The other night, I had rather a curious experience. They asked me if I would go down to a big shell factory, almost entirely manned by women, and speak to the squad on the night shift. I ought to explain a little about the women working in Munitions. They are not ordinary factory hands nor even all working girls. When the urgent call went out that thousands of women were needed to make the implements of war and stand as a rampart behind the fighting men, the response came from all classes. I know hundreds of women who formerly only knew work as something they paid other people to do, who are now cheerfully standing on their feet twelve hours a day with intervals for meals; living side by side in horrid little communal villages with girls from the East End and the slums, and who give all they earn to the war funds. Further, they are happier than they have ever been in their lives. They have found the key to one of the finest paradises available to humanity, and are proving work to be a panacea for almost every sorrow. I don’t think they are going to lose that key any more. But though it is all very fine, the first time I was in real big munition works and saw these heads—some of them such pretty heads—bent over the machines, I rebelled, just as I sometimes rebel over Effie’s youth being spent in the drudgery of the French war zone. For we are only young once, and for youth there is no substitute. You have to grip yourself hard sometimes when you are overwhelmed by the sight of womanhood dedicated to the work of destruction and ask what it all means. God made us creators, builders, conservers, and the waste and cruelty of war is opposed to the very basic principles of our being. Then why? Just because there is one thing worse than war, a dishonourable peace based on selfishness, and love of ease, and shirking of responsibility. I had the same feeling always when I had to stand up in the huts in France before the units of the First Hundred Thousand and it was only by gripping myself tight and holding on to the great ideals they stood for, that I had the courage to say anything to them at all. The spirit is fine among the women munitioners but sometimes they get tired and discouraged and long for the old sweet peace of home, and the cheerful comradeship of the fireside. It is then that the welfare superintendents, watching with unsleeping vigilance, call to the helpers outside to come and do their bit. I was to speak to them at the lunch hour, half past two in the morning, just to remind them that they are in the trenches too and that they must stand solid and unflinching behind the men who are laying down their lives for us.