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.

"Yes, sir," she answered above the