workers at a certain national shell factory gave me for the men at the
Front. I had been telling the general manager how good it was to see
the stacks of shells, the ceaseless flood that was running through
the works, to hear all he had been telling me of the progress made,
and still more of the further progress to be made, and I was led on
to tell him something of the heart-breaking shortage of shells we had
known a year ago, the punishment the troops had suffered again and
again from the heavy artillery fire of the Germans, and the slow and
grudging reply that was all we could make. The manager asked me would
I talk to some of their shop foremen and tell them what a shortage
of shells meant to the Front. So he called in about a score or more
of his men and I just talked to them, and told them how the Front
was hanging on the efforts of the war-workers at home. I told them of
that winter in the trenches, of the hopes we had held to of plenteous
supplies of shells in the spring, of the blow it was to us to hear
of as great a shortage as ever, and, still worse, of the squabbling
amongst munition workers and their haggling over 8_d._ or 8½ _d._ an
hour pay, or Saturday half-holidays, or double overtime for Sunday,
while the men in the trenches suffered a hell of shell-fire, and soaked
in knee-deep gutters, and lost their limbs and lives from frost-bite,
and put in six- or sixteen-day spells, as need be, with no half-holiday
and a shilling a day pay for time and overtime. Maybe there was no
special point in my telling these particular things to these particular
men, because, as their manager assured me, that factory was doing and
always had done its level best, and there had been no friction or
slacking whatever in any department. But anyhow I told them, and I
told them the Front was hoping again for a flood of unlimited shells
this spring, for the essential wherewithal to break the lock-fast
lines in the West, for the munitions that would at last give us a fair
fighting chance--the more than which we don’t want, and don’t need, to
give us victory. And the men heard me out, and after I came away it
appears that these foremen and charge hands went back to their shops
and told their men what I had said, and by and by their manager sent me
a resolution and a pledge they had passed and signed. When I think of
the ring of earnest faces that surrounded me as I talked, of the group
of figures in their oil-stained overalls in the office built over the
workshop where the lathes and hammers and punches and presses around
and underneath us sang their ceaseless song of Shells and Shells and
more Shells, I feel that this is a resolution to be fulfilled to the
hilt, a pledge to be carried out to the last shrapnel bullet. And here
I give you their message, leaving out only the name of the factory and
the names signed at the end:--
“DEAR SIR,--We, the managers, foremen, and charge hands of the
above factory, who listened with grave interest and concern to your
description of our brave lads fighting in France and Flanders, and the
hardships they have to endure, due in lots of cases to lack of shell,
desire to place on record our thanks to you (who have been through
the mill) for putting the matter so clearly before us. We also pledge
ourselves, and desire you to inform our lads at the Front, that, so
far as we are concerned at the ---- National Munitions Factory, we are
working diligently, harmoniously, and sticking it, and will continue
to stick it, with the one object of getting out of the above factory
_Every Possible Shell_. We trust that our rapidly increasing output in
shell will help to fill those empty limbers you mentioned so feelingly
in your remarks.--With kind regards, we are, dear Sir, yours very
sincerely.”
That, I know, is the heartening sort of message you want to hear out
Front, and it expresses, only more clearly and emphatically, what I
have heard from other shell-makers throughout the Kingdom. “Every
possible shell!” Think what it means, you at the Front. And you think
of it too, Fritz Boche.
V
THE WOMEN
Ever since I commenced my tour of the war works I have been developing
a most whole-hearted admiration for the women workers, and the Front
may “spring smartly to attention” and give them the full “Present
arms!” salute for the way they are buckling down to their job. This
applies to women of all grades and classes too. I read in a local
paper the other day a brief paragraph about a presentation made by
fellow-students to a girl who has apparently dropped her college
career, taken a course of instruction in munition work, and had just
been given a berth in a large works in a munition city. Lady S----
(the widow of a brave man whose name is a “household word” throughout
the Empire) is working in a munition factory, her title and position
unknown to her workmates. If she drew wages according to her value, she
would be getting many pounds where she gets shillings, because she has
by constant talks with her workmates impressed upon them and explained
to them that they are working for far more than a weekly wage, that
they are backing up their men out Front, are saving British lives, are
helping their fighting men to beat the Germans, are themselves fighting
and racing the German workshops for the prize of final victory. The
result of all her explaining is recorded in plain figures in that
workroom’s output, in the increase of 30 per cent. the figures show.
