Another factory commenced building a six-acre shell factory in June, is now employing 1,600 hands, and increasing them to 2,500 as quickly as possible. At another place the present factory, covering many acres, crammed to the doorstep with machinery and workers, stands on a site which before the war was an open green field. Now it employs 6,500 hands and is adding about 200 hands a week. Yet another place was an empty and idle building in July--in all these months mentioned I refer to the year 1915--but now it is turning out 5,000 shells a week, and it is to reach 20,000 a week within the next few months. All these are merely instances, picked at random from my notes. I could multiply them, and in every district I visited the local Munitions office could, if they were permitted, have given me figures and dates of this kind almost without end. Before I finish this chapter I must pass along a message that the workers at a certain national shell factory gave me for the men at the Front. I had been telling the general manager how good it was to see the stacks of shells, the ceaseless flood that was running through the works, to hear all he had been telling me of the progress made, and still more of the further progress to be made, and I was led on to tell him something of the heart-breaking shortage of shells we had known a year ago, the punishment the troops had suffered again and again from the heavy artillery fire of the Germans, and the slow and grudging reply that was all we could make. The manager asked me would I talk to some of their shop foremen and tell them what a shortage of shells meant to the Front. So he called in about a score or more of his men and I just talked to them, and told them how the Front was hanging on the efforts of the war-workers at home. I told them of that winter in the trenches, of the hopes we had held to of plenteous supplies of shells in the spring, of the blow it was to us to hear of as great a shortage as ever, and, still worse, of the squabbling amongst munition workers and their haggling over 8_d._ or 8½ _d._ an hour pay, or Saturday half-holidays, or double overtime for Sunday, while the men in the trenches suffered a hell of shell-fire, and soaked in knee-deep gutters, and lost their limbs and lives from frost-bite, and put in six- or sixteen-day spells, as need be, with no half-holiday and a shilling a day pay for time and overtime. Maybe there was no special point in my telling these particular things to these particular men, because, as their manager assured me, that factory was doing and always had done its level best, and there had been no friction or slacking whatever in any department. But anyhow I told them, and I told them the Front was hoping again for a flood of unlimited shells this spring, for the essential wherewithal to break the lock-fast lines in the West, for the munitions that would at last give us a fair fighting chance--the more than which we don’t want, and don’t need, to