[Illustration]
DOING THEIR BIT
DOING THEIR BIT
WAR WORK AT HOME
BY
BOYD CABLE
_Author of “Between the Lines,” “By Blow and Kiss,” etc._
WITH A PREFACE BY THE
RIGHT HON. DAVID LLOYD GEORGE, M.P.
_SECOND IMPRESSION_
HODDER AND STOUGHTON
LONDON NEW YORK TORONTO
MCMXVI
_First printed May 1916._
_Reprinted May 1916._
PREFACE
BY THE
RT. HON. DAVID LLOYD GEORGE, M.P.
I hope that Mr. Boyd Cable’s book will have a wide circulation, both
amongst our troops who will learn from it how their comrades at home
are doing “their bit,” and amongst the public who will learn from it
how great is the industry and devotion of those who are supplying our
armies with materials of war.
D. LLOYD GEORGE.
CONTENTS
I
PAGE
WORD TO THE FRONT 9
II
THE MUNITION MACHINE 22
III
SUBLIME TO THE--SUBLIME! 38
IV
SHELLS AND MORE SHELLS 52
V
THE WOMEN 67
VI
THE MASTER JOB 86
VII
“THEIR BIT” 103
VIII
THE GREAT “IF” 119
_It may be well to mention for the better understanding of references
to dates, etc., that these chapters were written in December-January,
1915-16, although publication has been delayed for various reasons
until now._
MAY, 1916.
DOING THEIR BIT
I
WORD TO THE FRONT
When I came here from the Front a couple of months ago I remember
looking out from the train and thinking how quiet and normal and
peaceful the country looked. Driving from the train through London,
the street crowds, although flecked and tinged with khaki, appeared to
be going busily or lazily about their ordinary business or laziness,
the people were shopping, or walking, or driving in buses or taxis as
if they personally had still no more than a newspaper interest in
the war, as if fighting or munition-making were matters concerning a
certain section of mankind altogether apart from the ordinary life of
the country.
I know better now. My eyes have been opened, and I have seen fully
and satisfyingly. There is no fighting here, thanks be, but the khaki
that swarms and hives about the outer ways, and only trickles through
the big towns, is evidence enough of the fighting material. And even
less in evidence, because it does not wear a uniform and because its
business is carried on behind closed and carefully guarded doors, the
country is sweating at forge and furnace, is juggling with lathes
and stamps and presses, has peeled off its coat and set to work in
deadly earnest to give the Front the unlimited munitions the Front
so long has wanted. It is not given to many to see what actually
is being done, and to still fewer to say what they have seen, and
first of all I may explain the why and wherefore of these chapters
I am writing on munitions and munition-making. I am aware that very
competent journalists have already covered the ground in a series of
articles widely published in leading papers, and I am also aware that
prominent politicians have made statements as to “increased output” and
“controlled factories” and “organisation of industry,” and so on. But
I am also fully aware that the Front has become exceedingly sceptical
of all the facts and figures that have been paraded and of the promises
that have been made for a year past. I remember how in the first winter
we at the Front looked forward to the spring and listened hopefully
to the tales of a flooding tide of munitions that was to help us in
the Big Push. I remember how we hung on through the winter enduring
the punishment that came to us because of the shortage of shells, of
bombs, of trench-mortars and machine-guns; and I know how grimly the
Front stuck out the punishment and hung on stubbornly with a tremendous
faith that, come the spring, all would be well, that new armies would
be coming along to help carry the weight, that munitions would be
pouring out to help us level the long tally. And I know too well the
bitter disappointment and the black rage that filled the Front when
the spring came and brought us, not a plenty of munitions, but tales
of a great shortage, stories of strikers and shirkers, woeful cries of
a wasted winter. And when the spring dragged on into summer and the
summer crawled past and brought us face to face with the certainty of
another winter in the trenches-- But these things are past, and, with
the Front, I am glad to leave them and let bygones be bygones. But it
is because of this past that I asked the Ministry of Munitions to give
me an opportunity to see with my own eyes what is being done now, to
give me a chance, as one of the Front themselves, to tell the Front as
much as I might of what I might see, to let the Front know what I am
sure the Front wants to know, what are the munition prospects for the
future. The Ministry of Munitions has allowed me to look and to see,
to ask questions, to talk with inspectors and managers and workers, to
watch the work that is being done, and to figure out what is going to
be done. And now I am going to tell the Front as fully as I may what it
all amounts to. Some things that I know it would not be wise to tell,
I shall not tell; but that still leaves a lot that I know the Front
will be glad to hear. I hope the Front may read these chapters, and I
hope the Front will tie a stone to this book and sling it over to any
near-enough portion of the Hun lines, because what I have to write is
so very cheerful telling for the Front to hear that it would surely be
highly unpleasant for the Germans to digest.
