may safely leave it to the future. It is probably bound up with that other
problem of the great new workshops springing up everywhere, and the huge
new plants laid down. One thinks of the rapid recovery of French trade
after the war of 1870, and of the far more rapid rate--after forty years
of machine and transport development, at which the industry of the Allied
countries may possibly recover the ravages of the present war, when once
peace is signed. In that recovery, how great a part may yet be played by
these war workshops!--transformed to the uses of peace; by their crowds of
work-people, and by the hitherto unused intelligence they are everywhere
evoking and training among both men and women.
As for the following day, my impressions, looking back, seem to be all a
variant on a well-known Greek chorus, which hymns the amazing--the
"terrible"--cleverness of Man! Seafaring, tillage, house-building,
horse-taming, so muses Sophocles, two thousand three hundred years ago;
how did man ever find them out? "Wonders are many, but the most wonderful
thing is man! _Only against death has he no resource_."
_Intelligence_--and _death_! They are written everywhere in these endless
workshops, devoted to the fiercest purposes of war. First of all, we visit
the "danger buildings" in the fuse factory, where mostly women are
employed. About 500 women are at work here, on different processes
connected with the delicate mechanism and filling of the fuse and gaine,
some of which are dangerous. Detonator work, for instance. The Lady
Superintendent selects for it specially steady and careful women or girls,
who are paid at time-and-a-quarter rate. Only about eight girls are
allowed in each room. The girls here all wear--for protection--green
muslin veils and gloves. It gives them a curious, ghastly look, that fits
the occupation. For they are making small pellets for the charging of
shells, out of a high-explosive powder. Each girl uses a small copper
ladle to take the powder out of a box before her, and puts it into a
press which stamps it into a tiny block, looking like ivory. She holds her
hand over a little tray of water lest any of the powder should escape.
What the explosive and death-dealing power of it is, it does not do to
think about.
In another room a fresh group of girls are handling a black powder for
another part of the detonator, and because of the irritant nature of the
powder, are wearing white bandages round the nose and mouth. There is
great competition for these rooms, the Superintendent says! The girls in
them work on two shifts of ten and one-half hours each, and would resent a
change to a shorter shift. They have one hour for dinner, half an hour for
tea, a cup of tea in the middle of the morning--and the whole of Saturdays
free. To the eye of the ordinary visitor they show few signs of fatigue.
After the fuse factory we pass through the high-explosive factory, where
250 girls are at work in a number of isolated wooden sheds filling
18-pounder shell with high explosive. The brass cartridge-case is being
filled with cordite, bundles of what look like thin brown sticks, and the
shell itself, including its central gaine or tube, with the various deadly
explosives we have seen prepared in the "danger buildings." The shell is
fitted into the cartridge-case, the primer and the fuse screwed on. It is
now ready to be fired.
I stand and look at boxes of shells, packed, and about to go straight to
the front. A train is waiting close by to take them the first stage on
their journey. I little thought then that I should see these boxes, or
their fellows, next, on the endless ranks of ammunition lorries behind the
fighting lines in France, and that within a fortnight I should myself
stand by and see one of those shells fired from a British gun, little more
than a mile from Neuve Chapelle.
But here are the women and girls trooping out to dinner. A sweet-faced
Superintendent comes to talk to me. "They are not as strong as the men,"
she says, pointing to the long lines of girls, "but what they lack in
strength they make up in patriotic spirit." I speak to two educated women,
who turn out to be High School mistresses from a town that has been
several times visited by Zeppelins. "We just felt we must come and help to
kill Germans," they say quietly. "All we mind is getting up at five-thirty
every morning. Oh, no! it is not too tiring."
