Another factory commenced building a six-acre shell factory in June, is now employing 1,600 hands, and increasing them to 2,500 as quickly as possible. At another place the present factory, covering many acres, crammed to the doorstep with machinery and workers, stands on a site which before the war was an open green field. Now it employs 6,500 hands and is adding about 200 hands a week. Yet another place was an empty and idle building in July—in all these months mentioned I refer to the year 1915—but now it is turning out 5,000 shells a week, and it is to reach 20,000 a week within the next few months. All these are merely instances, picked at random from my notes. I could multiply them, and in every district I visited the local Munitions office could, if they were permitted, have given me figures and dates of this kind almost without end.

Before I finish this chapter I must pass along a message that the workers at a certain national shell factory gave me for the men at the Front. I had been telling the general manager how good it was to see the stacks of shells, the ceaseless flood that was running through the works, to hear all he had been telling me of the progress made, and still more of the further progress to be made, and I was led on to tell him something of the heart-breaking shortage of shells we had known a year ago, the punishment the troops had suffered again and again from the heavy artillery fire of the Germans, and the slow and grudging reply that was all we could make. The manager asked me would I talk to some of their shop foremen and tell them what a shortage of shells meant to the Front. So he called in about a score or more of his men and I just talked to them, and told them how the Front was hanging on the efforts of the war-workers at home. I told them of that winter in the trenches, of the hopes we had held to of plenteous supplies of shells in the spring, of the blow it was to us to hear of as great a shortage as ever, and, still worse, of the squabbling amongst munition workers and their haggling over 8d. or 8½ d. an hour pay, or Saturday half-holidays, or double overtime for Sunday, while the men in the trenches suffered a hell of shell-fire, and soaked in knee-deep gutters, and lost their limbs and lives from frost-bite, and put in six- or sixteen-day spells, as need be, with no half-holiday and a shilling a day pay for time and overtime. Maybe there was no special point in my telling these particular things to these particular men, because, as their manager assured me, that factory was doing and always had done its level best, and there had been no friction or slacking whatever in any department. But anyhow I told them, and I told them the Front was hoping again for a flood of unlimited shells this spring, for the essential wherewithal to break the lock-fast lines in the West, for the munitions that would at last give us a fair fighting chance—the more than which we don’t want, and don’t need, to give us victory. And the men heard me out, and after I came away it appears that these foremen and charge hands went back to their shops and told their men what I had said, and by and by their manager sent me a resolution and a pledge they had passed and signed. When I think of the ring of earnest faces that surrounded me as I talked, of the group of figures in their oil-stained overalls in the office built over the workshop where the lathes and hammers and punches and presses around and underneath us sang their ceaseless song of Shells and Shells and more Shells, I feel that this is a resolution to be fulfilled to the hilt, a pledge to be carried out to the last shrapnel bullet. And here I give you their message, leaving out only the name of the factory and the names signed at the end:—

“Dear Sir,—We, the managers, foremen, and charge hands of the above factory, who listened with grave interest and concern to your description of our brave lads fighting in France and Flanders, and the hardships they have to endure, due in lots of cases to lack of shell, desire to place on record our thanks to you (who have been through the mill) for putting the matter so clearly before us. We also pledge ourselves, and desire you to inform our lads at the Front, that, so far as we are concerned at the —— National Munitions Factory, we are working diligently, harmoniously, and sticking it, and will continue to stick it, with the one object of getting out of the above factory Every Possible Shell. We trust that our rapidly increasing output in shell will help to fill those empty limbers you mentioned so feelingly in your remarks.—With kind regards, we are, dear Sir, yours very sincerely.”

That, I know, is the heartening sort of message you want to hear out Front, and it expresses, only more clearly and emphatically, what I have heard from other shell-makers throughout the Kingdom. “Every possible shell!” Think what it means, you at the Front. And you think of it too, Fritz Boche.