And will the Front as it reads please remember this--that I am not
writing to please or displease any person or party in politics, that I
am not trying to support or injure the beliefs of any portion of the
Press, that at the present time I have no interest in anything beyond
the interests of the Front, that, like themselves, I only want to get
on and get done with the job, and that my interest in munition-making
and its prospects is the main and personal one that is so urgent at the
Front--Are we going to get the stuff we want? Are we ever going to be
short again?
And here, in a sentence, is the belief I have come to after a wide
tour of the munition works: We ARE going to have all we ever hoped
for; we are never, never, never going to be short again. I say this
remembering how the size, and therefore the requirements, of the Army
have increased, how much vaster in proportion to the increased Army
the supplies will have to be to come up to our wants, how our fighting
fronts have multiplied and grown, how also some of our Allies are still
dependent upon us for some of their munitions. In spite of all these,
I believe we are going to get all we want and need, if--it is the only
if, although it is in a way a big enough one, and one that I’ll come
back to presently--if the workers at home play up and play the game and
back us up to allow us to play out ours.
If they do that, we are going to have munitions to play about with,
we’re going to have a heaping plenty of shells and machine-guns and
bombs and grenades and ’planes and trench-mortars.
There are enormous stacks of munitions ready and waiting now, and they
are a mere handful to the munition mountains that are going to come
along in ever increasing quantity month by month. You men who clung to
your battered and water-logged trenches that winter while the German
shells pounded them and you to pieces and our own guns were making a
cruelly feeble reply, you gunners who heard the angry demands and the
pitiful pleas of the suffering infantry for “retaliation” and a heavier
fire and the silencing of this battery or that _minnenwerfer_, and
had to smother your savage longing to “let ’em have it” because you
were short of shells, you will understand the joy that has lately been
mine to stand and look at massed rows and ranks of big fat howitzer
shells awaiting shipment, to watch the wide sea of lathes whirling and
buzzing, eating up length after length of steel and brass rods, turning
out fuse-parts and one bit or another of weapons and projectiles,
to hear store managers wonder how or where they are going to house
the growing output, to be told, as I have been told time and again,
that the factory is running night and day, week in week out, that the
present output is to be doubled in the next month or two months, that
the full volume will be reached in February or March, April or May, as
the case may be. That last was perhaps the most cheery feature of a
completely cheering tour--the constant assurance that larger premises
were in contemplation or course of construction; that extra hands were
being taken on, or sought, or trained; that further machinery was on
order, or coming in, or being installed; that present output is only
a beginning and is to be added to by half as much again, or to be
doubled, or trebled. I didn’t have to be satisfied with hearing these
things, either; to be content with the mere telling; to be left at
the end wondering if it was all a mere vague wish or hope or an empty
boast, and doubting whether the spring, like last, would see the hopes
squashed and the boasts fallen flat. I had plain enough proof meeting
me at every turn that there was a solid and businesslike backing to all
the boasts and promises. Here I could see a score of huge lathes with
the packing being stripped from about them, there a wide cement floor
being spread, new storeys sprouting in a tangle of scaffolding and
steel girders on existing works, half-built forges and furnaces rising
gaunt from a sea of bricks and mortar and cement. I drove headlong
for hours in a fast motor or tramped interminably over wide areas
where brick and wood huts and houses and workshops ran, row upon row,
township after township, all empty of munition men or machinery, but
all clattering and echoing to the saws and hammers of the workers who
drove the job to the quickest possible completion. The promises I got,
and that I gladly pass on to the Front, were not only by word of mouth;
they were in solid brick and stone and wood, shining steel and brass
and copper, regiments of working carpenters and masons, whole brigades
of brawny navvies delving and draining and digging out foundations and
laying and levelling engine-room beds and machine-shop floors. I was,
in fact, more keen to discover and make sure of what is to be done
rather than what has been or is being done, and this because I know,
and the Front knows, how we stand out there for munitions now, but not
how much lay behind our daily needs, how we are to fare when, or if,
all the scattered fronts get busy together, when one big battle is to
tread so close on the heels of another that it will be hard to sort out
one from the other and issue us the right clasps to our medals.
Well, I confess myself satisfied; and I’ve a strong fancy that by next
summer the Front is going to be satisfied, and the Germans also are
going to be satisfied after quite another fashion. Just now I’m writing
about munitions, and I’m not going to wander off into war strategy, or
compete with the prophet experts in guessing when the War is going to
finish. But, after all I’ve seen and heard, it is impossible to get
away from this happy thought--if last winter and spring and summer
we could hold the enemy, could even on occasion beat back a long and
desperate assault, break in and grip and stick to a mile or two of
country, a few lines of trenches, if we could do what we have done with
a small army and a desperate lack of munitions, what are we going to do
this year with a fresh and big army, with lavish supplies of every arm
and equipment we require, with a flood of munitions pouring in as fast
as ever we can pelt them out? It looks pretty good, doesn’t it? And
now I’ll go on to a general description of some of the proofs I have
had of just how good it really looks.
