equipped next morning, has been turned into a small workshop for shell
production--employing between three and four hundred girls, with the
number of skilled men necessary to keep the new unskilled labour going.
These girls are working on the eight hours' shift system; and working so
well that a not uncommon wage among them--on piece-work, of course--runs
to somewhere between two and three pounds a week.

"But there is much more than money in it," says the kind-faced woman
superintendent, as we step into her little office out of the noise, to
talk a little. "The girls are perfectly aware that they are 'doing their
bit,' that they are standing by their men in the trenches."

This testimony indeed is universal. There is patriotism in this grim
work, and affection, and a new and honourable self-consciousness. Girls
and women look up and smile as a visitor passes. They presume that he
or she is there for some useful purpose connected with the war, and
their expression seems to say: "Yes, we are all in it!--we know very
well what _we_ are doing, and what a difference we are making. Go
and tell our boys ..."

The interest of this workshop lay, of course, in the fact that it was a
sample of innumerable others, as quickly organised and as efficiently
worked, now spreading over the Midlands and the north. As to the main
works belonging to the same great firm, such things have been often
described; but one sees them to-day with new eyes, as part of a struggle
which is one with the very life of England. Acres and acres of ground
covered by huge workshops new and old, by interlacing railway lines and
moving trolleys. Gone is all the vast miscellaneous engineering work of
peace. The war has swallowed everything.