"Don't worry, sir," said Dawson, "I shall not fail. If it had not been for you and his lordship here, I should not have had this great chance. I won't let you down."
"Sh!" whispered the other. "Not so loud. We are conspirators, strictly incog., dressed in the shabbiest of clothes. We had to see you off, for I enjoyed the tussle of this morning beyond words. I would not for anything have missed the P.M.'s face when he found himself driven to act suddenly and definitely. I am eternally your debtor, Captain Dawson of the Red Marines."
"My word," exclaimed the Colonel-Lieutenant, when the visitors had slipped away like a couple of stage villains, with soft hats pulled down over their eyes--"the Field-Marshal and the First Lord! You have some friends, sir."
"I am only a ranker," said Dawson humbly, "with very temporary stars; not a pukka officer and gentleman like you. I hope that you do not mind sharing' a sleeper with me?"
"I should be proud to share with you the measliest dug-out in a Flanders graveyard," replied the Colonel emphatically. The two officers, so anomalously associated, entered their berth the best of friends and talked together far into the night. And as they talked, the Colonel, now a Lieutenant, made the same discovery which had startled Dawson's two powerful supporters of the morning. In the police officer, rough, half-educated, vain, tender of heart, he also had discovered a Man. "But for me and my Red Marines," said Dawson, as they turned in for some broken sleep, "those poor fools up yonder would get themselves shot in the streets. But I shall save them, and in saving them I shall save the country."
It was the afternoon of the following day, just twenty-four hours after Dawson had commandeered the resources of Chatham, and the scene was a public hall in a big industrial city. In the body of the room sat two hundred and thirty-four men--shop stewards and district trade union officials--and their faces were gloomy and anxious. They had come for a last meeting with the officers of the Munitions Dept, and to declare that the men whom they represented were resolved not to permit of any further dilution of labour. The great majority of them were not unpatriotic, their sons and brothers and friends had joined the Forces, and had already fought and died gallantly, but they were intensely suspicious. To them the "employer," the "capitalist," was a greater, because more enduring and insidious, enemy than the Germans. Dilution of labour had become in their eyes a device for destroying all their hardly won privileges and restrictions, and for delivering them bound and helpless to their "capitalist oppressers." To this sorry pass had the perpetual disputes of peace brought the workmen under stress of war! Rates of pay did not enter into the dispute--never in their lives had they earned such wages--its origin led in a queer perverted sense of loyalty to the trade unions, and to those members who had gone forth to fight. "What will our folks say," asked the men of one another, "when they come home from the war, if we have given away in their absence all that they fought for during long years?" When it was attempted to make clear that the lives of their own sons in the trenches were being made more hazardous by their obstinacy, they shook their heads and simply did not believe. "We can make all the guns and the shells that are wanted without giving up our rules. We value our sons' lives as much as you do. We love our country as much as you do. The capitalists are using a plea of patriotism to get the better of us." It was a pitiful deadlock--honest for the most part; yet it was a deadlock which, as Dawson said, brought very near the day when English artillery would be firing shotted guns in English streets.