All quotation marks, dashes, and
apostrophes have been transcribed as entity references.
Any hyphens occurring in line breaks have been removed; all hyphens are
encoded as "-" and em dashes as —.
BY
WITH A PREFACE BY THE EARL OF ROSEBERY, K.G.
LONDON
SMITH, ELDER & CO., 15 WATERLOO PLACE
1916
All rights reserved
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:
The answer is not yet quite what we should wish it to be. We have given full powers, a blank cheque, the best of our men. Our material acquisitions, so far, are outside Europe, won with admirable valour and skill. Our Fleet holds the sea, and the German flag has been driven from it. The heroism of our soldiers and sailors, the stubborn tenacity which in the first act of the war saved the situation, the chivalrous humanity and unsullied honour we have opposed to rank barbarism:--these may seem little in a debit and credit account, but they make us proud. As for the ultimate victory no soldier allows even a momentary doubt. And we at home set our teeth doggedly and wait with confidence for the inevitable end, though not
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
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?
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.
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.
which I see described in the letters of the Russian or American journalists who have been allowed to visit the Grand Fleet. There had been some talk, I understand, of sending me out in a destroyer; it was mercifully
'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?
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.
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!
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.
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!'
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.'
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.
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!
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.
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.
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.
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.'
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."'
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!'
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....
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.'
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.
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.
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.
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.
round. The second push had to be given--it was given--and it
still firmly persists.
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.'
analysis of necessity, much engineering work, generally reckoned as
'skilled' work, and reserved to 'skilled' workmen,
by a number of union regulations, is seen to be capable of solution into
various processes, some of which can be sorted out from the others as
within the capacity of the unskilled or semi-skilled worker. By so dividing
them up, and using the superior labour with economy, only where it is
really necessary, it can be made to go infinitely further; and the inferior
or untrained labour can then be brought into work where nobody supposed it
could be used, where, in fact, it never has been used.
(March 24)--'Since January, we have passed through several
critical moments, but, eventually, the principle was accepted, and dilution
is being introduced as fast as convenient. For this we have largely to
thank an admirable Commission--(Sir Croydon Marks, Mr. Barnes, and Mr.
Shackleton) which was sent down to interview employers and employed. Their
tact and acumen were remarkable. Speaking personally, I cannot help
believing that there is a better understanding between masters and men now
than has existed in my memory.'
told by the Ministry that I should have to double my output. Labour was
scarce and I consulted a deputation of the men about it. I told them the
problem and said I should be glad of suggestions. I told them that we
should either have to get men or women, and I asked them for their
co-operation, as there would be a great deal of teaching to be done.
"Probably," I said, "you would like to find the
men?" They agreed to try. I gave them a week, and at the end of a
week they came to me and said they would rather have women. I said to
them--"Then you must all pull together." They gave me
their word. Right from the beginning they have done their level best to
help, and things have gone on perfectly.' On one occasion, a woman
complained that the man directing her was 'working against
her.' 'I called the men's committee together,' said
the employer. 'I told them the facts, and they have dealt with the
offender themselves.'
sets the tools, and keeps the machines in running order, oversees eight,
ten, or more machines. But sometimes the comradeship is much closer. For
instance--(I quote again the witness mentioned above)--in a
machine tool shop, i.e. a shop for the making of tools used in
shell production, one of the most highly skilled parts of the business, you
may now see a man with a woman to help him, operating two lathes. If the
woman falls into any difficulty, the man comes to help her. Both can earn
more money than each can earn separately, and the skilled man who formerly
worked the second lathe is released. In the same shop a woman watched a
skilled man doing slot-drilling--'a process in which thousandths
of an inch matter'--for a fortnight. Now she runs the machine
herself by day, while the man works it on the night shift. One woman in
this shop is 'able to do her own tool-setting.' The observer
thinks she must be the only woman tool-setter in the country, and he drops
the remark that her capacity and will may have something to do with the
fact that she has a husband at the Front. Near by, as part of the same
works, which are not specialised, but engaged in general
engineering, is a bomb shop staffed by women, which is now sending 3000
bombs a week to the trenches. Women are also doing gun-breech work of the
most delicate and responsible kind under the guidance of a skilled
overseer. One of the women at this work was formerly a charwoman; she has
never yet broken a tool. All over the works, indeed, the labour of women
and unskilled men is being utilised in the same scientific way. Thus
'the area of the works has been doubled in a few months,'
without the engagement of a single additional skilled man from outside.
