The War on All Fronts: Englands Effort | Page 2

attack, but except for the fleet and her little expeditionary force, England had neither men nor equipment equal to the fighting of a great Continental war.
The wholly unexpected news of the invasion of Belgium aroused the whole country to realize that war on a scale never known before had come, and, as the firing upon Fort Sumter awakened America, convinced England that she must fight to the death for her liberties, unready as she was;--but Mr. Balfour, the First Lord of the Admiralty, says that, since the war began, she has added one million to the tonnage of her navy, and has doubled its personnel, and is adding more every day.
In the matter of munitions the story that Mrs. Ward tells is wonderful, almost beyond belief. Much had been done in the first eight months of the war, in the building of munition shops, and the ordering of vast quantities from abroad, before the second battle of Ypres, in April, 1915, which led to the formation of the new Coalition Ministry, including a wholly new department, the Ministry of Munitions, with Mr. Lloyd George at its head.
From that time to this the work has been colossal, and almost incredible, and without serious collision with the working classes. Vast new buildings have been erected all over England, and a huge staff, running into thousands, set in action. The new Minister has set out with determination to get the thing done at whatever cost, and to remove all obstacles that he found in his way. The Government has absolutely taken control of the whole work of the creation of munitions and the regulation of workmen, employed in it by whatever employers, and everything and everybody has had to submit to his imperious will, and the greatest change of all has been the employment of women on a vast scale to do the work that only men had ever done before. France had set about it immediately after the battle of the Marne, and allowed no Frenchman to remain idle who could do such work.
Mrs. Ward does not fail to do full justice to the working men of Great Britain, and shows that besides the hundreds of thousands that they have sent to the fighting line, a million and a half remained at work in the shops, creating munitions with the aid of skilled experts and the astonishing help of the women, who never before had expected to have anything to do with guns and shells, with bombs, rifles, and machine-guns. The old ways were laid aside, old distinctions of class and sex forgotten, and all worked with a common and indomitable will for the saving of the country.
To give a single instance, what was a few months ago a smiling pasture is now found covered with vast buildings, in which these manufactures are carried on by thirty-five hundred working people, of whom a large proportion are women. I love to quote a single sentence from the utterance of her companion on a visit to this establishment: "As to the women, they are saving the country. They don't mind what they do. Hours? They work ten and a half, or, with overtime, twelve hours a day, seven days a week. The Government are insisting on one Sunday, or two Sundays a month off. I don't say they aren't right, but the women resent it. 'We're not tired,' they say. And look at them! They are not tired."
This unheard-of spectacle of great engineering establishments filled with women, all hard at work, is a sure proof of the undying purpose of the whole English race. They are mostly young and comely, and their beauty of form and feature is only enhanced by their enthusiasm for their labors, and at the same time it has increased the ardor and intensity of their fellow workmen. Mrs. Ward found four thousand women to five thousand men engaged in this nation-saving labor, in a single establishment. They know that they are setting the skilled laborers free for work which women cannot do, and the unskilled in large numbers free for the army.
Every building, as well as every man and woman, that could be put to the work, has been availed of, and the results have been incredible. Another instance she gives of special interest: "An old warehouse, bought, so to speak, overnight, and equipped next morning, has been turned into a small workshop for shell production, employing between three and four hundred girls with the number of skilled men necessary to keep the new unskilled labor going. These girls are working on the eight-hours' shift system; working so well that a not uncommon wage among them, on piece-work, of course, runs to somewhere between two and three pounds a week," and all the time they are at work they