Part 4

If we at the Front felt aggrieved last spring that the winter had been wasted, that there had not been nearly enough hustling done on war work at Home, certain it is that we can have no such complaint to make this spring, or even now. The one great outstanding feature of all the war works to-day is the way everything is being driven and speeded up. I have told a fraction of what I have seen of this, of the green fields of six months back covered now with busy works, of new floor after floor being piled on existing works, wing after wing added to them, scores upon scores of new machines being built or imported and set up and to work, of hundreds and thousands of new hands being taught and employed, of huge firms adapted to war work, of new firms and National Factories working smooth and at top speed, of practically every works and every machine running night and day without halt, of the double and triple shifts of workers keeping the tireless machines whirling and grinding and hammering from dawn to dusk, and without pause from dusk on again to dawn. Perhaps amongst the many other things I have had to tell, this one great fact of hustle and increasing hustle has been a little overshadowed, and I had better give one clear instance where the fact stands out sharp and stark, where nothing is so evident, where almost nothing else is evident, but the one great and wonderful haste. The particular effort deserves the telling all the more because it is the tale of the Master Job, the greatest war factory in the world. You will always remember that if I am unsatisfactorily vague in some of the details and altogether miss out others, it is because I may not and would not “give information of value to the enemy.” Probably, despite the many precautions taken, the enemy knows all about it, but this can only be through spies, and since the bigness of a spy’s pay is apt to depend on the bigness of his news--or lies--at least I need not corroborate them. The new factory then is a National one, a huge plan to do, under the State and the Munitions Ministry, a volume of work which will presently be ready for it, and which no one works or several combined works is now capable of handling. Without being too exact, I may say that the area of the works covers a piece of country about twelve miles long and at no part less than a mile across. Think a moment what that alone means--twelve miles, the length of the Front running, say, from Loos up past Cambrin, the Brick Fields, Cuinchy and Givenchy, on by Indian Village and the Richebourg battle-front, Rue du Bois, Bois du Biez, and Port Arthur to about Neuve Chapelle. Take it another way, and it measures one of the marches you go from the firing-line back down the La Bassée Road to Bethune, through it, and on again to about Lillers. It is roughly twelve miles from Richmond across all London to Blackheath, from Alexandra Park down to Croydon. Twelve miles is more than double the width of the city of Glasgow from east to west, four times its extent from north to south. That may bring home to you what the twelve-mile length of the new munition works means. The engineer who took me round drove me in a fast car, out and across and back, in what I thought quite a big three-cornered wedge, but the ground covered, long though it appeared on the drive, shrank to a mere corner of the whole when I saw it on the map. Sitting in the car and looking round over long vistas and streets of huts and houses, I could see in one direction to a clump of wood outlined in toy trees against the sky; in another over a wide flat expanse with tiny dots of buildings in the far distance, to where the ground swelled and rose and fell away again in a tumble of plantations and hills and hollows; in another down a long road and a jumble of finished huts and naked, unfinished framings to where the horizon faded off into the indefinite distance; in yet another to where my eye searched along the skyline for the dot which was actually the big building of a power-station. Then I was told that all I could see around me was inside the boundaries of the works area as well as plenty beyond that I could not see. I saw the spread of the area as a whole on a five-foot-long map and saw the criss-cross of roads, the rows upon rows and clumps after clumps of dots that marked the buildings of workshops and workers’ houses--and even then, although there are huts for quite a number of thousands, many of the workers are being housed outside the area, a motor-bus system being run to carry them to and from their work. The buildings are of wood, steel, and brick construction, and they are already there, complete or incomplete, in tens and scores and hundreds. The town, with its stores and shops, its churches and cinema-show, clubs, canteens, and reading-rooms, is solidly built of stone, brick, steel, and wood. There are a score of undertakings in hand which here are mere side-lines, although each of them is a huge contract in itself. There is a system of railways, a main line and many branch lines and sidings, that runs to perhaps fifty miles of rails. There are vast water, drainage, and lighting systems, powerful pumping-stations, and a great reservoir; and a tremendous power-house to carry electricity throughout the area. For mile after mile I drove along roads with a line of great 33-inch diameter pipes laid along the ditch, and past regiments of navvies digging them in. There is another seven- or eight-mile stretch of 27-inch pipes and innumerable miles of smaller piping. The workers now engaged on construction work would make many line battalions of full fighting strength; the hands to be employed will run in numbers into brigades and divisions.

Now if all these facts convey any idea to you of the colossal size of the job, you may understand what organisation, what skill, what energy has been required to conceive, to plan, to execute the whole work, to build and equip it and set it running in a matter of mere months. The work that on ordinary contract, with smooth working and no day’s hitch, with all the advantage of peace-time work--unlimited labour, material and transport to be had for the asking and paying--would have occupied at the very least three to four years, is being done here inside six months. What that means only the heads, the officials and managers and engineers and contractors, will ever know. The shifts and stratagems that have had to be employed to find and keep labour, to get the materials required or their efficient substitutes, to secure transport to and on the area, to house and feed the workers, to fight the weather, the wet and the frost especially, would fill many books, would make a record of energy, efficiency, foresight, and resourcefulness which would be for ever a pride to the Empire. The country has conferred some large-sized powers on the Ministry of Munitions--larger perhaps than is generally realised--and I must say the Ministry has grabbed the powers with both hands and, through its lieutenants, is wielding them in all sorts of unexpectedly useful ways. On the Master Job, for instance, there was need for a lot of road transport, and mechanical transport was not easy to find. But somehow and anyhow it was found, and one traction engine that I saw puffing and snorting at the head of a rumbling wagon string gives an index to the ways and means of the finding. The engine still bore the legend “Jenkin’s Galloping Horses,” and, it appears, previous to its commandeering had been trundling from town to town a full set of caravans, and then converting itself into one of those power-engines which are familiar sights at country fairs driving a circle of prancing wooden chargers or sea-sicky switchback boats in a swing roundabout to the brazen music of a mechanical band.

