In a statement made later, in the House of Commons, the Minister of Munitions referred to the fact that nearly one thousand large guns were destroyed or captured, and between four and five thousand machine guns destroyed or captured, in the great German offensive which began on the twenty-first of March, 1918, and that in this same period the ammunition lost amounted to about the total production of from one to three weeks. But he declared that the loss had been more than made up in less than one month, and that nine-tenths of the huge output of shells which was then sufficient for the continuation of an intensive battle throughout the summer was due to the labor of three-quarters of a million women. I heard a great iron-merchant say: "Ah! sir, the women are saving the country. When I myself urged a holiday upon them,--and not in a year have they taken one,--they said: 'What will our men at the front do when we stop? Will the Germans sit back and rest too? We will have our holiday when the war is over and the lads come home.'" She was just a slip of a girl; but she smiled at the baby boy in her arms, and said, "His father is in France." She continued: "This is my first day with him in ten months. He is asleep when I get home at night, and he is asleep in the morning when I leave for the shop." And she smiled again as she added: "O, he is a fine sleeper, sir, and the ladies at the church [referring to the nursery] have no trouble with him. It is good, though, to have him in my arms with his eyes open." And, though I blinked my eyes hard as I looked at this brave English girl having an enforced vacation from shell-making because of "back-strain," she had no tears in her eyes. And in excess of all that her hands find to do, as when Spartan mothers sent their sons away and with the same spirit, Democracy's woman of work is giving her flesh and her blood to be food for the carrion-birds of countries she has never seen, while still beneath her heart she carries the developing life that is the hope of the future. I saw a great parade in London, one hundred thousand women marching in a vast demonstration after the triumph of suffrage--mothers, wives, sisters, and sweethearts, little daughters dressed in white, and gray-haired battle-widows of the Crimea. The faces of the marchers were inspiring, but my eyes did not rest upon them. I looked longest at the black masses of men and boys crowding close against the lines that kept the street open for the parade. To the eternal credit of manhood let it be said that the faces of the men were generally faces of old men and that the faces of the boys were the faces of children.