WOMEN WHO SHOOT TO KILL

New Zealand Listener, Volume 4, Issue 96, 24 April 1941, Page 48

WOMEN WHO SHOOT TO KILL

ms rN ORTY THOUSAND women march, fight, and fall on China’s battlefields. Women? we may ask. What kind of women? Can you be a true woman when you shoot to kill? These questions are answered in an article which appeared in the London Star as the result of an interview with Miss Lucy Tou, who is in civil life a lecturer in sociology at the Central China University, and an _ intimate friend of Madame Chiang Kai-shek. When you see Miss Tou in a grey Persian lamb coat, with a rose in her buttonhole and a Parisian hair-set, it is difficult to realise that she has gone through a training so severe that in comparison Waiouru is as voluptuous as a Beverley Hills apartment. "People ask what it is like to be a woman soldier," says Miss Tou. "The expression is a contradiction in itself. You can’t be both. Only.when fear, hatred, and despair have reached such a pitch that nothing seems to matter, only then will women in mass formation turn against their nature and fight to kill." Veterans of the Great War will wonder how women, however willing, can stand the pace physically. It is in order to cultivate endurance that the Chinese Government has devised such a hard training for its women battalions, Vanity is the first thing a woman must leave behind when she enters a Chinese training camp. "We were eight in a room with one washbasin between us," said Miss Tou. "With Reveille at 4.25 a.m. and Fall In in the courtyard at 4.30, very few of us had time to use a comb. From 4.30 to 6.30 we had field exercises. Then ‘breakfast,’ a cup of water (out of the tooth-cleaning mug) and dry bread. Then a military lecture. After that shooting, machine-gunning, horse riding till lunch. "For lunch a bowl of soup and a bowl of rice. More field exercises in the afternoon, another lecture, and at last dinner (consisting of vegetables and occasionally meat) at 7.30. Eight o’clock found us in bed. We had to sleep with our boots on and with our rifles slung over one shoulder-it’s rather uncomfortable until you get used to it, "But this is nothing compared with what women soldiers have to put up with when they reach the actual fighting line. In the training centre we at least slept on mattresses, but in the front line women soldiers frequently sleep on the bare ground, with only a cloak over their uniform. Food was meagre enough in the camp. In the trenches more often than not we were without food for two or three deys. "After what we have been through, no one can tell me that women’s physical endurance is less than men’s," concluded Miss Tou. "And there’s one other point. Women never complain. Whereas the men of the forces ask for this and that, the women always say ‘We're all right!’ They are concerned with only one thing-ridding their land of the invader. Till this is accomplished they are determined to remain soldiers-not women."