England's Effort (1916):

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Ward, Humphry, Mrs. (1851-1920)

Victorian Women Writers Project: an Electronic Collection

England's Effort: Letters to an American Friend

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ENGLAND'S EFFORT
Six Letters to an American Friend

BY

MRS. HUMPHRY WARD

WITH A PREFACE BY THE EARL OF ROSEBERY, K.G. LONDON
SMITH, ELDER & CO., 15 WATERLOO PLACE
1916 All rights reserved

PREFACE

        The consummate preparation of Prussia for this war is, indeed, at the base of all argument as to its authors. It is of no use then, as Mrs. Ward points out, for their Chancellors and pamphleteers to assert that a perfidious Albion engineered this war for its own base, and it may be added, inscrutable purposes. For the one simple incontrovertible proof of our innocence is that we were wholly unprepared for such a conflict, while Germany was armed to the teeth and prepared in every detail of organisation. It is not for the Army of 150,000 to scheme war against the Army of millions. Our exertions have been since the war began; and from that point of view alone they are superhuman.

        Why were we not prepared? In the first place because our Government could not be persuaded of the imminence of the danger. But above all, because democracies never prepare for war. There are always prophets to preach that civilisation has put an end to such a barbarous method of settling disputes, and multitudes to be tickled by so agreeable a doctrine. There are always politicians anxious to postpone military to more popular forms of expenditure.

        These letters then are primarily intended to make known to those Americans who are disposed to think of us as laggards the gigantic and unparalleled efforts which we are making in this gigantic and unparalleled war. To the American public we feel that we have a right to appeal. We do not presume to measure or criticise the attitude of the Government of the United States and its anxiety to keep clear of the hideous conflagration. But none the less do we feel that we may claim the sympathy of the disinterested American people for the unselfish but heroic part that our nation is playing in defence of the liberties of the world. For let none mistake. If Prussian ideals should be victorious in this conflict it means the definite abasement of Europe, and an infamous invasion of freedom and public law which would not be restricted to the old world. To mention only one case, it is clear that Prussian supremacy would imply a constant and imminent danger from the 'hyphenated' Americans who preserve Prussian sympathies and methods in the bosom of the Great Republic, methods which have already been abundantly manifest in plot and outrage.

        It is better not to dwell on this aspect of the case, for it does not immediately concern us. We stand foursquare to the world, and appeal with confidence to all impartial opinion. There Prussia has not a friend. She has indeed purchased Bulgaria, which owes everything to Russia. But elsewhere the condemnation has been signal and severe, nowhere more so than in the United States. The juries of civilisation have everywhere pronounced her guilty, even in cases where fear of sharing the fate of Belgium might enjoin silence.

        But it is not merely to America that these letters should appeal. Among neutral and even allied Powers there is much ignorance as to the part that our country is playing; ignorance which these letters in their scope and power should dispel. I know of friendly and intelligent critics among our allies who believe that we have only put 200,000 men into the field. If that were true, that would mean that we have done exactly what was expected of us at the outset. But, as Mrs. Ward reminds us on the authority of the Prime Minister, we have raised five millions of men in arms. And yet that is only a

part of our contribution. We have raised by votes of credit £2,382,000,000 during the war. We are spending nearly five millions a day. We have advanced at least five hundred millions sterling to our Allies, and are daily advancing more. We are supplying them with munitions to an extraordinary extent. Without these advances, we are authoritatively told, the war could not be carried on. More than all, our vast Armada, silent and ubiquitous, remains the vigilant guardian of the seas. And it has already fulfilled the supreme task of all. It cannot indeed protect every part of every ocean against murderous and relentless piracy. But it has secured the food supply of Great Britain and her Allies. It is well that all the populations concerned should realise this.

        Surely these facts speak for themselves. A supreme fleet, five millions of men in arms; a million and a half of men and a quarter of a million of women turning out munitions; a daily expenditure approaching five millions; a debt which is piling up so formidably that by next March at its present rate it will have reached the almost incalculable figure of £3,440,000,000; these are not a trivial effort

for a population of some forty millions (for the purpose of this computation we are not counting the Dominions).

        May we not indeed say more, that the history of the world produces nothing comparable? Just as there is no parallel to an Empire which, though scattered and worldwide, acts as a unit in this struggle.

        These figures record a prodigious sacrifice. We do not grudge it in a war for liberty and existence. But we cannot understand how in face of these facts we can be suspected of not doing our part. How long indeed could the war be carried on without us?

        It is not merely Americans or neutrals who will do well to ponder these figures. Many among our Allies imagine that they are bearing the brunt and that we are watching the war without material inconvenience or giving material support. The well-informed know better. I think that some misapprehension has been caused by recent discussions about attested married men, which may have caused the grotesque impression that our married men have hitherto been excluded from service. But it is well that those who do not know should realise the herculean

exertions of Great Britain. Nay, there are some among our own people to whom Mrs. Ward's facts may come as a surprise.

        One further question arises which is poignant enough: what has Great Britain obtained in return for these tremendous sacrifices? The bitter question of Marullus occurs:

What conquest brings he home?
What tributaries follow him to Rome?

unmindful of the daily sacrifice involved by delay.

        There is another consideration which vitally concerns all of us in the Empire, but especially those within these islands. What is to be the outcome of this war as regards our own future? We are enveloped in a mist of war which bites into our bones. We strain our eyes to penetrate it and to see what lies beyond. Is it a settled gloom or the grey haze which precedes the dawn and the sunrise? What effect will this war with its heroism abroad and its sacrifice at home have on ourselves? We seem justified in thinking that we shall have found ourselves. Glorious as our race has been in the past we may look forward to something nobler still. We see our warriors returning to us a new nation, raised by the stress and anguish of warfare to higher conceptions of duty, citizenship and patriotism. They will have proved themselves fitted for great things, they will be encompassed with glory and honour, they will lead the country. Comrades in arms of all ranks and classes, they will be united by memories of sublime endurance, they will feel a new fellowship, and the

nation will be braced to face its future in a new spirit. May we not hope, indeed, that all of us, combatants or non-combatants, may rise to a higher level, and that out of the sorrows, distresses and bereavements of the war we may find higher ideals and a closer union?

