with some kind of a vis?. Wouldn't a hostess, even the Duchess of Marlborough, be able to be more cordial if she knew that I had seen the Government before I saw her? Even the girl conductor on the 'bus this morning, when I essayed to ask her as Exhibit 1 in the new-woman-in-industry I was looking for, how she liked her job, turned and scurried down her staircase like a frightened rabbit.

So, this is not to be the simple life for research work. And though I come through all the submarines and the lines of steel, and the Zeppelins have not got me yet, what shall it profit me to save my life and lose my assignment? I am bound for the front and for certain information I am to gather on the way. Now, what should a journalist do?

Well, a journalist, I discovered, should get one's self personally conducted by Lord Northcliffe. There were those of my masculine contemporaries already headed for the front whom he was said on arrival here to have received into the bosom of his newspaper office and put to bed to rest from the nervous exhaustion of travel, and sent a secretary and a check and anything else to make them happy. And then he asked them only to name the day they wanted to see Woolwich or to cross to France. But nothing like that was happening to me. So what else should a journalist do?

One day I wrap myself in the rose satin down bed-quilt at the Ritz and spread out my letters of introduction to choose a journalistic lead. There are carved cupids on the walls of this bedroom, and a lovely rose velvet carpet on the floor and heavy rose silk hanging at the windows. But there isn't any place to be warm. The tiny open grate holds six or it may be seven coals--you see why Dickens always writes of "coals" in the plural--and you put them on delicately with things like the sugar tongs. It isn't good form to be warm in England. The best families aren't. It's plebeian and American even to want to be.

It is the way his voice thrills on "my America." I am sure any American correspondent hearing it would have been ready even in the fall of 1916 to clasp hands across the sea in the Anglo-American compact to win this war. Gilbert Parker is in tune with the American temperament. He doesn't wear a monocle. And he says to a woman "Now, what can I do for you?" in just the tone of voice that an American man would use when everything is going to be all right. I remember the red room just before he said it. Everything hung in the balance for me at this moment: "I have confidence in Mr. Vance, your editor. I know him," reflects the man who is deciding. "But--are you in 'Who's Who'?" Just for the lack of a line in a book, a government's good favour might have been lost! But he reached for the copy above his desk. "Any more credentials?" he asks. I cast desperately about in my mind--and drop a Phi Beta key in his hand. "I won't take that up on you," he says with a smile. And my cause is won.

THE WAY IT IS DONE

To get it, you write about it and call about it and write about it some more. And then it comes like this:

FOREIGN OFFICE, Nov. 6, 1917.

If you will call to-morrow Wednesday at 3 o'clock at the main entrance to Woolwich Arsenal and ask for Miss Barker, presenting the attached paper, you will find that arrangements have been made for your visit.

Yours very truly,

G. S. B.

Or it comes like this:

HEADQUARTERS, LONDON DISTRICT, Horse Guards, S.W., Nov. 7, 1917.

MRS. M. P. DAGGETT, Room 464 Ritz Hotel,

I have pleasure in informing you that under War Office instructions I have arranged with the officer commanding 3rd London General Hospital, Wandsworth Common, S.W., for you to visit his hospital at 11 A. M. on Friday next, the 9th instant.

I am, dear Madam

Yours faithfully,

I am facing France and the Channel crossing. Here in London it is so long since the Zeppelins have been heard from that we are almost lulled into a sense of security that they will not come again. If they do high government circles usually hear in advance. A friend whose cousin's brother-in-law is in the Admiralty will let me know as soon as he finds out. But now all of these neatly arranged life and death plans must go into the discard. For you see I am changing my danger back again from Zeppelins to submarines.

Let us see about the sinkings. Rumour reports now that about four out of six boats are getting across. I may get one of the four. On the night train from London, I wrap myself in my steamer-rug in the unheated compartment. Travelling is not what you might say encouraged. This journey to Paris, accomplished ordinarily in four hours, will now take twenty-four. No two time-tables will anywhere connect. There are as many difficulties as can possibly be arranged. Governments don't want you doing this every day in the week. And there is always a question whether you will be permitted to do it at all. At Southampton I must meet the steel line with the challenge, "Who goes there?"

Again I tell all my life to the man with a pistol at his belt and a sword at his side. He looks a second time at my passport: "You want to go all sorts of places you've no business to," he says sharply.

"Not all of them now," I answer humbly, "only France." "Well, why even France?" he persists testily. I try to tell him. I present for a second consideration one of my "most important credentials." It is a personal letter from the French consul in New York specially and cordially recommending me to the "care and protection of all the civil and military authorities in France." At last he tosses the letter inquiringly down his khaki line as much as to say, "Oh, well, if they want her over there?" It comes back with a nod of acquiescence from the last man, and a vis? in purple ink lets me through to the boat.

At my hotel in the Rue de Rivoli, the American man opposite me at the dinner table the next day is just about to sail, "going back to God's country, as far away home as I can get, to the tall pine trees on the Pacific Coast," he tells me. He had come to Europe on an assignment that was to have been accomplished in three months. It has taken him a year to get to the front. My knife and fork drop in despair on my plate as he says it. "Cheer up," he urges. "You just have to remember to take a Frenchman's promises as lightly as they're made. They always aim to please. And your hopes rise so that you order two cocktails for dinner to-night. Then to-morrow and to-morrow and to-morrow there will be only more promises. But you're an American woman. You'll dig through. Good luck," he says. And a taxicab takes him.

