IV
SHELLS AND MORE SHELLS
It would be impossible for me to describe in detail all the factories I was able to see, but in many of them I gleaned particulars which show plainly the way that war work is being pushed through. I suppose that if there is any one branch of munitions which the Front wants to hear about it is the output of shells. Shells and guns count for so much nowadays, a devastating artillery fire so eases the work of the attack, a heavier opposing fire is so appallingly destructive to an advance, the whole moral and physical effect of a superior artillery is so great, that I know well how very welcome a word it will be to the Front that shells of every size, weight, and calibre are pouring out from the factories in a stream already tremendous, but not yet nearly at its full volume.
One of the most inspiriting sights I saw on my tour was in the foundry of a shell factory where the rough forgings were being put through the first stages of their progress to completed six- and eight-inch shells. The foundry was a vast place, with chinks of vivid light glowing through the row of furnace-doors and lighting the hot gloom, the vaporous film of smoke and steam, the bulky machinery looming dimly through the half-dark, the hurrying figures of the workmen. A furnace-door slams open, and a burst of glaring light glows fiercely over the shop; long irons plunge into the flaming gap, and poke and prod and hook hastily about the fire; a lump of glowing steel rolls out, tips over, and thumps down on the inclined floor in front of the furnace. There is a babel of yells, the rush of flying feet, the clatter of a truck-barrow, and the red-hot billet of metal is pounced upon, snatched, and twisted on to the hand truck, rushed to where men wait its coming grouped about a lumbering press whose massive bulk towers aloft into the misty gloom. The hot metal is clutched and jerked into position under the heavy punch, and instantly the machine, with a gigantic hissing sigh, moves and thrusts downward a smooth-moving but irresistible punch. A gush of flame and burst of thick black smoke leaps upward and vanishes swiftly, the punch presses home, stops, reverses, pulls up and out again. The machine breathes another steamy sigh, twists the first punch aside, poises another an instant over the red, glowing metal, and again thrusts, plunging down upon it. One after another the full set of punches take their turn and squeeze and press their shape upon the plastic steel. Then the last punch draws out, and two men jabbing with long levers hook out the metal, still glowing hot but transformed in these few seconds from a rough round block to a hollow cylinder; chained pincers grab the cylinder and swing it rapidly to the drawing-press, where the tough steel is pulled out like putty and drawn to its required size. When it has worked its will the drawing-press disgorges the cylinder, cooled now to a deeper hot rose-red, tumbles it out on the floor, and waits ready for its next mouthful, while men trundle and roll the hot cylinder across the floor to rest and cool beside the long row that lies fading off from rose to blood-red, to darker and duller crimson, and through deeper and darker shades to cold grey and black. And as the punches were jabbing at the one hot billet another was falling from the furnace, and another was being worked in the draw-press, or rolling from it rapidly across the floor to the cooling place. Several gangs of men, several punches and presses, were all working at a top pressure of speed; the foundry was filled with the roar and rumbling and hissing sighs of the machinery, the clatter of trucks, and clank of levers and chains and pincers, the thump and thud and roll of the falling and moving billets, and every now and then the outburst and clamour of shouting voices, the swift rush of hurrying feet. The opening and closing doors of the furnaces, the fierce glow of the fires, and the white- or red-hot steel billets, the spouting gush of flames and sparks from the first thrust of the punches, threw in turn a mantle of searing golden light, of radiant orange, of dusky red, on the gleaming machinery, the running figures of the men, their thrusting and pulling arms, heaving, jerking shoulders, wet, glistening faces, shining, white-glinting eyes and teeth. The foundry was palpitating and alive, humming and trembling, panting and quivering, with savage, incessant haste, with sweating, driving energy, with a splendid and ordered virility. It did one’s heart good to stand there and watch billet after billet thud down from the furnace to the floor, to see the giant machinery beat and squeeze them into shape, to hear the calling and shouting, to sense the stir, the whirling rush and drive of the work. And “drive” was the key-word of the whole factory, as I found it is of most munition factories. Here, again, the manager who showed me round was most openly anxious to get the last possible ounce of output from his plant, and to add and add and keep on adding to plant and output. Every process of the work is under constant scrutiny, and every possible time- or labour-saving device has only to be tried and proved to be instantly adopted. Here I was shown under construction a new plant for cleaning out the finished shell; there a newly installed arrangement for the quick and even painting of the shells by air-brush spray; everywhere throughout the works similar dodges for cutting down the time and labour, for speeding up the output. And always remember that in war work cutting down time and labour does not, most emphatically does not, mean reducing the working hours or the number of hands. It only means finding time for more work, freeing hands to turn on to more work again. Anything that will save skilled labour especially, will allow the experienced engineers to “go round” a little better, spread over the unskilled hands a little more, is hailed as a godsend. In this particular factory there are 2,000 hands – I should say were, because that is some weeks ago now, and many changes come in a few weeks’ munition work these days – 2,000 hands, and of these there were only sixty men who were engineers, were skilled men. I asked what was the proportion amongst those men I had watched grabbing and slinging about the white-hot billets, handling them and the huge power machines so smoothly and skilfully. “Those,” said the manager simply, “were all unskilled no more than a matter of months ago. Milkmen, and market gardeners, and carters, and all sorts they were, red-raw new to the job, and never inside a shop or handled a tool till they came in here.” It seemed incredible, but I found plenty of similar instances since, and the munitions engineer who was going round with me assured me these things are the rule rather than the exception. So apparently war work is not only making shell factories out of sewing-machine and tobacco works, munition contractors out of enamel-button makers, munition machines from bicycle- and clock-factory lathes, but is also manufacturing as a by-product engineers and mechanics from milkmen and all sorts of similar unlikely material. This manager had the same old story to tell of increasing plant and hands and output. I stumbled over a litter of planks and bricks and mortar and building material outside this factory, just as I have outside many others, and saw the half-built furnaces and half-laid concrete engine-beds, and listened to the tally of the work under construction and the machines on order or delivery, and the increase of output that would result. This factory is doing six- and eight-inch shells mainly, but the same increased-output programme belongs to every other make in every shell factory I saw. One place is almost ready to commence delivery of some hundreds of twelve-inch shells per week as a new addition to their present output of many thousands of eight-inch shells and forgings of six-inch shells per week, as well as completing a portion of the six-inch. I saw at this place piles of new lathes and motors waiting to be erected, and saw the new shops that have used up 4,000 additional new hands.
