Doing their Bit / War work at home

Author:Boyd Cable [Cable, Boyd]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Published: 2015-06-13T16:00:00+00:00

VI

THE MASTER JOB

If we at the Front felt aggrieved last spring that the winter had been wasted, that there had not been nearly enough hustling done on war work at Home, certain it is that we can have no such complaint to make this spring, or even now. The one great outstanding feature of all the war works to-day is the way everything is being driven and speeded up. I have told a fraction of what I have seen of this, of the green fields of six months back covered now with busy works, of new floor after floor being piled on existing works, wing after wing added to them, scores upon scores of new machines being built or imported and set up and to work, of hundreds and thousands of new hands being taught and employed, of huge firms adapted to war work, of new firms and National Factories working smooth and at top speed, of practically every works and every machine running night and day without halt, of the double and triple shifts of workers keeping the tireless machines whirling and grinding and hammering from dawn to dusk, and without pause from dusk on again to dawn. Perhaps amongst the many other things I have had to tell, this one great fact of hustle and increasing hustle has been a little overshadowed, and I had better give one clear instance where the fact stands out sharp and stark, where nothing is so evident, where almost nothing else is evident, but the one great and wonderful haste. The particular effort deserves the telling all the more because it is the tale of the Master Job, the greatest war factory in the world. You will always remember that if I am unsatisfactorily vague in some of the details and altogether miss out others, it is because I may not and would not “give information of value to the enemy.” Probably, despite the many precautions taken, the enemy knows all about it, but this can only be through spies, and since the bigness of a spy’s pay is apt to depend on the bigness of his news—or lies—at least I need not corroborate them. The new factory then is a National one, a huge plan to do, under the State and the Munitions Ministry, a volume of work which will presently be ready for it, and which no one works or several combined works is now capable of handling. Without being too exact, I may say that the area of the works covers a piece of country about twelve miles long and at no part less than a mile across. Think a moment what that alone means—twelve miles, the length of the Front running, say, from Loos up past Cambrin, the Brick Fields, Cuinchy and Givenchy, on by Indian Village and the Richebourg battle-front, Rue du Bois, Bois du Biez, and Port Arthur to about Neuve Chapelle. Take it another way, and it measures one of the marches you go from the firing-line back down the La Bassée Road to Bethune, through it, and on again to about Lillers.

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