V
THE WOMEN

Ever since I commenced my tour of the war works I have been developing a most whole-hearted admiration for the women workers, and the Front may “spring smartly to attention” and give them the full “Present arms!” salute for the way they are buckling down to their job. This applies to women of all grades and classes too. I read in a local paper the other day a brief paragraph about a presentation made by fellow-students to a girl who has apparently dropped her college career, taken a course of instruction in munition work, and had just been given a berth in a large works in a munition city. Lady S—— (the widow of a brave man whose name is a “household word” throughout the Empire) is working in a munition factory, her title and position unknown to her workmates. If she drew wages according to her value, she would be getting many pounds where she gets shillings, because she has by constant talks with her workmates impressed upon them and explained to them that they are working for far more than a weekly wage, that they are backing up their men out Front, are saving British lives, are helping their fighting men to beat the Germans, are themselves fighting and racing the German workshops for the prize of final victory. The result of all her explaining is recorded in plain figures in that workroom’s output, in the increase of 30 per cent. the figures show. I met by chance at a restaurant lunch-table the other day a girl obviously of gentle birth and upbringing. She left the table at five minutes to the hour to be back to the factory when the whistle blew, and before she went she paid for her lunch about, I should estimate, as much as she would earn for her full day’s work. My being in uniform led her to ask a question and to tell about a brother at the Front and briefly what she has done and is doing—helping in the delivery of Derby “pink paper” forms, working in a soldier’s free buffet, making Red Cross supplies, and now, because she believed it to be the most useful and urgent, munition work. She starts work at 6 a.m. sharp every morning, she puts in some eighty hours’ work a week, and is openly proud of the fact that she has not “missed a quarter” on any day since she started. I am mentioning these instances, not for the honour and glory of any individual or any class, but merely to make it plain that many women are in munition works, not from any need or wish for pay, but solely and simply because “King and Country need them.” I have been told, when looking at a room filled with hundreds of women workers, that they represented every sort of class and occupation, and that every one of them was new to the workshops. There were ex-typists, milliners, cooks, housemaids, students, charwomen, theatre attendants, many wives and sisters of soldiers, many girls and women “of independent means.”

And their work is good, is, according to the opinion of every works manager I asked, excellent beyond expectation. One manager had no words sufficiently warm to praise. “Knock bottom oot o’ t’ men,” he said emphatically and repeatedly. At this particular factory women were doing the whole work of making 18-pounder shells. One girl, who a few months ago had never seen a lathe outside a picture-book, is turning the copper driving bands and does 250 bands each ten-hour shift—and that, I am told, is up to or over a good man’s average. These bands have to be pressed by a “banding press” on to the shells, and a girl puts 500 an hour through the machine. Now, without describing the operation in detail, this means that the girl lifts a shell from beside her, places it in the machine, where it gets a first squeeze, lifts it an inch or so and twists it round for a second squeeze, and lifts it out of the machine on to a table-shelf beside it. She does the three lifts—in, and twist, and out—500 times per hour, 5,000 times a day. That is no light physical feat, and it speaks volumes for the energy and the close attention paid, without a halt or break, to her work. There are no men in that factory except a handful of skilled engineers who are kept employed on tool-making and setting, sharpening cutters, erecting machinery, and other work that only skilled men can do. There is one room full of these men—The Room of the Old Men, I called it—that I want to tell you about presently. It is a tale to be proud of. For the most part the women workers I have seen were on lighter work—shell-fuses, rifle cartridges, filling or charging, gauging—but this manager assured me there was no doubt about the women’s ability to handle anything up to the 18-pounder shell (I saw some on the heavier 4·5 shells later in another place), showed me how and where his women loaded shells from the store into the trucks on the railway siding by hand, and lifted out and up and in, and packed and stowed eight tons an hour. And, finally, he boasted with honest and legitimate pride that his girls did at least as good and, on official figures, cheaper shells than any other factory in the kingdom. And the output is to be exactly quadrupled within a few weeks—not “may be,” or “hoped to be,” mark you, but, on cut-and-dried, certain, and deliberate plans, will be.

At another factory I stood in a glass-sided passage and looked out over a vast shop blazing with light, humming with belts and machinery, packed with lathes and their women workers, brilliant with the vivid colouring of the flags—Union Jacks and Standards—that were hoisted proudly over the head of each girl and her machine. The girls were in khaki overalls and caps, and the massed colours of the khaki, of the Allied flags’ scarlet and blue and white and orange and black, the glistening steely-blue of the machinery, the warm touches of the red copper and yellow brass, all under the bright glow of the electrics, all jostling and astir and quivering with life and animated movement, made up a picture as thrilling and alive and heart-warming as any I have seen throughout the war works. This is a brand-new factory—shops, machinery, and hands all collected and built from the foundations up since the war. There is no exact maximum output in view there, apparently. It is simply growing as fast as new shops can be built, machinery installed, hands found and taught and employed. There are 7,000 girls at work there now; they average 87½ hours’ work a week, and they are “as keen as razors, as steady as rocks, as regular and reliable as the factory hooter.”