the job, you may understand what organisation, what skill, what energy
has been required to conceive, to plan, to execute the whole work, to
build and equip it and set it running in a matter of mere months. The
work that on ordinary contract, with smooth working and no day’s hitch,
with all the advantage of peace-time work--unlimited labour, material
and transport to be had for the asking and paying--would have occupied
at the very least three to four years, is being done here inside six
months. What that means only the heads, the officials and managers and
engineers and contractors, will ever know. The shifts and stratagems
that have had to be employed to find and keep labour, to get the
materials required or their efficient substitutes, to secure transport
to and on the area, to house and feed the workers, to fight the
weather, the wet and the frost especially, would fill many books, would
make a record of energy, efficiency, foresight, and resourcefulness
which would be for ever a pride to the Empire. The country has
conferred some large-sized powers on the Ministry of Munitions--larger
perhaps than is generally realised--and I must say the Ministry has
grabbed the powers with both hands and, through its lieutenants, is
wielding them in all sorts of unexpectedly useful ways. On the Master
Job, for instance, there was need for a lot of road transport, and
mechanical transport was not easy to find. But somehow and anyhow it
was found, and one traction engine that I saw puffing and snorting
at the head of a rumbling wagon string gives an index to the ways
and means of the finding. The engine still bore the legend “Jenkin’s
Galloping Horses,” and, it appears, previous to its commandeering had
been trundling from town to town a full set of caravans, and then
converting itself into one of those power-engines which are familiar
sights at country fairs driving a circle of prancing wooden chargers or
sea-sicky switchback boats in a swing roundabout to the brazen music of
a mechanical band.
There was another difficulty to be overcome in the way of finding
all sorts of materials. Here, again, the powers that be did not
hesitate to commandeer where more usual methods could not prevail.
The Ministry inspectors and engineers apparently know what every firm
in the country is busy about, and they simply reported where anything
specially required was to be found. Thus and so, some corrugated-iron
sheds and huts in course of construction on contract and destined for
some places at the other ends of the earth find themselves hastily
transported to Somewhere in Britain and hurriedly erected there instead
of at Sumatra or Zanzibar. The buildings required some converting and
altering perhaps to adapt them to use in a chilly, damp-laden country
instead of under tropical skies, but such difficulties are very minor
ones to the men who are running this job. There have been and still are
greater ones that are constantly being surmounted. There were fewer
in the summer months perhaps, but in the frost and rain of a cold
and wet winter all the canons of carpentering, masonry, and building
construction have been flouted and set aside. Any builder will tell
you how impossible it is, for instance, to lay concrete in frosty
weather. As a rule the builder may not have descended to details of
the why and the wherefore, but here the causes were sought, found, and
overcome. When it was necessary the water for mixing the concrete was
heated and the stones were warmed, and when the concrete was spread
it was carefully covered with straw or cinders or anything that would
keep the frost off it. Sometimes a roof would be run up to keep off
the rain, a temporary break-wind wall erected to hold out the winds,
blazing fires lit in braziers to fight off the frost, so that mortar
might be mixed and brick walls built. Building work, it has always been
understood, must cease when the winter sets in. Here nothing ceases,
everything drives ahead at high-pressure speed.
The whole of the area is still more or less under construction, more
or less completed. In some parts rows of huts and houses stand
practically ready for occupation; in others the work is in its first
stages, and the ground is one weltering chaos of heaped earth and
rough holes, up-torn turf, piled planks, bricks, mortar, and building
material. Swarms of men hammer and hew and dig and burrow amidst the
confusion; perky, self-important-looking little “pug” engines puff and
pant and haul their trailing strings of wagons amongst the earth heaps
and holes, round and between the lumber and the foundations and frames
of unerected buildings.
In other parts the green turf of the fields is still undisturbed, but
already it is scored deep with wheel-marks, is plotted out for the
coming of the diggers and builders. By the end of spring they will
have gone, the twelve-mile stretch will be humming from end to end
with munition workers, will be pouring out in a stupendous stream the
fighting-food of the firing line. Until it is complete the daily
routine is one of constant hustle, of planning and contriving and
dovetailing one piece of work into another, of keeping each and all
hustling fast on the move. Nothing is allowed to halt or check or stay
the work; everything must give way to the need for haste. Time is
always money, but here it is more than money; it is an expenditure, not
only of money, but without stint of brain and muscle power. Work is
planned to commence by a certain date and by that date be sure it will
commence, and the Front will feel the rush of the increased torrent
that will come sluicing out from the Master Job.
There are other greatly planned and wonderfully executed works which
only in their size are outdistanced by the Master Job. I saw one such
new works, so new that in parts the fields are still scattered with
cabbage stumps or trampled turnips, so new that only at the end of this
last September was the first sod cut. The end of September--and by the
First of January the first section was due to be turning out munitions.
