Boyd Cable

“ The British Army doesn’t want anything more than a fair show, and only the British workers can give it them. The Army is quite and cheerfully ready and willing to hunger and thirst, to perish from cold and bitter soaking wet, to wallow in the mud and misery of the trenches, to endure bodily discomfort and aching fatigue, long marches and longer outpost watchings, and lack of sleep and rest, to suffer frost-bite and disease, loss of limbs and sight, dreadful wounds and death, so that we may win the War. ”

“ Driving from the train through London, the street crowds, although flecked and tinged with khaki, appeared to be going busily or lazily about their ordinary business or laziness, the people were shopping, or walking, or driving in buses or taxis as if they personally had still no more than10 a newspaper interest in the war, as if fighting or munition-making were matters concerning a certain section of mankind altogether apart from the ordinary life of the country. ”

“ I was, in fact, more keen to discover and make sure of what is to be done rather than what has been or is being done, and this because I know, and the Front knows, how we stand out there for munitions now, but not how much lay behind our daily needs, how we are to fare when, or if, all the scattered fronts get busy together, when one big battle is to tread so close on the heels of another that it will be hard to sort out one from the other and issue us the right clasps to our medals. ”

“ There is every evidence, and evidence that is under the hands and before the eyes of the war-workers, of the enormous amount of munitions now forthcoming. What I am anxious to impress upon them is the enormous amount the Front wants and needs if it is to get a fair show. I have no wish to belittle—even if it were possible—the war-workers’ efforts, but I do want them to understand that they cannot afford to slacken that effort for a single day if an adequate, a really adequate supply is to be maintained at the Front. ”

“ And even if every last possible arm and ammunition and equipment is completed in the artillery, the battle-line must halt, or, still worse, must be beaten back and brutally punished, if there is a shortage of machine-guns or cartridges or bombs or grenades. In a great battle every branch of the Army must move and work together and keep the pace as one great and unbroken whole, and it is equally vital that the battle of the war-workers must run in exactly the same fashion. ”

“ In a way she is typical of the women on war work, turning their skill and deftness, giving their youth and strength to “do their bit” and help the Front. She is more significant than any picture of a blood- and mud-stained fighting man, for she is emblematical of the work that must be done, and—thanks be—at last is being done, to win the War. ”

“ The hot metal is clutched and jerked into position under the heavy punch, and instantly the machine, with a gigantic hissing sigh, moves and thrusts downward a smooth-moving but irresistible punch. A gush of flame and burst of thick black smoke leaps upward and vanishes swiftly, the punch presses home, stops, reverses, pulls up and out again. ”

“ I don’t think there is the slightest fear that on the whole the war-workers are going to fail us, but it is impossible to avoid seeing that enormous damage and desperate delay may occur through the slacking or indifference or discontent of any one section of the workers. In this great business of munition-making it is inevitable that all the parts should dovetail, and that the output should advance in one long even wave. It is no use having a million shells if, because the fuse-makers have failed, there are not a million fuses to fit them ”

“ 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. ”

“ When it has worked its will the drawing-press disgorges the cylinder, cooled now to a deeper hot rose-red, tumbles it out on the floor, and waits ready for its next mouthful, while men trundle and roll the hot cylinder across the floor to rest and cool beside the long row that lies fading off from rose to blood-red, to darker and duller crimson, and through deeper and darker shades to cold grey and black. ”

“ And the Number One, the head-centre bull’s-eye boss of the job, is a partner in what I believe is one of the greatest, if not the greatest, contracting firms in the Empire or the world, a firm whose name is a household word, whose activities have spread over all the inhabited and a biggish section of the uninhabited globe, who control capital running well up in the millions and have fingers in all sorts of business pies. ”

“ It may surprise you at the Front, as it certainly did me, to learn that the Ministry of Munitions has taken a grip on the whole industry of this country; that it has an autocratic control over it, wide and strong beyond the wildest dreams of the craziest autocrat; that no man can buy or sell a barrow-load of old iron or a sovereign’s worth of copper or brass without some official of the Ministry getting to hear of it and popping up to air an insatiable curiosity ”

