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Page 49
And in the matter of ammunition, we have not only enormously increased the
quantity produced--we have greatly improved its quality. The testimony of
the French experts--themselves masters in these arts of death--as conveyed
through M. Thomas, is emphatic. The new British heavy guns are "admirably
made"--"most accurate"--"most efficient."
Meanwhile a whole series of chemical problems with regard to high
explosives have been undertaken and solved by Lord Moulton's department.
If it was ever true that science was neglected by the War Office, it is
certainly true no longer; and the soldiers at the front, who have to make
practical use of what our scientific chemists and our explosive factories
at home are producing, are entirely satisfied.
For that, as Mr. Montagu points out, is the sole and supreme test. How has
the vast activity of the new Ministry of Munitions--an activity which the
nation owes--let me repeat it--to the initiative, the compelling energy,
of Mr. Lloyd George--affected our armies in the field?
The final answer to that question is not yet. The Somme offensive is still
hammering at the German gates; I shall presently give an outline of its
course from its opening on July 1st down to the present. But meanwhile
what can be said is this.
The expenditure of ammunition which enabled us to sweep through the German
first lines, in the opening days of this July, almost with ease, was
colossal beyond all precedent. The total amount of heavy guns and
ammunition manufactured by Great Britain in the first ten months of the
war, from August, 1914, to June 1, 1915, would not have kept the British
bombardment on the Somme going _for a single day_. That gives some idea of
it.
Can we keep it up? The German papers have been consoling themselves with
the reflection that so huge an effort must have exhausted our supplies. On
the contrary, says Mr. Montagu. _The output of the factories, week by
week, now covers the expenditure in the field_. No fear now, that as at
Loos, as at Neuve Chapelle, and as on a thousand other smaller occasions,
British success in the field should be crippled and stopped by shortage of
gun and shell!
By whom has this result been brought about? By that army of British
workmen--and workwomen--which Mr. Lloyd George in little more than one
short year has mobilised throughout the country. The Ministry of Munitions
is now employing _three millions and a half of workers_--(a year ago it
was not much more than a million and a half)--of whom 400,000 _are
women_; and the staff of the Ministry has grown from 3,000--the figure
given in my earlier letters--to 5,000, just as that army of women, which
has sprung as it were out of the earth at the call of the nation, has
almost doubled since I wrote in April last. Well may the new Minister say
that our toilers in factory and forge have had some share in the glorious
recent victories of Russia, Italy, and France! Our men and our women have
contributed to the re-equipment of those gallant armies of Russia, which,
a month or six weeks earlier than they were expected to move, have broken
up the Austrian front, and will soon be once more in Western Poland,
perhaps in East Prussia! The Italian Army has drawn from our workshops and
learnt from our experiments. The Serbian Army has been re-formed and
re-fitted.
Let us sum up. The Germans, with years of preparation behind them, made
this war a war of machines. England, in that as in other matters, was
taken by surprise. But our old and proud nation, which for generations
led the machine industry of the world, as soon as it realised the
challenge--and we were slow to realise it!--met it with an impatient and a
fierce energy which is every month attaining a greater momentum and a more
wonderful result. The apparently endless supply of munitions which now
feeds the British front, and the _comparative_ lightness of the human cost
at which the incredibly strong network of the German trenches on their
whole first line system was battered into ruin, during the last days of
June and the first days of July, 1916:--it is to effects like these that
all that vast industrial effort throughout Great Britain, of which I saw
and described a fragment three months ago, has now steadily and
irresistibly brought us.
II
This then is perhaps the first point to notice in the landscape of the
war, as we look back on the last three months. For on it everything else,
Naval and Military, depends:--on the incredibly heightened output of
British workshops, in all branches of war material, which has been
attained since the summer of last year. In it, as I have just said, we see
an _effect_ of a great cause--i.e., of the "effort" made by Great
Britain, since the war broke out, to bring her military strength in men
and munitions to a point, sufficient, in combination with the strength of
her Allies, for victory over the Central Powers, who after long and
deliberate preparation had wantonly broken the European peace. The
"effort" was for us a new one, provoked by Germany, and it will have
far-reaching civil consequences when the war is over.
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