Page:Edward Prime-Stevenson - The Intersexes.djvu/263

 Flanders and Penthièvre—every school-girl knows thorn. The pages of mythology and romance furnish a long array of soldierly ideals; Semiramis, Penthesilea, Thalestris, Camilla, Bradamante, Brindomart, Hippolyta, the screaming Valkyrs the resplendently divine Minerva—that noblest conception of female divinity ever evolved by human imagination in any religion—and the mystic, cruel Bellona. Diana is un-feminine. Even Venus enters the battlefield, in Homer and Vergil. Apart from myths, the military spirit seems almost supreme in such uraniad types as Samura, the heroine of the defence of Ancona, the American Moll Pitcher, the valiant Anna Liihring, of Bremen; or the Hungarian heroines of Erlau's siege, who fought like the strongest and bravest of men. In many savage tribes to day women are as expert fighters as the men. But despite outward virility in such types, we cannot classify them as true Uraniads: for their amorous instincts are either too unclear, or else are more or less conclusively heterosexual. We say—"But yet a woman.

Sudden political upheavals create the soldiering amazonian. Sometimes she is fiercer and more sanguinary than most men. In the French Revolution period, the Vendée campaigns elicited squads of women, fighting in the ranks. Remarkable examples of feminine soldiering enter into the savage Chouan chronicles; But we may note that the French Revolution, though in the Vendée productive of notable heroines of camp and battle, does not afford us so many examples of women-soldiers, who were drawn to combat- by patriotism and natural firmness of nature, as it does instances of women who were détraquées; unheroic in their blood-thirstiness and in sheer passion for excitement; lower-class amazons particularly. One realizes such a strain of sanguinary unfeminity in Latins, at a Spanish bull-fight or a French guillotining. Such were the terrible tricoteuses at the guillotine, in 1792-93-94.