French Women and War
I
IN the first days of September 1939, in every village of France, the women gazed at the corn stacks, stretching in neat rows across the distant fields. And in each woman’s mind was the same thought: ‘The Army has taken my horses, my cattle, my lorries, my workmen, my husband. The harvest is not yet in — and I am alone.’
Our second war had begun, the second war for every Frenchman and Frenchwoman — for some, the third. In each of us old sensations awoke, old pictures came to life — those we had felt and seen twenty-five years ago. As soon as I got back to Paris my grocer offered me, almost by habit, those rolls of gum-paper we paste on the windows in wartime, and instinctively I found myself tracing out on my windows the same crisscross patterns through which I had looked out upon the world in childhood.
The way in which mobilization was carried out in France is common knowledge. And it really is wonderful to think that, in such a short space of time, three immense migrations were so successfully managed, without confusion in train time, practically without accident, without causing a garage to go short of gasoline, a baker of flour, or a fruiterer of choice grapes or peaches. For several days, five and ten times the normal number of trains were running on our railroads. Then it was over; one part of the population of France — the évacués — had descended upon the other part; the British Army had taken up its strategic position, and live million Frenchmen had left their homes and gone to the war.
France was cut in two: on one side were the men, on the other the women. On one side five million soldiers — so many soldiers, too many, as it happened — united by discipline, by comradeship, each with his particular job, each obeying some special order. On the other side an army of women, lacking direction or cohesion. Each had to make her own decisions, accept her own responsibilities, wage her own war; each was a soldier in an army of loneliness.
II
The first reaction of French women to the war drove them to imitate the men: to enroll for service, to enlist in some corps or other. But there was no official means of recruiting women. With wild enthusiasm women flocked to such private organizations as existed, and registered their names for some future and hypothetical war work. A friend of mine, who arrived at one of these offices half an hour after it opened, was given the number 697, and was almost stifled as she fought her way out through the enormous crowd that was waiting behind her.
Each individual woman, to quote an expression heard on every side at the time, ‘was ready to go anywhere and do anything.’ ‘Above all, put me in some difficult and dangerous post,’ they would plead. Far from fleeing danger, they courted it, they would have rushed to meet it; they saw themselves as dispatch riders, liaison agents, parachutists, lorry drivers, bombing pilots, anything and everything.
French women burned to be heroic; their country had, up till now, to refuse them this privilege, but asked of them other service, less spectacular and less easy.
As soon as the ferment of mobilization had died down, the mission that the men had bequeathed to the women became strikingly clear: it was immense, yet intangible; vital, yet diffused. Behind the bulwark formed by our armies the whole life of the country had suddenly stopped, as if paralyzed by the declaration of war. For a moment the fields were empty, the shops were closed, the looms were silent. France had to be reorganized. It had to be maintained in health, moral and physical, economic and social; it had need of the care the trainer lavishes upon the athlete who is about to enter the fiercest test of his whole life. Here, then, was a task for women, here was work they could do, without the wearing of uniform, without any marching or stamping or saluting, without sealed military orders.
This lack of parade, of regimentation, even of good organization, in regard to feminine activities in France, which is the despair of reporters and press photographers greedy for news, did not worry me at all. There was a reason, a purely personal one, which reassured me. The sight of all those women, last September, trying without much success to find their niche in a feverish world, recalled to me the action of another woman who was no longer there to take her part: my mother, Madame Curie. Twenty-five years ago, in that same summer heat, in that same empty Paris whose citizens had fled to the cool sea or the country, another general mobilization had found Marie Curie at work, in her laboratory. Exactly as in the case of any normal, unobtrusive French woman of 1939, the great scientist found herself stranded, thrown entirely on her own resources: her assistants, her colleagues, had all gone to join their regiments. The only people left in the laboratory were an aged mechanic, a woman cleaner, and herself, to whom a France at war had offered no special work, no post of vital importance.
Nevertheless, a few days later Madame Curie had switched over her energies to war. With the sure judgment of a scientist, she had immediately realized that there was a tragic gap in the organization for the reception of the wounded: both the advanced hospitals and those at the base were almost entirely lacking in X-ray apparatus.
Madame Curie was not long in deciding what was to be done: X-ray posts must be installed at once, wherever it was possible. Within a few hours she had drawn up a list of existing apparatus, made a round of the manufacturers, got together such X-ray machines as were available, and enlisted volunteers to manipulate them. Realizing also how essential it was to have mobile apparatus, she equipped the first French X-ray car. As early as August 1914, this car was being driven from hospital to hospital.
