I have spoken already of “The Room of the Old Men,” one of the finest samples I have seen of a patriotic endeavour by the workers to be up and “doing their bit” for the country and the Front. The Room is part of a National Factory that was commenced upon only last July. The men in it are skilled mechanics and engineers, doing the work which only skilled men can do, work without which a munitions factory cannot run. They are nearly all old men, men who had retired from their trade eight or ten or twelve years back, who, after a good long life of hard work in the shops, had taken off their overalls and laid down their tools, as they thought then, for good and ever. The manager took me round amongst them and introduced me to them and gave me a chance to speak to them and tell them that I hoped to let the Front know of their plucky retackling of their old jobs. Old as they were, up to the oldest of them—68 he proudly admitted to—they were doing a full and hard day’s work. One man in that room, for all his rough, toil-hardened hands and work-stained clothes, is worth his £20,000. Another when he dropped his trade had invested in “a little farm well filled” and worth its thousands of any man’s good money. And that man works each day in the factory from 8 a.m. to 5 p.m., and before he comes in from his little moorland farm, and at night after he returns to it from his day’s work, he milks his cows, and feeds his chickens, and settles up the odd jobs that must be done each day upon a farm. All the Old Men felt exactly the same way about the War. They were too old—very regretfully they were too old—to do their bit in khaki at the Front, but they were glad and thankful for the chance that was still left to them to do their bit in the shops. The manager, a local man himself, knowing the district well, when he took up the munition work went over in his mind all the old and retired mechanics he could remember. He went round to them and put the facts straight to them—the Front was held up for munitions, a National Factory was being started in their town, there was a sad lack of the skilled men that they, skilled men themselves, well knew were necessary, and—would they come? Would they? They were ready, then and there, to put on their caps, and walk back to the works with him, and start in on the job. And there they are now. The general manager, by the way, was deservedly enthusiastic about his Old Men and their fine effort, but he said exactly nothing at all about his own. That I discovered, by questioning, from the Ministry official who was showing me round the district. He told me how the general manager had been running a business of his own, but had left it when the word went round for business men and practical men to help the Munitions Ministry, how the works had been got together, how machines had had to be found and tools made, how the working of an industry quite new to him had to be learned first and taught to others afterwards, how under his planning and guidance the factory had been set running, how efficiently and fast it was turning out the work, how the Ministry in London had admitted the usefulness of workings and figures furnished by him, and, finally, how all his work had been and was being done without a penny of salary or recompense. It isn’t a bad “bit” for one man to be doing.

In startling contrast to the Room of the Old Men I was introduced to the works manager—aged 22. His is an old head on young shoulders, however, and I heard much of his share in the factory’s “bit.” “Takes his job serious, does our works manager,” I was told. “When we were puzzling out ways o’ work he used to sit up nights thinkin’ shells, an’ go to ’s bed dreamin’ shells. Took it that serious, couldn’t see a joke if ’t poked him in the eye.” And the works manager just grinned and let it go at that.

It was in this same factory, by the way, that I met one of those inspectors who in all factories pass the completed shells as correct, and who, in this instance, was an ex-cheesemonger. Amongst these same inspectors you can find ex- all sorts of trades and professions, from actors and acrobats to schoolmasters and sausage-makers. There was a question raised in Parliament recently about these men, and a good deal of would-be wit was expended on the folly of employing such amateurs to act as experts. But, after all, I see no faintest reason for the gibes. The work these men are doing is not impossible or even difficult for an intelligent man to learn. They have to pass gauges over the shell and the shell must fit all the gauges. They have to see that no flaw or crack is visible, that varnish is smooth and even, and so on. There is nothing, I should say, nearly as difficult in finding flaws in a shell as there is in making the same shell—and the shell has been made by once unskilled hands or “amateurs.” When all is said and done, the very great majority of munition-makers to-day are amateurs, although they have each become expert on their own work—as the inspectors have. The British Army that is going to whip Germany presently is composed almost solidly of amateur soldiers, of just the same ex- this, that, and t’other trade and profession as the munition workers and inspectors. And, when you think of it, many Members of Parliament are themselves amateurs at their job, or were not long since, and were also ex-all-sorts before they were M.P.’s. I don’t see why they should fling stones at the amateur inspectors who, like everybody else on this game, are only doing their best to “do their bit.”

In a rifle cartridge factory I saw girls who were examining the brass cartridges for defects. A girl would take a handful of cartridges and roll them rapidly one after another across her palm, and, quick and constant as the motion was, she missed no slightest fault. Some defects, indeed, were so slight that when I picked up some of the rejects I could see nothing wrong even on close and slow examination until the girl pointed out a tiny scratch, a rough dot, an almost invisible dent or bulge. There can be no hope of finding expert engineers (if that is what the M.P.’s want) as inspectors here. The cartridges are pouring from that factory at a rate of millions a week. Walking about the works, you see girls shovelling brass cases with a thing like a big coal-scoop into the capacious maws of hoppers to machines that joggle and jolt the cylinders into their back teeth, and turn and solemnly chew them over, and slide them out in a clicking and tinkling stream, with one more operation performed on their way to completion. Everywhere you may meet full barrels of cartridges wheeling round, or standing in rows, or being emptied and filled; you can see miles of ribbon-like brass bands sliding under punches that chop round discs from them, watch the discs running in hundreds from machine to machine, each machine giving it a punch in the passing and pressing it more and more into its finished stage. You may watch long ropes of lead running off fat reels into and through the machines which chop it into lengths and shape it into bullet-cores which stream along to meet another converging stream of nickel cases and become one with it; and pour on further to join up with the brass cartridges after they have run through the filling factory and had the cordite pushed in and sliced off and a wad rammed on top. And the surging torrent of completed, capped, cordited, wadded, and bulleted cartridges that sweeps into the packing-rooms and out from the factory is so largely the work of “amateurs” that there are about ten new hands employed for each one of the old hands that used to man the works. And when that factory is completed it will be turning out 5,000,000 cartridges a week—mainly by the hands of “amateur” girls swept in from all over the country to “do their bit.”