        And what of the Empire? If this opportunity of making imperial relations more intimate and businesslike be lost, we deserve that it should never recur. But it will not be lost.

        Lastly we may ask a question which concerns all mankind. Will this terrible convulsion when it has subsided bequeath war or peace as its heritage? In any case one would think there must be a generation of exhaustion. But will that generation bestir itself to find some guarantee against the recurrence of the curse or will it silently pile up armaments for hoarded vengeance? That is the question on which depends the future of the human race.

ROSEBERY.             May 1916

AUTHOR'S NOTE

ENGLAND'S EFFORT

LETTERS TO AN AMERICAN FRIEND

No. 1.

(I)

any story-teller goes with the first shaping of a story, died away, at the very beginning. For the day's respite had gone. The little 'wind-warm space' had disappeared. Life and thought were all given up, without mercy or relief, to the fever and nightmare of the war. I fell back upon my early recollections of Oxford thirty or forty years ago--and it was like rain in the desert. So that, in the course of months it had become a habit with me never to write about the war; and outside the hours of writing to think and talk of nothing else.

        But your letter suddenly roused in me a desire to write about the war. It was partly, I think, because what you wrote summed up and drove home other criticisms and appeals of the same kind. I had been putting them mechanically aside as not having any special reference to me; but in reality they had haunted me. And now you make a personal appeal. You say that England at the present moment is misunderstood, and even hardly judged, in America, and that even those great newspapers of yours that are most friendly to the Allies are often melancholy reading for those with English sympathies. Our

mistakes--real and supposed--loom so large. We are thought to be not taking the war seriously, even now. Drunkenness, strikes, difficulties in recruiting the new armies, the losses of the Dardanelles expedition, the failure to save Serbia and Montenegro, tales of luxurious expenditure in the private life of rich and poor, and of waste or incompetence in military administration--these are made much of, even by our friends, who grieve, while our enemies mock. You say the French case has been on the whole much better presented in America than the English case; and you compare the international situation with those months in 1863 when it was necessary for the Lincoln Government to make strenuous efforts to influence and affect English opinion, which in the case of our upper classes and too many of our leading men was unfavourable or sceptical towards the North. You who know something of the vastness of the English effort--you urge upon me that English writers whose work and name are familiar to the American public are bound to speak for their country, bound to try and make Americans feel what we here feel through every nerve--that cumulative force of a great

nation, which has been slow to rouse, and is now immovably, irrevocably, set upon its purpose. 'Tell me,' you say in effect, 'what in your belief is the real spirit of your people--of your men in the field and at sea, of your workmen and employers at home, your women, your factory workers, your soldiers' wives, your women of the richer and educated classes, your landowners and politicians. Are you yet fully awake--yet fully in earnest, in this crisis of England's fate? "Weary Titan" that she is, with her age-long history behind her, and her vast responsibilities by sea and land, is she shouldering her load in this incredible war, as she must shoulder it; as her friends--the friends of liberty throughout the world--pray that she may shoulder it?'

        Yes!--I must answer your questions, to the best of my power. I am no practised journalist--the days of my last articles in the old Saturday Review or the old Pall Mall are thirty odd years behind me! But I have some qualifications. Ever since, more than half a century ago, I paid my first childish visit to the House of Commons, and heard Mr. Roebuck, the 'Tear 'em' of Punch's cartoon, make his violent appeal to the English

Government to recognise the belligerency of the South, it would be almost true to say that politics and affairs have been no less interesting to me than books; and next to English politics, American politics and American opinion; partly because of my early association with men like W.E. Forster, stanch believers, even when Gladstone and John Russell wavered, in the greatness of the American future and the justice of the Union cause; and partly because of the warm and deep impression left upon me and mine by your successive Ambassadors in London, by Mr. Lowell above all, by Mr. and Mrs. Phelps, by the John Hays, the Choates and the Bayards, no less than by the many intimate friendships with Americans from different worlds which my books have brought me since 1888. During the last thirty years, also, I have had many friends--and some kinsmen--among the leaders of English politics, and in both political parties. At the present moment my only son is a member of the English House of Commons, and a soldier fighting in the war. All my younger kinsfolk are fighting; the sons of all my friends are fighting; and their daughters are nursing as

members of Voluntary Aid Detachments--(marvellous what the girl V.A.D.s, as England affectionately calls them, have done since the beginning of the war!)--or working week-end shifts to relieve munition workers, or replacing men of military age in the public offices and banks. I live in one of the Home Counties, within five miles of one of the military camps. The small towns near us are crowded with soldiers; the roads are full of marching infantry, of artillery trains and supply wagons. Our village has sent practically all its able-bodied men of military age to the Front; the few that remain are 'attested' and only waiting to be called up. A great movement, in which this household is engaged, is now beginning to put women on the land, and so replace the agricultural labourers who have gone either into the armies or the munition factories. And meanwhile all the elderly men and women of the country-side are sitting on War Committees, or working for the Red Cross. Our lives are penetrated by the war; our thoughts are never free from it.

        But in trying to answer your questions I have gone far beyond my own normal experience. I asked the English Government

to give me some special opportunities of seeing what Great Britain is doing in the war, and in matters connected with the war, and they have given them ungrudgingly. I have been allowed to go, through the snowstorms of this bitter winter, from which we have at last emerged, to the far north and visit the Fleet, in those distant waters where it keeps guard night and day over England. I have spent some weeks in the Midlands and the north, watching the vast new activity of the Ministry of Munitions throughout the country; and finally in a motor tour of some 500 miles through the zone of the English armies in France, I have not only been a spectator of that marvellous organisation in North-western France, of supplies, reinforcements, training camps and hospitals, which England has built up in the course of eighteen months behind her fighting line, but I have been--on the first of two days--within less than a mile of the fighting line itself, and on a second day, from a Flemish hill--with a gas helmet close at hand!--I have been able to watch a German counter-attack, after a successful English advance, and have seen the guns flashing from the English lines, and the shell-bursts on the

German trenches along the Messines ridge; while in the far distance, a black and jagged ghost, the tower of the Cloth Hall of Ypres broke fitfully through the mists--bearing mute witness before God and man.

