There
is splendid material to be derived from the golf-girl, the hockey-girl,
the factory- and the laundry-girl--all of them active, and in innumerable
instances far stronger than many of the narrow-chested, cigarette-smoking
"boys" whom we now see in our regiments. Briefly, a day may well come when
we shall see many of our so-called superfluous women taking to the
"career of arms." However, the attempts made to establish a corps of
women-soldiers in Paris, during the German siege, were more amusing than
serious. Early in October some hundreds of women demonstrated outside the
Hotel-de-Ville, demanding that all the male nurses attached to the
ambulances should be replaced by women. The authorities promised to grant
that application, and the women next claimed the right to share the
dangers of the field with their husbands and their brothers. This question
was repeatedly discussed at the public clubs, notably at one in the Rue
Pierre Levee, where Louise Michel, the schoolmistress who subsequently
participated in the Commune and was transported to New Caledonia,
officiated as high-priestess; and at another located at the Triat
Gymnasium in the Avenue Montaigne, where as a rule no men were allowed to
be present, that is, excepting a certain Citizen Jules Allix, an eccentric
elderly survivor of the Republic of '48, at which period he had devised a
system of telepathy effected by means of "sympathetic snails.
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