And their work is good, is, according to the opinion of every works manager I asked, excellent beyond expectation. One manager had no words sufficiently warm to praise. “Knock bottom oot o’ t’ men,” he said emphatically and repeatedly. At this particular factory women were doing the whole work of making 18-pounder shells. One girl, who a few months ago had never seen a lathe outside a picture-book, is turning the copper driving bands and does 250 bands each ten-hour shift--and that, I am told, is up to or over a good man’s average. These bands have to be pressed by a “banding press” on to the shells, and a girl puts 500 an hour through the machine. Now, without describing the operation in detail, this means that the girl lifts a shell from beside her, places it in the machine, where it gets a first squeeze, lifts it an inch or so and twists it round for a second squeeze, and lifts it out of the machine on to a table-shelf beside it. She does the three lifts--in, and twist, and out--500 times per hour, 5,000 times a day. That is no light physical feat, and it speaks volumes for the energy and the close attention paid, without a halt or break, to her work. There are no men in that factory except a handful of skilled engineers who are kept employed on tool-making and setting, sharpening cutters, erecting machinery, and other work that only skilled men can do. There is one room full of these men--The Room of the Old Men, I called it--that I want to tell you about presently. It is a tale to be proud of. For the most part the women workers I have seen were on lighter work--shell-fuses, rifle cartridges, filling or charging, gauging--but this manager assured me there was no doubt about the women’s ability to handle anything up to the 18-pounder shell (I saw some on the heavier 4·5 shells later in another place), showed me how and where his women loaded shells from the store into the trucks on the railway siding by hand, and lifted out and up and in, and packed and stowed eight tons an hour. And, finally, he boasted with honest and legitimate pride that his girls did at least as good and, on official figures, cheaper shells than any other factory in the kingdom. And the output is to be exactly quadrupled within a few weeks--not “may be,” or “hoped to be,” mark you, but, on cut-and-dried, certain, and deliberate plans, _will_ be.