'We have made the men take an interest in the women,' say the
employers. 'That is the secret of our success. We care nothing at all
about the money, we are all for the output. If the men think you are going
to exploit the women and cheapen the work, the scheme is crabbed right
away.'
45 hours a week in 8-hour shifts--the men 53 hours on 12-hour shifts.
There is no difficulty whatever in obtaining a full supply of woman's
labour--indeed the factory has now a waiting list of 500. Nor has
there been any difficulty with the men in regard to the women's work.
With the exception of two operations which are thought too heavy for them,
all the machines are run by women. But when the factory began, the
employers very soon detected that it was running below its possible output.
There was a curious lack of briskness in the work--a curious
constraint among the new workers. Yet the employers were certain that the
women were keen, and their labour potentially efficient. They put their
heads together, and posted up a notice in the factory to the effect that
whatever might be the increase in the output of piece-work, the piece-work
rate would not be altered. Instantly the atmosphere began to clear, the
pace of the machines began to mount. It was a factory in which the work was
new, the introduction of women was new, and the workers strange to each
other, and for the most part strange to their employers. A small leaven of
distrust on the part of the men
workers was enough, and the women were soon influenced. Luckily the
mischief was as quickly scotched. Men and women began to do their best, the
output of the factory--which had been planned for 14,000 shells a
week--ran up to 30,000, and everything has gone smoothly since.
which made a greater impression of energy--of a spirit behind the
work, than this shop. In its inspecting room I found a graduate from Yale.
'I had to join in the fight,'--he said
quietly--'this was the best way I could think of.' And it
was noticeable besides for some remarkable machines, which your country had
also sent us. In other shell factories, a single lathe carries through one
process, interminably repeated, sometimes two, possibly three. But here,
with the exception of the fixing and drilling of the copper band, and a few
minor operations, one lathe made the shell--cut, bored,
roughed, turned, nosed, and threaded it, so that it dropped out, all but
the finished thing--minus, of course, the fuse. The steel pole
introduced at the beginning of the process made nine shells, and the
average time per shell was 23 minutes. No wonder that in the great
warehouse adjoining the workshop one saw the shell heaps piling up in their
tens of thousands--only to be rushed off week by week, incessantly, to
the Front. The introduction of these machines had been largely the work of
an able Irish manager, who described to me the intense anxiety with which
he had watched their first putting up
and testing, lest the vast expenditure incurred should have been in any
degree thrown away. His cheerful looks and the shell warehouse told the
sequel. When I next met him it was at a northern station in company with
his Director. They were then apparently in search of new machinery. The
workshop I had seen was being given over to women, and the men were moving
on to heavier work. And this is the kind of process which is going on over
the length and breadth of industrial England.
which had been used for painting railway carriages; its first shell was
completed last August. The staff last June was one. It is now about 200,
and the employees nearly 2500. A month after the first factory was opened,
the Government asked for another--for larger shell. It was begun in
August, and was in work in a few weeks. In September a still larger
factory--for still larger shells--(how these demands illustrate
the course of the war! how they are themselves illustrated by the history
of Verdun!) was seen to be necessary. It was begun in September, and is now
running. Almost all the machines used in the factory have been made in the
town itself, and about 100 small firms, making shell-parts--Fuses,
Primers, Gaines, etc.--have been grouped round the main firm, and are
every day sending in their work to the factory to be tested, put together,
and delivered.
