At an uncomfortable hour I arrived at a certain bleak railway platform and in due season, stepping into a train, was whirled away Northwards. And as I journeyed, hearkening to the talk of my companions, men much travelled and of many nationalities, my mind was agog for the marvels and wonders I was to see in the workshops of Great Britain. Marvels and wonders I was prepared for, and yet for once how far short of fact were all my fancies! Britain has done great things in the past; she will, I pray, do even greater in the future; but surely never have mortal eyes looked on an effort so stupendous and determined as she is sustaining, and will sustain, until this most bloody of wars is ended. The deathless glory of our troops, their blood and agony and scorn of death have been made pegs on which to hang much indifferent writing and more bad verse--there have been letters also, sheaves of them, in many of which effusions one may discover a wondering surprise that our men can actually and really fight, that Britain is still the Britain of Drake and Frobisher and Grenville, of Nelson and Blake and Cochrane, and that the same deathless spirit of heroic determination animates her still. To-night, as I pen these lines, our armies are locked in desperate battle, our guns are thundering on many fronts, but like an echo to their roar, from mile upon mile of workshops and factories and shipyards is rising the answering roar of machinery, the thunderous crash of titanic hammers, the hellish rattle of riveters, the whining, droning, shrieking of a myriad wheels where another vast army is engaged night and day, as indomitable, as fierce of purpose as the army beyond the narrow seas. I have beheld miles of workshops that stand where grass grew two short years ago, wherein are bright-eyed English girls, Irish colleens and Scots lassies by the ten thousand, whose dexterous fingers flash nimbly to and fro, slender fingers, yet fingers contriving death. I have wandered through a wilderness of whirring driving-belts and humming wheels where men and women, with the same feverish activity, bend above machines whose very hum sang to me of death while I have watched a cartridge grow from a disc of metal to the hellish contrivance it is. And as I watched the busy scene it seemed an unnatural and awful thing that women's hands should be busied thus, fashioning means for the maiming and destruction of life--until, in a remote corner, I paused to watch a woman whose dexterous fingers were fitting finished cartridges into clips with wonderful celerity. A middle-aged woman, this, tall and white-haired, who, at my remark, looked up with a bright smile, but with eyes sombre and weary.