When I was there the big boilers of the power-station were not ready
to be installed, but a temporary boiler had been dug out from Heaven
knows where, and its chimney was pouring out smoke as the temporary
furnace prepared for a trial run. When I saw the place, only about
fifty working days had passed from the cutting of that first sod, and
yet here were rows of completed workrooms, completed in some down to
the varnished walls and the linoleumed floors, the steam-heating, and
the electric lamps over the work benches. There are a dozen 100-ton
stores, miles upon miles of raised board walks (the “clean way” that in
a works handling explosives keeps the feet of the workers out of mud or
earth or grit), of steam-heating pipes, of railway and trolly rails.
There are scores of magazines, many scores of huts and houses, railway
sidings to allow of the handling of many hundred tons a day.
There are to be thousands of hands employed on each shift--the works
will be run on the night-and-day plan that appears to be the regular
rule in munition works now--and the first of them were to start inside
a month from the time I was there. If I hadn’t had the evidence of the
many finished buildings, and the vast amount of completed work there
before my eyes, I should have doubted the possibility of that early
start. There seemed such an impossible amount still to do. Running
out from the railway ran a long, box-built passageway straddling
above ground on criss-cross piles and scaffolding, breaking off
raggedly and abruptly in mid-air. Beyond this there is to be a large
room for the explosives workers to change and dress, but this room
was then no more than the surveyor’s markings on the ground. The
site of the engine-room was a wide and deep hole walled round with
close-set, stout, water-tight planking and bottomed with unpleasant
mud. Altogether it looked about as hopeless a task as one could find
to get such a raw welter running in any completed part for many, many
months; and yet, having seen the outcome of the previous fifty working
days, having met and talked with some of the hard-headed, warm-blooded,
live-wire men who are running the job, I have not the faintest doubt
but that their plans have worked out, that by the time this is in print
the work will have begun.[1]
[1] Work commenced--January.
Once more it is the managers, the engineers, the contractors,
the business brains and energy of these and the local Munitions
Committee that have played the part of modern wizards and magicians,
that are turning an aching, empty desolation of waste land into a
spick-and-span bustling works. Here, again, difficulties have been
met only to be overcome promptly and efficiently--and if you saw the
ankle-deep, rutted mud, the water-tight, plank-sided box that had to be
sunk a good ten feet to find foundations for the engine-room bed, the
crane-engine overtilted and sunk in the mud where the unstable soil had
yielded to the platform piles, sank lop-sidedly, and left the engine
to slide gently overboard--if you saw these and many other things, you
would begin to appreciate some of the difficulties. But, after all,
there they are--a Master Job and many mastered jobs. And every week
that passes brings more of them to completion and nearer to completion,
nearer to the day we wait when no effort of the Front can outrun the
efforts of the war works.
VII
“THEIR BIT”
I have spoken already of “The Room of the Old Men,” one of the finest
samples I have seen of a patriotic endeavour by the workers to be up
and “doing their bit” for the country and the Front. The Room is part
of a National Factory that was commenced upon only last July. The men
in it are skilled mechanics and engineers, doing the work which only
skilled men can do, work without which a munitions factory cannot run.
They are nearly all old men, men who had retired from their trade eight
or ten or twelve years back, who, after a good long life of hard work
in the shops, had taken off their overalls and laid down their tools,
as they thought then, for good and ever. The manager took me round
amongst them and introduced me to them and gave me a chance to speak to
them and tell them that I hoped to let the Front know of their plucky
retackling of their old jobs. Old as they were, up to the oldest of
them--68 he proudly admitted to--they were doing a full and hard day’s
work. One man in that room, for all his rough, toil-hardened hands and
work-stained clothes, is worth his £20,000. Another when he dropped
his trade had invested in “a little farm well filled” and worth its
thousands of any man’s good money. And that man works each day in the
factory from 8 a.m. to 5 p.m., and before he comes in from his little
moorland farm, and at night after he returns to it from his day’s work,
he milks his cows, and feeds his chickens, and settles up the odd jobs
that must be done each day upon a farm. All the Old Men felt exactly
the same way about the War. They were too old--very regretfully they
were too old--to do their bit in khaki at the Front, but they were glad
and thankful for the chance that was still left to them to do their bit
in the shops. The manager, a local man himself, knowing the district
well, when he took up the munition work went over in his mind all the
old and retired mechanics he could remember. He went round to them and
put the facts straight to them--the Front was held up for munitions, a
National Factory was being started in their town, there was a sad lack
of the skilled men that they, skilled men themselves, well knew were
necessary, and--would they come? _Would they?_ They were ready, then
and there, to put on their caps, and walk back to the works with him,
and start in on the job. And there they are now. The general manager,
by the way, was deservedly enthusiastic about his Old Men and their
fine effort, but he said exactly nothing at all about his own. That I
discovered, by questioning, from the Ministry official who was showing
me round the district. He told me how the general manager had been
running a business of his own, but had left it when the word went round
for business men and practical men to help the Munitions Ministry, how
the works had been got together, how machines had had to be found and
tools made, how the working of an industry quite new to him had to be
learned first and taught to others afterwards, how under his planning
and guidance the factory had been set running, how efficiently and fast
it was turning out the work, how the Ministry in London had admitted
the usefulness of workings and figures furnished by him, and, finally,
how all his work had been and was being done without a penny of salary
or recompense. It isn’t a bad “bit” for one man to be doing.