high proportion of good looks--even of delicate beauty among
them--the upper galleries, with their tables piled with glittering
brass work, amid which move the quick trained hands of the women:--if
one could have forgotten for a moment the meaning of it all, one might have
applied to it Carlyle's description of a great school,
as--'a temple of industrious peace.'! Some day,
perhaps, this 'new industry'--as our ancestors
talked of a 'new learning'--this swift, astonishing
development of industrial faculty among our people, especially among our
women, will bear other and rich fruit for England under a cleared
sky. It is impossible that it should pass by without
effect--profound effect--upon our national life. But at present
it has one meaning and one only--war! Talk to these girls
and women. This woman has lost her son--that one her husband. This one
has a brother home on leave, and is rejoicing in the return of her husband
from the trenches, as a skilled man, indispensable in the shop; another has
friends in the places and among the people which suffered in the last
Zeppelin raid. She speaks of it with tight lips. Was it she who chalked the
inscription found by the Lady Superin-
tendent on a lathe some nights ago--'Done fourteen to-day.
Beat that if you can, you devils!' No!--under this
fast-spreading industry, with its suggestion of good management and high
wages, there is the beat of no ordinary impulse. Some feel it much more
than others; but, says the clever and kindly Superintendent I have already
quoted--'the majority are very decidedly working from the point
of view of doing something for their country.... A great many of the fuse
women are earning for the first time.... The more I see of them all, the
better I like them.' And then follow some interesting comments on the
relation of the more educated and refined women among them to the skilled
mechanics--two national types that have perhaps never met in such
close working contact before. One's thoughts begin to follow out some
of the possible social results of this national movement.
the great campaign. Some of them represent its 'humours.' Here
is a perfectly true story, which shows an Englishman with 'a move
on,' not unworthy of your side of the water. A father and son, both
men of tremendous energy, were the chiefs of a very large factory, which
had been already extensively added to. The father lived in a house
alongside the works. One day business took him into a neighboring county,
whilst the son came up to London on munition work. On the father's
return he was astonished to see a furniture van removing the contents of
his house. The son emerged. He had already signed a contract for a new
factory on the site of his father's house; the materials of the house
were sold, and the furniture half gone. After the first shock, the father
took it in true Yorkshire fashion--wasting no words, and apparently
proud of his son!
morrow, and in the evening, I find myself sitting next one of the most
illustrious of modern inventors, with that touch of dream in manner and
look which so often goes with scientific discovery. The invention of this
gentle and courteous man has affected every vessel of any size afloat,
whether for war or trade, and the whole electrical development of the
world. The fact was to be driven home even to my feminine ignorance of
mechanics when, a fortnight later, the Captain of a Flagship and I were
hanging over the huge shaft leading down to the engine-rooms of the
super-Dreadnought, and my companion was explaining to me something of the
driving power of the ship. But on this first meeting, how much I might have
asked of the kind, great man beside me, and was too preoccupied to ask! May
the opportunity be retrieved some day! My head was really full of the
overwhelming facts--whether of labour or of output, relating to this
world-famous place, which were being discussed around me. I do not name the
place because the banishment of names, whether of persons or places, has
been part of the plan of these articles. But one can no more disguise it by
writing round it,
than one could disguise Windsor Castle by any description that was not
ridiculous. Many a German officer has walked through these works, I
imagine, before the war, smoking his cigarette of peace with their
Directors, and inwardly ruminating strange thoughts. If any such comes
across these few lines, what I have written will, I think, do England no
harm. But here are some of the figures that can be given. The shop area of
the ammunition shops alone has been increased eightfold since
the outbreak of war. The total weight of shell delivered during 1915
was--in tons--fourteen times as much as that of 1914. The weight
of shell delivered per week, as between December 1914, and December 1915,
has risen nearly ten times. The number of workpeople, in these shops, men
and women, had risen (a) as compared with the month in which war
broke out, to a figure eight times as great; (b) as compared with
December 1914, to one between three and four times as great. And over the
whole vast enterprise--shipyard, gun-shops, ammunition shops, with all
kinds of naval and other machinery used in war--the numbers of
workpeople employed had increased since 1913 more than 200 per cent.