II
THE MUNITION MACHINE
I have, I admit, been amazed to see the extent to which the war
workshops of the country have grown, the enlargement of existing works,
the springing up of entirely new factories, the huge armies busily
employed in all these places. But I have been still more astonished--I
have been out Front a year, remember, and have lost touch with the
country’s domestic doings--to find how munition-making has become part
and parcel of the national existence; that it is quite a commonplace
for Lady This of Tudor Hall or Countess That of Belgravia to be
handling a lathe in a workshop alongside Miss So from Kensington
and ’Liza Such from Houndsditch; that it is no more than a matter of
course that a man cast for a commission and refused for the ranks a
year ago on account of bad eyes has “gone munitioning” and, grime and
oil to his weak eye-rims, is driving a donkey engine in a big factory;
that any day you may see at the “canteens” of various factories
scores of ladies, who have been used since the day they were born to
being waited on hand and foot, now taking the other end of the job
and carving mountains of bread into slices and carrying cups of tea
and cheerfully waiting on the workers who serve their country in the
“shops.” I find that the passenger train services have been chopped
to pieces, that mails take any old time to do their journey, that
goods by rail get there this week, or next, or a month hence--because
munition transport blocks the rails; that whole industries have
been blotted from existence because their hands or their plant were
wanted--for munitions; that Polytechnic classes are being busily
taught--to make munitions; that, in fact, the whole country is one
seething munition factory, and no man or lathe or tool that can be
turned to munition-making is possibly doing anything else. It may
surprise you at the Front, as it certainly did me, to learn that the
Ministry of Munitions has taken a grip on the whole industry of this
country; that it has an autocratic control over it, wide and strong
beyond the wildest dreams of the craziest autocrat; that no man can
buy or sell a barrow-load of old iron or a sovereign’s worth of copper
or brass without some official of the Ministry getting to hear of
it and popping up to air an insatiable curiosity; that no lathe or
machine for working metal may be imported without the Ministry being
given copious explanations as to its destination and intended use,
and, moreover, if that use be not for munition work that the machine
or metal is much more likely than not to be commandeered forthwith and
set to munitioning; that no machine may be exported; that you cannot
buy or sell a new or second-hand machine without a permit from the
Ministry; that no man or firm may use man or machine to make clocks or
gramophones or motor-cars or anything between if the Ministry prefers
the man or firm to turn his factory to making munitions in whole or in
part. And all this power is no empty form. It is used to the full, and
as a result thousands of machines and scores of thousands of hands have
been turned from other work on to munitions. A mechanic may no longer
work where and on what job he pleases. If he is running a machine for
stamping out trouser-buttons and the Ministry wants him to turn over
to stamping out cartridge discs, he has to do so. If a firm is busy
making motor-cars, the Ministry inspector may step in and tell the firm
to drop that work and start making shells. If another firm already
making munitions is employing daily 100 skilled and 100 unskilled
hands, the Ministry will almost certainly take away a number of the
skilled hands and hand them over to another factory where skilled men
are scarcer and more urgently required. All this simply means that the
engineering resources of the country are mobilised and efficiently
organised and turned full force on munition-making. The Munition
Machine is running now with wonderful smoothness, but it is easy to see
what a gigantic task it must have been to get it in running order. It
could only have been done with the willing agreement and co-operation
of the great engineering and business men and firms throughout the
country. You have heard how the Ministry called on local business
men to organise their districts, to form local committees, and to set
themselves to getting the last ounce of munition work out of their
districts. Now I am telling you how those committees have done their
work, how they and the local Ministry offices and officials have
handled the job. But I doubt if ever the country will realise how well
it has been done or how much it owes to these people. I have come
in contact with many of them in my tour, and I found only one thing
greater and more wonderful than their efficiency, and that is their
keenness. Obviously and emphatically their whole hearts and souls are
in the job. They have in many cases sacrificed their incomes, in every
instance I met the whole of their leisure or pleasure or ease to their
work. I met one works manager who has not seen his home in daylight
for over six months, who has not seen his young children awake in
that time, whose normal working hours have been 6 a.m. to 11 p.m.,
Saturday, Sunday, and Monday alike. These works owners and managers,
and inspectors, and committee-men, and chairmen and secretaries, the
brains of the munition business, are amazing and wonderful beyond
words. They are the organisers and the driving power behind the whole
vast machine, and what that machine is we are going to know more
and more fully as the War goes on. I have often in the past heard
expressions of wonder that the services of the great business men, the
“captains of industry,” were not properly employed in the service of
their country. That, when one comes to realise the truth, is rather
a good joke, because, while people are still grumbling about it not
being done, it has been done--has been, quite after the fashion of real
business men, very completely done with an entire absence of fuss and
feathers and fluster and talk.
