This is one of the largest guns. At such a scene as its mounting one is always struck by the contrast between the restless stir of the minute figures busy about it and the massive impassivity—for the present—of the thing they have created. “A great gun,” it has been said, “is so sheer.” In a gun shop it dwarfs everything round it and seems the embodiment, at the same time, of immobility and of menace.
XLVIII
“THE HALL OF THE MILLION SHELLS”
A store containing loaded shells of every calibre. All the plant has been made since 1914, in answer to the challenge of German militarism. The railway trucks in the foreground are incessantly filled and refilled from the supplies pouring into the store for dispatch to the front. Women drive the cranes that gather up bunches of shells from any part of the building and lower them, with absolute precision, to their appointed places in the trucks. All handling of shells must be cautious and deliberate, but the work proceeds, without haste and without rest, at a remarkable speed.