Afterwards?--I remember one long procession of stately shops, with their
high windows, their floors crowded with machines, their roofs lined with
cranes, the flame of the forges, and the smoke of the fizzling steel
lighting up the dark groups of men, the huge howitzer shells, red-hot,
swinging in mid-air, and the same shells, tamed and gleaming, on the great
lathes that rough and bore and finish them. Here are shell for the _Queen
Elizabeth_ guns!--the biggest shell made. This shop had been put up by
good luck just as the war began. Its output of steel has increased from
80 tons a week to 1,040.
Then another huge fuse shop, quite new, where 1,400 girls in one shift are
at work--said to be the largest fuse shop known. And on the following
morning, an endless spectacle of war work--gun-carriages, naval turrets,
torpedo tubes, armed railway carriages, small Hotchkiss guns for merchant
ships, tool-making shops, gauge shops--and so on for ever. In the
tool-making shops the output has risen from 44,000 to 3,000,000 a year!
And meanwhile I have not seen anything, and shall not have time to see
anything of the famous shipyards of the firm. But with regard to them, all
that it is necessary to remember is that before the war they were capable
of berthing twenty ships at once, from the largest battleship downward;
and we have Mr. Balfour's word for it as to what has happened, since the
war, in the naval shipyards of this country. "We have added _a million
tons to the Navy--and we have doubled its personnel_."
And now let me record two final sayings.
One from a manager of a department:
We have a good many Socialists here, and they constantly
give trouble. But the great majority of the men have done
wonderfully! Some men have put in one hundred hours a week
since the war began. Some have not lost a minute since it
began. The old hands have worked _splendidly_.
And another from one of the Directors:
I know of no drunkenness among our women. I don't remember
ever having seen a drunken woman round here.
III
I have almost said my say on munitions, though I could continue the story
much longer. But the wonder of it consists really in its vastness, in the
steady development of a movement which will not end or slacken till the
Allies are victorious. Except for the endless picturesqueness of the
women's share in it, and the mechanical invention and adaptation going on
everywhere, with which only a technical expert could deal, it is of course
monotonous, and I might weary you. I will only--before asking you to
cross the Channel with me to France--put down a few notes and impressions
on the Clyde district, where, as our newspapers will have told you, there
is at the present moment (March 29th) some serious labour trouble, with
which the Government is dealing. Until further light is thrown upon its
causes, comment is better postponed. But I have spoken quite frankly in
these letters of "danger spots," where a type of international Socialism
is to be found--affecting a small number of men, over whom the ideas of
"country" and "national honour" seem to have no hold. Every country
possesses such men and must guard itself against them. A nucleus of them
exists in this populous and important district. How far their influence
is helped among those who care nothing for their ideas, by any real or
supposed grievances against the employers, by misunderstandings and
misconceptions, by the sheer nervous fatigue and irritation of the men's
long effort, or by those natural fears for the future of their Unions,
to which I have once or twice referred, only one long familiar with the
district could say, I can only point out here one or two interesting
facts. In the first place, in this crowded countryside, where a small
minority of dangerous extremists appear to have no care for their
comrades in the trenches, the recruiting for the new Armies--so I learn
from one of the leading authorities--has been--"taken on any basis
whatever--substantially higher than in any other district. The men came
up magnificently." That means that among those left behind, whatever
disturbing and disintegrating forces exist in a great Labour centre have
freer play than would normally be the case. A certain amount of patriotic
cream has been skimmed, and in some places the milk that remains must be
thin. In the second place--(you will remember the employer I quoted to you
in a former letter)--the work done here by thousands and thousands of
workmen since the beginning of the war, especially in the great shipyards,
and done with the heartiest and most self-sacrificing good-will, has been
simply invaluable to the nation, and England remembers it well. And
finally, the invasion of women has perhaps been more startling to the
workmen here than anywhere else. Not a single woman was employed in the
works or factories of the district before the war, except in textiles.
There will soon be 15,000 in the munition workshops, and that will not be
the end.
But Great Britain cannot afford--even in a single factory--to allow any
trifling at this moment with the provision of guns, and the Government
must--and will--act decisively.
