the occupation. For they are making small pellets for the charging of
shells, out of a high-explosive powder. Each girl uses a small copper
ladle to take the powder out of a box before her, and puts it into a
press which stamps it into a tiny block, looking like ivory. She holds her
hand over a little tray of water lest any of the powder should escape.
What the explosive and death-dealing power of it is, it does not do to
think about.

In another room a fresh group of girls are handling a black powder for
another part of the detonator, and because of the irritant nature of the
powder, are wearing white bandages round the nose and mouth. There is
great competition for these rooms, the Superintendent says! The girls in
them work on two shifts of ten and one-half hours each, and would resent a
change to a shorter shift. They have one hour for dinner, half an hour for
tea, a cup of tea in the middle of the morning--and the whole of Saturdays
free. To the eye of the ordinary visitor they show few signs of fatigue.

After the fuse factory we pass through the high-explosive factory, where
250 girls are at work in a number of isolated wooden sheds filling
18-pounder shell with high explosive. The brass cartridge-case is being
filled with cordite, bundles of what look like thin brown sticks, and the
shell itself, including its central gaine or tube, with the various deadly
explosives we have seen prepared in the "danger buildings." The shell is
fitted into the cartridge-case, the primer and the fuse screwed on. It is
now ready to be fired.

I stand and look at boxes of shells, packed, and about to go straight to
the front. A train is waiting close by to take them the first stage on
their journey. I little thought then that I should see these boxes, or
their fellows, next, on the endless ranks of ammunition lorries behind the