Some of the heads of the greatest engineering firms in Great
Britain--no, that is very wrong, and I ought to say in the Empire--some
of the greatest business brains the Empire owns are running this
munition business. In many cases--I believe I might say most cases,
but throughout these chapters I am only going to tell of what I
have actually and personally seen and known--these men are spending
unstinted time and energy on the work, freely and without fee, salary,
profit, or reward. Men who have been handling contracts running into
millions of pounds, men who have been earning many thousands a year,
have dropped all their own affairs to come in on munition work. I can
give you one instance out of many I met which will do for a sample.
At one place, which I’ll describe more fully later on, and which is
going to be when complete the greatest munition works in the world,
bar none, something like a score of our greatest contractors are hard
at work. They are the sort of men who take on as an ordinary job the
tunnelling of the Alps or the Andes, the building of a Forth Bridge,
the erection of a street of skyscraper buildings, the building of a
Nile barrage. Now they are building roads and huts and power stations
and water- and drainage- and lighting-systems, and are driving the
work at a furious excess speed to completion. And the Number One, the
head-centre bull’s-eye boss of the job, is a partner in what I believe
is one of the greatest, if not the greatest, contracting firms in the
Empire or the world, a firm whose name is a household word, whose
activities have spread over all the inhabited and a biggish section
of the uninhabited globe, who control capital running well up in the
millions and have fingers in all sorts of business pies. About him are
gathered a crowd of picked men from the four corners of the earth.
In the block of offices run up to house the staff and staff work you
could probably find a man to speak any civilised or semi-civilised
language in the world, and a few who can speak some tongues it would
puzzle a University professor to put a name to. They have been hooked
in from Chile or Chicago, Sydney or Santiago, from railway surveys in
Brazil or oil-fields at Baku, from bridge-building, lumbering, mining,
canal-digging, well-boring, tunnelling, from any or all of the biggest
jobs in the Empire or outside of it. And here they are dumped down in
a corner of Great Britain, planning, estimating, figuring, tearing up
the foundations of the earth and re-shaping it to their own ends and to
that one great end, munition-making. The fruits of all their energy and
experience and knowledge are sprouting about them and growing visibly
under their hands and eyes day by day and, indeed, hour by hour. They
are the power that is driving the machine, the huge machine which is
just beginning to speed up, which has not yet properly got into its
stride, but which when it does is going to justify to the hilt that
verdict on the Old Country that is credited to a Yankee journalist:
“Bad starters, but darn good finishers.”
But it is not only in the large new or extended factories that the
Ministry of Munitions is doing good work; in fact, I have heard it
said that this is the easiest and simplest side of the colossal
task. The difficult and intricate part has been the organising of
the small business and plants, the converting of all sorts of weird
manufacturings into munition-making. I had innumerable instances of
this before me wherever I went, but the whole idea was in a fashion
epitomised in a drive I was making from one large factory to another.
One of the Ministry’s engineers was with me showing me round. Like
all his fellows that I met, he was desperately keen on the work,
and because I was evidently anxious to hear and to learn he talked
munitions without ceasing and poured enough facts and figures over
me to stun a census collector. Our car moved on the wet roads at a
pace that was just over or under the edge of the safety limit--I
discovered afterwards that this is a habit with the drivers of the
Ministry cars, and one driver to whom I dropped a casual remark about
fast driving explained the habit. “These munition gents I drive never
has but the one word for me,” he said, “an’ that’s ‘Hurry up!’” My
engineer companion was in the midst of a staggering estimate of the
rate at which his district’s output was growing when the car swung
dizzily round a sharp corner, braked hard, and slid guttering under
the tail-board of a huge lorry that lumbered along in the middle of
the road. There was a tarpaulin over the wagon, but at the tail of
it I caught sight of something that reminded me of long lines of men
staggering with heavy burdens into the back-door trenches at Loos.
The car jerked out from behind the wagon, dodged into a gap in the
reverse traffic, swooped past, and fled squattering down the wet
road. “That’s the factory, over there,” said the engineer, pointing,
“and that chimney-stack beside it is the Blank Tobacco Factory.
They’re doing shells there now.” I expressed some wonder that tobacco
manufacture could by any wizardry be converted to shell-making. “Bless
you,” the engineer chuckled, “that’s nothing. I can show you queerer
changes than that. You see, our great trouble is to get machines enough
and men enough to handle ’em. Shows like motor works and boilermakers
were dead easy and obvious, and they were scooped in the first snap.