They with their families equal the population of a great city--you may
see a new town rising to meet their needs on the further side of the
river.
--one guesses--doing a real service to both employers and
employed by the simplification and overhauling it is everywhere bringing
about. As to the problem of what is to be done with the women after the
war, one may safely leave it to the future. It is probably bound up with
that other problem of the great new workshops springing up everywhere, and
the huge new plants laid down. One thinks of the rapid recovery of French
trade after the war of 1870, and of the far more rapid rate--after
forty years of machine and transport development--at which the
industry of the Allied countries may possibly recover the ravages of the
present war, when once peace is signed. In that recovery, how great a part
may yet be placed by these war workshops!--transformed to the uses of
peace; by their crowds of workpeople, and by the hitherto unused
intelligence they are everywhere evoking and training among both men and
women.
three hundred years ago; how did man ever find them out? 'Wonders are
many, but the most wonderful thing is man! Only against death has he
no resource.'
little tray of water lest any of the powder should escape. What the
explosive and death-dealing power of it is, it does not do to think about.
In another room a fresh group of girls are handling a black powder for
another part of the detonator, and because of the irritant nature of the
powder, are wearing white bandages round the nose and mouth. There is great
competition for these rooms, the Superintendent says! The girls in them
work on two shifts of 10½ hours each, and would resent a change to a
shorter shift. They have one hour for dinner, half an hour for tea, a cup
of tea in the middle of the morning--and the whole of Saturdays free.
To the eye of the ordinary visitor, at least, they show few signs of
fatigue.
the cartridge case, the primer and the fuse screwed on. It is now ready to
be fired. I stand and look at boxes of shells, packed and about to go
straight to the Front. A train is waiting close by to take them the first
stage on their journey. I little thought then that I should see these
boxes, or their fellows, next, on the endless ranks of ammunition lorries
behind the fighting lines in France, and that within a fortnight I should
myself stand by and see one of those shells fired from a British gun,
little more than a mile from Neuve Chapelle.
cession of stately shops, with their high windows, their floors crowded
with machines, their roofs lined with cranes, the flame of the forges and
the smoke of the fizzling steel lighting up the dark groups of men, the
huge howitzer shells, red-hot, swinging in mid air. Near by, the same
shells, tamed and gleaming, on the great lathes that rough and bore and
finish them; and among them shell for the Queen Elizabeth
guns!--the biggest shell made. This shop had been put up by good luck
just as the war began. Its output of steel has increased from 80 tons a
week to 1040.
regard to them, all that it is necessary to remember is that before the war
they were capable of berthing twenty ships at once, from the largest
battleship downward; and we have Mr. Balfour's word for it as to what
has happened since the war in the naval shipyards of this country.
'We have added a million tons to the Navy--and we have
doubled its personnel.'
much longer. But the wonder of it consists really in its vastness, in the
steady development of a movement which will not end or slacken till the
Allies are victorious. Except for the endless picturesqueness of the
women's share in it, and the mechanical invention and adaptation going
on everywhere, with which only a technical expert could deal, it is of
course monotonous, and I might weary you. I will only--before asking
you to cross the Channel with me to France--put down a few notes and
impressions on the Clyde district, where, as our newspapers will have told
you, there is at the present moment (March 29th) some serious labour
trouble, with which the Government is dealing. Until further light is
thrown upon its causes, comment is better postponed. But I have spoken
quite frankly in these letters of 'danger spots,' where a type
of international Socialism is to be found, affecting a small number of men,
over whom the ideas of 'country' and 'national
honour' seem to have no hold. Every country possesses such men, and
must guard itself against them. A nucleus of them exists in this populous
and important district. How far their influence is helped among those who
care
nothing for their ideas, by any real or supposed grievances against the
employers, by misunderstandings and misconceptions, by the sheer nervous
fatigue and irritation of the men's long effort, or by those natural
fears for the future of their Unions, to which I have once or twice
referred, only one long familiar with the district could say. I can only
point out here one or two interesting facts. In the first place, in this
crowded countryside, where a small minority of dangerous extremists appear
to have no care for their comrades in the trenches, the recruiting for the
new Armies--so I learn from one of the leading authorities--has
been--'taken on any basis whatever--substantially higher
than in any other district. The men came up magnificently.' That
means that among those left behind, whatever disturbing and disintegrating
forces exist in a great Labour centre have freer play than would normally
be the case. A certain amount of patriotic cream has been skimmed, and in
some places the milk that remains must be thin. In the second
place--you will remember the employer I quoted to you in a former
letter--the work done here by thousands and thousands of workmen since
the beginning of the war, especially in the great shipyards, and done with
the heartiest and most self-sacrificing good will, has been simply
invaluable to the nation, and England should never forget what the
work means. 'Those who have nothing but criticism for the
men,' writes an old resident on the Clyde, well acquainted with all
the conditions of work there, 'ought to realise the exhausting
conditions, of noise from the hammers, and heat from the molten metal, i
which the men have worked their 50 to 100 hours a week, since August 1914.