As to the drinking in this district of which so much has been said, and
which is still far in excess of what it ought to be, I found many people
hard put to it to explain why the restriction of hours which has worked so
conspicuously well in other districts has had comparatively little effect
here. Is it defects of administration, or a certain "cussedness" in the
Scotch character, which resents any tightening of law? One large employer
with whom I discuss it, believes it would suit the Scotch better to
abolish all restrictions, and simply punish drunkenness much more
severely. And above all--"open all possible means of amusement on Sundays,
especially the cinemas!"--a new and strange doctrine, even now, in the
ears of a country that holds the bones of John Knox. There seems indeed to
be a terribly close connection between the dulness of the Scotch Sunday
and the obstinacy of Scotch drinking; and when one thinks of the heavy
toil of the week, of the confinement of the workshops, and the strain of
the work, one feels at any rate that here is a problem which is to be
_solved_, not preached at; and will be solved, some day, by nimbler and
humaner wits than ours.
In any case, the figures, gathered a month ago from those directly
concerned, as to the general extension of the national effort here, could
hardly be more striking. In normal times, the district, which is given up
to Admiralty work, makes ships and guns, but has never made shells. The
huge shell factories springing up all over it are a wholly new creation.
As usual, they are filled with women, working under skilled male
direction, and everywhere one found among managers and superintendents the
same enthusiasm for the women's work. "It's their honour they work on,"
said one forewoman. "That's why they stand it so well." The average
working week is fifty-four hours, but overtime may seriously lengthen the
tale. Wages are high; canteens and rest-rooms are being everywhere
provided; and the housing question is being tackled. The rapidity of the
women's piece-work is astonishing, and the mingling of classes--girls of
education and refinement working quite happily with those of a much
humbler type--runs without friction under the influence of a common
spirit. This common spirit was well expressed by a girl who before she
came to the factory was working a knitting-machine. "I like this
better--_because there's a purpose in it_." A sweet-faced woman who was
turning copper bands for shell, said to me: "I never worked a machine
before the war. I have done 912 in ten hours, but that tired me very much.
I can do 500 or 600 quite easily."
On the same premises, after leaving the shell shops, we passed rapidly
through gun shops, where I saw again processes which had become almost
familiar. "The production of howitzers," said my guide, "is the question
of the day. We are making them with great rapidity--but the trouble is to
get enough machines." The next shop, devoted to 18-pounder field-guns, was
"green fields fifteen months ago," and the one adjoining it, a fine shed
about 400 feet square, for howitzer work, was started in August last, on a
site "which was a bog with a burn running through it." Soon "every foot of
space will be filled with machines, and there will be 1,200 people at work
here, including 400 women. In the next shop we are turning out about 4,000
shrapnel and 4,000 high-explosive shells per week. When we started women
on what we thought this heavy shell, we provided men to help lift the
shell in and out of the machines. The women thrust the men aside in five
minutes."
Later on, as I was passing through a series of new workshops occupied with
all kinds of army work and employing large numbers of women, I stopped to
speak to a Belgian woman. "Have you ever done any machine work before?"
"No, Madame, never--_Mais, c'est la guerre. Il faut tuer les Allemands_!"
It was a quiet, passionless voice. But one thought, with a shiver, of
those names of eternal infamy--of Termonde, Aerschot, Dinant, Louvain.
It was with this woman's words in my ears that I set out on my last
visit--to which they were the fitting prelude. The afternoon was darkening
fast. The motor sped down a river valley, sodden with rain and melting
snow, and after some miles we turn into a half-made road, leading to some
new buildings, and a desolate space beyond. A sentry challenges us, and we
produce our permit. Then we dismount, and I look out upon a wide stretch
of what three months ago was swamp, or wet plough land. Now its 250 acres
are enclosed with barbed wire, and patrolled by sentries night and day. A
number of small buildings, workshops, stores, etc., are rising all over
it. I am looking at what is to be the great "filling" factory of the
district, where 9,000 women, in addition to male workmen, will soon be
employed in charging the shell coming from the new shell factories we have
left behind in the darkness.