On Armistice day, Madame Curie’s work could be summed up as follows: she had equipped twenty X-ray motorcars; set up two hundred X-ray posts in which one million wounded soldiers had been examined; organized classes in which one hundred and fifty X-ray workers received instruction; created a radium emanation service for the healing of stubborn wounds and skin lesions; visited more than three hundred military hospitals.
All this Madame Curie did on her own initiative, helped by some, obstructed by others. No noisy propaganda was made about her work, and, if it had been, it would only have displeased her.
When the war was over, my mother stored in its garage her personal X-ray car, scarred and battered by four years of continuous service. Then she went quietly back again to her work, to her beloved physics laboratory, to the research she worshiped. And within a few weeks the rôle she had played in the great drama was forgotten by all.
France is not a country where personal effort is advertised in bright colors or cried aloud from the housetops. It is a country where great work often goes unseen. But does it matter? What matters is that the work leads to victory.
III
During the first months of the war, there have been in France neither aerial bombardments nor immense casualties in the field, with the result that those women who were best prepared for war have had the least to do. The thirty thousand voluntary nurses, belonging to our three Red Cross organizations, are at their posts in various hospitals distributed over the country, in hospital trains, in front-line and motor ambulances. Numerous classes have been started, where new recruits to nursing formations are being prepared for the day when they will be required.
There is another class of women who are living in a state of what one might cynically call disappointment: I mean those volunteers who are employed upon Passive Defense. Among them are many who have been schooled in highly dangerous work. There is, for instance, a corps of motor drivers, chemists, and gas detectors, whose duty, in case of bombardment, would be to drive straight to the spot where poison bombs had exploded. In Paris this corps has regular hours of attendance at the police stations. Its members are ready at an instant’s notice to jump into their small two-seaters, where there is just room for two women and what is called the Kling apparatus — after the inventor, the director of our Municipal Laboratory. This apparatus is used for detecting the presence of gas. But, in addition, the women chemists have undergone special training in how to smell, which enables them to recognize traces of gas too weak to be registered by the Kling apparatus. The members of this new profession, born of the war, are called ‘sniffers’ — les flaireuses. This is their official name. Up to now the ‘sniffers’ have had nothing worse to sniff than ordinary air. They have passed most of their time on duty knitting or reading, to the consternation of those seekers after sensation whose appetite increases in proportion to the distance which separates them from the scene of danger.
War does not only call for volunteers. It enlists women whom it pays — women factory workers. In one of the factories of guns and shells which I visited, I saw as many women at work as there were men. They stood in lines before the drills, the moulds, and the machines which file down the steel to the exact gauge. At one end of the hall vibrating with noise, women were controlling the machines which turn out tiny parts of percussion fuses. Farther on, women were feeding unpolished steel bars to the jaws of an insatiable monster, and taking away, at regular intervals, heaps of fine whirligig steel shavings which gradually mounted around it. From its side the tiny shells fall, in a steady stream, into an oil-filled drum. Nearly all these women wore clogs and thick woolen stockings, to protect their feet from the oil and the metal shavings.
There are many forms of mechanical work which women perform more deftly and more quickly than men: for instance, the fixing of fuses in shells of small calibre. The tiny metal pieces, as tiny as those used in watchmaking, have to be fixed in position one behind the other. Men grow impatient at this work, but it is found that women do it as easily as if they were threading strings of beads. A girl I stood watching had white smooth hands and polished nails — and the deadly fuse, a small shining copper cylinder no larger than a thimble, looked, in her deft fingers, like some precious jewel from Cartier.
Munitions work will undoubtedly absorb an ever-increasing number of women. During the 1914 war, the number of French women at work reached four hundred thousand. Marshal Joffre, at a critical moment, said: ’If the women in the factories stopped work for twenty minutes, the Allies would lose the war.’
The women did not stop for twenty minutes. They hardly stopped for three and a half years. They worked day and night, Sundays and holidays and weekdays, ten, eleven, sometimes fourteen hours a day. The Allies won the war, but the women, in many cases, lost their health.
