Hall Caine

“ There is scarcely a sound. Presently there comes slowly down as from the key-stone of the monster machine, a shining column of steel. It reaches the black ring, presses down on it, descends without a pause to the white-hot block, rests on top of it for a moment, there is a thud as of something falling into a pit beneath, and then the column rises, the arch is reopened, and the ring has disappeared, having passed through the metal and dropped to the ground below. The sense of silent, irresistible, oceanic, almost motionless power has left you breathless. ”

“ They are doing other and deadlier work now, and as one drives up in the darkness towards Coventry and the vast amphitheatre of the great capital of the Midlands, and sees the wide glare with which it lights up the night sky, like a fiery buckle in the blazing belt of England, visible, one thinks, from the middle of the North Sea, and bidding defiance to Zeppelins, one remembers that tens of thousands of women are working here also. They love the theatre and the cinema, these midland women, but there is no time for either. ”

“ I see the life of the world already beginning again. I see a man ploughing a field that is not yet cleared of broken guns, shattered gun-carriages, and tangled masses of barbed wire; a woman milking her cow in a half-roofed cow-house, and children playing among the piled-up stones of a village street where less than a week ago a child lay face down after the bursting of a shell.
I see our armies arriving in Paris, now our second capital, and full for all time to come of vivid memories. ”

“ But some of us who through the dark hours have been watchers for the dawn think we see the signs of it. For my part I take my courage in both hands, and say we shall be a happier people at this time next year. I think the great Peace will come before that, and when it comes it will be righteous and authentic and bring tidings of great joy not to Britain and her Allies only, but to the whole body of mankind, who have lived so long in the deep bondage of an unnatural fear. I think next Christmas will see the war ended, our soldiers coming home, and the world lit up afresh as by a flaming torch. ”

“ But you realize that the lure of money is not the sole or yet the chief magnet that draws women to work for the war when you leave this immense workshop for the sinister-looking sheds in which the finished shells are filled. Everybody knows that a shell is not merely a lump of dead steel, but a living reservoir of compounds which have been brought up from the bowels of the earth and transformed into terrible explosives. ”

“ We see the streets of our great industrial towns surging and swaying with long processions of cheerful sightseers—women with eager faces, children with sparkling eyes, and men (washed and dressed after their work in the forge or the mill) carrying babies on their shoulders that they may see over the heads of the throngs into the brightly-lit shop windows, which are full of all dainty and beautiful and appetizing things, decked out with holly and mistletoe. ”

“ But perhaps the most awesome of all sights in Woolwich is that of the big furnace-house for the manufacture of the U M steel. I think I have witnessed in various parts of the world many scenes of nature in her wrath—scenes of earthquake, eruption, tidal wave, geyser, and boiling river—but I doubt if I have ever been more awed, more moved, and in a sense more terrified, than by the spectacle here presented of the physical forces of nature chained and harnessed to the work of man. ”

“ It is a dark and rather sullen evening, without moon or stars, and as we drive to one of the northern heights of London we become aware of the long journeys through lonely thoroughfares, and even open gaps of country, which multitudes of the girls may have to make before they begin on their night shift. We have also time to reflect that a stronger impulse than the desire for large earnings must be operating with many to enable them to defy so much discomfort. This is not the first time that women have made munitions of war. ”

“ Eight of their kind may protrude from the decks of a great battleship like the Queen Elizabeth, and, as the round breech of one of them is swung back, like the door of a safe, and you look down the shining and tapering barrel to the far-off mouth, it is easy to imagine that the grey waters of the North Sea are heaving beyond it, while the enemy ships are lying on the edge of the horizon, in their low visibility against a misty sky. ”

“ It is practically an open-air industry, for the doors of the tent are thrown wide, the heat being great within. In long rows of vats that are like huge kitchen coppers, women are boiling lead and pouring it into the shot-moulds. They are older and, perhaps, coarser women who engage in this labour, and as you approach the tents, and see the scaly grey liquid ladled out, you find it impossible not to think of the witches in Macbeth, especially when the hair of one of the workers falls from its knot, and, in lifting her ladle, her gaunt figure sways across the light. ”

