Great Britain. Army -- Ordnance facilities; World War, 1914-1918
watch the work that is being done, and to figure out what is going to
be done. And now I am going to tell the Front as fully as I may what it
all amounts to. Some things that I know it would not be wise to tell,
I shall not tell; but that still leaves a lot that I know the Front
will be glad to hear. I hope the Front may read these chapters, and I
hope the Front will tie a stone to this book and sling it over to any
near-enough portion of the Hun lines, because what I have to write is
so very cheerful telling for the Front to hear that it would surely be
highly unpleasant for the Germans to digest.
And will the Front as it reads please remember this--that I am not
writing to please or displease any person or party in politics, that I
am not trying to support or injure the beliefs of any portion of the
Press, that at the present time I have no interest in anything beyond
the interests of the Front, that, like themselves, I only want to get
on and get done with the job, and that my interest in munition-making
and its prospects is the main and personal one that is so urgent at the
Front--Are we going to get the stuff we want? Are we ever going to be
short again?
And here, in a sentence, is the belief I have come to after a wide
tour of the munition works: We ARE going to have all we ever hoped
for; we are never, never, never going to be short again. I say this
remembering how the size, and therefore the requirements, of the Army
have increased, how much vaster in proportion to the increased Army
the supplies will have to be to come up to our wants, how our fighting
fronts have multiplied and grown, how also some of our Allies are still
dependent upon us for some of their munitions. In spite of all these,
I believe we are going to get all we want and need, if--it is the only
if, although it is in a way a big enough one, and one that I’ll come
back to presently--if the workers at home play up and play the game and
back us up to allow us to play out ours.
If they do that, we are going to have munitions to play about with,
we’re going to have a heaping plenty of shells and machine-guns and
bombs and grenades and ’planes and trench-mortars.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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