assistant, clerks, shop assistants, three clergy--these latter going home
for their Sunday duty, and giving their wages to the Red Cross--unemployed
architects, and the like.

I cannot recall any shop which made a greater impression of energy, of a
spirit behind the work, than this shop. In its inspecting-room I found a
graduate from Yale. "I had to join in the fight," he said quietly--"this
was the best way I could think of." And it was noticeable besides for some
remarkable machines, which your country had also sent us.

In other shell factories a single lathe carries through one process,
interminably repeated, sometimes two, possibly three. But here, with the
exception of the fixing and drilling of the copper band, and a few minor
operations, one lathe _made the shell_--cut, bored, roughed, turned,
nosed, and threaded it, so that it dropped out, all but the finished
thing--minus, of course, the fuse. The steel pole introduced at the
beginning of the process made nine shells, and the average time per shell
was twenty-three minutes. No wonder that in the great warehouse adjoining
the workshop one saw the shell heaps piling up in their tens of
thousands--only to be rushed off week by week, incessantly, to the front.
The introduction of these machines had been largely the work of an able
Irish manager, who described to me the intense anxiety with which he had
watched their first putting up and testing, lest the vast expenditure
incurred should have been in any degree thrown away. His cheerful looks
and the shell warehouse told the sequel. When I next met him it was at a
northern station in company with his Director. They were then apparently
in search of new machinery! The workshop I had seen was being given over
to women, and the men were moving on to heavier work. And this is the kind
of process which is going on over the length and breadth of industrial
England.