Another factory commenced building a six-acre shell factory in June, is now employing 1,600 hands, and increasing them to 2,500 as quickly as possible. At another place the present factory, covering many acres, crammed to the doorstep with machinery and workers, stands on a site which before the war was an open green field. Now it employs 6,500 hands and is adding about 200 hands a week. Yet another place was an empty and idle building in July – in all these months mentioned I refer to the year 1915 – but now it is turning out 5,000 shells a week, and it is to reach 20,000 a week within the next few months. All these are merely instances, picked at random from my notes. I could multiply them, and in every district I visited the local Munitions office could, if they were permitted, have given me figures and dates of this kind almost without end.
Before I finish this chapter I must pass along a message that the workers at a certain national shell factory gave me for the men at the Front. I had been telling the general manager how good it was to see the stacks of shells, the ceaseless flood that was running through the works, to hear all he had been telling me of the progress made, and still more of the further progress to be made, and I was led on to tell him something of the heart-breaking shortage of shells we had known a year ago, the punishment the troops had suffered again and again from the heavy artillery fire of the Germans, and the slow and grudging reply that was all we could make. The manager asked me would I talk to some of their shop foremen and tell them what a shortage of shells meant to the Front. So he called in about a score or more of his men and I just talked to them, and told them how the Front was hanging on the efforts of the war-workers at home. I told them of that winter in the trenches, of the hopes we had held to of plenteous supplies of shells in the spring, of the blow it was to us to hear of as great a shortage as ever, and, still worse, of the squabbling amongst munition workers and their haggling over 8d. or 8½ d. an hour pay, or Saturday half-holidays, or double overtime for Sunday, while the men in the trenches suffered a hell of shell-fire, and soaked in knee-deep gutters, and lost their limbs and lives from frost-bite, and put in six- or sixteen-day spells, as need be, with no half-holiday and a shilling a day pay for time and overtime. Maybe there was no special point in my telling these particular things to these particular men, because, as their manager assured me, that factory was doing and always had done its level best, and there had been no friction or slacking whatever in any department. But anyhow I told them, and I told them the Front was hoping again for a flood of unlimited shells this spring, for the essential wherewithal to break the lock-fast lines in the West, for the munitions that would at last give us a fair fighting chance – the more than which we don’t want, and don’t need, to give us victory. And the men heard me out, and after I came away it appears that these foremen and charge hands went back to their shops and told their men what I had said, and by and by their manager sent me a resolution and a pledge they had passed and signed. When I think of the ring of earnest faces that surrounded me as I talked, of the group of figures in their oil-stained overalls in the office built over the workshop where the lathes and hammers and punches and presses around and underneath us sang their ceaseless song of Shells and Shells and more Shells, I feel that this is a resolution to be fulfilled to the hilt, a pledge to be carried out to the last shrapnel bullet. And here I give you their message, leaving out only the name of the factory and the names signed at the end: —
“Dear Sir, – We, the managers, foremen, and charge hands of the above factory, who listened with grave interest and concern to your description of our brave lads fighting in France and Flanders, and the hardships they have to endure, due in lots of cases to lack of shell, desire to place on record our thanks to you (who have been through the mill) for putting the matter so clearly before us. We also pledge ourselves, and desire you to inform our lads at the Front, that, so far as we are concerned at the – National Munitions Factory, we are working diligently, harmoniously, and sticking it, and will continue to stick it, with the one object of getting out of the above factory Every Possible Shell. We trust that our rapidly increasing output in shell will help to fill those empty limbers you mentioned so feelingly in your remarks. – With kind regards, we are, dear Sir, yours very sincerely.”
That, I know, is the heartening sort of message you want to hear out Front, and it expresses, only more clearly and emphatically, what I have heard from other shell-makers throughout the Kingdom. “Every possible shell!” Think what it means, you at the Front. And you think of it too, Fritz Boche.