There was another difficulty to be overcome in the way of finding all sorts of materials. Here, again, the powers that be did not hesitate to commandeer where more usual methods could not prevail. The Ministry inspectors and engineers apparently know what every firm in the country is busy about, and they simply reported where anything specially required was to be found. Thus and so, some corrugated-iron sheds and huts in course of construction on contract and destined for some places at the other ends of the earth find themselves hastily transported to Somewhere in Britain and hurriedly erected there instead of at Sumatra or Zanzibar. The buildings required some converting and altering perhaps to adapt them to use in a chilly, damp-laden country instead of under tropical skies, but such difficulties are very minor ones to the men who are running this job. There have been and still are greater ones that are constantly being surmounted. There were fewer in the summer months perhaps, but in the frost and rain of a cold and wet winter all the canons of carpentering, masonry, and building construction have been flouted and set aside. Any builder will tell you how impossible it is, for instance, to lay concrete in frosty weather. As a rule the builder may not have descended to details of the why and the wherefore, but here the causes were sought, found, and overcome. When it was necessary the water for mixing the concrete was heated and the stones were warmed, and when the concrete was spread it was carefully covered with straw or cinders or anything that would keep the frost off it. Sometimes a roof would be run up to keep off the rain, a temporary break-wind wall erected to hold out the winds, blazing fires lit in braziers to fight off the frost, so that mortar might be mixed and brick walls built. 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. 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; perky, self-important-looking little “pug” engines puff and pant and haul their trailing strings of wagons amongst the earth heaps and holes, round and between the lumber and the foundations and frames of unerected buildings.

In other parts the green turf of the fields is still undisturbed, but already it is scored deep with wheel-marks, is plotted out for the coming of the diggers and builders. 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 is 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; it is an expenditure, not only of money, but without stint of brain and muscle power. Work is planned to commence by a certain date and by that date be sure it will commence, and the Front will feel the rush of the increased torrent that will come sluicing out from the Master Job.

There are other greatly planned and wonderfully executed works which only in their size are outdistanced by the Master Job. I saw one such new works, so new that in parts the fields are still scattered with cabbage stumps or trampled turnips, so new that only at the end of this last September was the first sod cut. The end of September--and by the First of January the first section was due to be turning out munitions. When I was there the big boilers of the power-station were not ready to be installed, but a temporary boiler had been dug out from Heaven knows where, and its chimney was pouring out smoke as the temporary furnace prepared for a trial run. When I saw the place, only about fifty working days had passed from the cutting of that first sod, and yet here were rows of completed workrooms, completed in some down to the varnished walls and the linoleumed floors, the steam-heating, and the electric lamps over the work benches. There are a dozen 100-ton stores, miles upon miles of raised board walks (the “clean way” that in a works handling explosives keeps the feet of the workers out of mud or earth or grit), of steam-heating pipes, of railway and trolly rails. There are scores of magazines, many scores of huts and houses, railway sidings to allow of the handling of many hundred tons a day.

There are to be thousands of hands employed on each shift--the works will be run on the night-and-day plan that appears to be the regular rule in munition works now--and the first of them were to start inside a month from the time I was there. If I hadn’t had the evidence of the many finished buildings, and the vast amount of completed work there before my eyes, I should have doubted the possibility of that early start. There seemed such an impossible amount still to do. Running out from the railway ran a long, box-built passageway straddling above ground on criss-cross piles and scaffolding, breaking off raggedly and abruptly in mid-air. Beyond this there is to be a large room for the explosives workers to change and dress, but this room was then no more than the surveyor’s markings on the ground. The site of the engine-room was a wide and deep hole walled round with close-set, stout, water-tight planking and bottomed with unpleasant mud. Altogether it looked about as hopeless a task as one could find to get such a raw welter running in any completed part for many, many months; and yet, having seen the outcome of the previous fifty working days, having met and talked with some of the hard-headed, warm-blooded, live-wire men who are running the job, I have not the faintest doubt but that their plans have worked out, that by the time this is in print the work will have begun.[1]

[1] Work commenced--January.

Once more it is the managers, the engineers, the contractors, the business brains and energy of these and the local Munitions Committee that have played the part of modern wizards and magicians, that are turning an aching, empty desolation of waste land into a spick-and-span bustling works. Here, again, difficulties have been met only to be overcome promptly and efficiently--and if you saw the ankle-deep, rutted mud, the water-tight, plank-sided box that had to be sunk a good ten feet to find foundations for the engine-room bed, the crane-engine overtilted and sunk in the mud where the unstable soil had yielded to the platform piles, sank lop-sidedly, and left the engine to slide gently overboard--if you saw these and many other things, you would begin to appreciate some of the difficulties. But, after all, there they are--a Master Job and many mastered jobs. And every week that passes brings more of them to completion and nearer to completion, nearer to the day we wait when no effort of the Front can outrun the efforts of the war works.

VII

“THEIR BIT”

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.”