I met by chance at a restaurant lunch-table the other day a girl
obviously of gentle birth and upbringing. She left the table at five
minutes to the hour to be back to the factory when the whistle blew,
and before she went she paid for her lunch about, I should estimate,
as much as she would earn for her full day’s work. My being in uniform
led her to ask a question and to tell about a brother at the Front and
briefly what she has done and is doing--helping in the delivery of
Derby “pink paper” forms, working in a soldier’s free buffet, making
Red Cross supplies, and now, because she believed it to be the most
useful and urgent, munition work. She starts work at 6 a.m. sharp every
morning, she puts in some eighty hours’ work a week, and is openly
proud of the fact that she has not “missed a quarter” on any day since
she started. I am mentioning these instances, not for the honour and
glory of any individual or any class, but merely to make it plain
that many women are in munition works, not from any need or wish for
pay, but solely and simply because “King and Country need them.” I
have been told, when looking at a room filled with hundreds of women
workers, that they represented every sort of class and occupation,
and that every one of them was new to the workshops. There were
ex-typists, milliners, cooks, housemaids, students, charwomen, theatre
attendants, many wives and sisters of soldiers, many girls and women
“of independent means.”
And their work is good, is, according to the opinion of every works
manager I asked, excellent beyond expectation. One manager had no words
sufficiently warm to praise. “Knock bottom oot o’ t’ men,” he said
emphatically and repeatedly. At this particular factory women were
doing the whole work of making 18-pounder shells. One girl, who a few
months ago had never seen a lathe outside a picture-book, is turning
the copper driving bands and does 250 bands each ten-hour shift--and
that, I am told, is up to or over a good man’s average. These bands
have to be pressed by a “banding press” on to the shells, and a girl
puts 500 an hour through the machine. Now, without describing the
operation in detail, this means that the girl lifts a shell from beside
her, places it in the machine, where it gets a first squeeze, lifts it
an inch or so and twists it round for a second squeeze, and lifts it
out of the machine on to a table-shelf beside it. She does the three
lifts--in, and twist, and out--500 times per hour, 5,000 times a day.
That is no light physical feat, and it speaks volumes for the energy
and the close attention paid, without a halt or break, to her work.
There are no men in that factory except a handful of skilled engineers
who are kept employed on tool-making and setting, sharpening cutters,
erecting machinery, and other work that only skilled men can do. There
is one room full of these men--The Room of the Old Men, I called
it--that I want to tell you about presently. It is a tale to be proud
of. For the most part the women workers I have seen were on lighter
work--shell-fuses, rifle cartridges, filling or charging, gauging--but
this manager assured me there was no doubt about the women’s ability to
handle anything up to the 18-pounder shell (I saw some on the heavier
4·5 shells later in another place), showed me how and where his women
loaded shells from the store into the trucks on the railway siding by
hand, and lifted out and up and in, and packed and stowed eight tons an
hour. And, finally, he boasted with honest and legitimate pride that
his girls did at least as good and, on official figures, cheaper shells
than any other factory in the kingdom. And the output is to be exactly
quadrupled within a few weeks--not “may be,” or “hoped to be,” mark
you, but, on cut-and-dried, certain, and deliberate plans, _will_ be.
At another factory I stood in a glass-sided passage and looked out
over a vast shop blazing with light, humming with belts and machinery,
packed with lathes and their women workers, brilliant with the vivid
colouring of the flags--Union Jacks and Standards--that were hoisted
proudly over the head of each girl and her machine. The girls were in
khaki overalls and caps, and the massed colours of the khaki, of the
Allied flags’ scarlet and blue and white and orange and black, the
glistening steely-blue of the machinery, the warm touches of the red
copper and yellow brass, all under the bright glow of the electrics,
all jostling and astir and quivering with life and animated movement,
made up a picture as thrilling and alive and heart-warming as any I
have seen throughout the war works. This is a brand-new factory--shops,
machinery, and hands all collected and built from the foundations
up since the war. There is no exact maximum output in view there,
apparently. It is simply growing as fast as new shops can be built,
machinery installed, hands found and taught and employed. There are
7,000 girls at work there now; they average 87½ hours’ work a week,
and they are “as keen as razors, as steady as rocks, as regular and
reliable as the factory hooter.”
