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 3,500 work-people, about three times the number, of whom a large proportion are 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 bedhead, 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 the 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 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.”

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 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.