If I seem to stress the overwork of French women in the 1914 war, it is because it was a lesson to us, and we intend to profit by that lesson. Our Minister of Munitions, who has had an outstandingly successful career in industry, has made a special point of harboring the strength of women factory workers. In the factories I have visited, those women who have exhausting work to do and are kept on their feet have their time split up in the following manner: one week of day shift, one week night shift, one week rest. Other systems are also being tried out, such as shifts of five hours, or again eight hours a day for three days, followed by one day off. But of course women who have less tiring jobs, normal jobs, work much more than that, up to sixty hours a week.
IV
When I am asked to say what women’s war effort consists of in France, I am tempted to reply, ‘It consists of this: we have five million men mobilized, one eighth of our total population, one third of our active workers. Yet France continues to thrive, the daily round goes on.’
It happens that I can give you a perfect example of this replacement of men by women. Off the west coast of Brittany, there is a small rocky island called the Isle of Molène, having 662 inhabitants. On the day of mobilization, every man capable of work left the island — every man! The women had to take over everything — the care of the children and the aged, as well as the local government. So now, on the Isle of Molène, the ‘island without men,’ it is the women who go fishing among the channels beset with reefs. They clean and prepare the boats, repair the nets and the lines. Standing waist-deep in the water, they gather the seaweed which is dried and burnt to make iodine. One woman kneads and bakes the bread; another pushes the barrow, loaded with great round loaves, from door to door. Since the postman is gone, his daughter puts on his cap, buckles on his satchel, and delivers the letters. The wife of the engineer looks after the dynamo on which the island relies for its electric light. A Sister of Saint Vincent de Paul has taken over the chemist’s shop: she bandages wounds, pulls out teeth, heals the sick, and prays by the dead. The lifeboat is manned — ‘girled,’ if you like — by the daughters of the fishermen. The men of the Isle of Molène have gone to the war, its women fight the seas, and all is well. The mayor — or rather the substitute for the mayor — wears a black frock and has gray hair. Only one man has not been replaced: the barkeeper. The bar is closed.
Here is another example, a village in Normandy called Caumont, where there are 860 inhabitants — small contractors, farmers, and laborers. A few days after mobilization, the inhabitants founded a mutual-help centre and circulated a request for volunteers to every home. I will read you some of the replies received: ‘Arthur Stevenin, mobilized with the 1928 class, but his wife is ready to carry on’; ‘Auguste Anne, farmer, not mobilized. Both I and my wife wish to offer our services’; ‘Maurice Griset, garage owner, four children, mobilized with the 1918 class, but his wife is ready to carry on.’
‘The women will carry on.’ That is the unspoken motto of the peasant women all over France. I have not been able to see those women at work because I am shut up all day in an office and have hardly caught sight of a field for months past. I should like, however, to quote to you some words written by a young French author of talent who is also a real woman of the country. Her name is Michel Davet. In a letter I received from her a few days before leaving France, she gave me a description of the life of her neighbor, a peasant in a small village in the Department of Lot: —
A field of oats, a lane, a violet geranium against the worn and yellowing stonework of a doorstep, and, at the door itself, a young woman gazing at a departing man. The essential thing about this scene is the feeling of its continuity — that it is a picture repeating itself over and over again, the farmhouse, the field, and the sunburned woman watching a soldier disappear along the road. It is the same story, almost the same setting, as a hundred or three hundred years ago, under other forms of government and during other wars. There is less poverty, less ruggedness — yet it is more forlorn.
There is not a single workingman left in the group of gray-stone farms; the old are old, and this war has come, as wars generally do come, at the earth’s richest season, when everything is ripe and when every arm is needed. During the first few weeks, without giving way to a single hour of sorrow and indecision, my neighbor, after borrowing a donkey and a cart from a friend, harvested the third crop of lucerne on her own, gathered the beetroots and potatoes, all in a muddy heavy soil, picked the sunflowers, those great, tall blooms whose seed is so valuable for the poultry, harvested the corn, gathered in everything to the last of the leavings.
October has come, bringing with it the trying work of threshing, the most thankless task of harvesttime, and the picking of the fruit. A mist begins to gather over the fields, and the first frost comes. It is the season of ploughing, of sowing, and of great cartloads of manure. Nor must the logs or the last of the beetroots be forgotten, nor the planting out of cabbages, nor the cider, the brandy, the ratafia — since the men seem to like them. Again, the new wine must be drawn off and separated.