        For a woman--a marvellous experience! I hope later on in these letters to describe some of its details, and some of the thoughts awakened by them in a woman's mind. But let me here keep to the main point raised by your question--the effort of England. During these two months of strenuous looking and thinking, of conversation with soldiers and sailors and munition workers, of long days spent in the great supply-bases across the Channel, or of motoring through the snowy roads of Normandy and Picardy, I have naturally realised that effort far more vividly than ever before. It seems to me--it must seem to any one who has seriously attempted to gauge it--amazing, colossal. 'What country has ever raised over sixty per cent of its total recruitable strength, for service beyond the seas in a few months?' asks one of our younger historians--and that a country, not invaded, protected by the sea, and by a supreme fleet; a country,

moreover, without any form of compulsory military service, in which soldiering and the soldier have been rather unpopular than popular; a country in love with peace, and with no intention or expectation of going to war with any one?

(II)

of the Hague Tribunal. In vain. Germany would have none of them. Year by year, in a world of peace her battle navy grew. 'For what can it be intended but to attack England?' said the alarmist. But how few of us believed them! Our Tariff Reformers protested against the encroachments of German trade; but, outside a handful of persons who seemed to most of us fanatics, the emphasis lay always on care for our own people, and not on hostility to Germany. Those, indeed, who warned us passionately that Germany meant to provoke a struggle, that the struggle must come, were very little headed. Nobody slept the worse at night for their harangues. Lord Roberts's agitation for National Service, based on the portentous growth of the German army and navy, made comparatively little way. I speak from personal experience of a large Parliamentary division. 'Did you foresee it?'--I said to one of the ablest and most rising men in the Navy a few weeks ago. He thought a little. 'I always felt there might be a clash over some Colonial question--a quarrel about black men. But a war between the white nations over a European question--that Germany would force such a war--no,

that I never believed!' Nor did any of us--except those few, those very few persons who, Cassandra-like, saw the coming horror plainly, and spoke to a deaf country.

        'There was no hatred of Germany in this country'--I quote a Cabinet Minister. 'Even in those parts of the country which had most reason to feel the trade rivalry of Germany, there was no thought of war, no wish for war.' It came upon England like one of those sudden spates through mountain clefts in spring, that fall with havoc on the plains beneath. After such days of wrestling for European peace as have left their indelible mark upon every member of the English Cabinet which declared war on August 4th, 1914, we fought because we must, because, in Luther's words, we 'could no other.'

        What is the proof of this?--the proof which history will accept as final?--against the vain and lying pleas of Germany?

        Nothing less than the whole history of the past eighteen months!--beginning with that initial lack of realisation, and those harassing difficulties of organisation with which we are now so often and so ignorantly reproached. At the word 'Belgium' on August 4th,

practically the whole English nation fell into line. We felt no doubts--we knew what we had to do. But the problem was how to do it. Outside the Navy and the Expeditionary Force, both of them ready to the last gun and button, we had neither men nor equipment equal to the fighting of a Continental war, and we knew it. The fact is more than our justification--it is our glory. If we had meant war, as Germany still hoarsely but more faintly says, week after week, to a world that listens no longer, could any nation of sane men have behaved as we did in the years before the war? 233,000 men on active service--and 263,000 Territorials, against Germany's millions!--with arsenals and equipment to match. Is it any wonder that the country--our untouched, uninvaded country--safe as it believed itself to be, under the protection of its invincible Navy, was, in some sections of our population at any rate, slow to realise the enormous task to which, for the faith of treaties' sake, for self-defence' sake, it was committed?

        And yet--was it after all so slow? The day after war was declared the Prime Minister asked Parliament to authorise the addition of

half a million men to the Army and a first war credit of a hundred millions of money (five hundred million dollars). The first hundred thousand men came rolling up into the great military centres within a few days. By September 4th nearly 300,000 fresh men had enlisted--by Christmas, half a million. By May, a million men had been added to the new Armies; by September 1915 Sir John French alone had under his command close on a million men on the lines in France and Flanders, and in December 1915 the addition of another million men to the Army was voted by Parliament, bringing up the British military strength to approximately four millions, excluding Colonials. And what of the Dominions? By November 1915, Canada and Australia alone had sent us forces more than equal to the whole of that original Expeditionary Force, that 'contemptible little army' which, broken and strained as it was by the sheer weight and fierceness of the German advance, yet held the gates of the Channel till England could fling her fresh troops into the field, and France--admirable France!--had recovered from the first onslaught of her terrible and ruthless enemy.

        In one of my later letters, I hope to give some particulars of this first rush of men, gathered from those who witnessed it and took part in it. One remarkable point in connection with it is that those districts most heavily employed in munition-making and coal-mining, the two industries absolutely indispensable to our Army and Navy, have also sent the largest supply of men to the fighting line--take, for instance, Newcastle and the Clyde. Of course there have been anxious episodes in the great development. Was your own vast levy in the Civil War without them? And for the last half million men, we have had to resort, as Lincoln resorted, to a modified form of compulsion. There was, no doubt, a good deal of unnecessary waste and overlapping in the first camp and billeting organisation of the enormous forces raised. But when all is said, did we not, in the language of a French observer, 'improvise the impossible'?--and have we not good reason to be proud?--not with any foolish vain-glory, but with the sober and resolute pride of a great nation, conscious of its past, determined to correct its mistakes, and looking open-eyed and fearless towards the future?