“ Building work, it has always been understood, must cease when the winter sets in. Here nothing ceases, everything drives ahead at high-pressure speed.
The whole of the area is still more or less under construction, more or less completed.97 In some parts rows of huts and houses stand practically ready for occupation; in others the work is in its first stages, and the ground is one weltering chaos of heaped earth and rough holes, up-torn turf, piled planks, bricks, mortar, and building material. Swarms of men hammer and hew and dig and burrow amidst the confusion ”

“ 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. ”

“ These works owners and managers, and inspectors, and committee-men, and chairmen and secretaries, the brains of the munition business, are amazing and wonderful beyond words. They are the organisers and the driving power behind the whole vast machine, and what that machine is we are going to know more and more fully as the War goes on. ”

“ I find that the passenger train services have been chopped to pieces, that mails take any old time to do their journey, that goods by rail get there this week, or next, or a month hence—because munition transport blocks the rails; that whole24 industries have been blotted from existence because their hands or their plant were wanted—for munitions; that Polytechnic classes are being busily taught—to make munitions; that, in fact, the whole country is one seething munition factory, and no man or lathe or tool that can be turned to munition-making is possibly doing anything else. ”

“ Everywhere I saw the women, fresh young girls and elderly toil-worn women alike, closely intent on their work, wasting no fraction of a second between the completion of one tool’s cutting and its withdrawal and the substitution of the next tool—and such fractions are the more precious when their loss means waste of a valuable lathe’s time as well as the operator’s—80obviously driving the work, giving hand and mind and eye to getting through it quickly and getting on to the next. ”

“ It is a tale to be proud of. For the most part the women workers I have seen were on lighter work—shell-fuses, rifle cartridges, filling or charging, gauging—but this manager assured me there was no doubt about the women’s ability to handle anything up to the 18-pounder shell (I saw some on the heavier 4·5 shells later in another place) , showed me how and where his women loaded shells from the store into the trucks on the railway siding by hand, and lifted out and up and in, and packed and stowed eight tons an hour. ”

“ We cannot doubt but that the German and Austrian shops are also running night and day, that the need for an enormously increased output has long since been seen and provided for, that their workers are going all out to give their armies a preponderating supply so that they may meet and beat the best our fighting and our working men can do.
The Front has no shadow of doubt about being able to beat the Germans, if our workers can beat the enemy workers. ”

“ For munition work which is within their handling capacity they are apparently ideal workers. From the point of view of a firm’s or an industry’s progress and advancement—this may have little to do with war work, but is, I think, interesting—most of the engineers I spoke with agreed that the women are not as good as the men, because the women have not the initiative or inventiveness, would not think of or suggest any alteration or improvement in machinery or details of their work ”

“ I may not say, but it is common knowledge that the batteries run into very large numbers, and are going to take many shells to feed, are going to keep the war-workers sweating again to keep the guns going. In the battle-lines of the Western Front—I should say battle-line, because, even if a thrust is being made on any one part of a few miles,122 it means that an attack must be made strongly along the whole line to prevent the enemy knowing where the main attempt is being made—there are a prodigious number of guns employed. ”

“ In old days we have known it too often by having to sit and suffer under it while our own reply was hopelessly inadequate; now our great hope is that at last we are going to be on something better than level terms. But to put us on such terms the war-workers have still to strain every nerve and muscle, put out every ounce they possibly can. The whole thing rests124 on them. They have been given the material, the shops, the machines; they have got the finest brains of the Empire guiding their efforts and ensuring that the greatest possible result is obtained from their work. ”

“ Every scrap of work turned out by every firm or factory is done to gauge, and a screw made in a back room in Bermondsey and another turned at Clydebank will fill and fit a screw-hole bored in a Birmingham shop just as exactly as if the one man or machine had made the lot. ”