“ I see our armies arriving at Charing Cross, after stretching their necks in thick clumps through the carriage windows to catch the earliest glimpse of it. I see the platform of the railway station crowded with fluctuating masses of women, who have come up from every part of the city and from every quarter of the kingdom to meet the trains from France—the wives, mothers, sisters, sweethearts who are the daughters of Britain. ”

“ The next factory we call at is engaged in the making of shot. It lies far out in the fields, and as we turn down the lane that leads to it we pass an obelisk to the memory of Warwick, the King-maker, who fought his last battle there and was slain. The earth around sleeps full of the dead who died with him that day, and over yonder, behind fires that burn through the darkness like blood-shot eyes, some of their daughters, down many centuries, are making deadlier weapons of war than Warwick's men ever knew. ”

“ And is it only an effect of the strained and perhaps disordered condition of one's nerves, at sight of these brave and fearless women filling with deadly explosives the shells that are soon to batter down the trenches of the enemy who lies in wait behind them to kill their husbands and lovers on the battle-field, that as one stands in the breathless silence of this sombre spot, one thinks one hears the low, deep, far-off, booming of the great guns across the sea? ”

“ We see millions of homes, each with its little Christmas tree, that is shining with fairy lamps and glittering with tinkling toys, and has its merry company of happy little people dancing around it and clapping hands. As midnight approaches we hear the ringing of bells and the singing of "The Waits," and see people streaming into the churches, where the pulpits are decorated with ivy and red berries, and the walls of the chancel, above the tables of the Commandments, are pricked out in evergreens with the triumphant message, "Peace on earth, good will to men." ”

“ That is what keeps the hearts of the mothers of Britain alive, notwithstanding all they have lost and suffered. And the heart of our British Empire, too, which is the mother of all of us, may yet find comfort in the same deep thought—that her loss may be her gain; that those of her children who died earliest may live the longest; that her vast armies that have fallen in the war may be the multitude of her invisible subjects who will rule her in the days of peace ”

“ A gigantic press of four thousand tons' power is drilling a hole through another enormous block of white-hot metal. The great thing seems almost as large as the façade of St. Mark's at Venice, and not unlike it in form, though stark and black. Under its open arch, without a sound, or the appearance of a hand to guide them, and with a motion that is almost ghost-like, the great anvils, with their burning freights, glide into position. A score of stalwart men, stripped to the waist, stand round with long iron rods and pincers. ”

“ We know that our soldiers, straight out of that hell across the sea, and bearing on their bodies the scars of it, being awakened in the peaceful half-darkness of their wards (such of them as are able to sleep) after the shrieking of shells and the screaming of shrapnel, by women's soft voices coming from a long way off, pausing by their beds and dying away, will be stirred up to their throbbing hearts and quivering lips by God knows what memories of home and kindred. ”

“ Our way to the next factory lies along a road that borders one of the sinuous reaches of the Thames, past the docks for the ships that bring foreign cattle. A few hours hence these dark ways will be noisy with the trundling of heavy lorries taking live cattle to the abattoirs and dead ones to Smithfield market, that the big, hungry monster, London, may be fed to-morrow. It is growing late, and the night air is misty and damp. ”

“ We know that while thousands of factories and forges all over our islands are working day and night to destroy life, thousands of houses that stand side by side with them are working just as hard to save it. We know that while half a million British women are making munitions for the war, another vast army of them, their sisters in the hospitals, are nursing its sick and wounded. We know that the women in the factories and the women in the hospitals are working under the same general impulse, and that in spite of the war, Britain, with all her faults, is still Christian to the core. ”

“ The moon is now shining, and in the distance, under its slow-growing light, we see the shadowy figures of women workers in their khaki gowns and caps, moving noiselessly about like nuns. We could almost imagine that, out of the noise and tumult, the thud and roar of the forges behind us, with their tall chimneys showing black against the steel-grey sky, we have passed into the calm rest and silent atmosphere of some open-air convent. ”

“ And now what about the Christmas of 1916?
Already we realize that there is to be no rest, no calm, perhaps no holiday, or next to none, in any of the greater munition factories. A hideous crime has been committed, a foul plot against the welfare of the nations has been hatched, and if the whirl of blazing misery which it has already brought upon mankind is to be beaten down, we must go on working. ”

“ One wonders what the ancient world, whose utmost idea of female labour seems to have been covered by the scenes of Ruth gleaning in the fields, or Rachel feeding her flocks, and then returning to her house at nightfall to lie soft and warm, or gather her children about her knee, would have thought of the spectacle of hundreds of thousands of the daughters of Britain on their way to the factories in which they are to work all night. ”

