But it is not only in the large new or extended factories that the Ministry of Munitions is doing good work; in fact, I have heard it said that this is the easiest and simplest side of the colossal task. The difficult and intricate part has been the organising of the small business and plants, the converting of all sorts of weird manufacturings into munition-making. I had innumerable instances of this before me wherever I went, but the whole idea was in a fashion epitomised in a drive I was making from one large factory to another. One of the Ministry’s engineers was with me showing me round. Like all his fellows that I met, he was desperately keen on the work, and because I was evidently anxious to hear and to learn he talked munitions without ceasing and poured enough facts and figures over me to stun a census collector. Our car moved on the wet roads at a pace that was just over or under the edge of the safety limit – I discovered afterwards that this is a habit with the drivers of the Ministry cars, and one driver to whom I dropped a casual remark about fast driving explained the habit. “These munition gents I drive never has but the one word for me,” he said, “an’ that’s ‘Hurry up!’” My engineer companion was in the midst of a staggering estimate of the rate at which his district’s output was growing when the car swung dizzily round a sharp corner, braked hard, and slid guttering under the tail-board of a huge lorry that lumbered along in the middle of the road. There was a tarpaulin over the wagon, but at the tail of it I caught sight of something that reminded me of long lines of men staggering with heavy burdens into the back-door trenches at Loos.
The car jerked out from behind the wagon, dodged into a gap in the reverse traffic, swooped past, and fled squattering down the wet road. “That’s the factory, over there,” said the engineer, pointing, “and that chimney-stack beside it is the Blank Tobacco Factory. They’re doing shells there now.” I expressed some wonder that tobacco manufacture could by any wizardry be converted to shell-making. “Bless you,” the engineer chuckled, “that’s nothing. I can show you queerer changes than that. You see, our great trouble is to get machines enough and men enough to handle ’em. Shows like motor works and boilermakers were dead easy and obvious, and they were scooped in the first snap. Then later – quick, look down this lane – at the end!” The car swooped past, and I had one glimpse, as the lane-entrance opened and shut to our passing, of a dingy, grey vista gleaming with wet puddles and with a couple of lorries blocking the far end. “That,” said the engineer, “is the X Y Z Gramophone works. They’re shell-fuses now.” And so as the car buzzed fiercely down straight stretches, or banked steeply and swung skidding and lurching round greasy corners, or checked sharply and crawled hooting hoarsely and impatiently at impeding carts, the engineer discoursed at length on the conversion of this manufactory or that to munitions, and pointed out a late magneto-maker’s, or a piano factory, or a coach-builder’s, describing their past operations and summing up their conversion with “Now they’re pineapple bombs,” or “They’re rifle-stocks,” or “They’re aeroplane frames.” I asked him if these firms volunteered for munition work. “Some of them,” he said; “but others never dreamed there was any war work they could adapt themselves to.” I thought of the tobacco factory and concluded it was small wonder some didn’t dream of it. “But I will say,” went on the engineer, “as a rule they only want showing, or a hint of a showing, and they get as keen as mustard on it. There was the Rollero Duplicator now. You know what a duplicator is? Thing for printing copies off a typed stencil sheet. Well, they turned over to – ” and away he went on another magic-wand conversion tale.
And that is the sort of thing I have been meeting throughout the length and breadth of Great Britain. It isn’t only the big firms and factories that are on War work. The little fellows are doing their bit just as energetically, and if each of their shares is small it must bulk considerably in the total; and many of them, by devoting all their energy to certain screws or cups or cones, are able to free the large makers of this small work, and leave them to handle other parts and use up the fitments turned in to them. Every scrap of work turned out by every firm or factory is done to gauge, and a screw made in a back room in Bermondsey and another turned at Clydebank will fill and fit a screw-hole bored in a Birmingham shop just as exactly as if the one man or machine had made the lot. But the gauging work is quite a pretty story in itself, though I must leave out its telling in the meantime.
III
SUBLIME TO THE – SUBLIME!