        Then as to munitions:--in many ways, as you will perhaps say, and as I agree, a tragic story. If we had possessed last spring the ammunition, both for ourselves and our Allies, that we now possess, the war would have gone differently. Drunkenness, trade union difficulties, a small--very small--revolutionary element among our workpeople--all these have made trouble. But the real cause of our shortage lay in the fact that no one, outside Germany, realised till far into the war what the ammunition needs--the absolutely unprecedented needs--of this struggle were going to be. It was the second battle of Ypres at the end of April last year which burnt them into the English mind. We paid for the grim knowledge in thousands of our noblest lives. But since then?

        In a later letter I propose to draw some picture in detail of the really marvellous movement which since last July, under the impulse given by Mr. Lloyd George, has covered England with new munition factories, and added enormously to the producing power of the old and famous firms; has drawn in an army of women, now reckoned at something near a quarter of a million; and is at this

moment not only providing amply for our own armies, but is helping those of the Allies, against those final days of settlement with Germany which we believe to be now steadily approaching. American industry and enterprise have helped us substantially in this field of munitions. We are gratefully conscious of it. But England is now fast overtaking her own needs.

        More of this presently. Meanwhile to the military and equipment effort of the country, you have to add the financial effort--something like fifteen hundre millions sterling (seven thousand five hundred millions of dollars) already expended on the war; the organising effort, exemplified in the wonderful 'back of the army' in France, which I hope to describe to you; and the vast hospital system, with all its scientific adjuncts, and its constantly advancing efficiency.

        And at the foundation of it all, the human and personal effort!--the lives given for England, the blood so generously shed for her, the homes that have sacrificed their all; our 'golden lads' from all quarters and classes, whose young bodies lie mingled with an alien dust that 'is for ever England,' since they

sleep there and hallow it; our mothers who mourn the death or the wreck of the splendid sons they reared; our widowed wives and fatherless children. And this, in a quarrel which only very slowly our people have come to feel as in very deed their own. At first we thought most often and most vividly of Belgium, of the broken treaty, and of France, so wantonly attacked; whose people no English man or woman could ever have looked in the face again, had we forsaken her. Then came the hammer blows that forged our will--Louvain, Aerschot, Rheims, the air-raids on our defenceless towns, the senseless murder of our women and children, the Bryce report, the Lusitania, the execution of Edith Cavell--the whole stupefying revelation of the German hatred and greed towards this country, and of the qualities latent in the German character. Now we know that it is they, or we; since they willed it so. And this old, illogical, unready country is only just arriving at its full strength, only just fully conscious of the sternness of its own resolve, only just putting out its full powers, as the German power is weakening, and the omens are changing--both in East and West.

(III)

        In one point, indeed, there has been no improvisation. Nothing was trusted to chance. What is it that alone has secured us the time to make the effort we have made?

        It is now about a month ago that, by permission of the Admiralty, I found myself driving towards a certain pier in a harbour opening on the North Sea. The Commodore of a Cruiser Squadron was to send his boat for me, and I was to lunch with him on board his flagship. I duly passed the distrustful sentry on the road leading to the pier, arrived at the pier-head, and descended from the motor which had brought me. The morning was mistily sunny, and the pier strangely deserted. Where was the boat?--where was my friend who had hoped to come for me himself? No signs of either. The few old

sailors employed about the pier looked at me in astonishment, and shook their heads when I inquired. Commodore --'s boat was not there; no boat had been in that morning from the ships. I took the Commodore's letter from my hand-bag, to assure myself I had not been dreaming, and re-read it in perplexity. No dates could be clearer--no directions more precise. Suddenly I perceive one tall naval officer on the pier. 'Can you help me, Sir?' And I hand him the Commodore's letter. He looks at me--and at the letter. His face twinkles with repressed laughter; and I laugh, too, beginning to understand. 'Very sorry,' says the charming young man--'but I think I can assure you there will be no boat, and it is no use your waiting. Commodore X went to sea last night!'

        I thanked him, and we laughed together. Then I walked up the pier a little way, seeing a movement in the mist. A sailor came up to me. 'They all went to sea last night,' he said in my ear; 'and there are the slow ones coming back!' And out of the mist came the black shapes of warships, moving majestically up the harbour--one might have fancied, with a kind of injured dignity, because their

unreasonable fellows had been faster and had gone farther afield than they.

        I walked back to my motor, disappointed indeed, and yet exulting! It was good to realise personally, through this small incident, the mobility and ever-readiness of the Fleet; the absolute insignificance--non-existence even--of any civilian or shore interest, for the Navy at its work. It was not till a week later that I received an amusing and mysterious line from Commodore X, the most courteous of men.

(IV)

'Breaking the silence of the seas
Among the farthest Hebrides'--

abandoned. All the same, I must firmly put on record that mine was 'a visit to the Fleet,' by Admiralty permission, for the purpose of these letters to you, and through you to the American public, and that I seem to have been so far the only woman who, for newspaper ends, has been allowed to penetrate those mysterious northern limits where I spent two wonderful days.

        It was, indeed, a wintry visit. The whole land was covered with snow. The train could hardly drag itself through the choked Highland defiles; and it was hours behind its time when we arrived at a long-expected station, and a Vice-Admiral looking at me with friendly, keen eyes came to the carriage to greet me. 'My boat shall meet you at the pier with my Flag Lieutenant to-morrow morning. You will pick me up at the Flagship, and I will take you round the Fleet. You will lunch with me, I hope, afterwards.' I tried to show my grateful sense both of the interest and the humour of the situation! My kind visitor disappeared, and the train carried me on a few miles farther to my destination for the night.

        And here I take a few words from a journal written at the time:--

        'It is nearly dawn. A red light in the northeast is coming up over the snowy hills. The water, steely grey--the tide rising. What strange moving bodies are those, scudding along over the dim surface, like the ghosts of seaplanes? Dense flocks of duck apparently, rising and falling along the shallows of the shore. Now they are gone. Nothing moves. The morning is calm, and the water still. And on it lie, first a cruiser squadron, and then a line of Dreadnoughts stretching out of sight. No lights anywhere, except the green lights on a hospital ship far away. The great ships lie dark and silent, and I sit and watch them, in the cold dawn, thinking that but for them, and the multitude of their comrades that guard these seas and shores, England would be as Belgium or as Northern France, ravaged and destroyed by a barbarian enemy. My heart goes out to you, great ships, and you, gallant unwearied men, who keep your watch upon them! That watch has been kept for generations. Never has there been such need for it as now.'...

