fuse factory we pass through the high-explosive factory, where
250 girls are at work in a number of isolated wooden sheds filling
18-pounder shell with high explosive. The brass cartridge-case is being
filled with cordite, bundles of what look like thin brown sticks, and the
shell itself, including its central gaine or tube, with the various deadly
explosives we have seen prepared in the "danger buildings." The shell is
fitted into the cartridge-case, the primer and the fuse screwed on. It is
now ready to be fired.

I stand and look at boxes of shells, packed, and about to go straight to
the front. A train is waiting close by to take them the first stage on
their journey. I little thought then that I should see these boxes, or
their fellows, next, on the endless ranks of ammunition lorries behind the
fighting lines in France, and that within a fortnight I should myself
stand by and see one of those shells fired from a British gun, little more
than a mile from Neuve Chapelle.

But here are the women and girls trooping out to dinner. A sweet-faced
Superintendent comes to talk to me. "They are not as strong as the men,"
she says, pointing to the long lines of girls, "but what they lack in
strength they make up in patriotic spirit." I speak to two educated women,
who turn out to be High School mistresses from a town that has been
several times visited by Zeppelins. "We just felt we must come and help to
kill Germans," they say quietly. "All we mind is getting up at five-thirty
every morning. Oh, no! it is not too tiring."

Afterwards?--I remember one long procession of stately shops, with their
high windows, their floors crowded with machines, their roofs lined with
cranes, the flame of the forges, and the smoke of the fizzling steel
lighting up the dark groups of men, the huge howitzer shells, red-hot,
swinging in mid-air, and the same shells, tamed and gleaming, on the great
lathes that rough and bore and finish them. Here are shell for the _Queen
Elizabeth_ guns!--the biggest shell made. This shop had been put up by
good luck just as the war began. Its output of steel has increased from
80 tons a week to 1,040.

Then another huge fuse shop, quite new, where 1,400 girls in one shift are
at work--said to be the largest fuse shop known. And on the following
morning, an endless spectacle of war work--gun-carriages, naval turrets,
torpedo tubes, armed railway carriages, small Hotchkiss guns for merchant
ships, tool-making