The car had run into the closer traffic of the town, and the engineer was still pointing out various works that had been converted from all trades under the sun to the one and only that counts to-day, when he dropped a remark that roused a fresh current of curiosity. “It isn’t only regular business firms that are in on this game, you know,” he said. “There’s a good story I must get the Eastern district man to tell you, about an old-clo’ Jew that wanted to switch his jet-bead machines or something and his horribly sweated bonnet-makers on to war work. He’d have taken on any contract he could grab too, from 15-inch shells downwards. But the day’s long past when a man can hook a contract on the gamble of sub-contracting it out, so our Jew misfired that lot. I rather fancy his bonnet hands are button-holing cartridge-belts or something now, though. But clothing and kit isn’t my line, and I don’t know the details, and I’ve plenty of queer conversion cases inside my own job. There’s one little place I have now would tickle you. The factory is a top back bedroom in a little side street, the machinery is one knock-kneed, rheumaticky lathe, and the factory staff is one old man, although, between ourselves, I believe his old missus takes a turn and keeps the lathe running while he’s asleep. The room isn’t big enough to hold the lathe and the length of brass rod that feeds into it and turns into a fuse-part, so they’ve knocked a hole in the wall and the brass rod sticks out through it and works in again through the lathe an inch at a time. Then there’s another little place something after the same style to begin with, but growing a lathe at a time. It’s just down the street here, and we pass it presently.”
And presently, at my request, the car slowed, sidled cross-traffic, and halted outside the door of an ordinary, rather dingy-looking street-door. When we rang and were admitted we squeezed past the packing-cases that filled the narrow “hall,” climbed a steep stair, and were shown into a parlour that might have been transplanted bodily from a Bloomsbury boarding-house. Anything less promising of munition work it would be hard to find, but presently the manager-owner-engineer came along and fetched us to “the works.” He was mighty proud of those same works, and small blame to him. He had started with a single lathe and now here he had half a dozen running off the power of a tiny engine tucked away in the corner. The lathes had been purchased one at a time as each earned the first instalment to pay for the next, the Ministry encouraging and helping the effort substantially. Now the lathes were hard at work, packed so close that one had to twist sideways to move between them, and bright little scraps of polished metal ranged in rows gave proof of the capability of men and machines and of the organisation and energy that are running through the tiniest of Industry’s veins and are going to beat Germany’s greatest efforts in the long run. In an empty lumber-room upstairs we were shown a complicated and ingenious machine that represented the former employment of the owner; and pushed away in a corner, dusty and dull and tarnished, neglected and forgotten, were pieces of the work the machine had been turning out, work which had been dropped completely, and, more than that, which represented a trade and a connection, long and slow in the up-building perhaps, which also had been dropped completely. Here were buttons and belt-clasps and trinkets of silver and enamel and dainty cloisonné work, glowing with all the radiant colours of the rainbow, flecked with inset gleaming gold and delicate silver sprays and tendrils. “Eastern trade mostly,” said the proprietor, “India and Egypt and Turkey and so on. The natives like ’em, I suppose.”
Natives – yes. But instantly visions came back to me of Arabs chaffering on the deck at Port Said, of the dark and scented interior of a Japanese shop in Singapore, of a native pedlar squatted in the hot sun before the hotel veranda in Sourabaya, and the assurance of the seller, shrill and emphatic to the questioning tourists, “Native work, sah! Re-al native work!” And here in a back attic in England – I daresay the proprietor wondered why I grinned at his pretty trinkets and his big machine.
And then as we clumped down the stairs and into the street again the engineer made a remark that I must go back a little to make understandable. “Rather a case of ‘the sublime to the ridiculous,’ isn’t it?” he said, and in that he was referring to the works we had been over that morning and had just left. I had been shown these as a good sample of what a “converted” works could do. In pre-War days the firm were makers of a certain part of railway locomotives. They were entirely specialists in this work, and employed many specialist hands and a vast amount of specialist machinery on it. But now the whole of their locomotive work has been set aside, and the whole energy of the shops is turned on to war work. Some of the old machines, lathes, and so on had been ingeniously adapted by the making and fitting of new tools to their new work, and other new munition machinery has been introduced wholesale. We walked through huge rooms filled with heavy lathes, grinding, scraping, and screaming on the boring and turning of blocks of steel that were growing swiftly under our eyes to the familiar shape and semblance of shells. We followed the rough steel billets through all their processes, the shaping and smoothing of outside and inside, the grooving of the base to take the copper driving band, the cunning scoring out of a “wave line” in the groove, the fitting on of the copper band and its clutching in a giant steel-fingered closing and opening hand that squeezed the copper inexorably into its place and tightly into the “wave line,” there to grip and prevent it slipping under the terrific