        ...But the day has risen, and the sun with it. As I leave the shore in the Vice-Admiral's boat, the sunlight comes dancing

over a low line of hill, lighting up the harbour, the mighty ships, with their guns, and, scattered out to sea along the distance, the destroyers, the trawlers, the mine-sweepers, the small auxiliary craft of all kinds--those 'fringes of the Fleet'--which Kipling has caught and photographed as none but he can.

        The barge stops beside the flagship, and the Admiral descends into it. What is the stamp, the peculiar stamp that these naval men bear?--as of a force trained and disciplined to its utmost capacity, and then held lightly in check, till wanted. You see it in so many of their faces, even in eyes hollow for want of sleep. It is always there--the same strength, the same self-control, the same humanity. Is it produced by the testing weight of responsibility, the silent sense of ever-present danger, both from the forces of nature and the enmity of man, the high scientific training, and last but not least that marvellous comradeship of the Navy, whether between officer and officer, or between officers and men, which is constantly present indeed in the Army, but is necessarily closer and more intimate here, in the confined world of the ship, where all live together day after day, and week

after week, and where--if disaster comes--all may perish together?

        But on this bright winter morning, as we pass under and round the ships, and the Admiral points out what a landswoman can understand, in the equipment and the power of these famous monsters, with their pointing guns, there was for the moment no thought of the perils of the Navy, but only of the glory of it. And afterwards in the Admiral's pleasant drawing-room on board the flagship, with its gathering of naval officers, Admirals, Captains, Commanders, how good the talk was! Not a shade of boasting--no mere abuse of Germany--rather a quiet regret for the days when German and English naval men were friends throughout the harbours of the world. 'Von Spee was a very good fellow--I knew him well--and his two sons who went down with him,' says an Admiral gently. 'I was at Kiel the month before the war. I know that many of their men must loathe the work they are set to do.' 'The point is,' says a younger man, broad-shouldered, with the strong face of a leader, 'that they are always fouling the seas, and we are always cleaning them up. Let the neutrals under-

stand that! It is not we who strew the open waters with mines for the slaughter of any passing ship, and then call it 'maintaining the freedom of the seas.' And as to their general strategy, their Higher Command'--he throws back his head with a quiet laugh--and I listen to a rapid sketch of what the Germans might have done, have never done, and what it is now much too late to do, which I will not repeat.

        Type after type comes back to me:--the courteous Flag Lieutenant, who is always looking after his Admiral, whether in these brief harbour rests, or in the clash and darkness of the high seas; the Lieutenant-Commanders whose destroyers are the watch-dogs, the ceaseless protectors, no less than the eyes and ears of the Fleet; the Flag-Captain, who takes me through the great ship, with his vigilant, spare face, and his understanding, kindly talk about his men; many of whom on this Thursday afternoon--the quasi-half-holiday of the Fleet when in harbour--are snatching an hour's sleep when and where they can. That sleep-abstinence of the Navy!--sleep, controlled, measured out, reduced to a bare minimum, among thousands of men, that we

on shore may sleep our fill--look at the signs of it, in the eyes both of these officers, and of the sailors crowding the 'liberty' boats, which are just bringing them back from their short two hours' leave on shore!

        Another gathering, in the Captain's room, for tea. The talk turns on a certain popular play dealing with naval life, and a Commander describes how the manuscript of it had been brought to him, and how he had revelled in the cutting out of all the sentimentalisms. Two men in the play--friends--going into action--shake hands with each other 'with tears in their eyes.' A shout of derisive laughter goes up from the tea-table. But they admit 'talking shop' off duty. 'That's the difference between us and the Army.' And what shop it is! I listen to two young officers, both commanding destroyers, describing--one, his adventures in dirty weather the night before, on patrol duty. 'My hat, I thought one moment the ship was on the rocks! You couldn't see a yard for the snow--and the sea--beastly!' The other had been on one of Admiral Hood's monitors, when they suddenly loomed out of the mist on the Belgian coast, and the German army,

marching along the coast road to Dunkirk and Calais, marched no more, but lay in broken fragments behind the dunes, or any shelter available, till the flooding of the dykes further south completed the hopeless defeat which Admiral Hood's guns had begun.

        Then the talk ranges round the blockade, the difficulties and dangers of patrol work, the complaints of neutrals. 'America should understand us. Their blockade hit us hard enough in the Civil War. And we are fighting for their ideals no less than our own. When has our naval supremacy ever hurt them? Mayn't they be glad of it some day? What about a fellow called Monroe!'--so it runs. Then its tone changes insensibly. From a few words dropped I realise with a start where these pleasantly chatting men had probably been only two or three days before, where they would probably be again on the morrow. Some one opens a map, and I listen to talk which in spite of its official reticence throws many a light on the vast range of England's naval power, and the number of her ships. 'Will they come out?--when will they come out?' The question runs round the group. Some one tells a story of a German naval

prisoner taken not long ago in the North Sea, and of his remark to his captors--'Yes, we're beaten--we know that--but we'll make it hell for you before we give in!'

        For that final clash--that Armageddon that all think must come, our sailors wait, not despising their enemy, knowing very well that they--the Fleet--are the pivot of the situation, that without the British Navy, not all the valour of the Allies in France or Russia could win the war, and that with it, Germany's hope of victory is vain. While the Navy lives, England lives, and Germany's vision of a world governed by the ruthless will of the scientific soldier is doomed.

        Meanwhile, what has Germany been doing in her shipyards all this time? No one knows, but my hosts are well aware that we shall know some day.

