Page:Women Wanted.djvu/281

 however to write her first name. The War Office, hurrying down the lists, just drafted Dr. Gerard-Mangin as any other man. One night at twelve o'clock her concierge stood before her door with a government command ordering the doctor to report at once at the Vosges front. The next morning with a suit case in one hand and a surgeon's kit in the other, she was on her way. The astonished military medecin-en-chef, before whom she arrived, threw up his hands: "A woman surgeon for the French army! It could not be."

She held out her government order: "N'est ce pas?" He examined it more closely. "But yet," he insisted, "it must be a mistake."

"En ce moment," as they say in France, a thousand wounded soldiers were practically laid at the commander's feet—and he had only five doctors at hand. He turned with a whimsical smile to the toy of a woman before him. After all there was an alertness, an independent defiance of her femininity that straightened at attention to duty now every curving line of the little figure. His glance swept the wounded men: "Take off your hat and stay a while," he said in desperation. "But," he added, "I shall have to report this to the War Office. There must be an investigation."

Three months later when the Inspector General of the French army arrived to make it, he learned that Dr. Gerard-Mangin had performed six hundred operations without losing a single patient. "You'll do even though you are not a man," he hazarded.