Strange and tragic scene! Strange uprising of women!
We regain the motor and speed onwards, my secretary and I, through unknown
roads far away from the city and its factories towards the country house
where we are to spend the night. In my memory there surge a thousand
recollections of all that I have seen in the preceding fortnight. An
England roused at last--rushing to factory, and lathe, to shipyard and
forge, determined to meet and dominate her terrible enemy in the workshop,
as she has long since met and dominated him at sea, and will in time
dominate him on land--that is how my country looks to me to-night.
... The stars are coming out. Far away, over what seems like water with
lights upon it, there are dim snowy mountains--majestic--rising into the
sky. The noise and clamour of the factories are all quiet in the night.
Two thoughts remain with me--Britain's ships in the North Sea--Britain's
soldiers in the trenches. And encircling and sustaining both the justice
of a great cause--as these white Highland hills look down upon and
encircle this valley.
IV
Dear H.
A million and a half of men--over a quarter of a million of women--working
in some 4,000 State-controlled workshops for the supply of munitions of
war, not only to our own troops, but to those of our allies--the whole, in
the main, a creation of six months' effort--this is the astonishing
spectacle of some of the details of which I have tried, as an eye-witness,
to give you in my previous letters a rapid and imperfect sketch.
But what of the men, the Armies, for which these munitions are being made
and hurried to the fighting-lines? It was at Aldershot, a few days ago,
that I listened to some details of the first rush of the new Armies, given
me by a member of the Headquarters Staff who had been through it all.
Aldershot in peace time held about 27,000 troops. Since the outbreak of
war some million and a quarter of men have passed through the great camp,
coming in ceaselessly for training and equipment, and going out again to
the theatres of war.
In the first days and weeks of the war--during and after the marvellous
precision and rapidity with which the Expeditionary Force was despatched
to France--men poured in from all parts, from all businesses and
occupations; rich and poor, north and south country men, English, Scotch,
Irish, and Welsh; men from the Dominions, who had flung themselves into
the first home-coming steamer; men from India, and men from the uttermost
parts of Africa and Asia who had begged or worked their way home. They
were magnificent material. They came with set faces, asking only for
training, training, training!--and "what the peace soldier learns in six
months," said my companion, "they learnt in six weeks. We had neither
uniforms nor rifles, neither guns nor horses for them. We did not know how
to feed them or to house them. In front of the headquarters at Aldershot,
that Mecca of the soldier, where no one would dare to pass in ordinary
times whose turnout is not immaculate, the most extraordinary figures, in
bowler hats and bits of uniform, passed unrebuked. We had to raid the
neighbouring towns for food, to send frantic embassies to London for bread
and meat; to turn out any sort of shed to house them. Luckily it was
summer weather; otherwise I don't know what we should have done for
blankets. But nobody 'groused.' Everybody worked, and there were many who
felt it 'the time of their lives.'"
And yet England "engineered the war!" England's hypocrisy and greed
demanded the crushing of Germany--hence the lying "excuse" of
Belgium--that apparently is what all good Germans--except those who know
better--believe; what every German child is being taught. As I listen to
my companion's story, I am reminded, however, of a puzzled remark which
reached me lately, written just before Christmas last, by a German nurse
in a Berlin hospital, who has English relations, friends of my own. "We
begin to wonder whether it really was England who caused the war--since
you seem to be so dreadfully unprepared!" So writes this sensible girl to
one of her mother's kindred in England; in a letter which escaped the
German censor. She might indeed wonder! To have deliberately planned a
Continental war with Germany, and Germany's 8,000,000 of soldiers, without
men, guns, or ammunition beyond the requirements of an Expeditionary Force
of 160,000 men, might have well become the State of Cloud-Cuckoo-Land. But
the England of Raleigh, Chatham, Pitt, and Wellington has not generally
been reckoned a nation of pure fools.