WAR AS YOU FIRST SEE IT

Here in Paris I stand in the boulevards as I stood in the Strand and Oxford Street, and watch the new woman movement going by. Every time a man drops dead in the trenches, a woman steps permanently into the niche he used to hold in industry, in commerce, in the professions, in world affairs. It is the woman movement for which the ages have waited in ghastly truth. But, O God in Heaven, the price we pay! The price we pay! There is Madelaine La Fontaine, whom I saw yesterday in the Rue Renouard. Her black dress outlined her figure against the yellow garden wall where she stood in a little doorway. She leaned and kissed her child on his way to school. As she lifted her head, I saw the grief in her eyes and the dead man's picture in the locket at her throat.

They are everywhere through England and France, these women with the locket at their throats. Yet not for these would your heart ache most. There are the others, the clear-eyed girls in their 'teens just now coming up into long dresses. And life may not offer them so much as the pictured locket! There will be no man's face to fill it! Love that would have been, you see, lies slain there with all the bright boyhood that's falling on the battlefields. O God, the price we pay!

How far off now seems that summer's day I walked through 39th Street, my pulses throbbing pleasantly with the thrill of adventure and this commission! I wonder if ever life can look like that again. The heavens arched all blue above New York and the sunshine lay all golden on the city pavements. But that was before I knew. Oh, I had heard about war, even as have you and your next door neighbour. War was battle dates that had to be committed to memory at school. Or if instead of tiresome pages in history it should mobilise before our eyes, why, of course it would be flags flying, bands playing, and handsome heroes marching down Fifth Avenue!

Those are brave men who are dying on all the battlefields for their native lands. But oh, the bravery of these men who must live for their countries! These who have lost their eyes and their arms and their legs are as common over here as, why, as, say, men with brown hair. And these are terrible enough. But the men who have lost their faces! So long as they shall live, in every one's eyes into which they look, they must see a shudder of horror reflecting as in a looking glass their old agony. God in Heaven pity the men who have lost their faces! The greatest sculptors in the world are busy to-day making faces to be fastened on.

And he does it. You don't have to call his secretary a week later to ask, How about that letter the embassy was going to give me? And the week after and the week after ring up some more to recall that there's an American running up an expense account at the hotel down the street. That's not Mr. Sharpe's way. Within ten minutes he had handed me a letter of introduction to M. Briand, Prime Minister of France. He laughed as he passed it to me. "Honestly, I'd hate to hand any one a gold brick," he said. "That document looks imposing enough and important enough that a limousine should be at your hotel entrance to take you to the front at 9 A. M. to-morrow. But nothing like that will happen. In France you have to remember that no one hurries. And an American can't."

They are going to be charmed, as Frenchmen can be, to take me to the front. And the days pass and the days pass. "Ah, but you see, for a lady journalist it is so different and so difficult. The trip must be specially arranged." And the weeks go by. And M. Polignac is so polite and polite and polite--just that and nothing more.

One day he says to me: "And, Mme. Daggett, how long is it you will be in Paris?" "Why," I falter, "I hadn't expected to winter here. I'm waiting, you know, just waiting until I can go to the front." "And how much longer now could you wait?" he inquires. "Oh," I answer desperately, "I'll surely have to go by the 29th. I couldn't stay longer than that."

So in the course of the next few days there comes a letter telling me how it pains the French government that they should not be able to "take that trip in hand" before the 29th. And of course if I must leave them on that date, as I had said I must, oh, they so much regret, etc., etc.

If I intend to get to the front, evidently then I must dig through! And in my room at the Hotel Regina in the Rue de Rivoli, I take my pen in hand.

To "Maison de la Presse, Service de l'Information Diplomatique," I write: "Gentlemen, your favour of the 26th inst. with your regrets just received. And I hasten to write you that I cannot, for the sake of France, accept your decision as final, without presenting to your attention a situation with which you may not be familiar. You see, gentlemen, in the country from which I come, we have a feminism that is neither an ideal nor a theory, but a working reality. In America, there were when I left, four million women citizens, and the State legislatures every little while making more. These are, gentlemen, four million citizens with a vote, whose wishes must be consulted by Congress at Washington in determining the war policy of the United States. Their sympathies help to determine the amount of the war relief contributions that may come across the Atlantic. These are four million women who count, gentlemen, please understand, exactly the same as four million men.

"Believe me, gentlemen, the opportunity for propaganda that I offer you is unparalleled. I beg you therefore to reconsider. I earnestly desire to go to the front this week. Can you, I ask, permit me to leave this land without granting the privilege? For the sake of France, gentlemen! Awaiting your reply, I remain," etc.

That letter was posted at 11 o'clock at night. Before noon the next day Maison de la Presse was on the telephone and speaking English. In France they do not hurry. It is not customary to use the telephone. And it is at this time against the law to speak English on it. But listen: "Will Mme. Daggett find herself able to accept the invitation of the French government to go to the front on Thursday?" inquires the voice on the wire.

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