I have, I admit, been amazed to see the extent to which the war workshops of the country have grown, the enlargement of existing works, the springing up of entirely new factories, the huge armies busily employed in all these places. But I have been still more astonished--I have been out Front a year, remember, and have lost touch with the country’s domestic doings--to find how munition-making has become part and parcel of the national existence; that it is quite a commonplace for Lady This of Tudor Hall or Countess That of Belgravia to be handling a lathe in a workshop alongside Miss So from Kensington and ’Liza Such from Houndsditch; that it is no more than a matter of course that a man cast for a commission and refused for the ranks a year ago on account of bad eyes has “gone munitioning” and, grime and oil to his weak eye-rims, is driving a donkey engine in a big factory; that any day you may see at the “canteens” of various factories scores of ladies, who have been used since the day they were born to being waited on hand and foot, now taking the other end of the job and carving mountains of bread into slices and carrying cups of tea and cheerfully waiting on the workers who serve their country in the “shops.” I find that the passenger train services have been chopped to pieces, that mails take any old time to do their journey, that goods by rail get there this week, or next, or a month hence--because munition transport blocks the rails; that whole industries have been blotted from existence because their hands or their plant were wanted--for munitions; that Polytechnic classes are being busily taught--to make munitions; that, in fact, the whole country is one seething munition factory, and no man or lathe or tool that can be turned to munition-making is possibly doing anything else. It may surprise you at the Front, as it certainly did me, to learn that the Ministry of Munitions has taken a grip on the whole industry of this country; that it has an autocratic control over it, wide and strong beyond the wildest dreams of the craziest autocrat; that no man can buy or sell a barrow-load of old iron or a sovereign’s worth of copper or brass without some official of the Ministry getting to hear of it and popping up to air an insatiable curiosity; that no lathe or machine for working metal may be imported without the Ministry being given copious explanations as to its destination and intended use, and, moreover, if that use be not for munition work that the machine or metal is much more likely than not to be commandeered forthwith and set to munitioning; that no machine may be exported; that you cannot buy or sell a new or second-hand machine without a permit from the Ministry; that no man or firm may use man or machine to make clocks or gramophones or motor-cars or anything between if the Ministry prefers the man or firm to turn his factory to making munitions in whole or in part. And all this power is no empty form.