It is true that the professionals in machine-making have done much to smooth the path of the amateur. Some of the semi-automatic and automatic machines are so wonderful that one might imagine them endowed with life and professional skill themselves. I have watched, fascinated, the work of a screw-making machine which, after turning the tiny thread, reached over a steel finger and thumb, picked up the screw, lifted it back to a new position and jammed it there for another tool to slide forward at the precisely right second and cut out the cross-nick on the screw-head. There are automatic lathes which seize a steel or brass rod pushed within their clutch and chop it up and make shoulders and grooves and screw-threads on its outside, and drill out the centre and put another and different sized and shaped set of carvings on the inside, throw out the finished part, pull in the metal rod, and commence work afresh on it. Some of these lathes have five or six tools running and each performing its part in turn on the fuse or shell part. In one small-arm factory there is a huge room full of these automatic lathes all whirring and grinding away at their hardest. And the men in that room are so few that one hardly notices them and has an impression that the shop is cheerfully running itself. Actually there is one man to each ten machines, to keep the long brass or steel rods passing into their busy wheels and tools, to maintain and regulate the flow of lubricant which runs constantly on each cutting tool. In this factory there are automatics drilling out the rifle-barrels, the drill pressing in so far at a time, when the machine carefully withdraws it for a busy little steel hand to poke forward and fussily brush off the grit and chips and clear the drill, which then slides smoothly back and goes on with its job. A stream of oil runs on each drill, and something like 1,000 horse-power is required for nothing but the pumping of this oil to the rifle-drilling machines. The factory is turning out 8,000 completed rifles and over 300 machine-guns a week now. And, after the usual fashion, it is busily preparing to add heavily to its output. About twelve acres of new floor space have already been added to the works, and new floor is still being piled on floor, filled with another tossing and churning sea of machinery as fast as it is made ready, and driven up into its top working speed at once. On top of the one room packed with workers and machines the builders are at work on another room, laying the concrete floor, riveting the steel girders of new walls, putting on another new roof. And the moment the floor is down and the roof on and the steel skeleton complete, in come the men who erect the overhead shafting and fill the windows with glass—I might say fill the walls with glass, for each shop is nothing but a glass-sided box—and start to erect the machines. Each of the new glass boxes is about 600 feet long by 40 feet wide, and there are whole blocks of them erected or with the builders hard at work turning another roof-top into the floor of still another shop. It is plain that the present output is going to do some tall climbing very soon.

I find that my available space is running short, while I have still left untold much that I have seen, so I must be content to assure the Front that I have covered the ground of munition work more fully than these writings may indicate. I don’t think I left any department of the work untouched. I saw the making of bombs and grenades and air-torpedoes, trench-mortars and bomb-throwers—cheerful things some of these too, throwing bombs and winged torpedoes of impressive size with accuracy for hundreds of yards—shells, innumerable shells, from the pill, standing man-high and measuring about four feet round the waist, that “Granny” throws, down through all the sizes of the twelve-inch, and of “Mother’s” fit, to the fodder for the ubiquitous 18-pounders and Four-point-five “hows,” and still down to the fancy sizes for the anti-aircraft and the pretty little one-pounder pom-poms. I saw all shapes and sizes of guns too—massive, lengthy monsters in stages running from the huge rough castings to the smooth shining and polished tubes, fat-bodied squat howitzers, and, laid out in rows, many field-guns, and, ranked in battery upon battery, many more light Q.F. and machine-guns. There was an aeroplane factory where at least a score of ’planes stood in various stages, from one completely built and ready for her engines, to those still only in dismembered finished parts, to say nothing of the piles of parts in the making. Here alone the one firm I should have supposed were turning out more finished ’planes per week—battle-’planes and observing-’planes and fast-flying scout-’planes—than all our armies could find a use for; and yet there are, even to my own knowledge, several other ’plane factories.

So that you may take it I have made a full and comprehensive round, have satisfied myself in order that I might fully satisfy the Front that all their munition wants are going to be satisfied up to and over the hilt. I can only finish the report of my observations with the same assurance as I began it—we are never going to be short of munitions again; spend them as fast and hot and heavy as we can, the workshops can make faster than the Front can use; and the longer the War runs the more completely we shall be armed and equipped to wage it. All this seems certain and positive if—it is the only “if,” although it might be a big one—if the war-workers continue to do their share, if they play up and back us in playing out the game.