shells, with bombs, rifles, and machine-guns.
The old ways were laid aside, old distinctions of class and sex
forgotten, and all worked with a common and indomitable will for the
saving of the country.

To give a single instance, what was a few months ago a smiling pasture is
now found covered with vast buildings, in which these manufactures are
carried on by thirty-five hundred working people, of whom a large
proportion are women. I love to quote a single sentence from the utterance
of her companion on a visit to this establishment: "As to the women, they
are saving the country. They don't mind what they do. Hours? They work ten
and a half, or, with overtime, twelve hours a day, seven days a week. The
Government are insisting on one Sunday, or two Sundays a month off. I
don't say they aren't right, but the women resent it. 'We're not tired,'
they say. And look at them! They are not tired."

This unheard-of spectacle of great engineering establishments filled with
women, all hard at work, is a sure proof of the undying purpose of the
whole English race. They are mostly young and comely, and their beauty of
form and feature is only enhanced by their enthusiasm for their labors,
and at the same time it has increased the ardor and intensity of their
fellow workmen. Mrs. Ward found four thousand women to five thousand men
engaged in this nation-saving labor, in a single establishment. They know
that they are setting the skilled laborers free for work which women
cannot do, and the unskilled in large numbers free for the army.

Every building, as well as every man and woman, that could be put to the
work, has been availed of, and the results have been incredible. Another
instance she gives of special interest: "An old warehouse, bought, so to
speak, overnight, and equipped next morning, has been turned into a small
workshop for shell production, employing between three and four hundred
girls with the number of skilled men necessary to keep the new unskilled
labor going. These girls are working on the eight-hours' shift system;
working so well that a not uncommon wage among them, on piece-work, of
course, runs to somewhere between two and three pounds a week," and all
the time they are at work they remember that they are doing common service
with their husbands, and sweethearts, and sons, and brothers, who are
perilling their lives in the trenches.

None of this distinguished writer's romances compare in vivid description