wrench and spin the rifled gun would give it. This “banding press” was a new machine just installed and putting through its first shells while we were there. It was merely another word in the same story I have heard throughout the munition works. “It will speed up the output a good deal,” said the manager complacently as we watched. “We’ll be doing another so-and-so per cent. when it’s running.” In another vast chamber we saw “pineapple bombs” or hand grenades being made – “pineapple” being a neat description of the shape and criss-cross pattern of lines marking the segments into which the grenade bursts. In the foundry the floor was covered with rows upon rows of square-shaped, dark-grey boxes, and with other square boxes bearing what looked like the impressions of small dumb-bells. Men were busy about these boxes, the moulds for the casting of the bombs, and at one end of the room other men were tapping and prodding at an up-ended boiler-looking arrangement. From this, when the clay stopper had been knocked out, a jet of molten metal shot in a glowing, pinky-red stream running like water from a tap into the heavy bucket in place to receive it. When the bucket filled, a fresh plug of clay stopped off the stream, and instantly the bucket swung off, swaying in the grasp of chains and hooks that ran on overhead rails to the waiting moulds. The bucket checked and tilted at each mould and the liquid metal poured smoothly into its appointed place until the bucket was empty. After the rooms where the lathes rumbled and roared, and the riven steel grated and squealed under the cutting tools, and the hammers jarred and pounded incessantly, this foundry was strangely un-noisy; but here, as in all the other rooms, there was the same sense of bustle, of rush, of speed, of driving the work; and the spurting jet of hot metal, the glow of the furnace, the dull roar of the fire, the hoarse blowing of air through a nozzle where the moulds were being blown clear and clean of dust and sand, the clink and rattle of tools, the movements of the stripped and sweating workers – all gave their own sure impression of haste and activity. “Thirty thousand a day we’re turning out of these,” said the manager, “and we’ll better that presently.” Now, you bombers of the “Suicide Clubs” might note this – 30,000 grenades a day are being turned out by this one firm, a firm which only devotes a part of its work to grenades. This is only one firm out of many I have seen, and very many more, no doubt, I haven’t seen, and one particular make of the many makes you out Front know are being made. Does it give you any realisation of the number of grenades you will be getting presently? I hope so. I hope you will understand and be sure that never again will you be “bombed out” of a captured trench because your supplies of grenades ran out. And I hope Herr Fritz across the way in the front trench also understands and appreciates the prospect.
From the foundry we passed back into the workshops, picking a way round and past and between stacks and piles of shells in every stage of roughness and completeness; we climbed stairs, wandered over many more floors, and many acres of man- and machine-filled rooms, and came at last to one large, empty room. In it there were machines in plenty, but no man or woman. The walls echoed emptily to our steps and voices, the machines were still and silent, dust-covered, dingy, forlorn, and abandoned; and piled in the corners, on and under the benches, anywhere out of the way, were heaps of the locomotive parts on which the firm was once solely engaged. There were many thousands of pounds’ worth of these parts and of machinery standing idle, and one might have expected the sight and the thought of all his own diverted specialist knowledge and experience to have brought sadness and melancholy to the mind of any manager. But here the manager had evidently no regrets and no time to waste on memories. “We couldn’t adapt any of this machinery,” he said lightly, “so we’re going to clear it out, and fill this place up with new shell-making plant.” But, after all, that sentence only summarises the whole scheme of this munition business. The man or the machine that cannot or will not be adapted to war work is ruthlessly cleared out and replaced by man or machine that can. It is to the everlasting credit of the men that so many of their machines have been cleverly adapted, that so few of themselves could not be, and that still fewer – if any – would not.
The factory was knocking off for dinner as we came away, and the car ploughed out through a hurrying crowd at the main gate and down a dividing sea of workers in the road outside.
So now you will understand – to come back to where I broke off at the street-door of the humble workshop of the one-time maker of enamel buttons and “re-al native work” – what was in my engineer’s mind when he made that side remark: “Rather a case of ‘the sublime to the ridiculous,’ isn’t it?”
But it doesn’t altogether strike me that way. After all, the trinket-maker upstairs was “doing his bit” to the best of his ability, just as the manager in the locomotive works was doing his. When you think of it, there is something rather fine in that single-track footy little business cheerfully climbing out of its established groove and plunging off along the new and unknown path of war work. If we take the trinket-maker, and that other old man and his wife with their brass rod sticking out through a hole in the wall, as samples and specimens of the spirit that is animating the Empire and its workers to-day, it is a thing to be mightily and devoutly thankful for. It is not, if you look at it aright – the huge humming locomotive works and the sometime button-maker – any case of “the sublime to the ridiculous.” I am not sure, in fact, that it is not rather The Sublime to the More Sublime.