Doing their Bit - Boyd Cable

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is to be done rather than what has been or is being done, and this because I know, and the Front knows, how we stand out there for munitions now, but not how much lay behind our daily needs, how we are to fare when, or if, all the scattered fronts get busy together, when one big battle is to tread so close on the heels of another that it will be hard to sort out one from the other and issue us the right clasps to our medals.

      Well, I confess myself satisfied; and I’ve a strong fancy that by next summer the Front is going to be satisfied, and the Germans also are going to be satisfied after quite another fashion. Just now I’m writing about munitions, and I’m not going to wander off into war strategy, or compete with the prophet experts in guessing when the War is going to finish. But, after all I’ve seen and heard, it is impossible to get away from this happy thought – if last winter and spring and summer we could hold the enemy, could even on occasion beat back a long and desperate assault, break in and grip and stick to a mile or two of country, a few lines of trenches, if we could do what we have done with a small army and a desperate lack of munitions, what are we going to do this year with a fresh and big army, with lavish supplies of every arm and equipment we require, with a flood of munitions pouring in as fast as ever we can pelt them out? It looks pretty good, doesn’t it? And now I’ll go on to a general description of some of the proofs I have had of just how good it really looks.

      II

      THE MUNITION MACHINE

      I have, I admit, been amazed to see the extent to which the war workshops of the country have grown, the enlargement of existing works, the springing up of entirely new factories, the huge armies busily employed in all these places. But I have been still more astonished – I have been out Front a year, remember, and have lost touch with the country’s domestic doings – to find how munition-making has become part and parcel of the national existence; that it is quite a commonplace for Lady This of Tudor Hall or Countess That of Belgravia to be handling a lathe in a workshop alongside Miss So from Kensington and ’Liza Such from Houndsditch; that it is no more than a matter of course that a man cast for a commission and refused for the ranks a year ago on account of bad eyes has “gone munitioning” and, grime and oil to his weak eye-rims, is driving a donkey engine in a big factory; that any day you may see at the “canteens” of various factories scores of ladies, who have been used since the day they were born to being waited on hand and foot, now taking the other end of the job and carving mountains of bread into slices and carrying cups of tea and cheerfully waiting on the workers who serve their country in the “shops.” I find that the passenger train services have been chopped to pieces, that mails take any old time to do their journey, that goods by rail get there this week, or next, or a month hence – because munition transport blocks the rails; that whole industries have been blotted from existence because their hands or their plant were wanted – for munitions; that Polytechnic classes are being busily taught – to make munitions; that, in fact, the whole country is one seething munition factory, and no man or lathe or tool that can be turned to munition-making is possibly doing anything else. It may surprise you at the Front, as it certainly did me, to learn that the Ministry of Munitions has taken a grip on the whole industry of this country; that it has an autocratic control over it, wide and strong beyond the wildest dreams of the craziest autocrat; that no man can buy or sell a barrow-load of old iron or a sovereign’s worth of copper or brass without some official of the Ministry getting to hear of it and popping up to air an insatiable curiosity; that no lathe or machine for working metal may be imported without the Ministry being given copious explanations as to its destination and intended use, and, moreover, if that use be not for munition work that the machine or metal is much more likely than not to be commandeered forthwith and set to munitioning; that no machine may be exported; that you cannot buy or sell a new or second-hand machine without a permit from the Ministry; that no man or firm may use man or machine to make clocks or gramophones or motor-cars or anything between if the Ministry prefers the man or firm to turn his factory to making munitions in whole or in part. And all this power is no empty form. It is used to the full, and as a result thousands of machines and scores of thousands of hands have been turned from other work on to munitions. A mechanic may no longer work where and on what job he pleases. If he is running a machine for stamping out trouser-buttons and the Ministry wants him to turn over to stamping out cartridge discs, he has to do so. If a firm is busy making motor-cars, the Ministry inspector may step in and tell the firm to drop that work and start making shells. If another firm already making munitions is employing daily 100 skilled and 100 unskilled hands, the Ministry will almost certainly take away a number of the skilled hands and hand them over to another factory where skilled men are scarcer and more urgently required. All this simply means that the engineering resources of the country are mobilised and efficiently organised and turned full force on munition-making. The Munition Machine is running now with wonderful smoothness, but it is easy to see what a gigantic task it must have been to get it in running order. It could only have been done with the willing agreement and co-operation of the great engineering and business men and firms throughout the country. You have heard how the Ministry called on local business men to organise their districts, to form local committees, and to set themselves to getting the last ounce of munition work out of their districts. Now I am telling you how those committees have done their work, how they and the local Ministry offices and officials have handled the job. But I doubt if ever the country will realise how well it has been done or how much it owes to these people. I have come in contact with many of them in my tour, and I found only one thing greater and more wonderful than their efficiency, and that is their keenness. Obviously and emphatically their whole hearts and souls are in the job. They have in many cases sacrificed their incomes, in every instance I met the whole of their leisure or pleasure or ease to their work. I met one works manager who has not seen his home in daylight for over six months, who has not seen his young children awake in that time, whose normal working hours have been 6 a.m. to 11 p.m., Saturday, Sunday, and Monday alike. These works owners and managers, and inspectors, and committee-men, and chairmen and secretaries, the brains of the munition business, are amazing and wonderful beyond words. They are the organisers and the driving power behind the whole vast machine, and what that machine is we are going to know more and more fully as the War goes on. I have often in the past heard expressions of wonder that the services of the great business men, the “captains of industry,” were not properly employed in the service of their country. That, when one comes to realise the truth, is rather a good joke, because, while people are still grumbling about it not being done, it has been done – has been, quite after the fashion of real business men, very completely done with an entire absence of fuss and feathers and fluster and talk.

      Some of the heads of the greatest engineering firms in Great Britain – no, that is very wrong, and I ought to say in the Empire – some of the greatest business brains the Empire owns are running this munition business. In many cases – I believe I might say most cases, but throughout these chapters I am only going to tell of what I have actually and personally seen and known – these men are spending unstinted time and energy on the work, freely and without fee, salary, profit, or reward. Men who have been handling contracts running into millions of pounds, men who have been earning many thousands a year, have dropped all their own affairs to come in on munition work. I can give you one instance out of many I met which will do for a sample. At one place, which I’ll describe more fully later on, and which is going to be when complete the greatest munition works in the world, bar none, something like a score of our greatest contractors are hard at work. They are the sort of men who take on as an ordinary job the tunnelling of the Alps or the Andes, the building of a Forth Bridge, the erection of a street of skyscraper buildings, the building of a Nile barrage. Now they are building roads and huts and power stations and water- and drainage- and lighting-systems, and are driving the work at a furious excess speed to completion. And the Number One, the head-centre bull’s-eye boss of the job, is a partner in what I believe is one of the greatest, if not the greatest, contracting firms in the Empire or the world, a firm whose name is a household word, whose activities have spread over all the inhabited and a biggish section of the uninhabited globe, who control capital running well up in the millions and have fingers in all sorts of business pies. About him are gathered a crowd of picked men from the four corners of the earth. In the block of offices run up to house the staff and staff work you could probably find a man to speak any civilised or semi-civilised language in the world, and a few who can speak some tongues

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