Page:Women Wanted.djvu/111

 with shoulder straps of red. These are they who wear the surgeon's white tunic in the operating theatre, who issue the physician's orders at the patient's bedside. Now the door at the end of the ward opens. A woman with red shoulder straps stands there, whom every wounded patient able to lift his right arm, salutes as if his own military commander had appeared. "But it's my doctor, my doctor," exclaims the Suffragette of yesterday.

And it is. The doctor, you see, used to hold in fact the unofficial post of first aid physician to the Women's Social and Political Union. Frequently she was wont to hurry out on an emergency call to attend some militant picked up cut and bleeding from the missiles of the mobs or released faint and dying from a hunger strike. And the doctor herself did her bit in the old days. The Government had her in Holloway jail for six weeks. Well, today they have her as surgeon in command of this war hospital with the rank of major. She's so well fitted for the place, you see, by her earlier experience.

But, visibly agitated, My Suffragette again plucks at my sleeve: "Are you quite sure," she asks, "that Scotland Yard won't take her?"

Poor dear lady of yesterday. They're not that to-day. Your woman movement was militant against the Government. This woman movement is militant with the Government. There's all the difference in the world. And the woman in khaki has found it. Militancy of the popular kind has come