In startling contrast to the Room of the Old Men I was introduced to
the works manager--aged 22. His is an old head on young shoulders,
however, and I heard much of his share in the factory’s “bit.” “Takes
his job serious, does our works manager,” I was told. “When we were
puzzling out ways o’ work he used to sit up nights thinkin’ shells, an’
go to ’s bed dreamin’ shells. Took it that serious, couldn’t see a joke
if ’t poked him in the eye.” And the works manager just grinned and let
it go at that.
It was in this same factory, by the way, that I met one of those
inspectors who in all factories pass the completed shells as correct,
and who, in this instance, was an ex-cheesemonger. Amongst these same
inspectors you can find ex- all sorts of trades and professions, from
actors and acrobats to schoolmasters and sausage-makers. There was a
question raised in Parliament recently about these men, and a good deal
of would-be wit was expended on the folly of employing such amateurs to
act as experts. But, after all, I see no faintest reason for the gibes.
The work these men are doing is not impossible or even difficult for
an intelligent man to learn. They have to pass gauges over the shell
and the shell must fit all the gauges. They have to see that no flaw
or crack is visible, that varnish is smooth and even, and so on. There
is nothing, I should say, nearly as difficult in finding flaws in a
shell as there is in making the same shell--and the shell has been made
by once unskilled hands or “amateurs.” When all is said and done, the
very great majority of munition-makers to-day are amateurs, although
they have each become expert on their own work--as the inspectors
have. The British Army that is going to whip Germany presently is
composed almost solidly of amateur soldiers, of just the same ex- this,
that, and t’other trade and profession as the munition workers and
inspectors. And, when you think of it, many Members of Parliament are
themselves amateurs at their job, or were not long since, and were also
ex-all-sorts before they were M.P.’s. I don’t see why they should fling
stones at the amateur inspectors who, like everybody else on this game,
are only doing their best to “do their bit.”
In a rifle cartridge factory I saw girls who were examining the brass
cartridges for defects. A girl would take a handful of cartridges
and roll them rapidly one after another across her palm, and, quick
and constant as the motion was, she missed no slightest fault. Some
defects, indeed, were so slight that when I picked up some of the
rejects I could see nothing wrong even on close and slow examination
until the girl pointed out a tiny scratch, a rough dot, an almost
invisible dent or bulge. There can be no hope of finding expert
engineers (if that is what the M.P.’s want) as inspectors here. The
cartridges are pouring from that factory at a rate of millions a week.
Walking about the works, you see girls shovelling brass cases with
a thing like a big coal-scoop into the capacious maws of hoppers to
machines that joggle and jolt the cylinders into their back teeth, and
turn and solemnly chew them over, and slide them out in a clicking and
tinkling stream, with one more operation performed on their way to
completion. Everywhere you may meet full barrels of cartridges wheeling
round, or standing in rows, or being emptied and filled; you can see
miles of ribbon-like brass bands sliding under punches that chop round
discs from them, watch the discs running in hundreds from machine to
machine, each machine giving it a punch in the passing and pressing
it more and more into its finished stage. You may watch long ropes of
lead running off fat reels into and through the machines which chop
it into lengths and shape it into bullet-cores which stream along to
meet another converging stream of nickel cases and become one with
it; and pour on further to join up with the brass cartridges after
they have run through the filling factory and had the cordite pushed
in and sliced off and a wad rammed on top. And the surging torrent
of completed, capped, cordited, wadded, and bulleted cartridges that
sweeps into the packing-rooms and out from the factory is so largely
the work of “amateurs” that there are about ten new hands employed for
each one of the old hands that used to man the works. And when that
factory is completed it will be turning out 5,000,000 cartridges a
week--mainly by the hands of “amateur” girls swept in from all over
the country to “do their bit.”