        As to England--here is Mr. Balfour moving the Naval Estimates in the House of Commons--the 'token votes' which tell nothing that should not be told. But since the war began, says the First Lord, we have added 'one million' to the tonnage of the Navy, and we have doubled its personnel. We are adding more every day; for the Admiralty are

always 'wanting more.' We are quite conscious of our defects--in the Air Service first and foremost. But they will be supplied. There is a mighty movement afoot in the workshops of England--an effort which, when all drawbacks are allowed for, has behind it a free people's will.

        In my next letter I propose to take you through some of these workshops. 'We get the most extraordinary letters from America'--writes one of my correspondents, a steel manufacturer in the Midlands,--'What do they think we are about?' An American letter is quoted. 'So you are still, in England, taking the war lying down?'--

        Are we? Let us see.

No. 2

(I)

        Let me then give you some account--an eye-witness's account--of what there is now to be seen by the ordinary intelligent observer in the 'Munition Areas,' as the public has learned to call them, of England and Scotland. That great spectacle, as it exists to-day,--so inspiring in what it immediately suggests of human energy and human ingenuity, so appalling in its wider implications--testifies, in the first instance, to the fierce stiffening of England's resolve to win the war, and to win it at a lessened cost in life and suffering to our men in the field, which ran through the nation, after the second Battle of Ypres, towards the close of April 1915. That battle, together with the disagreement between Mr. Winston Churchill and Lord Fisher at the Admiralty, had, as we all know, momentous consequences. The two events

brought the national dissatisfaction and disappointment with the general course of the spring fighting. By May 19, the Ministry which had declared the war and so far conducted it, had disappeared; a National or Coalition Ministry, drawn from the leading men of both parties, reigned in its stead. The statement made by Mr. Asquith, as late, alack, as April 20th, 1915, that there was 'no truth in the statement' that our efforts at the Front 'were being crippled or at any rate hampered' by want of ammunition, was seen almost immediately, in the bitter light of events, to be due to some fatal misconceptions, or mis-judgments, on the part of those informing the Prime Minister, which the nation, in its own interests, and those of its Allies, could only peremptorily sweep away. A new Ministry was created--the Ministry of Munitions, and Mr. Lloyd George was placed at its head.

        The work done since June 1915 by Mr. Lloyd George and his Ministry--now employing vast new buildings, and a staff running into thousands--is nothing less than colossal. Much, no doubt, had been done earlier for which the new Ministry has perhaps unjustly

got the credit, and not all has been smooth sailing since. One hears, of course, criticism and complaints. What vast and effective stir, for a great end, was ever made in the world without them? Mr. Lloyd George has incurred a certain amount of unpopularity among the working classes, who formerly adored him. In my belief he has incurred it for the country's sake, and those sections of the working class who have smarted under his criticisms most bitterly will forgive him when the time comes. In his passionate determination to get the thing done, he has sometimes let his theme--of the national need, and the insignificance of all things else in comparison with it--carry him into a vehemence which the workmen have resented, and which foreign or neutral countries have misunderstood. He found in his path, which was also the nation's path, three great foes:--drunkenness; the old envenomed quarrel between employer and employed; and that deep-rooted industrial conservatism of England, which shews itself, on the one hand, in the Trade Union customs and restrictions of the working class, built up, as they hold, through long years, for the protection of their

own standards of life; and, on the other, in the slowness of many of the smaller English employers (I am astonished, however, at the notable exceptions everywhere!) to realise new needs and processes, and to adapt themselves to them. Could any one have made such an omelet without breaking a great many eggs! Is it wonderful that the employers have sometimes felt themselves unbearably hustled, sometimes misunderstood, and at other times annoyed, or worried by what seems to them the red tape of the new Ministry, and its apparent multiplicity of forms and inquiries? Men accustomed to conduct their own businesses with the usual independence of regulation have been obliged to submit to regulation. Workmen accustomed to defend certain methods of work and certain customs of their trade as matters of life and death have had to see them jeopardised or swept away. The restoration of these methods and customs is solemnly promised them after the war; but meanwhile they become the servants of a public department almost as much under orders as the soldier himself. They are asked to admit unskilled men to the skilled processes over which they

have long kept so jealous a guard; above all, they are asked to assent wholesale to the employment of women in trades where women have never been employed before, where it is obvious that their introduction taps an immense reservoir of new labour, and equally obvious that, once let in, they are not going to be easily or wholly dislodged. Of course, there has been friction and difficulty; nor is it all yet at an end. In the few danger-spots of the country, where heads are hottest, where thousands of the men of most natural weight and influence are away fighting, and where among a small minority hatred of the capitalist deadens national feeling, and obscures the national danger, there have been anxious moments during the winter; there may possibly be some anxious moments again.

        But, after all, how little it amounts to--in comparison with the enormous achievement! It took us nine months to realise what France--which, remember, is a Continental nation under conscription--had realised after the Battle of the Marne, when she set every hand in the country to work at munitions that could be set to work. With us, whose villages were unravaged, whose normal life was

untouched, realisation was inevitable slower. Again we were unprepared, and again, as in the case of the Army itself, we may plead that we have 'improvised the impossible.' 'No nation,' says Mr. Buchan in his vivid 'History of the War,' 'can be adequately prepared, unless, like Germany, it intends war; and Britain, like France paid the penalty of her honest desire for peace.' Moreover, we had our Navy to work for, without which the cause of the Allies would have gone under, must have gone under, at the first shock of Germany. What the workmen of England did in the first year of the war in her docks and shipyards, history will tell some day. 'What's wrong with the men!' cried a Glasgow employer indignantly to me, one winter evening as, quite unknown the one to the other, we were nearing one of the towns on the Clyde--'What was done on the Clyde, in the first months of the war, should never be forgotten by this country. Working from six to nine every day, till they dropped with fatigue--and Sundays, too--drinking just to keep themselves going--too tired to eat or sleep--that's what it was--I saw it!' I, too, have seen that utter fatigue, stamped on a certain