Then later--quick, look down this lane--at the end!” The car swooped
past, and I had one glimpse, as the lane-entrance opened and shut to
our passing, of a dingy, grey vista gleaming with wet puddles and with
a couple of lorries blocking the far end. “That,” said the engineer,
“is the X Y Z Gramophone works. They’re shell-fuses now.” And so as
the car buzzed fiercely down straight stretches, or banked steeply and
swung skidding and lurching round greasy corners, or checked sharply
and crawled hooting hoarsely and impatiently at impeding carts, the
engineer discoursed at length on the conversion of this manufactory or
that to munitions, and pointed out a late magneto-maker’s, or a piano
factory, or a coach-builder’s, describing their past operations and
summing up their conversion with “Now they’re pineapple bombs,” or
“They’re rifle-stocks,” or “They’re aeroplane frames.” I asked him if
these firms volunteered for munition work. “Some of them,” he said;
“but others never dreamed there was any war work they could adapt
themselves to.” I thought of the tobacco factory and concluded it was
small wonder some didn’t dream of it. “But I will say,” went on the
engineer, “as a rule they only want showing, or a hint of a showing,
and they get as keen as mustard on it. There was the Rollero Duplicator
now. You know what a duplicator is? Thing for printing copies off a
typed stencil sheet. Well, they turned over to----” and away he went on
another magic-wand conversion tale.
And that is the sort of thing I have been meeting throughout the
length and breadth of Great Britain. It isn’t only the big firms and
factories that are on War work. The little fellows are doing their bit
just as energetically, and if each of their shares is small it must
bulk considerably in the total; and many of them, by devoting all their
energy to certain screws or cups or cones, are able to free the large
makers of this small work, and leave them to handle other parts and
use up the fitments turned in to them. Every scrap of work turned out
by every firm or factory is done to gauge, and a screw made in a back
room in Bermondsey and another turned at Clydebank will fill and fit
a screw-hole bored in a Birmingham shop just as exactly as if the one
man or machine had made the lot. But the gauging work is quite a pretty
story in itself, though I must leave out its telling in the meantime.
III
SUBLIME TO THE--SUBLIME!
The car had run into the closer traffic of the town, and the engineer
was still pointing out various works that had been converted from all
trades under the sun to the one and only that counts to-day, when he
dropped a remark that roused a fresh current of curiosity. “It isn’t
only regular business firms that are in on this game, you know,” he
said. “There’s a good story I must get the Eastern district man to tell
you, about an old-clo’ Jew that wanted to switch his jet-bead machines
or something and his horribly sweated bonnet-makers on to war work.
He’d have taken on any contract he could grab too, from 15-inch shells
downwards. But the day’s long past when a man can hook a contract on
the gamble of sub-contracting it out, so our Jew misfired that lot.
I rather fancy his bonnet hands are button-holing cartridge-belts or
something now, though. But clothing and kit isn’t my line, and I don’t
know the details, and I’ve plenty of queer conversion cases inside my
own job. There’s one little place I have now would tickle you. The
factory is a top back bedroom in a little side street, the machinery
is one knock-kneed, rheumaticky lathe, and the factory staff is one
old man, although, between ourselves, I believe his old missus takes a
turn and keeps the lathe running while he’s asleep. The room isn’t big
enough to hold the lathe and the length of brass rod that feeds into
it and turns into a fuse-part, so they’ve knocked a hole in the wall
and the brass rod sticks out through it and works in again through the
lathe an inch at a time. Then there’s another little place something
after the same style to begin with, but growing a lathe at a time. It’s
just down the street here, and we pass it presently.”
And presently, at my request, the car slowed, sidled cross-traffic,
and halted outside the door of an ordinary, rather dingy-looking
street-door. When we rang and were admitted we squeezed past the
packing-cases that filled the narrow “hall,” climbed a steep stair,
and were shown into a parlour that might have been transplanted bodily
from a Bloomsbury boarding-house. Anything less promising of munition
work it would be hard to find, but presently the manager-owner-engineer
came along and fetched us to “the works.” He was mighty proud of those
same works, and small blame to him. He had started with a single
lathe and now here he had half a dozen running off the power of a
tiny engine tucked away in the corner. The lathes had been purchased
one at a time as each earned the first instalment to pay for the
next, the Ministry encouraging and helping the effort substantially.
Now the lathes were hard at work, packed so close that one had to
twist sideways to move between them, and bright little scraps of
polished metal ranged in rows gave proof of the capability of men and
machines and of the organisation and energy that are running through
the tiniest of Industry’s veins and are going to beat Germany’s
greatest efforts in the long run. In an empty lumber-room upstairs we
were shown a complicated and ingenious machine that represented the
former employment of the owner; and pushed away in a corner, dusty
and dull and tarnished, neglected and forgotten, were pieces of the
work the machine had been turning out, work which had been dropped
completely, and, more than that, which represented a trade and a
connection, long and slow in the up-building perhaps, which also had
been dropped completely. Here were buttons and belt-clasps and trinkets
of silver and enamel and dainty cloisonné work, glowing with all the
radiant colours of the rainbow, flecked with inset gleaming gold and
delicate silver sprays and tendrils. “Eastern trade mostly,” said the
proprietor, “India and Egypt and Turkey and so on. The natives like
’em, I suppose.”
