say: "Yes, we are all in it!--we know very
well what _we_ are doing, and what a difference we are making. Go
and tell our boys ..."

The interest of this workshop lay, of course, in the fact that it was a
sample of innumerable others, as quickly organised and as efficiently
worked, now spreading over the Midlands and the north. As to the main
works belonging to the same great firm, such things have been often
described; but one sees them to-day with new eyes, as part of a struggle
which is one with the very life of England. Acres and acres of ground
covered by huge workshops new and old, by interlacing railway lines and
moving trolleys. Gone is all the vast miscellaneous engineering work of
peace. The war has swallowed everything.

I have a vision of a great building, where huge naval guns are being
lowered from the annealing furnace above into the hardening oil-tank
below, or where in the depths of a great pit, with lights and men moving
at the bottom, I see as I stoop over the edge, a jacket being shrunk upon
another similar monster, hanging perpendicularly below me.

Close by are the forging-shops whence come the howitzers and the huge
naval shells. Watch the giant pincers that lift the red-hot ingots and
drop them into the stamping presses. Man directs; but one might think the
tools themselves intelligent, like those golden automata of old that
Hephaestus made, to run and wait upon the gods of Olympus. Down drops the
punch. There is a burst of flame, as though the molten steel rebelled, and
out comes the shell or the howitzer in the rough, nosed and hollowed, and
ready for the turning.

The men here are great, powerful fellows, blanched with heat and labour;
amid the flame and smoke of the forges one sees them as typical figures in
the national struggle, linked to those Dreadnoughts in the North Sea, and
to those lines in Flanders and Picardy where Britain holds her enemy at
bay. Everywhere the same intensity of effort, whether in the men or in
those directing them. And what delicate and responsible processes!

In the next shop, with its rows of shining guns, I stop to look at a great
gun apparently turning itself. No workman is visible for the moment. The
process goes on automatically, the bright steel emerging under the tool
that here, too, seems alive. Close to it is a man winding steel wire, or
rather braid, on a 15-inch gun; beyond again there are workmen and
inspectors testing and gauging another similar g