percentage of faces, through the Midlands, or the districts of the Tyne and the Clyde--fatigue which is yet indomitable, which never gives way. How fresh, beside that look, are the faces of the women, for whom workshop life is new! In its presence one forgets all hostile criticism, all talk of strikes and drink, of trade union difficulties, and the endless worries of the employers. The English workman is not tractable material--far from it, and he is not imaginative; except in the persons of some of his chosen leaders, he has never seen a ruined French or Flemish village, and he was slow to realise the bitterness of that silence of the guns on the Front, when ammunition runs short, and lives must pay. But he has sent his hundreds of thousands to the fighting line; there are a million and a half of him now working at munitions; and it is he, in a comradeship with the brain workers, the scientific intelligence of the nation, closer than any he has yet known, and lately, with the new and astonishing help of women--it is he, after all, who is 'delivering the goods,' he who is now piling the great arsenals and private works with guns and shells, with bombs, rifles, and machine-guns, he who is

working night and day in the shipyards, he who is teaching the rising army of women their work, and making new and firm friends, through the national emergency, whether in the trenches or the workshops, with other classes and types in the nation, hitherto little known to him, to whom he too is perhaps a revelation.

        There will be a new wind blowing through England when this war is done. Not only will the scientific intelligence, the general education, and the industrial plant of the nation have gained enormously from this huge impetus of war; but men and women, employers and employed, shaken perforce out of their old grooves, will look at each other, surely, with new eyes, in a world which has not been steeped for nothing in effort and sacrifice, in common griefs and a common passion of will.

(II)

• (1) The steady enlargement of existing armament and munition works, national or private.

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  Page 38

• (2) The transformation of a host of other engineering businesses into munition works.
• (3) The co-ordination of a vast number of small workshops dealing with the innumerable metal industries of ordinary commerce, so as to make them feed the larger engineering works, with all those minor parts of the gun or shell, which such shops had the power to make.
• (4) The putting up of entirely new workshops--National Workshops--directly controlled by the new Ministry under the Munitions Acts.

        Let me take you through a few typical scenes.

        It was on February 1st, the day after the Zeppelin raid of January 31st, that I left a house in the north where I had been seeing one of the country-house convalescent hospitals, to which English women and English wealth are giving themselves everywhere without stint; and made my way by train, through a dark and murky afternoon, towards a midland town. The news of the raid was so far vague. The newspapers of the morning gave no

names or details. I was not aware that I was passing through towns where women and children in back streets had been cruelly and wantonly killed the night before, where a brewery had been bombed, and the windows of a train broken, in order that the German public might be fed on ridiculous lies about the destruction of Liverpool docks, and the wrecking of 'English industry.' 'English industry lies in ruins,' said the Hamburger Nachrichten, complacently. Marvellous paper! Just after reading its remarks, I was driving down the streets of the great industrial centre I had come to see--a town which the murderers of the night before would have been glad indeed to hit. As it was, 'English industry' seemed tolerably active amid its 'ruins.' The clumsy falsehoods of the German official reports, and the German newspapers, affect me strangely! It is not so much their lack of truth as their lack of the ironic, the satiric sense; which is a certain protection, after all, even amid the tragedy of war. We have a tolerable British conceit of ourselves, no doubt, and in war we make foolish or boasting statements about the future, because, in spite of all our grumbling, we are at bottom a nation of optimists,

and apt to see things as we wish. But this sturdy or fatuous lying about the past--the 'sinking' of the Lion, the 'capture' of Fort Vaux, or the 'bombardment' of Liverpool docks--is really beyond us. Our sense of ridicule, if nothing else, forbids--the instinct of an old people with an old and humourous literature. These leading articles of the Hamburger Nachrichten, the sermons of German pastors, and those amazing manifestoes of German professors, flying straight in the face of historic documents,--'scraps of paper'--which are there, none the less, to all time:--for us, these things are only not comic because, to the spiritual eye, they are written in blood.

        But to return to the 'ruins,' and this 'English industry' which during the last six months has taken on so grim an aspect for Germany.

        My guide, an official of the Ministry, stops the motor, and we turn down a newly made road, leading towards a mass of spreading building on the left. 'A year ago,' says my companion--'this was all green fields. Now the company is employing, instead of 3500 workpeople, about three times the number, of whom a large proportion are

women. Its output has been quadrupled, and the experiment of introducing women has been a complete success.' 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 bed head, 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 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 the 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. Etchers like Muirhead Bone, or Joseph Pennell have shown us what can be done in art with these high workshops, their intricate distances, the endless criss-cross of their belting, and their ranged machines. But the coming in of the girls, in their close khaki caps and overalls, shewing 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 4000 of them, to 5000 men, when I saw the shop, and their number has no doubt increased since; for the latest

figures shew 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 it 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, 60 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 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 descend, we watch the testing of a particular gun. I was to hear its note on the actual battlefield 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.

(III)

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, shewing the signs of an Evangelical tradition in his strong dislike for Sunday work, his evident care for his workpeople, 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 alone, 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 work-

shops, 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, first, of a great building, where huge naval guns are being lowered from the heating 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 Hephaestus 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. One of them writes some careful notes for me. Their report of labour conditions is excellent. 'No organised strikes and few cessations of work to report. Overtime is being freely worked. Little or no drunkenness, and that at a time when the average earnings of many classes of workmen are two or three times above the normal level. The methods introduced in the twenty years before the war--conference and discussion--have practically settled all difficulties between employers and employed, in these parts, at any rate, during this time of England's trial.'

        After luncheon we diverge to pay another all too brief visit to a well-known firm. The Managing Director gives me some wonderful figures of a new Shell Factory they are just putting up. It was begun in September 1915. Since then 2000 tons of steelwork has been erected, and 200 out of 1200 machines required have been received and fixed. Four to five thousand hands will be ultimately employed. >All the actual production off the machines will be done by women--and this

although the works are intended for a heavy class of shell--60-pounder High Explosive. Women are already shewing their capacity--helped by mechanical devices--to deal with this large type of shell; and the workshop when in full working order is intended for an output of a million shell per annum.