And her housekeeping and her mothering both go on just as usual, in addition to this heavy work. She has just as much washing and mending to do as the women in the towns. In the evening, when she sits down to strip the corn, she feels her legs all of a tremble and she thinks she is beginning to get old. Then there is the animal life which exists, parallel with the human life of the farm — the pigs must be fattened, and the chickens and the turkeys.
And what about the war? And winter? While she sits knitting gloves or scarfs, my neighbor pictures the bitter cold at the front, and wonders a little, too, whether the frost is going to kill her roses and geraniums.
When I tell her she is courageous, when I say to her, ‘How do you manage to cope with all that work?’ she begins by apologizing for her hands, blackened by the walnuts, then she says: ‘Well, in wartime, the days are so long. . . . Besides, I don’t need much sleep.’
Official commentary on all such hidden toil can be found in a circular sent out by the Ministry of Agriculture on November 15, 1939, which contains these brief and simple words: ‘In spite of present circumstances, the sowing of crops is normal in France.’
V
One finds countless cases, at any stage of the social ladder, where women have replaced the mobilized men. Overnight some women have undertaken executive jobs. I could mention women who are directing factories, running law offices or important industrial concerns. I am thinking also of women shopkeepers, left in charge of the shop; they do the buying, keep the accounts, have a ready smile for customers, and are proud that they have kept things going unaided, proud to be able to tell their husbands that all is well. I am thinking of the women doctors, who have an immense amount of work on their hands, of women professors, of women scientists working for laboratories engaged upon national defense work.
Then there is the Postal Service, which was suddenly paralyzed at the outbreak of war by lack of personnel. Women were demanded for sorting the mail, a particularly arduous work given, in normal times, to young and energetic men. It means standing eight hours, with a break of only one quarter of an hour. As soon as a mailbag is full, the sorter must tie it up and drag it to the loading room. A mailbag weighs eighty pounds. I know a girl — she was at one time a radio announcer — who volunteered for this work. Her duties began at 3 A.M. ; she worked for a month, lost sixteen pounds in weight, and earned a thousand francs — about twenty-two dollars! There are also the women van drivers, who, day and night, drive the mail to and from the railway stations and the aerodromes. At the present time, of the total employees in the Postal Service, 58 per cent are women.
However, some trades, and especially women’s trades, were for a short time almost killed by the war — those of fashion and luxury. It seemed paradoxical, almost insane, in that Paris of September last, — menaced by destruction from the air, its streets empty, silent, — to invent frocks for balls which would never take place, or hats when we had ceased wearing hats, to mount jewels nobody would ever be able to afford. Most of the great firms closed their doors, and in so doing forced into unemployment the multitude of industries which depend on them for existence: furs, feathers, flowers, manufacturers of dress materials and lace, the fashion magazines.
A few weeks went by. Paris was not bombarded, but the effects of the crisis became clear: it was seen that the closing down of the big dressmakers alone had thrown twenty-five thousand workers out of employment. The total number of people in the clothing industry in France is one million, and the export of luxury goods is one of the principal sources of our national income. It represents, in a normal year, one billion francs’ worth of perfumes, six billion of materials, thirty million of feathers, seventy-five million of artificial flowers, six hundred million of hats and frocks. . . .
The managers’ desks in the deserted fashion houses became heaped with telegrams from all over the world — telegrams from those countries not at war, where there were plenty of light and plenty of dance bands, where people gave balls and cocktail parties. While France was asking herself what her fate was to be, those countries, with almost equal anxiety, were asking her other questions. For instance: ‘Cable details of winter and spring fashions. What colors will be worn this year? Will hats be over the nose or the back of the neck? What new materials are there? What are the length and width of skirts?’
There was a war, admitted. But there were also, all over the world, millions of women who ‘hadn’t a thing to wear’ and who were looking to France to tell them what to wear. Do not think I am making fun of this appeal: it is a demonstration of confidence, which makes me feel extremely proud of my country.
Then something happened. The proprietors of the luxury trade, the work people, the manufacturers of materials and accessories, without forgetting those ministers responsible, made a concerted and spontaneous effort to bring the trade to life again. The government reduced the taxes of the proprietors, the proprietors took unheard-of financial risks, the employees, in turn, made heavy sacrifices.
The day came when Paris was able to reply to those telegrams from abroad something as follows: ‘We have reopened. Our new creations are out. Can accept all orders and are preparing some magnificent frocks for January. Business as usual.’
