all ages produced, at an enormous cost, the primal munition of war, without
which no other would exist. There is no battlefield on earth, nor ever has
been, howsoever covered with slain, which is has not cost the women of the
race more in actual bloodshed and anguish to supply, then it has cost the
men who lie there. We pay the first cost on all human life.

In supplying the men for the carnage of a battlefield, women have not
merely lost actually more blood, and gone through a more acute anguish and
weariness, in the long months of bearing and in the final agony of
childbirth, than has been experienced by the men who cover it; but, in the
long months and years of rearing that follow, the women of the race go
through a long, patiently endured strain which no knapsacked soldier on his
longest march has ever more than equalled; while, even in the matter of
death, in all civilised societies, the probability that the average woman
will die in childbirth is immeasurably greater than the probability that
the average male will die in battle.

There is, perhaps, no woman, whether she have borne children, or be merely
potentially a child-bearer, who could look down upon a battlefield covered
with slain, but the thought would rise in her, "So many mothers' sons! So
many bodies brought into the world to lie there! So many months of
weariness and pain while bones and muscles were shaped within; so many
hours of anguish and struggle that breath might be; so many baby mouths
drawing life at woman's breasts;--all this, that men might lie with glazed
eyeballs, and swollen bodies, and fixed, blue, unclosed mouths, and great
limbs tossed--this, that an acre of ground might be manured with human
flesh, that next year's grass or poppies or karoo bushes may spring up
greener and redder, where they have lain, or that the sand of a plain may
have a glint of white bones!" And we cry, "Without an inexorable cause,
this should not be!" No woman who is a woman says of a human body, "It is