means--why didn't you do something?' That
is my bad dream when I sit knitting, because I feel hard toward the
women that are gone. They were a poor lot, many of them. I like now
best of all Jennie Geddes who threw the stool at somebody's head. I
forget what Jennie's grievance was, but it was the principle that
counts--she had a conviction, and was willing to fight for it. I never
said these things--until I got this." She still held the letter, with
its red inscription, in her hand. "But now I feel that I have earned
the right to speak out. I have made a heavy investment in the cause of
Humanity and I am going to look after it. The only thing that makes it
possible to give up Alex is the hope that Alex's death may help to
make war impossible and so save other boys. But unless we do something
his death will not help a bit; for this thing has always been--and
that is the intolerable thought to me. I am willing to give my boy to
die for others if I am sure that the others are going to be saved, but
I am not willing that he should die in vain. You see what I mean,
don't you?"

I told her that I did see, and that I believed that she had expressed
the very thought that was in the mind of women everywhere.

"Well, then," she said quickly, "why don't you write it? We will
forget this when it is all over and we will go back to our old
pursuits and there will be nothing--I mean, no record of how we felt.
Anyway, we will die and a new generation will take our places. Why
don't you write it while your heart is hot?"

"But," I said, "perhaps what I should write would not truly represent
what the women are thinking. They have diverse thoughts, and how can I
hope to speak for them?"

"Write what you feel," she said sternly. "These are fundamental
things. Ideas are epidemic--they go like the measles. If you are
thinking a certain thing, you may be sure you have no monopoly of it;
many others are thinking it too. That is my greatest comfort at this
time. Write down what you feel, even if it is not what you think you
ought to feel. Write it down for all of us!"

And that is how it happened. There in the Municipal Hall in the small
town of Ripston, as we sat round the stove that cold November day,
with the sleet sifting against the windows, I got my commission from
these women, whom I had not seen until that day, to tell what we think
and feel, to tell how it looks to us, who are the mothers of soldiers,
and to whom even now the let