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Their original purpose was to found a crêche for the babies of women munition-workers. When they got to Paris they found that such institutions were not wanted. They at once changed their programme, and asked to be allowed to take their crêche into the army zone and convert it into a hospital for refugee children.
There was one wounded Belgian to whom my aunt gave my address before she left for Russia that he might have someone with whom he might correspond. I used to hear from him regularly, and every letter breathed gratitude to "la dame écossaise." He said she had saved his life. Miss Macnaughtan's lectures to munition-workers were, perhaps, the best work that she did during the war.
She had been gathering sphagnum moss on the fells almost from sunrise that morning; and by tea-time she was expecting a dozen munition-workers from Barrow, whom she was to house, feed and 'do for, in her little cottage over the week-end.
It is only we who have the right of optimism. It's we who have to do the dirty work! They seem to think we like the job! What are they doing to bring the end nearer?" Many of them came back from seven days' leave fuming and sullen. Everybody was having a good time. Munition-workers were earning wonderful wages and spending them on gramophones, pianos, furs, and the "pictures."
In order to get material for my lecture to munition-workers I was very anxious to see more of the war for myself than is possible at a soup-kitchen, and I asked at the British Mission if I might be given permission to go into the British lines. Major in giving me a flat refusal, was a little pompous and important I thought, and he said it was impossible to get near the British.
Seeing these shell-shock cases month after month, during years of fighting, I, as an onlooker, hated the people who had not seen, and were callous of this misery; the laughing girls in the Strand greeting the boys on seven days' leave; the newspaper editors and leader-writers whose articles on war were always "cheery"; the bishops and clergy who praised God as the Commander-in-Chief of the Allied armies, and had never said a word before the war to make it less inevitable; the schoolmasters who gloried in the lengthening "Roll of Honor" and said, "We're doing very well," when more boys died; the pretty woman-faces ogling in the picture-papers, as "well known war-workers"; the munition-workers who were getting good wages out of the war; the working-women who were buying gramophones and furs while their men were in the stinking trenches; the dreadful, callous, cheerful spirit of England at war.
It wouldn't do for any one person to have too much money, for that would excite suspicion; but if they would go to work and spend that much for dodgers to be distributed among the munition-workers, and for street-meetings, and for the proposed radical paper well, there was plenty more money in the place where this had come from. Where was that place?
When did he die? A Belgian doctor told Mrs. Wynne that in looking through a German officer's knapsack he found a quantity of children's hands a pretty souvenir! I write these things down because they must be known, and if I go home to lecture to munition-workers I suppose I must tell them of these barbarities.
It was all very well for Schneider to talk, but suppose someone were to demand that the brewery-workers should strike and refuse to make beer for munition-workers? That was a mere quibble, argued Schneider; but the other denied this, declaring that it was an illustration of what the worker was up against, with no control of his own destiny, no voice as to what use should be made of his product.
She nodded brightly, but she was not yet quite mistress of her nerves, and her face quivered. He turned away, and began to set his palette, while she seated herself. Hester watched the lesson for half an hour, till it was time to go and make ready for her munition-workers.
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