"But there is much more than money in it," says the kind-faced woman superintendent, as we step into her little office out of the noise, to talk a little. "The girls are perfectly aware that they are 'doing their bit,' that they are standing by their men in the trenches." This testimony indeed is universal. There is patriotism in this grim work, and affection, and a new and honourable self-consciousness. Girls and women look up and smile as a visitor passes. They presume that he or she is there for some useful purpose connected with the war, and their expression seems to say: "Yes, we are all in it!--we know very well what _we_ are doing, and what a difference we are making. Go and tell our boys ..." The interest of this workshop lay, of course, in the fact that it was a sample of innumerable others, as quickly organised and as efficiently worked, now spreading over the Midlands and the north. As to the main works belonging to the same great firm, such things have been often described; but one sees them to-day with new eyes, as part of a struggle which is one with the very life of England. Acres and acres of ground covered by huge workshops new and old, by interlacing railway lines and moving trolleys. Gone is all the vast miscellaneous engineering work of peace. The war has swallowed everything. I have a vision of a great building, where huge naval guns are being lowered from the annealing furnace above into the hardening oil-tank below, or where in the depths of a great pit, with lights and men moving at the bottom, I see as I stoop over the edge, a jacket being shrunk upon another similar monster, hanging perpendicularly below me. Close by are the forging-shops whence come the howitzers and the huge naval shells. Watch the giant pincers that lift the red-hot ingots and drop them into the stamping presses. Man directs; but one might think the tools themselves intelligent, like those golden automata of old that Hephaestus made, to run and wait upon the gods of Olympus. Down drops the punch. There is a burst of flame, as though the molten steel rebelled, and out comes the shell or the howitzer in the rough, nosed and hollowed, and ready for the turning. The men here are great, powerful fellows, blanched with heat and labour; amid the flame and smoke of the forges one sees them as typical figures in the national struggle, linked to those Dreadnoughts in the North Sea, and to those lines in Flanders and Picardy where Britain holds her enemy at bay. Everywhere the same intensity of effort, whether in the men or in those directing them. And what delicate and responsible processes!