Peering out from the window of one of those dingy third-class compartments was a young girl in a rather faded felt hat and a cheap navy-blue coat, while upon the platform, apparently taking notice of nobody, stood a tallish young man in a brown overcoat. The munition-girl was Ella Drost, and the man her lover, Seymour Kennedy.
As the train at last moved out across the long bridge over the river, the pair exchanged glances, and then Ella, with her brass triangle on her blouse, sat back in the crowded carriage in thought, her little attaché-case upon her knees, listening to the merry chat of her fellow-workers.
Arrived at the station, she followed the crowd of workers to the huge newly-erected factory close by, a great hive of industry where, through night and day, Sunday and weekday, over eight thousand women made big shells for the guns at the front.
At the entrance-gate each girl passed singly beneath the keen eyes of door-keepers and detectives, for no intruder was allowed within, it being as difficult for strangers to gain admission there as to enter the presence of the Prime Minister at Downing Street.
The shifts were changing, and the day-workers were going off. Hence there was considerable bustle, and many of those lathes drilling and turning the great steel projectiles were, for the moment, still.
Presently the night-workers began to troop in, each in her pale-brown overall with a Dutch cap, around the edge of which was either a red or blue band denoting the status of the worker, while the forewomen were distinctive in their dark-blue overalls.
Some of the girls had exchanged their skirts for brown linen trousers. Those were the girls working the travelling cranes which, moving up and down the whole length of the factory, carried the shells from one lathe to another as they passed through the many processes between drilling and varnishing. Ella was among these latter, and certainly nobody who met her in her Dutch cap with its blue band, her linen overall jacket with its waistband, and her trousers, stained in places with oil, would have ever recognised her as the star of London revue.
Lithely she mounted the straight steep iron ladder up to her lofty perch on the crane, and, seating herself, she touched the switch and began to move along the elevated rails over the heads of the busy workers below.
The transfer of a shell from one lathe to another was accomplished with marvellous ease and swiftness. A girl below her lifted her hand as signal, whereupon Ella advanced over her, and let down a huge pair of steel grips which the lathe-worker placed upon the shell, at the same time releasing it from the lathe. Again she raised her hand, and the shell was lifted a few yards above her head and lowered to the next machine, where the worker there placed it in position, and then released it to undergo its next phase of manufacture.
Such was Ella’s work. In the fortnight she had been there she had become quite expert in the transfer of the huge shells, and, further, she had become much interested in her new life and its unusual surroundings In that great place the motive force of all was electricity. All those whirring lathes, drills, hammers, saws, cutting and polishing machines, cranes, everything in that factory, as well as the two other great factories in the near vicinity, were driven from the great electrical power-station close by.