Some of the work I have watched the women on is light and might
properly be described as women’s work. In one place, for instance,
there is a long row of girls sitting over a bench under the blaze of
electric lamps. They were piecing together four tiny scraps of metal
which at the end of the bench are being fused into one, making one
whole fuse-part which when complete is about the size of a sixpence and
the thickness of two pennies. One of the four pieces of metal is about
as flimsy as a clipping from a lady’s little finger-nail. How exactly
the fitting and brazing or soldering must be done was very clearly
proved by a box full of these particular fuse-parts that was shown me.
There were 40,000 of these completed parts and they were all “scrapped”
as useless because through a mistake in the making of one of the gauges
they were wrong by half a thousandth of an inch. It is hard to find a
comparison which adequately conveys the meaning of ½ a 1,000th. Perhaps
the nearest would be a fine hair-line, the upstroke of a pen. In this
same works--they were originally telephone-makers, although now the
original place is swamped in newly risen workshops--a large room is
filled with girls gauging or measuring the various finished parts, just
as in other factories I saw thousands of girls similarly engaged on
all sorts and descriptions of parts from shell bodies downwards. The
method of gauging is, roughly, that a girl has two gauges on which to
work, a “go” and a “won’t go.” One girl gauges a part for length, say,
another for width, another for depth, and if in any of these operations
the part “won’t go,” won’t pass through the gauge where it should “go”
or does go through the under-size or “won’t go” gauge, that part is
immediately outcast and returned for alteration or to the melting-pot.
In this factory there are something like 30,000 fuses on the move
flowing through the works, and on each fuse and its parts there are
about a hundred gaugings to be done. At another place--a motor works
in pre-War days--I was told that no girl had been employed by the firm
until a few months ago. Now every possible job they can handle is
being given to them. Everywhere I heard the same tale from employers,
managers, overseers, teachers, from every man who had had any dealings
with the women workers--they are intelligent, eager and quick to
learn, easy to teach; they are punctual and regular in attendance;
they are tractable and obedient and don’t “raise trouble”; they are
amazingly keen on their work, take an interest in it, stick closely to
it, and honestly do their best all the time. For munition work which
is within their handling capacity they are apparently ideal workers.
From the point of view of a firm’s or an industry’s progress and
advancement--this may have little to do with war work, but is, I think,
interesting--most of the engineers I spoke with agreed that the women
are not as good as the men, because the women have not the initiative
or inventiveness, would not think of or suggest any alteration or
improvement in machinery or details of their work; would, for instance,
go on for ever taking ten movements of hands and arms in lifting,
moving, and laying down each part if they had first been taught to do
it in ten movements, and quite ignoring any discovery they themselves
might make that the same thing could be done in nine moves or less. And
it appears they have little ambition, don’t tire of one simple job and
worry to be promoted to a less easy, higher-standard one as men do.
Offsetting all this, we must remember that women are new to such work,
and everyone admits it utterly surprising they should have picked it up
so completely and well. For their keenness and the intelligent handling
of their tools I need no hearsay evidence. I saw enough of it myself.
In shop after shop I moved about amongst these women, saw them pulling
levers, turning hand-wheels, sliding cutters to and from their exact
positions, handling complicated-looking lathes and presses and machines
as if they had been born and reared to the job, although actually 99
per cent. had never had hand on any machine more intricate than a
washhouse mangle. They are doing work, too, that a good many men would
hesitate about tackling. Personally, I should be sorry, for instance,
to be doing the riveting on of shell base-plates with a riveting
machine which delivers its hammer-blows at a rate of about 2,000 a
minute, a fiercely rapid roar of jarring blows that made one’s ears and
temples throb to hear for a few minutes. Yet women to whom I spoke on
that work smiled cheerfully and merely remarked that “you get used to
it in time.” Perhaps, but I don’t envy them the time till they do.
Everywhere I saw the women, fresh young girls and elderly toil-worn
women alike, closely intent on their work, wasting no fraction of a
second between the completion of one tool’s cutting and its withdrawal
and the substitution of the next tool--and such fractions are the more
precious when their loss means waste of a valuable lathe’s time as
well as the operator’s--obviously driving the work, giving hand and
mind and eye to getting through it quickly and getting on to the next.