What struck me most forcibly in this matter of the luxury trade — and it is a matter I have followed closely — was the enormous amount France stood to lose. I am not thinking so much of the billions of francs’ worth of exports, which would have vanished if the dressmaking trade had shut down; I am thinking rather of the thousands of pairs of women’s hands, French hands, the most deft, the most inventive in the world, which would have ceased folding or draping Lyons silk and velvet, Flanders linen, Alengon lace, tulle from Auvergne. Sentimental waiters have written any amount of cheap stories about the French midinettes and their ‘fairy hands.’ But they are far more than merely fairy hands; they are hard-working. It is by their continuous labor that the French dressmaking tradition and taste have been preserved. Only by constant practice, unremitting daily exercise, such as the acrobat or the pianist must keep up, do those hands retain their art.
A few weeks ago I needed some frocks and hats for my trip to the United States. I was extremely busy and wanted to lose as little time as possible. At my dressmaker’s I suggested that it was unnecessary to go to a lot of trouble, that I could quite well wear one or two of my last season’s frocks. I came up against fierce resistance. Once again the whole establishment, from the designer to the smallest petite main who does no more than pick up the pins, was intoxicated by the thrill of fashion, the craving for what is new. I remember one of the saleswomen, whose husband was in the very front line and who, without any doubt, was living in a constant state of apprehension, remonstrating excitedly: ‘Mademoiselle Curie, you simply cannot wear that sixmonths-old dress. Why it’s pre-war! You can’t show that dress in America. Think how the fashion has changed!’
At the hat shop it was the same story.
I was not allowed to bring away with me a hat more than a fortnight old. I had to wear the latest invention of the rue de la Paix, something created in the shop half an hour before — in fact, the hat which had just put all the others in the shade.
As for the fitter, she was ready to try on at any hour of the day or night. She would go without lunch or stay long after closing time, waiting for me, to make sure of a fold or alter a pleat. On the last day she said to me: ‘Just think, these frocks are going all over the United States, and this year of all years. I should worry myself to death if everything weren’t quite all right.’
In a country at war, here was this anonymous worker considering the turning out of a ‘faultless’ dress as a kind of national victory and, at the present time, a kind of challenge to the world.
VI
What the employees, the proprietors, and the government have done for the dressmaking trade they will do, or try to do, for all other French trades, which include — I am giving you the official figure — six hundred and eighty-two women’s trades. French women and men will make whatever effort or sacrifice is necessary; they have grasped very clearly the meaning of those words ‘production, exports, work, economy,’ which are part of the vocabulary of modern war. They know that the country which will work more, export more, buy more, produce more, is the country which is going to win.
What makes the reorganization of labor difficult in France is the evacuation of the civilian population. Until the first of September, 1,400,000 people were living in their own homes, going about their ordinary daily work — living, in fact, their normal lives. A few days later those same people found themselves transplanted in overcrowded country villages, five or six hundred miles away, with nothing to live on but what the government provided! Among them were Alsatians, strongly attached to their language, their religion, their local traditions, and a defenseless host of children.
The education of these children has been a matter of considerable difficulty for those responsible. On the day the schools should normally have reopened, our French educational system — so carefully planned, with its primary and secondary schools, its lycées, universities, and higher specializing schools — became a nightmare jigsaw puzzle. Some areas were deserted by children and students, others overcrowded. In the provinces, a number of colleges had been requisitioned for the troops or transformed into military hospitals, thus depriving the boarders of their beds and the day pupils of their desks.
The educational staff devised various alternatives. They hurriedly furnished new premises, formed mixed classes of boys and girls, improvised correspondence courses, and even — most successful of all — organized lessons over the radio.
The hardest task of all fell to the primary-school teachers. They accompanied their pupils, who were evacuated by classes, into the refugee area. They sleep, very often, in the dormitories with the children, wash them, mend their clothes, and supervise their food. They often have to cut the children’s hair and bandage cuts and bruises, let alone finding occupation for the undisciplined little monkeys during playtime — a never-ending job.
All of this output of feminine energy, these efforts outwardly so disconnected, have a common foundation: I mean our welfare services, both official and private, with which the numerous women’s committees for war work are closely collaborating.
Social service had its beginning in France during the 1914 war. America inspired it, and for a long time gave it practical support by financing many admirable organizations. Twenty years have gone by, and our welfare services have continued to develop. The 1939 war is putting them on their mettle and is demonstrating the efficiency of the network of feminine organizations which now reaches to every corner of France.