In some of these yards it is rare to find a "riveter" who is
not deaf for life after 25, and sometimes earlier.'
working a knitting-machine. 'I like this better--because
there's a purpose in it.' A frail-looking woman who was
turning copper bands for shell said to me 'I never worked a machine
before the war. I have done 912 in ten hours, but that tired me very much.
I can do 500 or 600 quite easily.'
help lift the shell in and out of the machines. The women thrust the men
aside in five minutes!'
patrolled by sentries night and day. A number of small
buildings--workshops, stores, etc.--are rising all over it. I am
looking at what is to be the great 'filling' factory of the
district, where 9000 women, in addition to male workmen, will soon be
employed in charging the shell coming from the new shell factories we have
left behind in the darkness.
there are dim snowy mountains--majestic--rising into the sky. The
noise and clamour of the factories are all quiet in the night. Two thoughts
remain with me--Britain's ships in the North
Sea--Britain's soldiers in the trenches. And encircling and
sustaining both, the justice of a great cause; as these white Highland
hills look down upon and encircle this valley.
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
Page 25
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
Page 26
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,
Page 27
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
Page 28
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
Page 29
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.
Page 30No. 2
(I)
In this second letter I am to try and prove to you that England is
not taking the war 'lying down.'
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
Page 31
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
Page 32
Page 33
Page 34
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
Page 35
Page 36
Page 37
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)
All over England, then, the same quadruple process has now been going on
for months.
Page 38
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
Page 39
Page 40
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
Page 41
Page 42
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
Page 43
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
Page 44
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
Page 45
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
Page 46(III)
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
Page 47
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
Page 48
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;
Page 49
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
Page 50
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-
Page 51
Page 52
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
Page 53
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
Page 54
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
Page 55
Page 56
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
Page 57
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)
It is now three months since Mr. Lloyd George made his startling speech,
as Munitions Minister, in the House of Commons in which, as he wound up his
review of his new department, he declared--'unless we quicken
our movements, damnation will fall on the sacred cause for which so much
gallant blood has flowed.' The passion of this peroration was like
the fret of a river in flood chafing at some obstacle in its course.
Generally speaking, the obstacle gives way. In this case Mr. George's
obstacle had begun to give way long before December 21st--the date of
the speech. The flood had been pushing at it with increasing force since
the foundation of the Ministry of Munitions in the preceding summer. But
the crumbling process was not quick enough for Great Britain's needs,
or for the energy of her Minister.
Hence the outspoken speech of December 21st, supported by Mr.
Asquith's grave words
Page 59
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
Page 60
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
Page 61
In this chapter, then, 'Dilution' will always take a leading
place.
What is 'dilution'?
