Salt Lake Tribune | 1914-10-11 | Page 15 | Oliver Schreiner on Women and Warfare

Olive Schretner on Women and Warfare Men have made boomerangs bows swords or guns with wh ch to destroy one another; we (the women) have made the men who destroyed and were destroyed I Wo have in all ages pro duced, at an enormous cost, the pr mal munition of war without wh ch no other would exist There is no battle field on earth, nor ever has been how soever covered w th slain, which it has not cost the women of the race more in actual bloodshed and angu sh to supply than it has cost the men who lie there We pay the f rst cost on all human life , There is perhaps no woman, wheth er she have borne ch ldren or be mere ly potent ally a child bearer who could look down upon a battlefield covered with s ain but the thought would r se in her So many mothers sons I So many young bod es brought into the world to he therel So many months of weariness and pain while bones and muscles shaped within! So many hours of angu sh and straggle that breath might bel So many baby mouths drawing life at women s breasts all th s that men m zht lie with g azed eyeballs and swollen faces and fixed blue unclosed mouths and great limbs tossed th a that an acre of ground m ght be manured w th human flesh that next year s grass or poppies or karoo bushes may spring up greener and redder where they navo lain or that the sand of a plain may have a glint of wh te bonesl And we cry Without an inexorable cause this must not bel No woman who is a woman says of a human bodv It is nothing From 01 ve Schre ner s Woman and Labor