Bloody Brilliant Women: The Pioneers, Revolutionaries and Geniuses Your History Teacher Forgot to Mention. Cathy Newman

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СКАЧАТЬ had identified as a safe house, there to feast on the remnants of his rations and get a few hours’ kip on a straw-bale bed.

      Before long, however, problems arose. The tight swaddling around her chest grew painful – Lawrence had a ‘robust figure’ – and the stress of maintaining the subterfuge combined with the horrible conditions triggered a host of anxiety-related ailments. After just ten days she decided to give up, reasoning that it was better to be honest than to be discovered by accident.

      When she made her announcement to the Sergeant in charge, his first reaction was to smile and pat her on the back. Lawrence was relieved: such heartiness surely meant he was going to allow her to stay at the front? In fact, he called the military police immediately and within minutes Lawrence was hauled out of her trench, screaming and shouting at her betrayer, ‘You are the biggest blackguard I have ever met. If I were really a man I’d knock you down here and now.’3

      Suspected of being a spy, Lawrence was interrogated by a panel of intelligence officers. ‘So utterly ludicrous appeared this betrousered little female, marshalled solemnly by three soldiers and deposited before 20 embarrassed men,’ she wrote. Rather than act manly and tough, however, Lawrence found herself ‘[lapsing] into feminine attitudes despite my little khaki uniform, concealment no longer being necessary’.4 Her private letters were scrutinised for signs that she had been passing secrets to the enemy.

      The discovery that Lawrence was neither a spy nor a ‘camp-follower’ (i.e. a prostitute) but a would-be journalist seemed to confuse military top brass, who had expected her to defend herself by professing patriotic loyalty. Still, her presence at the front was a serious security lapse, if nothing else. To avoid further embarrassment – and to stop Lawrence trying to file stories about the incident while preparations were underway for the imminent Battle of Loos – she was bundled off to a nearby convent while a decision was made about her future.

      If Lawrence is to be believed, the nuns there loved her and were ‘utterly enthralled at the adventures of a woman who had got out to the big world’.5 So too the soldiers she had served alongside, a small crowd of whom queued up to shake her hand before her final expulsion from France.

      On the ferry home, in a bizarre coincidence, Lawrence bumped into Emmeline Pankhurst, who was fascinated by Lawrence’s story and tried to persuade her to speak at a WSPU event to encourage women to play an active part in the war effort. But the War Office had forbidden Lawrence from telling her story or discussing anything she had witnessed in the trenches until the end of the war. This was a professional blow to Lawrence, who pointed out: ‘In making that promise I sacrificed the chance of earning by newspaper articles written on this escapade, as a girl compelled to earn her livelihood.’6

      Not until 1919 did Lawrence’s book see the light of day. It made little impact, possibly because it’s brief and indifferently written; possibly because, even at the time, it felt a bit over-egged: not the sort of war story the British reading public wanted to hear. Its subtitle – ‘the only English woman soldier’ – has a whiff of fake news about it: Lawrence never served as a soldier and was only in the trenches for two weeks. What’s more, other women found equally creative ways to see action.

      The most famous of these other ‘military maids’ is Flora Sandes, a Yorkshire woman with close-cropped hair and a determined manner, whose career as a soldier seems partly to have been an expression of dissatisfaction with the limitations of her gender: ‘When a very small child I used to pray every night that I might wake up in the morning and find myself a boy,’ she admitted in her second volume of autobiography.7

      Sandes’ transformation from nurse at a military hospital in the then-Serbian city of Prilep, to soldier with the Serbian army was, she wrote, a result of her having ‘naturally drifted’ rather than any concerted effort to enlist. Female soldiers were not unusual in Serbia, where skill set was considered more important than sex, so given that the middle-class Sandes could shoot, ride and speak French and German as well as English, her appeal isn’t hard to fathom. (Serbia was Britain’s ally in the First World War, affiliated to the so-called Triple Entente linking Britain, France and Russia.)

      Sandes’ career ended in glory. Wounded by a grenade in 1916, she was promoted to the rank of Sergeant Major and awarded one of Serbia’s highest military honours, the Order of Karađorđe’s Star. At home, too, she was lionised. As Julie Wheelwright observes: ‘In the English press she was catapulted from Red Cross nurse to the “Serbian Joan of Arc”’8 – stopped in the street by taxi drivers; invited to dine with royals and generals. Her first autobiography, published in 1916 – presumably she wasn’t bound as Dorothy Lawrence was by War Office demands for secrecy – received rave reviews and set her up for a successful career as a public speaker and unofficial ambassador for Serbia, whose post-war plight she was determined to alleviate.

      Everywhere she went she relished her ambiguous, swaggering appearance (short hair, cane, full military regalia including sword) and the confusion it caused. In return, she was accorded the greatest respect. Introducing her to a capacity crowd at Sydney’s King’s Hall on 8 June 1920, the governor of New South Wales, Sir Walter Davidson, declared: ‘I have not heard of anything finer, or brighter, or more natural, or more modest, or braver or more skilful than the work of Lieutenant Flora Sandes.’9

      Dorothy Lawrence, on the other hand, was unable to parlay her early daring into anything lasting or substantial. The career in journalism she craved eluded her and by 1925 her increasingly eccentric behaviour landed her in Colney Hatch Asylum in north London where she revealed to staff that she had been raped as a child by the church guardian who raised her after her parents died. She was locked up there until her death in 1964.

      Lawrence’s sense of herself as unique was clearly the point of her story. But this uniqueness would not have been much appreciated during the war when the prevailing sense among men (and many women too) was that women functioned best en masse as busy little worker bees. This is not to demean women’s achievements at this time. After a century in which the First World War has been seen largely as a man’s war – because it was the men who lost their lives and ran the show – the roles played by women have recently started to receive more attention.

      Much of this wartime work, it’s true, was traditional angel-in-the-house stuff. Thanks to Florence Nightingale’s efforts during the Crimean War – trailblazing in some ways, constricting in others – the healing and caring professions were felt to be natural options for women. Not just by men, either: ‘It was universally felt that there was work for women, even in war – the work of cleansing, setting in order, breaking down red tape, and soothing the vast sum of human suffering which every war is bound to cause,’ wrote Millicent Garrett Fawcett, looking back on the 1850s from the pre-war, pre-suffrage vantage point of 1912.10 And yet much of it was radically different from anything women had done before.

      So let’s begin at the beginning of the women’s First World War.

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      Everyone knows that the First World War was triggered by the assassination of the Austrian Archduke Franz Ferdinand by nineteen-year-old Gavrilo Princip on 28 June 1914.

      The American journalist Mabel Potter Daggett would write that on that day ‘the door of The Doll’s House [as in Henrik Ibsen’s feminist play] opened – for the shot that was fired in Serbia summoned men to their most ancient occupation СКАЧАТЬ