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

by Mrs. Humphry Ward

But now the Midlands and the Yorkshire towns are behind me. The train hurries on through a sunny afternoon, and I look through some notes sent me by an expert in the great campaign. Some of them represent its humours. Here is a perfectly true story, which shows an Englishman with "a move on," not unworthy of your side of the water.

A father and son, both men of tremendous energy, were the chiefs of a very large factory, which had been already extensively added to. The father lived in a house alongside the works. One day business took him into the neighbouring county, whilst the son came up to London on munition work. On the father's return he was astonished to see a furniture van removing the contents of his house. The son emerged. He had already signed a contract for a new factory on the site of his father's house; the materials of the house were sold and the furniture half gone. After a first start, the father took it in true Yorkshire fashion—wasting no words, and apparently proud of his son!

Here we are at last, in the true north—crossing a river, with a climbing town beyond, its tiled roofs wreathed in smoke, through which the afternoon lights are playing. I am carried off to a friend's house. Some directors of the great works I am come to see look in to make a kindly plan for the morrow, and in the evening, I find myself sitting next one of the most illustrious of modern inventors, with that touch of dream in manner and look which so often goes with scientific discovery. The invention of this gentle and courteous man has affected every vessel of any size afloat, whether for war or trade, and the whole electrical development of the world. The fact was to be driven home even to my feminine ignorance of mechanics when, a fortnight later, the captain of a Flag-ship and I were hanging over the huge shaft leading down to the engine-rooms of the Super-dreadnought, and my companion was explaining to me something of the driving power of the ship. But on this first meeting, how much I might have asked of the kind, great man beside me, and was too preoccupied to ask! May the opportunity be retrieved some day! My head was really full of the overwhelming facts, whether of labour or of output, relating to this world-famous place, which were being discussed around me. I do not name the place, because the banishment of names, whether of persons or places, has been part of the plan of these articles. But one can no more disguise it by writing round it than one could disguise Windsor Castle by any description that was not ridiculous. Many a German officer has walked through these works, I imagine, before the war, smoking the cigarette of peace with their Directors, and inwardly ruminating strange thoughts. If any such comes across these few lines, what I have written will, I think, do England no harm.

But here are some of the figures that can be given. The shop area of the ammunition shops alone has been increased eightfold since the outbreak of war. The total weight of shell delivered during 1915 was—in tons—fourteen times as much as that of 1914. The weight of shell delivered per week, as between December, 1914, and December, 1915, has risen nearly ten times. The number of work-people, in these shops, men and women, had risen (a) as compared with the month in which war broke out, to a figure eight times as great; (b) as compared with December, 1914, to one between three and four times as great. And over the whole vast enterprise, shipyards, gun shops, ammunition shops, with all kinds of naval and other machinery used in war, the numbers of work-people employed had increased since 1913 more than 200 per cent. They, with their families, equal the population of a great city—you may see a new town rising to meet their needs on the farther side of the river.

As to Dilution, it is now accepted by the men, who said when it was proposed to them: "Why didn't you come to us six months ago?"

And it is working wonders here as elsewhere. For instance, a particular portion of the breech mechanism of a gun used to take one hour and twenty minutes to make. On the Dilution plan it is done on a capstan, and takes six minutes. Where 500 women were employed before the war, there are now close on 9,000, and there will be thousands more, requiring one skilled man as tool-setter to about nine or ten women. In a great gun-carriage shop, "what used to be done in two years is now done in one month." In another, two tons of brass were used before the war; a common figure now is twenty-one. A large milling shop, now entirely worked by men, is to be given up immediately to women. And so on.

Dilution, it seems to me, is breaking down a number of labour conventions which no longer answer to the real conditions of the engineering trades. The pressure of the war is doing a real service to both employers and employed by the simplification and overhauling it is everywhere bringing about.

As to the problem of what is to be done with the women after the war, one may safely leave it to the future. It is probably bound up with that other problem of the great new workshops springing up everywhere, and the huge new plants laid down. One thinks of the rapid recovery of French trade after the war of 1870, and of the far more rapid rate—after forty years of machine and transport development, at which the industry of the Allied countries may possibly recover the ravages of the present war, when once peace is signed. In that recovery, how great a part may yet be played by these war workshops!—transformed to the uses of peace; by their crowds of work-people, and by the hitherto unused intelligence they are everywhere evoking and training among both men and women.

As for the following day, my impressions, looking back, seem to be all a variant on a well-known Greek chorus, which hymns the amazing—the "terrible"—cleverness of Man! Seafaring, tillage, house-building, horse-taming, so muses Sophocles, two thousand three hundred years ago; how did man ever find them out? "Wonders are many, but the most wonderful thing is man! Only against death has he no resource."

Intelligence—and death! They are written everywhere in these endless workshops, devoted to the fiercest purposes of war. First of all, we visit the "danger buildings" in the fuse factory, where mostly women are employed. About 500 women are at work here, on different processes connected with the delicate mechanism and filling of the fuse and gaine, some of which are dangerous. Detonator work, for instance. The Lady Superintendent selects for it specially steady and careful women or girls, who are paid at time-and-a-quarter rate. Only about eight girls are allowed in each room. The girls here all wear—for protection—green muslin veils and gloves. It gives them a curious, ghastly look, that fits the occupation. For they are making small pellets for the charging of shells, out of a high-explosive powder. Each girl uses a small copper ladle to take the powder out of a box before her, and puts it into a press which stamps it into a tiny block, looking like ivory. She holds her hand over a little tray of water lest any of the powder should escape. What the explosive and death-dealing power of it is, it does not do to think about.