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Page 15
There will be a new wind blowing through England when this war is done.
Not only will the scientific intelligence, the general education, and the
industrial plant of the nation have gained enormously from this huge
impetus of war; but men and women, employers and employed, shaken perforce
out of their old grooves, will look at each other surely with new eyes, in
a world which has not been steeped for nothing in effort and sacrifice, in
common griefs and a common passion of will.
II
All over England, then, the same quadruple process has now been going on
for months:
The steady enlargement of existing armament and munition works, national
or private.
The transformation of a host of other engineering businesses into munition
works.
The co-ordination of a vast number of small workshops dealing with the
innumerable metal industries of ordinary commerce, so as to make them feed
the larger engineering works, with all those minor parts of the gun or
shell, which such shops had the power to make.
The putting up of entirely new workshops--National Workshops--directly
controlled by the new Ministry, under the Munitions Acts.
Let me take you through a few typical scenes.
It was on February 1st, the day after the Zeppelin raid of January 31st,
that I left a house in the north where I had been seeing one of the
country-house convalescent hospitals, to which Englishwomen and English
wealth are giving themselves everywhere without stint, and made my way by
train, through a dark and murky afternoon, towards a Midland town. The
news of the raid was so far vague. The newspapers of the morning gave no
names or details. I was not aware that I was passing through towns where
women and children in back streets had been cruelly and wantonly killed
the night before, where a brewery had been bombed, and the windows of a
train broken, in order that the German public might be fed on ridiculous
lies about the destruction of Liverpool docks and the wrecking of "English
industry." "English industry lies in ruins," said the _Hamburger
Nachrichten_ complacently. Marvellous paper! Just after reading its
remarks, I was driving down the streets of the great industrial centre I
had come to see--a town which the murderers of the night before would have
been glad indeed to hit. As it was, "English industry" seemed tolerably
active amid its "ruins." The clumsy falsehoods of the German official
reports and the German newspapers affect me strangely! It is not so much
their lack of truth as their lack of the ironic, the satiric sense, which
is a certain protection, after all, even amid the tragedy of war. We have
a tolerable British conceit of ourselves, no doubt, and in war we make
foolish or boasting statements about the future, because, in spite of all
our grumbling, we are at bottom a nation of optimists, and apt to see
things as we wish. But this sturdy or fatuous lying about the past--the
"sinking" of the _Lion_, the "capture" of Fort Vaux, or the "bombardment"
of Liverpool docks--is really beyond us. Our sense of ridicule, if nothing
else, forbids--the instinct of an old people with an old and humourous
literature. These leading articles of the _Hamburger Nachrichten_, the
sermons of German pastors, and those amazing manifestoes of German
professors, flying straight in the face of historic documents--"scraps of
paper"--which are there, none the less, to all time--for us, these things
are only not comic because, to the spiritual eye, they are written in
blood. But to return to the "ruins," and this "English industry" which
during the last six months has taken on so grim an aspect for Germany.
My guide, an official of the Ministry, stops the motor, and we turn down a
newly made road, leading towards a mass of spreading building on the left.
"A year ago," says my companion--"this was all green fields. Now the
company is employing, instead of 3,500 work-people, about three times the
number, of whom a large proportion are women. Its output has been
quadrupled, and the experiment of introducing women has been a complete
success."
We pass up a fine oak staircase to the new offices, and I am soon
listening to the report of the works superintendent. A spare, powerful man
with the eyes of one in whom life burns fast, he leans, his hands in his
pockets, against the wall of his office, talking easily and well. He
himself has not had a day's holiday for ten months, never sleeping more
than five and a half hours, with the telephone at his bedhead, and waking
to instant work when the moment for waking comes. His view of his workmen
is critical. It is the view of one consumed with "realisation," face to
face with those who don't "realise." "But the raid will do a deal of
good," he says cheerfully.
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