It means, of course, that under the sharp
Page 62
Obvious enough, perhaps! But the idea had to be applied in haste to
living people--employers, many of whom shrank from reorganising their
workshops and changing all their methods at a moment's notice; and
workmen, looking forward with consternation to being outnumbered, by ten to
one, in their own workshops, by women. When I was in the Midlands and the
North, at the end of January and in early February, dilution was still an
unsettled question in some of the most important districts. One of the
greatest employers in the country writes to me to-day
Page 63
A great achievement that!--for both employers and
employed--for the Minister also who appointed the Commission, and thus
set the huge stone rolling yet another leap upon its way.
It will be readily seen how much depends also on the tact of the
individual employer. That employer has constantly done best who has called
his men into council with him, and thrown himself on their patriotism and
good sense. I take the following passage from an interesting report by a
very shrewd observer, printed in one of the northern newspapers.* It describes an employer as
saying--'I was
___________________*
Yorkshire Observer, February 1, 1916.
Page 64
The general system now followed in the shell factories as I have already
described them, is to put so many skilled men in charge of so many lathes
worked by women workers. Each skilled man, who teaches the women,
Page 65
Page 66
I myself came across the effect of this suspicion in the minds of the
workmen in the case of a large Yorkshire shell factory, where the employers
at once detected and slew it. This great workshop, formerly used for
railway work, now employs some 1300 women, with a small staff of skilled
men. The women work
Page 67
Page 68
Let me now, however, describe another effect of
'dilution'--the employment of unskilled men
on operations hitherto included in skilled engineering.
On the day after the factory I have just described, my journey took me
to another town close by, where my guide--a Director of one of the
largest and best known steel and engineering works in the
kingdom--shewed me a new shell factory filled with 800 to 900 men, all
'medically unfit' for the Army, and almost all drawn from the
small trades and professions of the town, especially from those which had
been hard hit by the war. Among those I talked to I found a keeper of
bathing machines, a publican's assistant, clerks, shop assistants,
three clergy!--(these latter going home for their Sunday duty, and
giving their wages to the Red Cross)--unemployed architects, and the
like. I cannot recall any shop
Page 69
Page 70
So far, however, I have described the expansion or adaptation of firms
already existing. But the country is now being covered with another and new
type of workshop--the National Shell Factories--which are
founded, financed, and run by the Ministry of Munitions. The English
Government is now by far the greatest engineering employer in the world.
Let me take an illustration from a Yorkshire town--a town where this
Government engineering is rapidly absorbing everything but the textile
factories. A young and most competent Engineer officer is the Government
head of the factory. The work was begun last July, by the help of borrowed
lathes, in a building
Page 71
No factory made a better impression upon me than this one. The large,
airy building with its cheerful lighting, the girls in their dark blue caps
and overalls, their long and comely lines reminding one of some
processional effect in a Florentine picture; the
Page 72
Page 73(II)
But now the Midlands and the Yorkshire towns are behind me. The train
hurries on through a sunny winter afternoon, and I look through some notes
sent me by an expert on
Page 74
...Here we are at last, in the true North--crossing a river, with a
climbing town beyond, its tiled roofs wreathed in smoke, through which the
afternoon lights are playing. I am carried off to a friend's house.
Some Directors of the great works I am come to see look in to make a kindly
plan for the
Page 75
Page 76
Page 77
As to Dilution, it is now accepted by the men, who said when it was
proposed to them--'Why didn't you come to us six months
ago?' and it is working wonders here as elsewhere. For instance, a
particular portion of the breech mechanism of a gun used to take one hour
and twenty minutes to make. On the dilution plan it is done on a capstan
and takes six minutes. Where 500 women were employed before
the war, there are now close on 9000, and there will be thousands more,
requiring one skilled man as tool-setter to about nine or ten women. In a
great gun-carriage shop, 'what used to be done in two years is now
done in one month.' In another, two tons of brass were used before
the war; a common figure now is twenty-one. A large milling shop, now
entirely worked by men, is to be given up immediately to women. And so
on.
