Great Britain. Army -- Ordnance facilities; World War, 1914-1918
In a way she is typical of the women on war work, turning their skill
and deftness, giving their youth and strength to “do their bit” and
help the Front. She is more significant than any picture of a blood-
and mud-stained fighting man, for she is emblematical of the work that
must be done, and--thanks be--at last is being done, to win the War.
VI
THE MASTER JOB
If we at the Front felt aggrieved last spring that the winter had been
wasted, that there had not been nearly enough hustling done on war work
at Home, certain it is that we can have no such complaint to make this
spring, or even now. The one great outstanding feature of all the war
works to-day is the way everything is being driven and speeded up. I
have told a fraction of what I have seen of this, of the green fields
of six months back covered now with busy works, of new floor after
floor being piled on existing works, wing after wing added to them,
scores upon scores of new machines being built or imported and set up
and to work, of hundreds and thousands of new hands being taught and
employed, of huge firms adapted to war work, of new firms and National
Factories working smooth and at top speed, of practically every works
and every machine running night and day without halt, of the double and
triple shifts of workers keeping the tireless machines whirling and
grinding and hammering from dawn to dusk, and without pause from dusk
on again to dawn. Perhaps amongst the many other things I have had to
tell, this one great fact of hustle and increasing hustle has been a
little overshadowed, and I had better give one clear instance where the
fact stands out sharp and stark, where nothing is so evident, where
almost nothing else is evident, but the one great and wonderful haste.
The particular effort deserves the telling all the more because it is
the tale of the Master Job, the greatest war factory in the world.
You will always remember that if I am unsatisfactorily vague in some
of the details and altogether miss out others, it is because I may
not and would not “give information of value to the enemy.” Probably,
despite the many precautions taken, the enemy knows all about it, but
this can only be through spies, and since the bigness of a spy’s pay
is apt to depend on the bigness of his news--or lies--at least I need
not corroborate them. The new factory then is a National one, a huge
plan to do, under the State and the Munitions Ministry, a volume of
work which will presently be ready for it, and which no one works or
several combined works is now capable of handling. Without being too
exact, I may say that the area of the works covers a piece of country
about twelve miles long and at no part less than a mile across. Think
a moment what that alone means--twelve miles, the length of the Front
running, say, from Loos up past Cambrin, the Brick Fields, Cuinchy and
Givenchy, on by Indian Village and the Richebourg battle-front, Rue
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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