witzer work, was started in August last, on a
site "which was a bog with a burn running through it." Soon "every foot of
space will be filled with machines, and there will be 1,200 people at work
here, including 400 women. In the next shop we are turning out about 4,000
shrapnel and 4,000 high-explosive shells per week. When we started women
on what we thought this heavy shell, we provided men to help lift the
shell in and out of the machines. The women thrust the men aside in five
minutes."

Later on, as I was passing through a series of new workshops occupied with
all kinds of army work and employing large numbers of women, I stopped to
speak to a Belgian woman. "Have you ever done any machine work before?"
"No, Madame, never--_Mais, c'est la guerre. Il faut tuer les Allemands_!"
It was a quiet, passionless voice. But one thought, with a shiver, of
those names of eternal infamy--of Termonde, Aerschot, Dinant, Louvain.

It was with this woman's words in my ears that I set out on my last
visit--to which they were the fitting prelude. The afternoon was darkening
fast. The motor sped down a river valley, sodden with rain and melting
snow, and after some miles we turn into a half-made road, leading to some
new buildings, and a desolate space beyond. A sentry challenges us, and we
produce our permit. Then we dismount, and I look out upon a wide stretch
of what three months ago was swamp, or wet plough land. Now its 250 acres
are enclosed with barbed wire, and patrolled by sentries night and day. A
number of small buildings, workshops, stores, etc., are rising all over
it. I am looking at what is to be the great "filling" factory of the
district, where 9,000 women, in addition to male workmen, will soon be
employed in charging the shell coming from the new shell factories we have
left behind in the darkness.

Strange and tragic scene! Strange uprising of women!

We regain the motor and speed onwards, my secretary and I, through unknown
roads far away from the city and its factories towards the country house
where we are to spend the night. In my memory there surge a thousand
recollections of all that I have seen in the preceding fortnight. An
England roused at last--rushing to factory, and lathe, to shipyard and
forge, determined to meet and dominate her terrible enemy in the workshop,
as she has long since met and dominated him at sea, and will in time
dominate him on land--that is how my country looks to me to-night.