'Dilution,' it seems to me, is breaking down a number of
labour conventions which no longer answer to the real conditions of the
engineering trades. The pressure of the war is
Page 78
As for the following day, my impressions, looking back, seem to be all a
variant on a well-known Greek chorus, which hymns the amazing--the
'terrible'--cleverness of Man! Sea-faring, tillage,
house-building, horse-taming, so muses Sophocles, two thousand
Page 79
Intelligence--and death! They are written
everywhere in these endless workshops, devoted to the fiercest purposes of
war. First of all, we visit the 'danger buildings' in the Fuse
Factory, where mostly women are employed. About 500 women are at work here,
on different processes connected with the delicate mechanism and filling of
the fuse and gaine, some of which are dangerous. Detonator work, for
instance. The Lady Superintendent selects for it specially steady and
careful women or girls, who are paid at time and a quarter rate. Only about
eight girls are allowed in each room. The girls here all wear--for
protection--green muslin veils and gloves. It gives them a curious
ghastly look, that fits the occupation. For they are making small pellets
for the charging of shells, out of a high-explosive powder. Each girl uses
a small copper ladle to take the powder out of a box before her and puts it
into a press which stamps it into a tiny block, looking like ivory. She
holds her hand over a
Page 80
After the Fuse Factory, we pass through the High Explosive Factory,
where 250 girls are at work in a number of isolated wooden sheds filling
18-pounder shell with high explosive. The brass cartridge case is being
filled with cordite--bundles of what look like thin brown sticks; and
the shell itself, including its central gaine or tube, with the various
deadly explosives we have seen prepared in the 'danger
buildings.' The shell is fitted into
Page 81
But here are the women and girls trooping out to dinner. A sweet-faced
Superintendent comes to talk to me. 'They are not as strong as the
men,' she says, pointing to the long lines of girls--'but
what they lack in strength they make up in patriotic spirit.'--I
speak to two educated women, who turn out to be High School mistresses from
a town that has been several times visited by Zeppelins. 'We just
felt we must come and help to kill Germans,' they say quietly.
'All we mind is getting up at 5.30 every morning. Oh no!--It is
not too tiring.'
Afterwards?--I remember one long pro-
Page 82
Then another huge fuse-shop, quite new, where 1400 girls in one shift
are at work--said to be the largest fuse-shop known. And on the
following morning, an endless spectacle of war-work--gun-carriages,
naval turrets, torpedo tubes, armoured railway carriages, small Hotchkiss
guns for merchant ships, tool-making shops, gauge shops--and so on for
ever. In the tool shops the output has risen from 44,000 to 3,000,000 a
year!
And meanwhile I have not seen anything and shall not have time to see
anything of the famous shipyards of the firm. But with
Page 83
And now in connection with these works let me record two final
sayings:--
One from a manager of a department:--'We have a good many
Socialists here, and they constantly give trouble. But the great
majority of the men have done wonderfully. Some men have put in 100
hours a week since the war began. Some have not lost a minute since it
began. The old hands have worked splendidly!'
And another from one of the Directors:--'I know of no
drunkenness among our women. I don't remember ever having seen a
drunken woman round here.'(III)
Well! I have almost said my say on munitions, though I could continue
the story
Page 84
Page 85
Page 86
And finally, the invasion of women has perhaps been more startling to
the workmen here than anywhere else. Not a single woman was employed in the
works or factories of the district before the war, except in textiles.
There will soon be 15,000 in the munition workshops, and that will not be
the end.
But Great Britain cannot afford--even in a single factory--to
allow any trifling at this moment with the provision of guns, and the
Government must--and will--act decisively.
Page 87
As to the drinking in this district of which so much has been said, and
which is still far in excess of what it ought to be, I found many people
hard put to it to explain why the restriction of hours which has worked so
conspicuously well in other districts has had comparatively little effect
here. Is it laxity of administration--or a certain
'cussedness' in the Scotch character which resents any
tightening of law? One large employer with whom I discuss it believes it
would suit the Scotch better to abolish all restrictions, and simply punish
drunkenness much more severely. And above all--'Open all
possible means of amusement on Sundays!'--especially the
cinemas!--a new and strange doctrine even now, in the ears of a
country that holds the bones of John Knox. There seems indeed to be a
terribly close connection between the dulness of the Scotch Sunday and the
obstinacy of Scotch drinking; and when one thinks of the heavy toil of the
week, of the confinement of the workshops, and the strain of the work, one
feels at any rate that here is a problem which is to be
solved, not preached at; and will be solved, some day, by
nimbler and humaner wits than ours.