The military camps of Great Britain tell the tale of our incredible
venture. "Great areas of land had to be cleared, levelled, and drained;
barracks had to be built; one camp alone used 42,000 railway truck-loads
of building material." There was no time to build new railways, and the
existing roads were rapidly worn out. They were as steadily repaired; and
on every side new camps sprang up around the parent camps of the country.
The Surrey commons and woods, the Wiltshire downs, the Midland and
Yorkshire heaths, the Buckinghamshire hills have been everywhere
invaded--their old rural sanctities are gone. I walked in bewilderment the
other day up and down the slopes of a Surrey hill which when I knew it
last was one kingdom of purple heather, beloved of the honey-bees, and
scarcely ever trodden by man or woman. Barracks now form long streets upon
its crest and sides; practise-trenches, bombing-schools, the stuffed and
dangling sacks for bayonet training, musketry ranges, and the rest, are
everywhere. Tennyson, whose wandering ground it once was, would know it no
more. And this camp is only one of a series which spread far and wide
round the Aldershot headquarters.
Near my own home, a park and a wooded hillside, that two years ago were
carefully guarded even from a neighbour's foot, are now occupied by a
large town of military huts, which can be seen for miles round. And
fifteen miles away, in a historic "chase" where Catharine of Aragon lived
while her trial was proceeding in a neighbouring town, a duke, bearing one
of the great names of England, has himself built a camp, housing 1,200
men, for the recruits of his county regiments alone, and has equipped it
with every necessary, whether for the soldier's life or training. But
everywhere--East, North, South, and West--the English and Scotch roads are
thronged with soldiers and horses, with trains of artillery wagons and
Army Service lorries, with men marching back from night attacks or going
out to scout and skirmish on the neighbouring commons and through the most
sacred game--preserves. There are no more trespass laws in England--for
the soldier.
You point to our recruiting difficulties in Parliament. True enough. We
have our recruiting difficulties still. Lord Derby has not apparently
solved the riddle; for riddle it is, in a country of voluntary service,
where none of the preparations necessary to fit conscription into ordinary
life, with its obligations, have ever been made. The Government and the
House of Commons are just now wrestling with it afresh, and public opinion
seems to be hardening towards certain final measures that would have been
impossible earlier in the war.[B] The call is still for men--more--and
more--men! And given the conditions of this war, it is small wonder that
England is restless till they are found. But amid the cross currents of
criticism, I catch the voice of Mr. Walter Long, the most practical, the
least boastful of men, in the House of Commons, a few nights ago: Say what
you like, blame, criticise, as you like, but "what this country has done
since August, 1914, is an almost incredible story." And so it is.
And now let us follow some of these khaki-clad millions across the seas,
through the reinforcement camps, and the great supply bases, towards that
fierce reality of war to which everything tends.
[B] Since these lines were written the crisis in the Government, the Irish
rising, and the withdrawal of the military service bill have happened in
quick succession. The country is still waiting (April 28th) for the last
inevitable step.
II
It was about the middle of February, after my return from the munition
factories, that I received a programme from the War Office of a journey in
France, which I was to be allowed to make. I remember being at first much
dissatisfied with it. It included the names of three or four places well
known to be the centres of English supply organisation in France. But it
did not include any place in or near the actual fighting zone. To me, in
my ignorance, the places named mainly represented the great array of
finely equipped hospitals to be found everywhere in France in the rear of
our Armies; and I was inclined to say that I had no special knowledge of
hospital work, and that one could see hospitals in England, with more
leisure to feel and talk with the sufferers in them than a ten days' tour
could give. A friendly Cabinet Minister smiled when I presented this view.
"You had better accept. You will find it very different from what you
suppose. The 'back' of the Army includes everything." He was more than
right!