now engaged on construction work would make many line battalions of full fighting strength; the hands to be employed will run in numbers into brigades and divisions. Now if all these facts convey any idea to you of the colossal size of the job, you may understand what organisation, what skill, what energy has been required to conceive, to plan, to execute the whole work, to build and equip it and set it running in a matter of mere months. The work that on ordinary contract, with smooth working and no day’s hitch, with all the advantage of peace-time work--unlimited labour, material and transport to be had for the asking and paying--would have occupied at the very least three to four years, is being done here inside six months. What that means only the heads, the officials and managers and engineers and contractors, will ever know. The shifts and stratagems that have had to be employed to find and keep labour, to get the materials required or their efficient substitutes, to secure transport to and on the area, to house and feed the workers, to fight the weather, the wet and the frost especially, would fill many books, would make a record of energy, efficiency, foresight, and resourcefulness which would be for ever a pride to the Empire. The country has conferred some large-sized powers on the Ministry of Munitions--larger perhaps than is generally realised--and I must say the Ministry has grabbed the powers with both hands and, through its lieutenants, is wielding them in all sorts of unexpectedly useful ways. On the Master Job, for instance, there was need for a lot of road transport, and mechanical transport was not easy to find. But somehow and anyhow it was found, and one traction engine that I saw puffing and snorting at the head of a rumbling wagon string gives an index to the ways and means of the finding. The engine still bore the legend “Jenkin’s Galloping Horses,” and, it appears, previous to its commandeering had been trundling from town to town a full set of caravans, and then converting itself into one of those power-engines which are familiar sights at country fairs driving a circle of prancing wooden chargers or sea-sicky switchback boats in a swing roundabout to the brazen music of a mechanical band.