guns short of shells, the Front without artillery support. The whole business of munition-making must be hung up if the coal-miners, the transport workers, the engineers, the explosive makers, almost any one section of the war-workers, fail us. Such a complete hold-up may be unthinkable, but there is another danger which is more possible and almost equally lamentable. There are still some war-workers who appear to consider the War as merely grinding out a grist of profit and good wages to them; another lot who are still more concerned over their hours and pay and conditions of labour, over labour rules and laws, written and unwritten, over the profits the employers are making or supposed to be making, over their position and status when the war is finished, than ever they are over the winning of the war. I know one works where there are two departments engaged on making six-inch and eight-inch shells. In some way, which for the moment is of no matter, the six-inch workers are paid at a lower rate than the eight-inch workers. The wages of the six-inch workers cannot be raised because that would raise the cost of the shells above the contract price; the wages of the eight-inch workers may not be lowered to level them with the six-inchers. The result is that the higher-paid men deliberately restrict their output, make fewer shells per week than they could do, so that they will only draw a weekly sum about equal to the less well-paid workers. And they do this out of a so-called sense of fairness, a supposed “loyalty to their mates.” That is the sort of pettiness or indifference that staggers anyone who has been in the carnage and destruction and misery of the Front, who has endured the punishment resulting from a shell shortage. “Sense of fairness”--“loyalty to their mates”! What about fairness to the Front, loyalty to their mates and sons and brothers in the trenches? How I wish I could make these men understand what it means to see a line of infantry hung up by barbed wire, hacking desperately at it, running up and down its face in frantic groups searching for a gap and a clear path for their bayonets, to see these stout hearts falling in hundreds under a hail of lead, the blast of machine-gun and rifle fire and bursting bombs, to watch the line dwindle and wither and melt away to heaps and clumps of dead lying still in the mud or squirming in the clutch of the wire entanglements, to scattered figures crawling and rolling and dragging their broken limbs and shattered bodies back across the shell- and bullet-swept ground in a last struggle to reach shelter. If only the most discontented workers could see such a sight, would realise that it was due to nothing but the wire entanglements not being completely swept away because sufficient shells could not be spared to make a clean job of it, I wonder if they would ever again talk of “loyalty to their mates,” would ever again waste a day off or