Cirrus@Austlit

Even this early in the war, women writers were thinking through the effect of this mass bereavement of women:

''Couldn't she get another soldier?" asked Jock eagerly, but Madge was crying softly.

"No, my dear little boy, she would never have another soldier," smiled the fairy through her tears,"she loved that one too deeply."

Mabel Forrest's poetry of the war years was strongly pro-war, and this short story is no different. But the real brutality here is in the class consciousness:

It was to be wondered at that he had chosen a woman with no taste in dress, he who had always loved beauty: but it was still more remarkable that he should have chosen a girl with a common mouth, a loose-lipped mouth, that made one think of material things. The woman in the chair felt suddenly that this girl enjoyed pork sausages. She couldn't have explained why. It was marvellous to think he could have picked out a girl who –

But – had he? Wasn't it rather the loneliness of a man in a big military camp and unaccustomed conditions, some miles from the city. A man from the far bush, who knew no one in the place, and did not care for fast women.

In this rather brutal story, the soldier's appearance in the casualty list is presented as a better outcome than his being slowly dragged down to his wife's level.

What is fascinating about this story is how, this late in the conflict, the woman's war work is presented as just another chore to be crossed off a to-do list:

The day was a strenuous one.

[...]

Madge, the eldest girl, was to help with a big dinner for the soldiers, and as she got up rather late it was a little difficult for her to get away in time. She had to collect pies and things she had made the day before, pack them in boxes, and get herself ready to go away by car at 10 o'clock. It was a great rush.

G.B. Lancaster, one of Australia's most prolific and successful writers of this period, didn't contribute many war stories to Australian periodicals: based in London, she was more inclined to submit them to English periodicals, such as the Windsor Magazine. But some were published in Australia, including this two-part narrative, told from a man's perspective, of the woman's responsibility to the men who were wounded:

She nestled against him in an ecstasy of relief and thankfulness. Ken could never come back and claim her now. Ken, whose wounds her untrained imagination had distorted into a something too hideous to be spoken of. Ken, that derelict bit of human wreckage with the wild soul in him, and the unstable heart which had flung her off in his hour of need, and might demand her again if the mood so took him. She was safe from him now. Safe with this man whom she loved as she never had loved the other.

Ostensibly a love story, this short story by G.B. Lancaster makes a strong argument for the war as a crucible in which women, not solely men, are formed:

"Wait! Don't touch me, or I'll scream. Do you think you'd got another rubber doll. You haven't." From blazing eyes down she was a ringing blade of steel as she drove her thrusts home. "We won't ever be rubber dolls any more, we women. We are trying, most of us, to be brave, because we believe you men want us to be brave. We are trying to be good, because we believe that all the—the lower part is being purged out of you by blood and suffering and sacrifice. We're trying to be honest, because we believe you're fighting shams—outward and inward shams. We're trying, lots of us, to be worthy of what we believe you soldiers to be now. Worthy of-—you, Mr Saumarez."

In this short story from Alice Tomholt, a returned soldier, wounded out of the war by the loss of an arm, tells the story of his revenge against a woman who was handing out white feathers to unenlisted men.

To counterbalance 'The Red Feather', we have this story, which strongly promotes the idea of shame as a woman's legitimate recruitment tactic. Even when the man singled out, at the heroine's suggestion, for community shaming turns out to be not an unenlisted man but a wounded soldier on leave, the essential idea of using shame to coerce enlistment remains unquestioned here.

Here, just before the end of the war, we have a story of the power of women to ruin their men, as a woman flatly refuses her husband's desire to enlist.

In this Alice Tomholt story, a young man–desperate to enlist, unable to marry his sweetheart unless he does so, hearing himself denounced on all sides as cowardly–is yet prevented from signing up by his mother:

She took in her hands the small black silk bag which she invariably carried about with her—the bag which contained the tiny bottle of specially prescribed headache tabloids, an overdose of which would, he knew, mean certain death to her weakened system.

"I swear that I would not live a day after the sailing of your boat," she said slowly. "What would life be to me without you?"

"You have the other boys," he protested desperately. "Are they nothing to you?"

"No; nothing."

A ghost story and a war story, 'The Secret Garden' is the embodiment of 'Lest we forget':

"But why can't I see them? I can see you, so why can't I see the other boys?"

"Because you love me, I guess," said Bob cheerfully. "We are only real to the people who love – us and remember us. When they forget us we cease to exist."

"Bob," asked Barbara, softly, "have many ceased to exist since – since you've been here?"

"A good many," said Bob. "Each morning someone has gone, and we know that someone has forgotten. The boys are lucky who have mothers to remember them, for mothers never forget; but sometimes others do."