Among many impressions I retain very clearly of the women’s deftness
and hustling intentness there is one I remember especially. A young and
pretty girl was testing shell-fuses, and as I stopped with the manager
beside her she flicked one quick upward glance from her work to us and
went on swiftly and steadily with her job. The manager explained to me
what she was doing. A box of fuses stood at her left hand; fixed to
the bench before her was an instrument which the touch on a lever set
revolving rapidly, and a little to the right and beyond this stood a
sort of clock-face with a pointer moving round and indicating the speed
of the machine’s revolutions. The operator picked up a fuse, slipped
it in the revolving-wheel centre, and started the machine. “Watch the
centre of the fuse,” said the manager. I watched it spinning until it
lost all shape or outline and became a mere blur. Then--_click_, a
tiny black hole appeared in the centre, the operator switched off the
current, slipped out the fuse, and put it aside as “passed correct”!
“This time,” said the manager, “try to see what figure the clock-finger
indicates at the instant the black hole appears.” It was harder to
do than it sounds, simply because that girl was so impishly quick at
seeing the two things in the same instant that the machine was slowing
and the clock-finger sliding backward and slowing before I could get my
eye on to it. But by watching the clock and ignoring the fuse I found
the needle always went to within a shade of the same point before it
checked and slowed. “The whole thing,” said the manager, “is simply
a speed test of a shutter which must open only after the speed of
revolutions reaches a certain number, and always before it rises to
another certain number. With the shutter working correctly, the shell
must be moving at a certain speed and spin before that opening comes
to allow the flash to pass and burst the shell. It is a check against
premature bursts, I believe.”
Through all this the girl’s flying fingers never halted or slowed, her
eyes never strayed from their set lines. She appeared to be doing two
things at once all the time, to be watching and catching unfailingly
the flashing wink of the opening black eye in the blurring circle,
the swing of the quivering needle-point, and at the same time to see
where to find the next fuse, the starting lever, the place to put the
fuse “passed.” Once she slipped out a fuse, prodded and fiddled at it
a moment with some mysteriously appearing tools, jabbed it back in the
machine, whirled it, stopped it, slid it to the “passed” side, and
without pause went on to the next. “That,” said the manager, “was a
‘fault’ she spotted--shutter opened too soon or too late. Slight fault
evidently she could rectify herself. If she couldn’t she’d have sent it
back as a reject.”
The manager spoke to her, and she answered him without lifting her head
or her eye or checking her hand an instant. And in turn I spoke to her
and told her just what the work she was doing meant to the Front. At
my first word she just flicked that quick glance at me again and kept
on smoothly and swiftly at her work. So, without interrupting her, I
went on and told her what a “premature” through a faulty fuse might
mean, at our end--a high explosive bursting in the bore, blowing out
the breech-block, splitting the piece, killing and wounding perhaps
every other man, or every man at the gun; or a shrapnel prematuring
at the muzzle, and the bullets that should have gone lifting high
and clear inside the case smashing, perhaps, into the open rear of
a gun-emplacement or a battery a few hundred yards in front of the
prematuring gun; or a shell exploding a second or two before it should,
some bare scores of yards short of where it should have burst, spilling
its hundreds of bullets down into our own trenches instead of the
enemy’s, hindering and hurting our own men instead of helping them. If
she had missed that fault she had just caught, I told her, the shell
that fuse was fitted to might, probably would, have done some such
deadly work; and every fuse she tested and passed good was one other
certain to do its proper work and help our men to storm a trench or
hold off an assault.
Then I came away, and I suppose she is sitting there now, her slender
fingers flying deftly to and fro, her pretty head and soft hair bent
over that whirling machine, her young girl’s eyes wide and intent on
the blurring fuse and the jumping needle, at either elbow a heaped
pile of golden-gleaming metal that soon or late will go roaring out
from the guns in flaming cordite blasts to beat a way through for the
Front to take to Victory and Peace.
In a way she is typical of the women on war work, turning their skill
and deftness, giving their youth and strength to “do their bit” and
help the Front. She is more significant than any picture of a blood-
and mud-stained fighting man, for she is emblematical of the work that
must be done, and--thanks be--at last is being done, to win the War.