Page 88
In any case, the figures, gathered a month ago from those directly
concerned, as to the general extension of the national effort here, could
hardly be more striking. In normal times, the district, which is given up
to Admiralty work, makes ships and guns, but has never made shells. The
huge shell factories springing up all over it are a wholly new creation. As
usual, they are filled with women, working under skilled male direction,
and everywhere one found among managers and superintendents the same
enthusiasm for the women's work. 'It's their honour they
work on,' said one forewoman. 'That's why they stand it so
well.' The average working week is fifty-four hours, but overtime may
seriously lengthen the tale. Wages are high; canteens and rest rooms are
being everywhere provided; and the housing question is being tackled. The
rapidity of the women's piece-work is astonishing, and the mingling of
classes--the girls of education and refinement working quite happily
with those of a much humbler type--runs without friction under the
influence of a common spirit. This common spirit was well expressed by a
girl who before she came to the factory was
Page 89
On the same premises, after leaving the shell shops, we passed rapidly
through gun shops, where I saw again processes which had become almost
familiar. 'The production of howitzers,'--said my
guide--'is the question of the day. We are making them with
great rapidity--but the trouble is to get enough machines.' The
next shop, devoted to 18-pounder field guns, was 'green fields
fifteen months ago,' and the one adjoining it, a fine shed about 400
feet square, for howitzer work, was started in August last, on a site
'which was a bog with a burn running through it.' Soon
'every foot of space will be filled with machines, and there will be
1200 people at work here, including 400 women. In the next shop we are
turning out about 4000 shrapnel and 4000 high explosive shells per week.
When we started women on what we thought this heavy shell, we provided men
to
Page 90
Later on, as I was passing through a series of new workshops occupied
with all kinds of army work and employing large numbers of women, I stopped
to speak to a Belgian woman. 'Have you ever done any machine work
before?' 'No, Madame, never--Mais,
c'est la guerre. Il faut tuer les Allemands!' It was a
quite passionless voice; but one thought, with a shiver, of those names of
eternal infamy--of
Termonde--Aerschot--Dinant--Louvain.
It was with this woman's words in my ears, that I set out on my
last visit--to which they were the fitting prelude. The afternoon was
darkening fast. The motor sped down a river valley, sodden with rain and
melting snow, and after some miles we turn into a half-made road, leading
to some new buildings, and a desolate space beyond. A sentry challenges us,
and we produce our permit. Then we dismount, and I look out upon a wide
stretch of what three months ago was swamp, or wet plough land. Now its 250
acres are enclosed with barbed wire, and
Page 91
Strange and tragic scene! Strange uprising of women!
We regain the motor, and speed onwards, my secretary and I, through
unknown roads far away from the city and its factories towards the country
house where we are to spend the night. In my memory there surge a thousand
recollections of all that I have seen in the preceding fortnight. An
England roused at last--rushing to factory, and lathe, to shipyard and
forge, determined to meet and dominate her terrible enemy in the workshop,
as she has long since met and dominated him at sea, and will in time
dominate him on land--that is how my country looks to me to-night.
... The stars are coming out. Far away, over what seems like water with
lights upon it,
Page 92
Page 93No. 4
(I)
A million and a half of men--over a quarter of a million of
women--working in some 4000 State-controlled workshops for the supply
of munitions of war, not only to our own troops, but to those of our
Allies--the whole, in the main, a creation of six months'
effort--this is the astonishing spectacle, of some of the details of
which, I have tried, as an eye-witness, to give you in my previous letters
a rapid and imperfect sketch.
But what of the men, the armies for which these munitions are