nd stopped by shortage of
gun and shell!

By whom has this result been brought about? By that army of British
workmen--and workwomen--which Mr. Lloyd George in little more than one
short year has mobilised throughout the country. The Ministry of Munitions
is now employing _three millions and a half of workers_--(a year ago it
was not much more than a million and a half)--of whom 400,000 _are
women_; and the staff of the Ministry has grown from 3,000--the figure
given in my earlier letters--to 5,000, just as that army of women, which
has sprung as it were out of the earth at the call of the nation, has
almost doubled since I wrote in April last. Well may the new Minister say
that our toilers in factory and forge have had some share in the glorious
recent victories of Russia, Italy, and France! Our men and our women have
contributed to the re-equipment of those gallant armies of Russia, which,
a month or six weeks earlier than they were expected to move, have broken
up the Austrian front, and will soon be once more in Western Poland,
perhaps in East Prussia! The Italian Army has drawn from our workshops and
learnt from our experiments. The Serbian Army has been re-formed and
re-fitted.

Let us sum up. The Germans, with years of preparation behind them, made
this war a war of machines. England, in that as in other matters, was
taken by surprise. But our old and proud nation, which for generations
led the machine industry of the world, as soon as it realised the
challenge--and we were slow to realise it!--met it with an impatient and a
fierce energy which is every month attaining a greater momentum and a more
wonderful result. The apparently endless supply of munitions which now
feeds the British front, and the _comparative_ lightness of the human cost
at which the incredibly strong network of the German trenches on their
whole first line system was battered into ruin, during the last days of
June and the first days of July, 1916:--it is to effects like these that
all that vast industrial effort throughout Great Britain, of which I saw
and described a fragment three months ago, has now steadily and
irresistibly brought us.

II

This then is perhaps the first point to notice in the landscape of the
war, as we look back on the last three months. For on it everything else,
Naval and Military, depends:--on the incredibly heightened output of
British workshops, in all branches of war material, which has been
attained sinc