Natives--yes. But instantly visions came back to me of Arabs chaffering
on the deck at Port Said, of the dark and scented interior of a
Japanese shop in Singapore, of a native pedlar squatted in the hot sun
before the hotel veranda in Sourabaya, and the assurance of the seller,
shrill and emphatic to the questioning tourists, “Native work, sah!
Re-al native work!” And here in a back attic in England--I daresay the
proprietor wondered why I grinned at his pretty trinkets and his big
machine.
And then as we clumped down the stairs and into the street again
the engineer made a remark that I must go back a little to make
understandable. “Rather a case of ‘the sublime to the ridiculous,’
isn’t it?” he said, and in that he was referring to the works we had
been over that morning and had just left. I had been shown these as a
good sample of what a “converted” works could do. In pre-War days the
firm were makers of a certain part of railway locomotives. They were
entirely specialists in this work, and employed many specialist hands
and a vast amount of specialist machinery on it. But now the whole of
their locomotive work has been set aside, and the whole energy of the
shops is turned on to war work. Some of the old machines, lathes,
and so on had been ingeniously adapted by the making and fitting
of new tools to their new work, and other new munition machinery
has been introduced wholesale. We walked through huge rooms filled
with heavy lathes, grinding, scraping, and screaming on the boring
and turning of blocks of steel that were growing swiftly under our
eyes to the familiar shape and semblance of shells. We followed the
rough steel billets through all their processes, the shaping and
smoothing of outside and inside, the grooving of the base to take
the copper driving band, the cunning scoring out of a “wave line” in
the groove, the fitting on of the copper band and its clutching in a
giant steel-fingered closing and opening hand that squeezed the copper
inexorably into its place and tightly into the “wave line,” there to
grip and prevent it slipping under the terrific wrench and spin the
rifled gun would give it. This “banding press” was a new machine just
installed and putting through its first shells while we were there.
It was merely another word in the same story I have heard throughout
the munition works. “It will speed up the output a good deal,” said
the manager complacently as we watched. “We’ll be doing another
so-and-so per cent. when it’s running.” In another vast chamber we saw
“pineapple bombs” or hand grenades being made--“pineapple” being a
neat description of the shape and criss-cross pattern of lines marking
the segments into which the grenade bursts. In the foundry the floor
was covered with rows upon rows of square-shaped, dark-grey boxes, and
with other square boxes bearing what looked like the impressions of
small dumb-bells. Men were busy about these boxes, the moulds for the
casting of the bombs, and at one end of the room other men were tapping
and prodding at an up-ended boiler-looking arrangement. From this,
when the clay stopper had been knocked out, a jet of molten metal shot
in a glowing, pinky-red stream running like water from a tap into the
heavy bucket in place to receive it. When the bucket filled, a fresh
plug of clay stopped off the stream, and instantly the bucket swung
off, swaying in the grasp of chains and hooks that ran on overhead
rails to the waiting moulds. The bucket checked and tilted at each
mould and the liquid metal poured smoothly into its appointed place
until the bucket was empty. After the rooms where the lathes rumbled
and roared, and the riven steel grated and squealed under the cutting
tools, and the hammers jarred and pounded incessantly, this foundry was
strangely un-noisy; but here, as in all the other rooms, there was the
same sense of bustle, of rush, of speed, of driving the work; and the
spurting jet of hot metal, the glow of the furnace, the dull roar of
the fire, the hoarse blowing of air through a nozzle where the moulds
were being blown clear and clean of dust and sand, the clink and rattle
of tools, the movements of the stripped and sweating workers--all gave
their own sure impression of haste and activity. “Thirty thousand a
day we’re turning out of these,” said the manager, “and we’ll better
that presently.” Now, you bombers of the “Suicide Clubs” might note
this--30,000 grenades a day are being turned out by this one firm, a
firm which only devotes a part of its work to grenades. This is only
one firm out of many I have seen, and very many more, no doubt, I
haven’t seen, and one particular make of the many makes you out Front
know are being made. Does it give you any realisation of the number
of grenades you will be getting presently? I hope so. I hope you will
understand and be sure that never again will you be “bombed out” of a
captured trench because your supplies of grenades ran out. And I hope
Herr Fritz across the way in the front trench also understands and
appreciates the prospect.