“ Looking at the comely, dark faces of the girls who are sewing these canvas hoods in their close workshops in the East End, one has visions of the ghoul-like figures of a line of infantry hacking at a barrier of barbed wire, running frantically up and down to find a gap in it, and falling, perhaps, under curtains of fire, but no longer, thank God, before clouds of the poisonous gas which used to burst the lungs and plunge down the throat like bars of burning steel. ”

“ The enemy knows Woolwich, where and what it is, therefore there can be no danger of revealing secrets. But though the vast Arsenal is at our own doors few of us who sleep in London, under the broad shadow of its wings, have any real sense of its colossal presence, its immense significance, the tremendous force it stands for. Its origin dates back to the days of other wars, but when the present war began its workers were only fourteen thousand in all, without a woman of their number. Now there are nearly seventeen thousand women within its high walls, and fifty thousand men besides. ”

“ Although not naturally more inhuman than woman, he is capable of beating his drums and his kettle-drums over a battlefield covered with ten thousand dead, if only they are the enemy's dead. But woman is the life-giver, not the life-destroyer, and in her heart of hearts ten thousand slain, whether friend or foe, are ten thousand mothers' sons, each of them a man born of a woman and suckled at her breast. What, then, brings women into the munition factories? ”

“ I hear him tell our soldiers the majestic story. They have won a great victory, not merely over human enemies (who may have thought they were doing right and were therefore all the more wrong) , but over the powers of darkness which have been using our fellow men to destroy the living soul of humanity. For this reason God in His wisdom has permitted the miseries and calamities of war, that as once by flood so now by fire the world may be purged of its impurities. The earth sleeps full of the dead who have died to win this conflict. ”

“ Here is a slip of a girl working one of the latter kind, a huge thing that has two large wheels like mill-wheels revolving at either side of her, and though she looks like a child in the jaws of some great black monster, she does not seem to be the least afraid. Here is another young girl who is feeding a round disc with bits of metal that look like discoloured farthings, and as her own particular Caliban eats them up it utters from its interior a hoarse grunt that hits you like a blow on the brain, yet she does not seem to hear. ”

“ Yet a dream may be something better than an idle and useless effort, for the longest and blackest night may be shortened and made bearable by a vision of the morning. After two years of the night of war it is not for us, who have known its unimaginable horrors, to prate about peace until we see that it is near and know it will be right. ”

“ One has the sense of all the munition factories within the twenty-five mile area of London crouching in the dark and waiting. While one waits oneself, with the singing and the dancing in one's ears, it is impossible not to remember the night before Waterloo, when the beauty and chivalry of Brussels were startled out of their revelry by the booming of the guns. ”

“ In the Catholic churches we see the little Nativities which have been set up in the side chapels, with their tiny pasteboard figures of the Mother and Child, Joseph and his ass and the Wise Men of the East, for Christmas makes us all children. And because Christmas comes at a time of the year when want is keenly felt, we see good women, to whom God has given no children of their own, perhaps, going out into the fog and darkness of the streets to look for the homeless and hungry among the children of other people. ”

“ Their hard work does not seem to be doing much harm to their health, for their eyes are bright, their cheeks are fresh, and there is hardly any evidence of fatigue among them. The clamorous and deafening noise of the machinery, its jar and whirr and clank, which makes your temples throb, sings (after their first days in the factory) like music in their ears and they would miss it if it stopped. They work day and night, in two shifts of twelve hours each, with a break of an hour for dinner and half an hour for tea. ”

“ Then there are huge ovens, from whose glittering depths, lit as by thousands of electric lamps, long ribbons of red-hot steel are being drawn at the ends of pincers by half-stripped men with the sweat pouring down their blackened faces. Then smithies, where shells in their earliest processes are being shaped, under fire and hammer, from rough blocks of metal into round things with noses, and flung off from the cranes of anvils to roll away and cool. ”

“ No one with eyes to see and ears to hear, and a heart to feel, can go through the great munition factories without realizing that there is always thrilling through them a mysterious call to the battlefields, and that a kind of invisible hand-clasp is constantly being made between the women at the lathes and the men in the trenches. ”