du Bois, Bois du Biez, and Port Arthur to about Neuve Chapelle. Take it another way, and it measures one of the marches you go from the firing-line back down the La Bassée Road to Bethune, through it, and on again to about Lillers. It is roughly twelve miles from Richmond across all London to Blackheath, from Alexandra Park down to Croydon. Twelve miles is more than double the width of the city of Glasgow from east to west, four times its extent from north to south. That may bring home to you what the twelve-mile length of the new munition works means. The engineer who took me round drove me in a fast car, out and across and back, in what I thought quite a big three-cornered wedge, but the ground covered, long though it appeared on the drive, shrank to a mere corner of the whole when I saw it on the map. Sitting in the car and looking round over long vistas and streets of huts and houses, I could see in one direction to a clump of wood outlined in toy trees against the sky; in another over a wide flat expanse with tiny dots of buildings in the far distance, to where the ground swelled and rose and fell away again in a tumble of plantations and hills and hollows; in another down a long road and a jumble of finished huts and naked, unfinished framings to where the horizon faded off into the indefinite distance; in yet another to where my eye searched along the skyline for the dot which was actually the big building of a power-station. Then I was told that all I could see around me was inside the boundaries of the works area as well as plenty beyond that I could not see. I saw the spread of the area as a whole on a five-foot-long map and saw the criss-cross of roads, the rows upon rows and clumps after clumps of dots that marked the buildings of workshops and workers’ houses--and even then, although there are huts for quite a number of thousands, many of the workers are being housed outside the area, a motor-bus system being run to carry them to and from their work. The buildings are of wood, steel, and brick construction, and they are already there, complete or incomplete, in tens and scores and hundreds. The town, with its stores and shops, its churches and cinema-show, clubs, canteens, and reading-rooms, is solidly built of stone, brick, steel, and wood. There are a score of undertakings in hand which here are mere side-lines, although each of them is a huge contract in itself. There is a system of railways, a main line and many branch lines and sidings, that runs to perhaps fifty miles of rails. There are vast water, drainage, and lighting systems, powerful pumping-stations, and a great reservoir; and a tremendous power-house to carry electricity throughout the area. For mile after mile I drove along roads with a line of great 33-inch diameter pipes laid along the ditch, and past regiments of navvies digging them in. There is another seven- or eight-mile stretch of 27-inch pipes and innumerable miles of smaller piping. The workers