From the foundry we passed back into the workshops, picking a way
round and past and between stacks and piles of shells in every stage
of roughness and completeness; we climbed stairs, wandered over many
more floors, and many acres of man- and machine-filled rooms, and came
at last to one large, empty room. In it there were machines in plenty,
but no man or woman. The walls echoed emptily to our steps and voices,
the machines were still and silent, dust-covered, dingy, forlorn, and
abandoned; and piled in the corners, on and under the benches, anywhere
out of the way, were heaps of the locomotive parts on which the firm
was once solely engaged. There were many thousands of pounds’ worth of
these parts and of machinery standing idle, and one might have expected
the sight and the thought of all his own diverted specialist knowledge
and experience to have brought sadness and melancholy to the mind of
any manager. But here the manager had evidently no regrets and no time
to waste on memories. “We couldn’t adapt any of this machinery,” he
said lightly, “so we’re going to clear it out, and fill this place
up with new shell-making plant.” But, after all, that sentence only
summarises the whole scheme of this munition business. The man or the
machine that cannot or will not be adapted to war work is ruthlessly
cleared out and replaced by man or machine that can. It is to the
everlasting credit of the men that so many of their machines have been
cleverly adapted, that so few of themselves could not be, and that
still fewer--if any--would not.
The factory was knocking off for dinner as we came away, and the car
ploughed out through a hurrying crowd at the main gate and down a
dividing sea of workers in the road outside.
So now you will understand--to come back to where I broke off at the
street-door of the humble workshop of the one-time maker of enamel
buttons and “re-al native work”--what was in my engineer’s mind when
he made that side remark: “Rather a case of ‘the sublime to the
ridiculous,’ isn’t it?”
But it doesn’t altogether strike me that way. After all, the
trinket-maker upstairs was “doing his bit” to the best of his ability,
just as the manager in the locomotive works was doing his. When you
think of it, there is something rather fine in that single-track footy
little business cheerfully climbing out of its established groove and
plunging off along the new and unknown path of war work. If we take the
trinket-maker, and that other old man and his wife with their brass
rod sticking out through a hole in the wall, as samples and specimens
of the spirit that is animating the Empire and its workers to-day, it
is a thing to be mightily and devoutly thankful for. It is not, if you
look at it aright--the huge humming locomotive works and the sometime
button-maker--any case of “the sublime to the ridiculous.” I am not
sure, in fact, that it is not rather The Sublime to the More Sublime.
IV
SHELLS AND MORE SHELLS
It would be impossible for me to describe in detail all the factories
I was able to see, but in many of them I gleaned particulars which
show plainly the way that war work is being pushed through. I suppose
that if there is any one branch of munitions which the Front wants to
hear about it is the output of shells. Shells and guns count for so
much nowadays, a devastating artillery fire so eases the work of the
attack, a heavier opposing fire is so appallingly destructive to an
advance, the whole moral and physical effect of a superior artillery is
so great, that I know well how very welcome a word it will be to the
Front that shells of every size, weight, and calibre are pouring out
from the factories in a stream already tremendous, but not yet nearly
at its full volume.
One of the most inspiriting sights I saw on my tour was in the foundry
of a shell factory where the rough forgings were being put through
the first stages of their progress to completed six- and eight-inch
shells. The foundry was a vast place, with chinks of vivid light
glowing through the row of furnace-doors and lighting the hot gloom,
the vaporous film of smoke and steam, the bulky machinery looming
dimly through the half-dark, the hurrying figures of the workmen. A
furnace-door slams open, and a burst of glaring light glows fiercely
over the shop; long irons plunge into the flaming gap, and poke and
prod and hook hastily about the fire; a lump of glowing steel rolls
out, tips over, and thumps down on the inclined floor in front of the
furnace. There is a babel of yells, the rush of flying feet, the
clatter of a truck-barrow, and the red-hot billet of metal is pounced
upon, snatched, and twisted on to the hand truck, rushed to where men
wait its coming grouped about a lumbering press whose massive bulk
towers aloft into the misty gloom. The hot metal is clutched and jerked
into position under the heavy punch, and instantly the machine, with
a gigantic hissing sigh, moves and thrusts downward a smooth-moving
but irresistible punch. A gush of flame and burst of thick black smoke
leaps upward and vanishes swiftly, the punch presses home, stops,
reverses, pulls up and out again. The machine breathes another steamy
sigh, twists the first punch aside, poises another an instant over
the red, glowing metal, and again thrusts, plunging down upon it. One
after another the full set of punches take their turn and squeeze and
press their shape upon the plastic steel. Then the last punch draws
out, and two men jabbing with long levers hook out the metal, still
glowing hot but transformed in these few seconds from a rough round
block to a hollow cylinder; chained pincers grab the cylinder and swing
it rapidly to the drawing-press, where the tough steel is pulled out
like putty and drawn to its required size. When it has worked its will
the drawing-press disgorges the cylinder, cooled now to a deeper hot
rose-red, tumbles it out on the floor, and waits ready for its next
mouthful, while men trundle and roll the hot cylinder across the floor