Our women workers played a leading part in the evacuation of both children and adults, by accompanying trains and supervising the installation of refugee areas. In town and country they have become the advisers of every woman lost amid new surroundings and loaded with new cares. Social workers assigned to factories are constantly effecting improvements in the working conditions of their fellow women, and acting as impartial liaison agents between employers and employees.
It can be said quite definitely that the war will make France richer for all time in welfare services. They will be the surest protection of that family life which is the very foundation of our country. They will carry out effectively the government’s present policy of encouraging family life and the birth rate. France is making a great effort to bring closer together the inner life of the family and the various occupations of its members, by such laws as our new Code de la Famille. Social welfare is therefore not only improving the present, but planning for the future.
VII
The future? No doubt you are asking yourselves how I can bring myself to speak of this future. No doubt you are thinking that the future of France is obscured by the war, which, so far as the west front is concerned, is still like a slow-moving prelude; maybe that, for France, the future will mean a procession of horrors, cities in ruin, a legion of dead, nameless suffering. How can women, the everlasting ‘enemies of war,’ admit of such a future for their country? What is the secret of the Frenchwoman’s present calm, of her unwavering decision ?
As a woman — as a French woman — I will try to reply to these questions, not by political argument but by a woman’s argument: the only form, indeed, that I am entitled to use. For in my country women have no political rights. I admit that such a state of things is illogical and absurd, and it is destined, I hope, soon to be changed. Yet — forgive me if I am a little paradoxical — this injustice may have had a good side. Thanks to it, there are in France twenty-one million people untouched, even bored by politics — aside from a few brilliant and obvious exceptions. Accordingly, those twenty-one million women, instead of wasting their enthusiasm in pursuit of the many deceptive ideologies of national or international politics, have remained in direct contact with life — have remained, in other words, realists.
During the years of so-called ‘peace’ through which we have just passed, these women, these realists, have not lost themselves in the labyrinth of treaties or revisions of treaties, of party quarrels or party alliances. What they have done, these cold calculators, is simply to assess the amount of happiness accorded to them, and accorded, in general, to the inhabitants of Europe. When one of these women looked at the map of Europe, she did not seek the landmarks of complicated diplomatic moves, or of some sophisticated balance of power. She examined the map in a more simple, more direct manner. From that carved-up peninsula which is our continent she picked out the ever-widening regions of suffering and persecution and the ever-narrowing regions of peace and tolerance. She understood that for years, since 1933, we have not been at peace: we have been at war. Since 1933 a man has been trying, year after year, to conquer Europe, and, after Europe, the world.
Our women have seen the tide of oppression advancing farther each day, surging over the weak, then treacherously creeping towards the strong. Before the subtle and hypocritical menace, full of snares, the women of France have seen their husbands, their fiancés, and their sons losing confidence in their work and their future. Twice already, in October 1938 and March 1939, the white mobilization posters have called our men to arms, and they have had to remain on guard during weeks of anxious waiting, which is even worse than actual war. From that time on, in every home there lurked the shadow of an intruder, of an evildoer, of him who has dared to speak those terrible words: ‘I am war.’ It was as if that man had whispered in every woman’s ear: ‘You are happy, for the time being. Your child is alive, for the time being. The walls of your house are intact, for the time being. But when I say the word, your world will be shattered.’
Before the drama of this war began, its elements shone in a clear light. Those twin agents of evil which were oppressing Europe, and which had seemed to be enemies, Naziism and Bolshevism, drew suddenly together in quite logical friendship, and crushed between them a fiercely struggling Poland, which has for centuries, in the eyes of both Germany and Russia, been a standing excuse for plunder and partition. Afterwards there remained only a few countries lying along the limits of the European peninsula in which the dignity of man still had a meaning.
Then, before the silent gaze of surrounding nations that seemed as if hypnotized, France and England took up arms. And our men began to speak those quiet, very ordinary words which are now on the lips of every man in uniform, no matter what may be his social standing or political opinion: ‘We have had enough. We can’t go on living like this. We’ve got to finish with it. Il faut en finir.' And every woman, when with her realism, and even her feminine egoism, she had weighed up her existence, said, too: ‘We have had enough. I can’t go on living like this. He can’t go on living like this. Il faut en finir.’
