The War on All Fronts: England's Effort / Letters to an American Friend

by Mrs. Humphry Ward

Muirhead Bone and Joseph Pennell have shown us what can be done in art with these high workshops, with their intricate distances and the endless crisscross of their belting, and their ranged machines. But the coming in of the girls, in their close khaki caps and overalls, showing the many pretty heads and slender necks, and the rows of light bending forms, spaced in order beside their furnaces or lathes as far as the eye can reach, has added a new element—something flower-like, to all this flash of fire and steel, and to the grimness of war underlying it.

For the final meaning of it all is neither soft nor feminine! These girls—at hot haste—are making fuses and cartridge-cases by the hundred thousand, casting, pressing, drawing, and, in the special danger-buildings, filling certain parts of the fuse with explosive. There were about 4,000 of them to 5,000 men, when I saw the shop, and their number has no doubt increased since; for the latest figures show that about 15,000 fresh women workers are going into the munition works every week. The men are steadily training them, and without the teaching and co-operation of the men—without, that is, the surrender by the men of some of their most cherished trade customs—the whole movement would have been impossible.

As it is, by the sheer body of work the women have brought in, by the deftness, energy, and enthusiasm they throw into the simpler but quite indispensable processes, thereby setting the unskilled man free for the Army, and the skilled man for work which women cannot do, Great Britain has become possessed of new and vast resources of which she scarcely dreamed a year ago; and so far as this war is a war of machinery—and we all know what Germany's arsenals have done to make it so—its whole aspect is now changing for us. The "eternal feminine" has made one more startling incursion upon the normal web of things!

But on the "dilution" of labour, the burning question of the hour, I shall have something to say in my next letter. Let me record another visit of the same day to a small-arms factory of importance. Not many women here so far, though the number is increasing, but look at the expansion figures since last summer! A large, new factory added, on a bare field; 40,000 tons of excavation removed, two miles of new shops, sixty feet wide and four floors high, the output in rifles quadrupled, and so on.

We climbed to the top floor of the new buildings and looked far and wide over the town. Dotted over the tall roofs rose the national flags, marking "controlled" factories, i.e., factories still given over a year ago to one or other of the miscellaneous metal trades of the Midlands, and now making fuse or shell for England's Armies, and under the control of the British Government. One had a sudden sharp sense of the town's corporate life, and of the spirit working in it everywhere for England's victory. Before we descended, we watched the testing of a particular gun. I was to hear its note on the actual battle-field a month later.

An afternoon train takes me on to another great town, with some very ancient institutions, which have done very modern service in the war. I spent my evening in talking with my host, a steel manufacturer identified with the life of the city, but serving also on one of the central committees of the Ministry in London. Labour and politics, the chances of the war, America and American feeling towards us, the task of the new Minister of Munitions, the temper of English and Scotch workmen, the flux into which all manufacturing conditions have been thrown by the war, and how far old landmarks can be restored after it—we talked hard on these and many other topics, till I must break it off—unwillingly!—to get some sleep and write some notes.

Next day took me deep into the very central current of "England's Effort"—so far as this great phase of it at any rate is concerned. In this town, even more than in the city I had just left, one felt the throb of the nation's rising power, concentrated, orderly, determined. Every single engineering business in a town of engineers was working for the war. Every manufacturer of any importance was doing his best for the Government, some in connection with the new Ministry, some with the Admiralty, some with the War Office. As for the leading firms of the city, the record of growth, of a mounting energy by day and night, was nothing short of bewildering. Take these few impressions of a long day, as they come back to me.

First, a great steel warehouse, full of raw steel of many sorts and kinds, bayonet steel, rifle steel, shell steel, stacked in every available corner and against every possible wall—all sold, every bit of it, and ready to be shipped—some to the Colonies, some to our Allies, with peremptory orders coming in as to which the harassed head of the firm could only shake his head with a despairing "impossible!"

Then some hours in a famous works, under the guidance of the managing director, one of those men, shrewd, indefatigable, humane, in whose company one learns what it is, in spite of all our supposed deficiencies, that makes the secret of England's industrial tenacity. An elderly Scotchman, very plainly marked by the labour and strain of the preceding eighteen months, but still steadily keeping his head and his temper, showing the signs of an Evangelical tradition in his strong dislike for Sunday work, his evident care for his work-people—men and women—and his just and sympathetic tone towards the labour with which he has to deal—such is my companion.

He has a wonderful story to tell: "In September, 1914, we were called upon to manufacture a large extra number of field-guns. We had neither buildings nor machinery for the order. However, we set to work. We took down seven dwelling-houses; in three weeks we were whitewashing the walls of our new workshop and laying in the machinery. My idea was to make so many guns. The Government asked for four times as many. So we took down more houses, and built another much larger shop. The work was finished in ten weeks. Five other large workshops were put up last year, all built with lightning speed, and everywhere additions have been made to the machinery in every department wherever it was possible to put machines."