“ The war-workers have to keep going more than the one front of a year ago. There is now the Western Front, the Balkans, East Africa, Mesopotamia, to say132 nothing of Egypt or any other battle-fronts that may develop. Our war-workers are doing wonders, are turning out mountains of munitions—but so, you may be very sure, are the enemy war-workers. They had a very long start of us, had munition factories and machines built and running, and they have been increasing these while we have been improvising and starting ours. ”

“ There are still some war-workers who appear to consider the War as merely grinding out a grist of profit and good wages to them; another lot who are still more concerned over their hours and pay and conditions of labour, over labour rules and laws, written and unwritten, over the profits the employers are making or supposed to be making, over their position and status when the war is finished, than ever they are over the winning of the war. I know one works where there are two departments engaged on making six-inch127 and eight-inch shells. ”

“ And here, in a sentence, is the belief I have come to after a wide tour of the munition works: We ARE going to have all we ever hoped for; we are never, never,15 never going to be short again. I say this remembering how the size, and therefore the requirements, of the Army have increased, how much vaster in proportion to the increased Army the supplies will have to be to come up to our wants, how our fighting fronts have multiplied and grown, how also some of our Allies are still dependent upon us for some of their munitions. ”

“ If a firm is busy making motor-cars, the Ministry inspector may step in and tell the firm to drop that work and start making shells. If another firm already making munitions is employing daily 100 skilled and 100 unskilled hands, the Ministry will almost certainly take away a number of the skilled hands and hand them over to another factory where skilled men are scarcer and more urgently required. All this simply means that the engineering resources of the country are mobilised and efficiently organised and turned full force on munition-making. ”

“ Here I was shown under construction a new plant for cleaning out58 the finished shell; there a newly installed arrangement for the quick and even painting of the shells by air-brush spray; everywhere throughout the works similar dodges for cutting down the time and labour, for speeding up the output. And always remember that in war work cutting down time and labour does not, most emphatically does not, mean reducing the working hours or the number of hands. It only means finding time for more work, freeing hands to turn on to more work again. ”

“ At a distance behind the infantry trenches the ground is simply packed with guns and batteries. Hitherto we have hardly had the guns going full pelt for more than a day or two at a time. We have no wish to anticipate any such spasmodic and unsustained efforts again. On the Western Front, or the Balkan Front, or any other front, when the real Big Push comes we must look to see a battle fought fiercely and desperately week after week without a pause. ”

“ The men making one of many fuse-parts may lose us a battle if they hang up their work and prevent the fuses being finished and so leave the guns126 short of shells, the Front without artillery support. The whole business of munition-making must be hung up if the coal-miners, the transport workers, the engineers, the explosive makers, almost any one section of the war-workers, fail us. ”

“ By the end of spring they will have gone, the twelve-mile stretch will be humming from end to end with munition workers, will be pouring out in a stupendous stream the fighting-food of the firing line. Until it is98 complete the daily routine is one of constant hustle, of planning and contriving and dovetailing one piece of work into another, of keeping each and all hustling fast on the move. Nothing is allowed to halt or check or stay the work; everything must give way to the need for haste. Time is always money, but here it is more than money ”

“ If she drew wages according to her value, she would be getting many pounds where she gets shillings, because she has by constant talks with her workmates impressed upon them and explained to them that they are working for far more than a weekly wage, that they are backing up their men out Front, are saving British lives, are helping their fighting men to beat the Germans, are themselves fighting and racing the German workshops for the prize of final victory. The result of all her explaining is recorded in plain figures in that workroom’s output, in the increase of 30 per cent. ”

“ 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 smoothly114 back and goes on with its job. ”

“ At one place, which I’ll describe more fully later on, and which is going to be when complete the greatest munition works in the world, bar none, something30 like a score of our greatest contractors are hard at work. They are the sort of men who take on as an ordinary job the tunnelling of the Alps or the Andes, the building of a Forth Bridge, the erection of a street of skyscraper buildings, the building of a Nile barrage. Now they are building roads and huts and power stations and water- and drainage- and lighting-systems, and are driving the work at a furious excess speed to completion. ”