I have beheld miles of workshops that stand where grass grew two short years ago, wherein are bright-eyed English girls, Irish colleens and Scots lassies by the ten thousand, whose dexterous fingers flash nimbly to and fro, slender fingers, yet fingers contriving death. I have wandered through a wilderness of whirring driving-belts and humming wheels where men and women, with the same feverish activity, bend above machines whose very hum sang to me of death while I have watched a cartridge grow from a disc of metal to the hellish contrivance it is.
And as I watched the busy scene it seemed an unnatural and awful thing that women's hands should be busied thus, fashioning means for the maiming and destruction of life--until, in a remote corner, I paused to watch a woman whose dexterous fingers were fitting finished cartridges into clips with wonderful celerity. A middle-aged woman, this, tall and white-haired, who, at my remark, looked up with a bright smile, but with eyes sombre and weary.
"Yes, sir," she answered above the roar of machinery, "I had two boys at the front, but--they're a-laying out there somewhere, killed by the same shell. I've got a photo of their graves--very neat they look, though bare, and I'll never be able to go and tend 'em, y'see--nor lay a few flowers on 'em. So I'm doin' this instead--to help the other lads. Yes, sir, my boys did their bit, and now they're gone their mother's tryin' to do hers."
Thus I stood and talked with this sad-eyed white-haired woman who had cast off selfish grief to aid the Empire, and in her I saluted the spirit of noble motherhood ere I turned and went my way.
But now I woke to the fact that my companions had vanished utterly; lost, but nothing abashed, I rambled on between long alleys of clattering machines, which in their many functions seemed in themselves almost human, pausing now and then to watch and wonder and exchange a word with one or other of the many workers, until a kindly works-manager found me and led me unerringly through that riotous jungle of machinery.
He brought me by devious ways to a place he called "holy ground"--long, low outbuildings approached by narrow, wooden causeways, swept and re-swept by men shod in felt--a place this, where no dust or grit might be, for here was the magazine, with the filling sheds beyond. And within these long sheds, each seated behind a screen, were women who handled and cut deadly cordite into needful lengths as if it had been so much ribbon, and always and everywhere the same dexterous speed.