I have a vision of a great building, where huge naval guns are being
lowered from the annealing furnace above into the hardening oil-tank
below, or where in the depths of a great pit, with lights and men moving
at the bottom, I see as I stoop over the edge, a jacket being shrunk upon
another similar monster, hanging perpendicularly below me.

Close by are the forging-shops whence come the howitzers and the huge
naval shells. Watch the giant pincers that lift the red-hot ingots and
drop them into the stamping presses. Man directs; but one might think the
tools themselves intelligent, like those golden automata of old that
Hephæstus made, to run and wait upon the gods of Olympus. Down drops the
punch. There is a burst of flame, as though the molten steel rebelled, and
out comes the shell or the howitzer in the rough, nosed and hollowed, and
ready for the turning.

The men here are great, powerful fellows, blanched with heat and labour;
amid the flame and smoke of the forges one sees them as typical figures in
the national struggle, linked to those Dreadnoughts in the North Sea, and
to those lines in Flanders and Picardy where Britain holds her enemy at
bay. Everywhere the same intensity of effort, whether in the men or in
those directing them. And what delicate and responsible processes!

In the next shop, with its rows of shining guns, I stop to look at a great
gun apparently turning itself. No workman is visible for the moment. The
process goes on automatically, the bright steel emerging under the tool
that here, too, seems alive. Close to it is a man winding steel wire, or
rather braid, on a 15-inch gun; beyond again there are workmen and
inspectors testing and gauging another similar giant. Look down this
shining tube and watch the gauging, now with callipers, now with a rubber
device which takes the impression of the rifling and reveals any defect.