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Page 25
After the fuse factory we pass through the high-explosive factory, where
250 girls are at work in a number of isolated wooden sheds filling
18-pounder shell with high explosive. The brass cartridge-case is being
filled with cordite, bundles of what look like thin brown sticks, and the
shell itself, including its central gaine or tube, with the various deadly
explosives we have seen prepared in the "danger buildings." The shell is
fitted into the cartridge-case, the primer and the fuse screwed on. It is
now ready to be fired.
I stand and look at boxes of shells, packed, and about to go straight to
the front. A train is waiting close by to take them the first stage on
their journey. I little thought then that I should see these boxes, or
their fellows, next, on the endless ranks of ammunition lorries behind the
fighting lines in France, and that within a fortnight I should myself
stand by and see one of those shells fired from a British gun, little more
than a mile from Neuve Chapelle.
But here are the women and girls trooping out to dinner. A sweet-faced
Superintendent comes to talk to me. "They are not as strong as the men,"
she says, pointing to the long lines of girls, "but what they lack in
strength they make up in patriotic spirit." I speak to two educated women,
who turn out to be High School mistresses from a town that has been
several times visited by Zeppelins. "We just felt we must come and help to
kill Germans," they say quietly. "All we mind is getting up at five-thirty
every morning. Oh, no! it is not too tiring."
Afterwards?--I remember one long procession of stately shops, with their
high windows, their floors crowded with machines, their roofs lined with
cranes, the flame of the forges, and the smoke of the fizzling steel
lighting up the dark groups of men, the huge howitzer shells, red-hot,
swinging in mid-air, and the same shells, tamed and gleaming, on the great
lathes that rough and bore and finish them. Here are shell for the _Queen
Elizabeth_ guns!--the biggest shell made. This shop had been put up by
good luck just as the war began. Its output of steel has increased from
80 tons a week to 1,040.
Then another huge fuse shop, quite new, where 1,400 girls in one shift are
at work--said to be the largest fuse shop known. And on the following
morning, an endless spectacle of war work--gun-carriages, naval turrets,
torpedo tubes, armed railway carriages, small Hotchkiss guns for merchant
ships, tool-making shops, gauge shops--and so on for ever. In the
tool-making shops the output has risen from 44,000 to 3,000,000 a year!
And meanwhile I have not seen anything, and shall not have time to see
anything of the famous shipyards of the firm. But with regard to them, all
that it is necessary to remember is that before the war they were capable
of berthing twenty ships at once, from the largest battleship downward;
and we have Mr. Balfour's word for it as to what has happened, since the
war, in the naval shipyards of this country. "We have added _a million
tons to the Navy--and we have doubled its personnel_."
And now let me record two final sayings.
One from a manager of a department:
We have a good many Socialists here, and they constantly
give trouble. But the great majority of the men have done
wonderfully! Some men have put in one hundred hours a week
since the war began. Some have not lost a minute since it
began. The old hands have worked _splendidly_.
And another from one of the Directors:
I know of no drunkenness among our women. I don't remember
ever having seen a drunken woman round here.
III
I have almost said my say on munitions, though I could continue the story
much longer. But the wonder of it consists really in its vastness, in the
steady development of a movement which will not end or slacken till the
Allies are victorious. Except for the endless picturesqueness of the
women's share in it, and the mechanical invention and adaptation going on
everywhere, with which only a technical expert could deal, it is of course
monotonous, and I might weary you. I will only--before asking you to
cross the Channel with me to France--put down a few notes and impressions
on the Clyde district, where, as our newspapers will have told you, there
is at the present moment (March 29th) some serious labour trouble, with
which the Government is dealing. Until further light is thrown upon its
causes, comment is better postponed. But I have spoken quite frankly in
these letters of "danger spots," where a type of international Socialism
is to be found--affecting a small number of men, over whom the ideas of
"country" and "national honour" seem to have no hold. Every country
possesses such men and must guard itself against them. A nucleus of them
exists in this populous and important district. How far their influence
is helped among those who care nothing for their ideas, by any real or
supposed grievances against the employers, by misunderstandings and
misconceptions, by the sheer nervous fatigue and irritation of the men's
long effort, or by those natural fears for the future of their Unions,
to which I have once or twice referred, only one long familiar with the
district could say, I can only point out here one or two interesting
facts. In the first place, in this crowded countryside, where a small
minority of dangerous extremists appear to have no care for their
comrades in the trenches, the recruiting for the new Armies--so I learn
from one of the leading authorities--has been--"taken on any basis
whatever--substantially higher than in any other district. The men came
up magnificently." That means that among those left behind, whatever
disturbing and disintegrating forces exist in a great Labour centre have
freer play than would normally be the case. A certain amount of patriotic
cream has been skimmed, and in some places the milk that remains must be
thin. In the second place--(you will remember the employer I quoted to you
in a former letter)--the work done here by thousands and thousands of
workmen since the beginning of the war, especially in the great shipyards,
and done with the heartiest and most self-sacrificing good-will, has been
simply invaluable to the nation, and England remembers it well. And
finally, the invasion of women has perhaps been more startling to the
workmen here than anywhere else. Not a single woman was employed in the
works or factories of the district before the war, except in textiles.
There will soon be 15,000 in the munition workshops, and that will not be
the end.
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