The time for secrecy was past; but how to stem the tide? The situation was, and indeed remained, such that a year later Mr. Lloyd George (then Secretary of State for War) was moved to make this astounding admission in the House of Commons: "The House would be simply appalled to hear of the dangers we had to run last year." And again at a subsequent date when as Minister of Munitions he exclaimed in the House, "I wonder whether it will not be too late. Ah! fatal words on this occasion! Too late in moving here, too late in arriving there, too late in coming to this decision, too late in starting enterprises, too late in preparing. In this war the footsteps of the Allied forces have been dogged by the mocking spectre of 'Too late.'" In this connection it would be amusing, were it not so utterly tragic, to compare a slightly previous and public utterance from the lips of this same "Saviour of his Country":--"This is the most favourable moment for twenty years to overhaul our expenditure on armaments" (Mr. Lloyd George. _Daily Chronicle_, January 1st, 1914). Happily however, "il n'est jamais trop tard pour bien faire," and this good old adage as to it being never _too_ late to mend was perhaps never better exemplified than when, the Army Ordnance authorities having realised that the Government arsenals were in no position to cope fully with the demands likely to be made by the military authorities in the field, that other army of "Contemptibles," the staffs and employés of the great engineering concerns of this country, came forward in a manner unparalleled in the history of modern industry, and forthwith commenced to adapt themselves and their entire available plant to the process of manufacturing munitions of war. Foremost amongst firms of world-wide repute must be mentioned the great London and North-Western Railway Company, whose Chief Mechanical Engineer, Mr. C. J. Bowen-Cooke, C.B.E., realising from the outset the import of the late Lord Kitchener's forecast as to the probable duration and extent of the war, and in spite of ever-increasing demands on locomotive power which he found himself compelled to meet for military as well as for ordinary civilian purposes, threw himself heart and soul into the problem of adapting the then existing conditions and plant in the Company's locomotive works at Crewe to the requirements of the military authorities.