Doing their Bit

Doing their Bit
Boyd Cable

Doing their Bit War work at home

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.

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.

Before I finish this chapter I must pass along a message that the 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 8d. 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.