Part 6

We pass up a fine oak staircase to the new offices, and I am soon listening to the report of the works superintendent. A spare, powerful man with the eyes of one in whom life burns fast, he leans, his hands in his pockets, against the wall of his office, talking easily and well. He himself has not had a day's holiday for ten months, never sleeping more than five and a half hours, with the telephone at his bedhead, and waking to instant work when the moment for waking comes. His view of his workmen is critical. It is the view of one consumed with "realisation," face to face with those who don't "realise." "But the raid will do a deal of good," he says cheerfully.

"As to the women!"--he throws up his hands--"they're saving the country. They don't mind what they do. Hours? They work ten and a half or, with overtime, twelve hours a day, seven days a week. At least, that's what they'd like to do. The Government are insisting on one Sunday--or two Sundays--a month off. I don't say they're not right. But the women resent it. 'We're not tired!' they say. And you look at them!--they're not tired.

"If I go down to the shed and say: 'Girls!--there's a bit of work the Government are pushing for--they say they must have--can you get it done?' Why, they'll stay and get it done, and then pour out of the works, laughing and singing. I can tell you of a surgical-dressing factory near here, where for nearly a year the women never had a holiday. They simply wouldn't take one. 'And what'll our men at the front do, if we go holiday-making?'

"Last night" (the night of the Zeppelin raid) "the warning came to put out lights. We daren't send them home. They sat in the dark among the machines, singing, 'Keep the home fires burning,' 'Tipperary,' and the like. I tell you, it made one a bit choky to hear them. They were thinking of their sweethearts and husbands I'll be bound!--not of themselves."

In another minute or two we were walking through the new workshops. Often as I have now seen this sight, so new to England, of a great engineering workshop filled with women, it stirs me at the twentieth time little less than it did at first. These girls and women of the Midlands and the north, are a young and comely race. Their slight or rounded figures among the forest of machines, the fair or golden hair of so many of them, their grace of movement, bring a strange touch of beauty into a scene which has already its own spell.

Muirhead Bone and Joseph Pennell have shown us what can be done in art with these high workshops, with their intricate distances and the endless crisscross of their belting, and their ranged machines. But the coming in of the girls, in their close khaki caps and overalls, showing the many pretty heads and slender necks, and the rows of light bending forms, spaced in order beside their furnaces or lathes as far as the eye can reach, has added a new element--something flower-like, to all this flash of fire and steel, and to the grimness of war underlying it.

For the final meaning of it all is neither soft nor feminine! These girls--at hot haste--are making fuses and cartridge-cases by the hundred thousand, casting, pressing, drawing, and, in the special danger-buildings, filling certain parts of the fuse with explosive. There were about 4,000 of them to 5,000 men, when I saw the shop, and their number has no doubt increased since; for the latest figures show that about 15,000 fresh women workers are going into the munition works every week. The men are steadily training them, and without the teaching and co-operation of the men--without, that is, the surrender by the men of some of their most cherished trade customs--the whole movement would have been impossible.

As it is, by the sheer body of work the women have brought in, by the deftness, energy, and enthusiasm they throw into the simpler but quite indispensable processes, thereby setting the unskilled man free for the Army, and the skilled man for work which women cannot do, Great Britain has become possessed of new and vast resources of which she scarcely dreamed a year ago; and so far as this war is a war of machinery--and we all know what Germany's arsenals have done to make it so--its whole aspect is now changing for us. The "eternal feminine" has made one more startling incursion upon the normal web of things!

But on the "dilution" of labour, the burning question of the hour, I shall have something to say in my next letter. Let me record another visit of the same day to a small-arms factory of importance. Not many women here so far, though the number is increasing, but look at the expansion figures since last summer! A large, new factory added, on a bare field; 40,000 tons of excavation removed, two miles of new shops, sixty feet wide and four floors high, the output in rifles quadrupled, and so on.

We climbed to the top floor of the new buildings and looked far and wide over the town. Dotted over the tall roofs rose the national flags, marking "controlled" factories, i.e., factories still given over a year ago to one or other of the miscellaneous metal trades of the Midlands, and now making fuse or shell for England's Armies, and under the control of the British Government. One had a sudden sharp sense of the town's corporate life, and of the spirit working in it everywhere for England's victory. Before we descended, we watched the testing of a particular gun. I was to hear its note on the actual battle-field a month later.

An afternoon train takes me on to another great town, with some very ancient institutions, which have done very modern service in the war. I spent my evening in talking with my host, a steel manufacturer identified with the life of the city, but serving also on one of the central committees of the Ministry in London. Labour and politics, the chances of the war, America and American feeling towards us, the task of the new Minister of Munitions, the temper of English and Scotch workmen, the flux into which all manufacturing conditions have been thrown by the war, and how far old landmarks can be restored after it--we talked hard on these and many other topics, till I must break it off--unwillingly!--to get some sleep and write some notes.

Next day took me deep into the very central current of "England's Effort"--so far as this great phase of it at any rate is concerned. In this town, even more than in the city I had just left, one felt the throb of the nation's rising power, concentrated, orderly, determined. Every single engineering business in a town of engineers was working for the war. Every manufacturer of any importance was doing his best for the Government, some in connection with the new Ministry, some with the Admiralty, some with the War Office. As for the leading firms of the city, the record of growth, of a mounting energy by day and night, was nothing short of bewildering. Take these few impressions of a long day, as they come back to me.