        I drive on, overshadowed by these figures. 'Per annum'! The little common words haunt the ear intolerably. Surely before one more year is over, this horror under which we live will be lifted from Europe!--Britain, a victorious Britain, will be at peace, and women's hands will have something else to do than making high explosive shell. But meanwhile, there is no other way. The country's call has gone out, clear and stern, and her daughters are coming in their thousands to meet it, from loom, and house, and shop.

        A little later, in a great board-room, I find the Munitions Committee gathered. Its function of course is to help the new Ministry in organising the war-work of the town. In the case of the larger firms, the committee has been chiefly busy in trying to replace labour withdrawn by the war. It has been getting

skilled men back from the trenches, and advising the Ministry as to the 'badging' of munition workers. It has itself, through its command of certain scientific workshops, been manufacturing gauges and testing materials. It has turned the electro-plate workshops of the town on to making steel helmets, and in general has been 'working in' the smaller engineering concerns, so as to make them feed the larger ones. This process here as everywhere is a very educating one. The shops employed on bicycle and ordinary motor work have as a rule little idea of the extreme accuracy required in munition work. The idea of working to the thousandth of an inch seems to them absurd; but they have to learn to work to the ten-thousandth, and beyond. The war will leave behind it greatly raised standards of work in England!--that every one agrees. And I carry away with me, as a last remembrance of this great town and its activities, two recollections:--one of a University man doing some highly skilled work on a particularly fine gauge--'If you ask me what I have been doing for the last few weeks, I can only tell you that I have been working like a nigger and have done nothing! Patience!--that's

all there is to say.' And another--of a 'transformed' shop of moderate size, where an active and able man, after giving up the whole of his ordinary business, has thrown himself into the provision, within his powers, of the most pressing war needs, as he came across them. In July last year, for instance, munitions work in many quarters was actually held up for want of gauges. Mr. D. made something like 10,000, to the great assistance of certain new Government shops. Then the Government asked for a particular kind of gun. Mr. D. undertook 1000, and has already delivered 400. Tools for shell-making are everywhere wanted in the rush of the huge demand. Mr. D. has been making them diligently. This is just one example among hundreds of how a great industry is adapting itself to the fiery needs of war.

        But the winter dark has come, and I must catch my train. As I speed through a vast industrial district, I find in the evening papers hideous details of the Zeppelin raid, which give a peculiar passion and poignancy to my recollections of a crowded day,--and peculiar interest, also, to the talk of an able representative of the Ministry of Munitions, who is

travelling with me, and endeavouring to give me a connected view of the whole new organisation. As he speaks, my thoughts travel to the English battle line, to the trenches and casualty clearing-stations behind it, to distant Russia; and I think of the Prime Minister's statement in Parliament--that the supply of munitions, for all its marvellous increase, is not yet equal to the demand. New shops, new workers, new efforts--England is producing them now unceasingly; she must go on producing them. There must be no pause or slackening. There will be none.

        I am going now to see--after the Midlands--what the English and Scotch north is doing to swell the stream. And in my next letter there will be plenty to say about 'dilution' of labour, about wages, and drink, and some other burning topics of the moment.

No. 3

(I)

        Hence the outspoken speech of December 21st, supported by Mr. Asquith's grave words

of a few weeks later. 'We cannot go on,' said the Prime Minister in effect--'depending upon foreign countries for our munitions. We haven't the ships to spare to bring them home, and the cost is too great. We must make them ourselves.' 'Yes--and quicker!'--Mr. Lloyd George had already said, with a sharp emphasis, meant to 'hustle' that portion of the nation which still required hustling; over-painting his picture, no doubt, but with quite legitimate rhetoric, in order to produce his effect.

        The result of that fresh 'hustling' was the appointment of the Dilution Commissioners, a second Munitions Act amending the first, and a vast expansion all over the country of the organisation which had seemed so vast before. It was not till mid-winter, in the very midst of the new and immense effort I have been describing, that the Minister of Munitions and those working with him convinced themselves that, without another resolute push, the barrier across the stream of the nation's will might still fatally hold it back. More and more men were wanted every week,--in the Army and the workshops--and there were not men to go

round. The second push had to be given--it was given--and it still firmly persists.

        In the spring of 1915, the executives of the leading Trade Unions had promised the Government the relaxation of their trade rules for the period of the war. Many of the Trade Union leaders--Mr. Barnes, Mr. Henderson, Mr. Hodge, and many others, have worked magnificently in this sense. And many Unions have been thoroughly loyal throughout their ranks to the pledge given in their name. The iron-moulders, the ship-wrights, the brass-workers may be specially mentioned. But in the trades mostly concerned with ammunition, there were certain places and areas where the men themselves, as distinct from their responsible leaders, offered a dogged, though often disguised resistance. Personally, as I have already said, I think that anyone at all accustomed to try and look at labour questions from the point of view of labour, will understand the men while heartily sympathising with the Minister, who was determined to get 'the goods,' and has succeeded in getting them. Here, in talking of 'the men,' I except that small revolutionary element among them, to

which I have once or twice referred, which has no country, and exists in all countries. And I except, too, instances which certainly are to be found, though rarely, of what one might call a purely mean and over-reaching temper on the part of workmen--taking advantage of the nation's need, as some of the less responsible employers have no doubt, also, taken advantage of it. But in general, it seems to me, there has been an honest struggle in the minds of thousands of workmen between what appears to them the necessary protection of their standards of life--laboriously attained through long effort--and the call of the war. And that the overwhelming majority of the workmen concerned with munitions should have patriotically and triumphantly decided this struggle as they have--under pressure, no doubt, but under no such pressure as exists in a conscripted, still more in an invaded, nation--may rank, I think, with the raising of our voluntary armies, as another striking chapter in the book of 'England's Effort.'

        In this chapter, then, 'Dilution' will always take a leading place.

        What is 'dilution'?

        It means, of course, that under the sharp