Muirhead Bone and Joseph Pennell have shown us what can be done in art with these high workshops, with their intricate distances and the endless crisscross of their belting, and their ranged machines.  But the coming in of the girls, in their close khaki caps and overalls, showing the many pretty heads and slender necks, and the rows of light bending forms, spaced in order beside their furnaces or lathes as far as the eye can reach, has added a new element—­something flower-like, to all this flash of fire and steel, and to the grimness of war underlying it.

For the final meaning of it all is neither soft nor feminine!  These girls—­at hot haste—­are making fuses and cartridge-cases by the hundred thousand, casting, pressing, drawing, and, in the special danger-buildings, filling certain parts of the fuse with explosive.  There were about 4,000 of them to 5,000 men, when I saw the shop, and their number has no doubt increased since; for the latest figures show that about 15,000 fresh women workers are going into the munition works every week.  The men are steadily training them, and without the teaching and co-operation of the men—­without, that is, the surrender by the men of some of their most cherished trade customs—­the whole movement would have been impossible.

As it is, by the sheer body of work the women have brought in, by the deftness, energy, and enthusiasm they throw into the simpler but quite indispensable processes, thereby setting the unskilled man free for the Army, and the skilled man for work which women cannot do, Great Britain has become possessed of new and vast resources of which she scarcely dreamed a year ago; and so far as this war is a war of machinery—­and we all know what Germany’s arsenals have done to make it so—­its whole aspect is now changing for us.  The “eternal feminine” has made one more startling incursion upon the normal web of things!

But on the “dilution” of labour, the burning question of the hour, I shall have something to say in my next letter.  Let me record another visit of the same day to a small-arms factory of importance.  Not many women here so far, though the number is increasing, but look at the expansion figures since last summer!  A large, new factory added, on a bare field; 40,000 tons of excavation removed, two miles of new shops, sixty feet wide and four floors high, the output in rifles quadrupled, and so on.

We climbed to the top floor of the new buildings and looked far and wide over the town.  Dotted over the tall roofs rose the national flags, marking “controlled” factories, i.e., factories still given over a year ago to one or other of the miscellaneous metal trades of the Midlands, and now making fuse or shell for England’s Armies, and under the control of the British Government.  One had a sudden sharp sense of the town’s corporate life, and of the spirit working in it everywhere for England’s victory.  Before we descended, we watched the testing of a particular gun.  I was to hear its note on the actual battle-field a month later.