For that, as Mr. Montagu points out, is the sole and supreme test. How has the vast activity of the new Ministry of Munitions--an activity which the nation owes--let me repeat it--to the initiative, the compelling energy, of Mr. Lloyd George--affected our armies in the field? The final answer to that question is not yet. The Somme offensive is still hammering at the German gates; I shall presently give an outline of its course from its opening on July 1st down to the present. But meanwhile what can be said is this. The expenditure of ammunition which enabled us to sweep through the German first lines, in the opening days of this July, almost with ease, was colossal beyond all precedent. The total amount of heavy guns and ammunition manufactured by Great Britain in the first ten months of the war, from August, 1914, to June 1, 1915, would not have kept the British bombardment on the Somme going _for a single day_. That gives some idea of it. Can we keep it up? The German papers have been consoling themselves with the reflection that so huge an effort must have exhausted our supplies. On the contrary, says Mr. Montagu. _The output of the factories, week by week, now covers the expenditure in the field_. No fear now, that as at Loos, as at Neuve Chapelle, and as on a thousand other smaller occasions, British success in the field should be crippled and stopped by shortage of gun and shell! By whom has this result been brought about? By that army of British workmen--and workwomen--which Mr. Lloyd George in little more than one short year has mobilised throughout the country. The Ministry of Munitions is now employing _three millions and a half of workers_--(a year ago it was not much more than a million and a half)--of whom 400,000 _are women_; and the staff of the Ministry has grown from 3,000--the figure given in my earlier letters--to 5,000, just as that army of women, which has sprung as it were out of the earth at the call of the nation, has almost doubled since I wrote in April last. Well may the new Minister say that our toilers in factory and forge have had some share in the glorious recent victories of Russia, Italy, and France! Our men and our women have contributed to the re-equipment of those gallant armies of Russia, which, a month or six weeks earlier than they were expected to move, have broken up the Austrian front, and will soon be once more in Western Poland, perhaps in East Prussia! The Italian Army has drawn from our workshops and learnt from our experiments. The Serbian Army has been re-formed and re-fitted.