There are to be thousands of hands employed on each shift--the works will be run on the night-and-day plan that appears to be the regular rule in munition works now--and the first of them were to start inside a month from the time I was there. If I hadn’t had the evidence of the many finished buildings, and the vast amount of completed work there before my eyes, I should have doubted the possibility of that early start. There seemed such an impossible amount still to do. Running out from the railway ran a long, box-built passageway straddling above ground on criss-cross piles and scaffolding, breaking off raggedly and abruptly in mid-air. Beyond this there is to be a large room for the explosives workers to change and dress, but this room was then no more than the surveyor’s markings on the ground. The site of the engine-room was a wide and deep hole walled round with close-set, stout, water-tight planking and bottomed with unpleasant mud. Altogether it looked about as hopeless a task as one could find to get such a raw welter running in any completed part for many, many months; and yet, having seen the outcome of the previous fifty working days, having met and talked with some of the hard-headed, warm-blooded, live-wire men who are running the job, I have not the faintest doubt but that their plans have worked out, that by the time this is in print the work will have begun.[1]
Once more it is the managers, the engineers, the contractors, the business brains and energy of these and the local Munitions Committee that have played the part of modern wizards and magicians, that are turning an aching, empty desolation of waste land into a spick-and-span bustling works. Here, again, difficulties have been met only to be overcome promptly and efficiently--and if you saw the ankle-deep, rutted mud, the water-tight, plank-sided box that had to be sunk a good ten feet to find foundations for the engine-room bed, the crane-engine overtilted and sunk in the mud where the unstable soil had yielded to the platform piles, sank lop-sidedly, and left the engine to slide gently overboard--if you saw these and many other things, you would begin to appreciate some of the difficulties. But, after all, there they are--a Master Job and many mastered jobs. And every week that passes brings more of them to completion and nearer to completion, nearer to the day we wait when no effort of the Front can outrun the efforts of the war works.