VI
THE MASTER JOB
If we at the Front felt aggrieved last spring that the winter had been
wasted, that there had not been nearly enough hustling done on war work
at Home, certain it is that we can have no such complaint to make this
spring, or even now. The one great outstanding feature of all the war
works to-day is the way everything is being driven and speeded up. I
have told a fraction of what I have seen of this, of the green fields
of six months back covered now with busy works, of new floor after
floor being piled on existing works, wing after wing added to them,
scores upon scores of new machines being built or imported and set up
and to work, of hundreds and thousands of new hands being taught and
employed, of huge firms adapted to war work, of new firms and National
Factories working smooth and at top speed, of practically every works
and every machine running night and day without halt, of the double and
triple shifts of workers keeping the tireless machines whirling and
grinding and hammering from dawn to dusk, and without pause from dusk
on again to dawn. Perhaps amongst the many other things I have had to
tell, this one great fact of hustle and increasing hustle has been a
little overshadowed, and I had better give one clear instance where the
fact stands out sharp and stark, where nothing is so evident, where
almost nothing else is evident, but the one great and wonderful haste.
The particular effort deserves the telling all the more because it is
the tale of the Master Job, the greatest war factory in the world.
You will always remember that if I am unsatisfactorily vague in some
of the details and altogether miss out others, it is because I may
not and would not “give information of value to the enemy.” Probably,
despite the many precautions taken, the enemy knows all about it, but
this can only be through spies, and since the bigness of a spy’s pay
is apt to depend on the bigness of his news--or lies--at least I need
not corroborate them. The new factory then is a National one, a huge
plan to do, under the State and the Munitions Ministry, a volume of
work which will presently be ready for it, and which no one works or
several combined works is now capable of handling. Without being too
exact, I may say that the area of the works covers a piece of country
about twelve miles long and at no part less than a mile across. Think
a moment what that alone means--twelve miles, the length of the Front
running, say, from Loos up past Cambrin, the Brick Fields, Cuinchy and
Givenchy, on by Indian Village and the Richebourg battle-front, Rue
du Bois, Bois du Biez, and Port Arthur to about Neuve Chapelle. Take
it another way, and it measures one of the marches you go from the
firing-line back down the La Bassée Road to Bethune, through it, and
on again to about Lillers. It is roughly twelve miles from Richmond
across all London to Blackheath, from Alexandra Park down to Croydon.
Twelve miles is more than double the width of the city of Glasgow from
east to west, four times its extent from north to south. That may bring
home to you what the twelve-mile length of the new munition works
means. The engineer who took me round drove me in a fast car, out and
across and back, in what I thought quite a big three-cornered wedge,
but the ground covered, long though it appeared on the drive, shrank
to a mere corner of the whole when I saw it on the map. Sitting in the
car and looking round over long vistas and streets of huts and houses,
I could see in one direction to a clump of wood outlined in toy trees
against the sky; in another over a wide flat expanse with tiny dots of
buildings in the far distance, to where the ground swelled and rose
and fell away again in a tumble of plantations and hills and hollows;
in another down a long road and a jumble of finished huts and naked,
unfinished framings to where the horizon faded off into the indefinite
distance; in yet another to where my eye searched along the skyline for
the dot which was actually the big building of a power-station. Then I
was told that all I could see around me was inside the boundaries of
the works area as well as plenty beyond that I could not see. I saw
the spread of the area as a whole on a five-foot-long map and saw the
criss-cross of roads, the rows upon rows and clumps after clumps of
dots that marked the buildings of workshops and workers’ houses--and
even then, although there are huts for quite a number of thousands,
many of the workers are being housed outside the area, a motor-bus
system being run to carry them to and from their work. The buildings
are of wood, steel, and brick construction, and they are already
there, complete or incomplete, in tens and scores and hundreds. The
town, with its stores and shops, its churches and cinema-show, clubs,
canteens, and reading-rooms, is solidly built of stone, brick, steel,
and wood. There are a score of undertakings in hand which here are mere
side-lines, although each of them is a huge contract in itself. There
is a system of railways, a main line and many branch lines and sidings,
that runs to perhaps fifty miles of rails. There are vast water,
drainage, and lighting systems, powerful pumping-stations, and a great
reservoir; and a tremendous power-house to carry electricity throughout
the area. For mile after mile I drove along roads with a line of great
33-inch diameter pipes laid along the ditch, and past regiments of
navvies digging them in. There is another seven- or eight-mile stretch
of 27-inch pipes and innumerable miles of smaller piping. The workers
now engaged on construction work would make many line battalions of
full fighting strength; the hands to be employed will run in numbers
into brigades and divisions.