to rest and cool beside the long row that lies fading off from rose to
blood-red, to darker and duller crimson, and through deeper and darker
shades to cold grey and black. And as the punches were jabbing at the
one hot billet another was falling from the furnace, and another was
being worked in the draw-press, or rolling from it rapidly across the
floor to the cooling place. Several gangs of men, several punches and
presses, were all working at a top pressure of speed; the foundry was
filled with the roar and rumbling and hissing sighs of the machinery,
the clatter of trucks, and clank of levers and chains and pincers, the
thump and thud and roll of the falling and moving billets, and every
now and then the outburst and clamour of shouting voices, the swift
rush of hurrying feet. The opening and closing doors of the furnaces,
the fierce glow of the fires, and the white- or red-hot steel billets,
the spouting gush of flames and sparks from the first thrust of the
punches, threw in turn a mantle of searing golden light, of radiant
orange, of dusky red, on the gleaming machinery, the running figures of
the men, their thrusting and pulling arms, heaving, jerking shoulders,
wet, glistening faces, shining, white-glinting eyes and teeth. The
foundry was palpitating and alive, humming and trembling, panting and
quivering, with savage, incessant haste, with sweating, driving energy,
with a splendid and ordered virility. It did one’s heart good to stand
there and watch billet after billet thud down from the furnace to the
floor, to see the giant machinery beat and squeeze them into shape,
to hear the calling and shouting, to sense the stir, the whirling
rush and drive of the work. And “drive” was the key-word of the whole
factory, as I found it is of most munition factories. Here, again,
the manager who showed me round was most openly anxious to get the
last possible ounce of output from his plant, and to add and add and
keep on adding to plant and output. Every process of the work is under
constant scrutiny, and every possible time- or labour-saving device has
only to be tried and proved to be instantly adopted. Here I was shown
under construction a new plant for cleaning out the finished shell;
there a newly installed arrangement for the quick and even painting
of the shells by air-brush spray; everywhere throughout the works
similar dodges for cutting down the time and labour, for speeding up
the output. And always remember that in war work cutting down time and
labour does not, most emphatically does not, mean reducing the working
hours or the number of hands. It only means finding time for more work,
freeing hands to turn on to more work again. Anything that will save
skilled labour especially, will allow the experienced engineers to “go
round” a little better, spread over the unskilled hands a little more,
is hailed as a godsend. In this particular factory there are 2,000
hands--I should say were, because that is some weeks ago now, and many
changes come in a few weeks’ munition work these days--2,000 hands, and
of these there were only sixty men who were engineers, were skilled
men. I asked what was the proportion amongst those men I had watched
grabbing and slinging about the white-hot billets, handling them and
the huge power machines so smoothly and skilfully. “Those,” said the
manager simply, “were all unskilled no more than a matter of months
ago. Milkmen, and market gardeners, and carters, and all sorts they
were, red-raw new to the job, and never inside a shop or handled a
tool till they came in here.” It seemed incredible, but I found plenty
of similar instances since, and the munitions engineer who was going
round with me assured me these things are the rule rather than the
exception. So apparently war work is not only making shell factories
out of sewing-machine and tobacco works, munition contractors out of
enamel-button makers, munition machines from bicycle- and clock-factory
lathes, but is also manufacturing as a by-product engineers and
mechanics from milkmen and all sorts of similar unlikely material. This
manager had the same old story to tell of increasing plant and hands
and output. I stumbled over a litter of planks and bricks and mortar
and building material outside this factory, just as I have outside
many others, and saw the half-built furnaces and half-laid concrete
engine-beds, and listened to the tally of the work under construction
and the machines on order or delivery, and the increase of output that
would result. This factory is doing six- and eight-inch shells mainly,
but the same increased-output programme belongs to every other make
in every shell factory I saw. One place is almost ready to commence
delivery of some hundreds of twelve-inch shells per week as a new
addition to their present output of many thousands of eight-inch shells
and forgings of six-inch shells per week, as well as completing a
portion of the six-inch. I saw at this place piles of new lathes and
motors waiting to be erected, and saw the new shops that have used up
4,000 additional new hands.
Another factory commenced building a six-acre shell factory in June, is
now employing 1,600 hands, and increasing them to 2,500 as quickly as
possible. At another place the present factory, covering many acres,
crammed to the doorstep with machinery and workers, stands on a site
which before the war was an open green field. Now it employs 6,500
hands and is adding about 200 hands a week. Yet another place was an
empty and idle building in July--in all these months mentioned I refer
to the year 1915--but now it is turning out 5,000 shells a week, and
it is to reach 20,000 a week within the next few months. All these are
merely instances, picked at random from my notes. I could multiply
them, and in every district I visited the local Munitions office
could, if they were permitted, have given me figures and dates of this
kind almost without end.