It is true that the professionals in machine-making have done much
to smooth the path of the amateur. Some of the semi-automatic and
automatic machines are so wonderful that one might imagine them
endowed with life and professional skill themselves. I have watched,
fascinated, the work of a screw-making machine which, after turning
the tiny thread, reached over a steel finger and thumb, picked up
the screw, lifted it back to a new position and jammed it there for
another tool to slide forward at the precisely right second and cut
out the cross-nick on the screw-head. There are automatic lathes which
seize a steel or brass rod pushed within their clutch and chop it up
and make shoulders and grooves and screw-threads on its outside, and
drill out the centre and put another and different sized and shaped
set of carvings on the inside, throw out the finished part, pull in
the metal rod, and commence work afresh on it. Some of these lathes
have five or six tools running and each performing its part in turn on
the fuse or shell part. In one small-arm factory there is a huge room
full of these automatic lathes all whirring and grinding away at their
hardest. And the men in that room are so few that one hardly notices
them and has an impression that the shop is cheerfully running itself.
Actually there is one man to each ten machines, to keep the long brass
or steel rods passing into their busy wheels and tools, to maintain
and regulate the flow of lubricant which runs constantly on each
cutting tool. In this factory there are automatics drilling out the
rifle-barrels, the drill pressing in so far at a time, when the machine
carefully withdraws it for a busy little steel hand to poke forward and
fussily brush off the grit and chips and clear the drill, which then
slides smoothly back and goes on with its job. A stream of oil runs
on each drill, and something like 1,000 horse-power is required for
nothing but the pumping of this oil to the rifle-drilling machines. The
factory is turning out 8,000 completed rifles and over 300 machine-guns
a week now. And, after the usual fashion, it is busily preparing to
add heavily to its output. About twelve acres of new floor space have
already been added to the works, and new floor is still being piled
on floor, filled with another tossing and churning sea of machinery
as fast as it is made ready, and driven up into its top working speed
at once. On top of the one room packed with workers and machines the
builders are at work on another room, laying the concrete floor,
riveting the steel girders of new walls, putting on another new roof.
And the moment the floor is down and the roof on and the steel skeleton
complete, in come the men who erect the overhead shafting and fill the
windows with glass--I might say fill the walls with glass, for each
shop is nothing but a glass-sided box--and start to erect the machines.
Each of the new glass boxes is about 600 feet long by 40 feet wide, and
there are whole blocks of them erected or with the builders hard at
work turning another roof-top into the floor of still another shop. It
is plain that the present output is going to do some tall climbing very
soon.
I find that my available space is running short, while I have still
left untold much that I have seen, so I must be content to assure
the Front that I have covered the ground of munition work more fully
than these writings may indicate. I don’t think I left any department
of the work untouched. I saw the making of bombs and grenades and
air-torpedoes, trench-mortars and bomb-throwers--cheerful things some
of these too, throwing bombs and winged torpedoes of impressive size
with accuracy for hundreds of yards--shells, innumerable shells,
from the pill, standing man-high and measuring about four feet round
the waist, that “Granny” throws, down through all the sizes of the
twelve-inch, and of “Mother’s” fit, to the fodder for the ubiquitous
18-pounders and Four-point-five “hows,” and still down to the fancy
sizes for the anti-aircraft and the pretty little one-pounder pom-poms.
I saw all shapes and sizes of guns too--massive, lengthy monsters in
stages running from the huge rough castings to the smooth shining and
polished tubes, fat-bodied squat howitzers, and, laid out in rows,
many field-guns, and, ranked in battery upon battery, many more light
Q.F. and machine-guns. There was an aeroplane factory where at least
a score of ’planes stood in various stages, from one completely built
and ready for her engines, to those still only in dismembered finished
parts, to say nothing of the piles of parts in the making. Here alone
the one firm I should have supposed were turning out more finished
’planes per week--battle-’planes and observing-’planes and fast-flying
scout-’planes--than all our armies could find a use for; and yet there
are, even to my own knowledge, several other ’plane factories.
So that you may take it I have made a full and comprehensive round,
have satisfied myself in order that I might fully satisfy the Front
that all their munition wants are going to be satisfied up to and over
the hilt. I can only finish the report of my observations with the same
assurance as I began it--we are never going to be short of munitions
again; spend them as fast and hot and heavy as we can, the workshops
can make faster than the Front can use; and the longer the War runs the
more completely we shall be armed and equipped to wage it. All this
seems certain and positive if--it is the only “if,” although it might
be a big one--_if_ the war-workers continue to do their share, _if_
they play up and back us in playing out the game.
VIII
THE GREAT “IF”
In my previous chapters I have told the Front what I could of the
rising tide of munitions, of what they may expect from the gigantic
effort that is at last being made in war work. I have said, judging
from what I have seen, nothing can stand against our armies and the
torrent of shells and munitions they will assuredly have from and after
the spring--if the war-workers play out their part. That is the one and
only “if,” but in the war works I have seen and heard some indication
that the “if” still remains, and now I want to say a word, as one who
went through that first winter and a year at the Front, to the workers
at Home, to ask the men in the trenches to write home to any and every
man or woman they may know in the war works and urge them to every
possible effort as I here urge them.