First, a great steel warehouse, full of raw steel of many sorts and kinds, bayonet steel, rifle steel, shell steel, stacked in every available corner and against every possible wall--all sold, every bit of it, and ready to be shipped--some to the Colonies, some to our Allies, with peremptory orders coming in as to which the harassed head of the firm could only shake his head with a despairing "impossible!"

Then some hours in a famous works, under the guidance of the managing director, one of those men, shrewd, indefatigable, humane, in whose company one learns what it is, in spite of all our supposed deficiencies, that makes the secret of England's industrial tenacity. An elderly Scotchman, very plainly marked by the labour and strain of the preceding eighteen months, but still steadily keeping his head and his temper, showing the signs of an Evangelical tradition in his strong dislike for Sunday work, his evident care for his work-people--men and women--and his just and sympathetic tone towards the labour with which he has to deal--such is my companion.

He has a wonderful story to tell: "In September, 1914, we were called upon to manufacture a large extra number of field-guns. We had neither buildings nor machinery for the order. However, we set to work. We took down seven dwelling-houses; in three weeks we were whitewashing the walls of our new workshop and laying in the machinery. My idea was to make so many guns. The Government asked for four times as many. So we took down more houses, and built another much larger shop. The work was finished in ten weeks. Five other large workshops were put up last year, all built with lightning speed, and everywhere additions have been made to the machinery in every department wherever it was possible to put machines."

As to their thousands of workmen, Mr. C. has no complaints to make.

"They have been steadily working anything from 60 to 80 hours per week; the average is 64.29 hours per week, and the average time lost only 3.51 per cent. A little while ago, a certain union put forward a claim for an advance in wages. We had to decline it, but as the meeting came to an end, the trade-union secretary said:

"'Of course, we are disappointed, and we shall no doubt return to the matter again. But whether you concede the advance of wages or not, our members will continue to do their level best, believing that they are not only working for themselves, but helping the Government and helping our soldiers to wage this war to a successful conclusion.'"

And the manager adds his belief that this is the spirit which prevails "among the work-people generally."

Before we plunge into the main works, however, my guide takes me to see a recent venture, organised since the war, in which he clearly takes a special interest. An old warehouse bought, so to speak, overnight, and equipped next morning, has been turned into a small workshop for shell production--employing between three and four hundred girls, with the number of skilled men necessary to keep the new unskilled labour going. These girls are working on the eight hours' shift system; and working so well that a not uncommon wage among them--on piece-work, of course--runs to somewhere between two and three pounds a week.

"But there is much more than money in it," says the kind-faced woman superintendent, as we step into her little office out of the noise, to talk a little. "The girls are perfectly aware that they are 'doing their bit,' that they are standing by their men in the trenches."

This testimony indeed is universal. There is patriotism in this grim work, and affection, and a new and honourable self-consciousness. Girls and women look up and smile as a visitor passes. They presume that he or she is there for some useful purpose connected with the war, and their expression seems to say: "Yes, we are all in it!--we know very well what we are doing, and what a difference we are making. Go and tell our boys ..."

The interest of this workshop lay, of course, in the fact that it was a sample of innumerable others, as quickly organised and as efficiently worked, now spreading over the Midlands and the north. As to the main works belonging to the same great firm, such things have been often described; but one sees them to-day with new eyes, as part of a struggle which is one with the very life of England. Acres and acres of ground covered by huge workshops new and old, by interlacing railway lines and moving trolleys. Gone is all the vast miscellaneous engineering work of peace. The war has swallowed everything.

I have a vision of a great building, where huge naval guns are being lowered from the annealing furnace above into the hardening oil-tank below, or where in the depths of a great pit, with lights and men moving at the bottom, I see as I stoop over the edge, a jacket being shrunk upon another similar monster, hanging perpendicularly below me.

Close by are the forging-shops whence come the howitzers and the huge naval shells. Watch the giant pincers that lift the red-hot ingots and drop them into the stamping presses. Man directs; but one might think the tools themselves intelligent, like those golden automata of old that Hephæstus made, to run and wait upon the gods of Olympus. Down drops the punch. There is a burst of flame, as though the molten steel rebelled, and out comes the shell or the howitzer in the rough, nosed and hollowed, and ready for the turning.

The men here are great, powerful fellows, blanched with heat and labour; amid the flame and smoke of the forges one sees them as typical figures in the national struggle, linked to those Dreadnoughts in the North Sea, and to those lines in Flanders and Picardy where Britain holds her enemy at bay. Everywhere the same intensity of effort, whether in the men or in those directing them. And what delicate and responsible processes!

In the next shop, with its rows of shining guns, I stop to look at a great gun apparently turning itself. No workman is visible for the moment. The process goes on automatically, the bright steel emerging under the tool that here, too, seems alive. Close to it is a man winding steel wire, or rather braid, on a 15-inch gun; beyond again there are workmen and inspectors testing and gauging another similar giant. Look down this shining tube and watch the gauging, now with callipers, now with a rubber device which takes the impression of the rifling and reveals any defect. The gauging turns upon the ten-thousandth part of an inch, and any mistake or flaw may mean the lives of men....

We turn out into a pale sunshine. The morning work is over, and the men are trooping into the canteens for dinner--and we look in a moment to see for ourselves how good a meal it is. At luncheon, afterwards, in the Directors' Offices, I am able to talk with the leading citizens of the great town.