month off. I don't say they're not right. But the women resent
it. '_We're_ not tired!' they say. And you look at them!--they're not
tired.

"If I go down to the shed and say: 'Girls!--there's a bit of work the
Government are pushing for--they say they must have--can you get it done?'
Why, they'll stay and get it done, and then pour out of the works,
laughing and singing. I can tell you of a surgical-dressing factory near
here, where for nearly a year the women never had a holiday. They simply
wouldn't take one. 'And what'll our men at the front do, if we go
holiday-making?'

"Last night" (the night of the Zeppelin raid) "the warning came to put out
lights. We daren't send them home. They sat in the dark among the
machines, singing, 'Keep the home fires burning,' 'Tipperary,' and the
like. I tell you, it made one a bit choky to hear them. They were thinking
of their sweethearts and husbands I'll be bound!--not of themselves."

In another minute or two we were walking through the new workshops. Often
as I have now seen this sight, so new to England, of a great engineering
workshop filled with women, it stirs me at the twentieth time little less
than it did at first. These girls and women of the Midlands and the north,
are a young and comely race. Their slight or rounded figures among the
forest of machines, the fair or golden hair of so many of them, their
grace of movement, bring a strange touch of beauty into a scene which has
already its own spell.

Muirhead Bone and Joseph Pennell have shown us what can be done in art
with these high workshops, with their intricate distances and the endless
crisscross of their belting, and their ranged machines. But the coming in
of the girls, in their close khaki caps and overalls, showing the many
pretty heads and slender necks, and the rows of light bending forms,
spaced in order beside their furnaces or lathes as far as the eye can
reach, has added a new element--something flower-like, to all this flash
of fire and steel, and to the grimness of war underlying it.

For the final meaning of it all is neither soft nor feminine! These
girls--at hot haste--are making fuses and cartridge-cases by the hundred
thousand, casting, pressing, drawing, and, in the special
danger-buildings, filling certain parts of the fuse with explosive. There
were about 4,000 of them to 5,000 men, when I saw the shop, and their
number has no doubt increased since; for the latest figures show that
abou