Frenchmen and Frenchwomen, being the citizens of a free country, feel responsible for the freedom they enjoy. In the last year or two they have learned that ‘peace at any price’ is no peace at all; that life at any price has no value whatever, for life is nothing without the privileges, the joys, the pride, which make it worth living, and also worth giving. They have discovered also that there is something more ugly, more atrocious than war or death, and that is to live in fear. Having to choose between defending and not defending our very conception of life, we chose to defend it and make it win. And, all at once, our fears have left us, have vanished. Strangely enough, fear now is not with the belligerents. It is with the neutrals.
When our soldiers have won the war, they will not have added an inch of territory to our country, and the frontiers of France, on the map of Europe to which I referred just now, will not have changed their shape. But it will be a very great victory indeed if they can obliterate from that map the shadow of oppression and distress, if they can liberate all those men and women who are cowering or might have cowered under a shameful law, if they give them back their right to that little bit of happiness, that confidence in the future, and that blessed hope which all of us feel should be ours.
Once again I find myself speaking of hope and the future, when the future is unknown. The fact is, every Frenchwoman thinks of the future, every Frenchwoman hopes. It is said that women have ‘a craze for hoping.’ If they have it, it is a first-class craze, and full of good sense. The wise are fond of saying that war will bring utter destruction, that not a single house will be left standing, that the whole social structure will crash — but women, in their hearts, don’t believe a word of it. Instinct tells them that even should many things have changed when peace comes, people will still live in houses, go to market, cook food, bring up children, and transact business. . . .
After my mother died, I went through her black leather pocket case, in which she had kept her identification papers during the 1914 war. It had been everywhere with her, to Ypres, to Amiens, to Verdun. After the Armistice, it had remained for years intact in a drawer. I found in it, together with orders from military missions, two little sachets which had contained garden seeds: some rosemary which Madame Curie had planted in the beds outside her laboratory, between her visits to the front. Even in the darkest days of 1917 and 1918, that stubborn scientist knew that one day the laboratories would open their doors again, that scientific research would return to its own, and that people would again find pleasure in gazing at flowers. French women of today are just as stubborn as Marie Curie. So, while the men are fighting for France, they work patiently like ants, they build and prepare, they look to the France of tomorrow, to the Europe of tomorrow.
The war has enabled French women to show the world something of which they themselves already had a notion: that the country could be handed over to them for a time without being any the worse for it. This not only proves their powers of improvisation; it also proves the words of the Prince of Ligne, that ‘in France men make the laws but women set the standards.’ Again it proves that the French woman is, as she always has been, energetic, competent, full of power, and — to use the words in their best sense — capable of anything.
You may have been surprised that I have not mentioned by name any of those French women who are working so hard for victory, that I have avoided setting up one among many as a heroine. There is no reason why I should. In the official communiqué issued by General Headquarters, we are not told the name of the corporal who repulses a raid, of the pilot who brings down an enemy machine, of the driver of a tank who cleverly avoids a trap, of the sapper who reënforces a trench. In everyday life, that corporal, or pilot, or sapper, or driver of the tank, had a trade; he was a baker or a lawyer, a clerk or a business man. So long as those men are carrying out their duties at the front, so long will women step into their places in the rear — anonymously. Like a fresh crew, they have taken over the working of the ship, and are keeping it on its course.
You may also ask me why, since I have been talking to you about women, I have not mentioned love. As a matter of fact, I feel I have hardly mentioned anything else. What is it, if not love, that gives woman the strength to accomplish such marvels? In a woman’s heart, patriotism and love are inseparable allies.
Our two teams — masculine and feminine — are not only fighting beside one another; they are fighting for one another. They are equal in courage and in patience. Both detest advertisement and sensationalism. When the battle is won — and it may be long and fierce — the men and women of France will seek no applause. But forgive me for speaking my mind: if the Allies finally wipe out Hitlerism, if, after fighting a total war, they succeed in getting a ‘total peace,’— a peace where every citizen of Europe will have the possibility of a decent life, will again have a future, — I don’t think it is presumptuous on my part to say they will have deserved well of all nations.
Since the beginning of the war a quotation, a motto, has come back very often to my memory. In the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, when the Polish legions were fighting desperately against Prussian and Russian troops, they carried purple flags, and on these flags was embroidered a magnificent appeal, directed at the same time to the Polish soldiers and to the soldiers of the oppressors: ‘For our freedom and for yours.’