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. It is roughly twelve miles from Richmond across all London to Blackheath, from Alexandra Park down to Croydon. Twelve miles is more than double the width of the city of Glasgow from east to west, four times its extent from north to south. That may bring home to you what the twelve-mile length of the new munition works means. The engineer who took me round drove me in a fast car, out and across and back, in what I thought quite a big three-cornered wedge, but the ground covered, long though it appeared on the drive, shrank to a mere corner of the whole when I saw it on the map. Sitting in the car and looking round over long vistas and streets of huts and houses, I could see in one direction to a clump of wood outlined in toy trees against the sky; in another over a wide flat expanse with tiny dots of buildings in the far distance, to where the ground swelled and rose and fell away again in a tumble of plantations and hills and hollows; in another down a long road and a jumble of finished huts and naked, unfinished framings to where the horizon faded off into the indefinite distance; in yet another to where my eye searched along the skyline for the dot which was actually the big building of a power-station. Then I was told that all I could see around me was inside the boundaries of the works area as well as plenty beyond that I could not see. I saw the spread of the area as a whole on a five-foot-long map and saw the criss-cross of roads, the rows upon rows and clumps after clumps of dots that marked the buildings of workshops and workers’ houses – and even then, although there are huts for quite a number of thousands, many of the workers are being housed outside the area, a motor-bus system being run to carry them to and from their work. The buildings are of wood, steel, and brick construction, and they are already there, complete or incomplete, in tens and scores and hundreds. The town, with its stores and shops, its churches and cinema-show, clubs, canteens, and reading-rooms, is solidly built of stone, brick, steel, and wood. There are a score of undertakings in hand which here are mere side-lines, although each of them is a huge contract in itself. There is a system of railways, a main line and many branch lines and sidings, that runs to perhaps fifty miles of rails. There are vast water, drainage, and lighting systems, powerful pumping-stations, and a great reservoir; and a tremendous power-house to carry electricity throughout the area. For mile after mile I drove along roads with a line of great 33-inch diameter pipes laid along the ditch, and past regiments of navvies digging them in. There is another seven- or eight-mile stretch of 27-inch pipes and innumerable miles of smaller piping. The workers now engaged on construction work would make many line battalions of full fighting strength; the hands to be employed will run in numbers into brigades and divisions.
Now if all these facts convey any idea to you of the colossal size of the job, you may understand what organisation, what skill, what energy has been required to conceive, to plan, to execute the whole work, to build and equip it and set it running in a matter of mere months. The work that on ordinary contract, with smooth working and no day’s hitch, with all the advantage of peace-time work – unlimited labour, material and transport to be had for the asking and paying – would have occupied at the very least three to four years, is being done here inside six months. What that means only the heads, the officials and managers and engineers and contractors, will ever know. The shifts and stratagems that have had to be employed to find and keep labour, to get the materials required or their efficient substitutes, to secure transport to and on the area, to house and feed the workers, to fight the weather, the wet and the frost especially, would fill many books, would make a record of energy, efficiency, foresight, and resourcefulness which would be for ever a pride to the Empire. The country has conferred some large-sized powers on the Ministry of Munitions – larger perhaps than is generally realised – and I must say the Ministry has grabbed the powers with both hands and, through its lieutenants, is wielding them in all sorts of unexpectedly useful ways. On the Master Job, for instance, there was need for a lot of road transport, and mechanical transport was not easy to find. But somehow and anyhow it was found, and one traction engine that I saw puffing and snorting at the head of a rumbling wagon string gives an index to the ways and means of the finding. The engine still bore the legend “Jenkin’s Galloping Horses,” and, it appears, previous to its commandeering had been trundling from town to town a full set of caravans, and then converting itself into one of those power-engines which are familiar sights at country fairs driving a circle of prancing wooden chargers or sea-sicky switchback boats in a swing roundabout to the brazen music of a mechanical band.
There was another difficulty to be overcome in the way of finding all sorts of materials. Here, again, the powers that be did not hesitate to commandeer where more usual methods could not prevail. The Ministry inspectors and engineers apparently know what every firm in the country is busy about, and they simply reported where anything specially required was to be found. Thus and so, some corrugated-iron sheds and huts in course of construction on contract and destined for some places at the other ends of the earth find themselves hastily transported to Somewhere in Britain and hurriedly erected there instead of at Sumatra or Zanzibar. The buildings required some converting and altering perhaps to adapt them to use in a chilly, damp-laden country instead of under tropical skies, but such difficulties are very minor ones to the men who are running this job. There have been and still are greater ones that are constantly being surmounted. There were fewer in the summer months perhaps, but in the frost and rain of a cold and wet winter all the canons of carpentering, masonry, and building construction have been flouted and set aside. Any builder will tell you how impossible it is, for instance, to lay concrete in frosty weather. As a rule the builder may not have descended to details of the why and the wherefore, but here the causes were sought, found, and overcome. When it was necessary the water for mixing the concrete was heated and the stones were warmed, and when the concrete was spread it was carefully covered with straw or cinders or anything that would keep the frost off it. Sometimes a roof would be run up to keep off the rain, a temporary break-wind wall erected to hold out the winds, blazing fires lit in braziers to fight off the frost, so that mortar might be mixed and brick walls built. Building work, it has always been understood, must cease when the winter sets in. Here nothing ceases, everything drives ahead at high-pressure speed.
The whole of the area is still more or less under construction, more or less completed. In some parts rows of huts and houses stand practically ready for occupation; in others the work is in its first stages, and the ground is one weltering chaos of heaped earth and rough holes, up-torn turf, piled planks, bricks, mortar, and building material. Swarms of men hammer and hew and dig and burrow amidst the confusion; perky, self-important-looking little “pug” engines puff and pant and haul their trailing strings of wagons amongst the earth heaps and holes, round and between the lumber and the foundations and frames of unerected buildings.
In other parts the green turf of the fields is still undisturbed, but already it is scored deep with wheel-marks, is plotted out for the coming of the diggers and builders. By the end of spring they will have gone, the twelve-mile stretch will be humming from end to end with munition workers, will be pouring out in a stupendous stream the fighting-food of the firing line. Until it is complete the daily routine is one of constant hustle, of planning and contriving and dovetailing one piece of work into another, of keeping each and all hustling fast on the move. Nothing is allowed to halt or check or stay the work; everything must give way to the need for haste. Time is always money, but here it is more than money; it is an expenditure, not only of money, but without stint of brain and muscle power. Work is planned to commence by a certain date and by that date be sure it will commence, and the Front will feel the rush of the increased torrent that will come sluicing out from the Master Job.
There are other greatly planned and wonderfully executed works which only in their size are outdistanced by the Master Job. I saw one such new works, so new that in parts the fields are still scattered with cabbage stumps or trampled turnips, so new that only at the end of this last September was the first sod cut. The end of September – and by the First of January the first section was due to be turning out munitions. When I was there the big boilers of the power-station were not ready to be installed, but a temporary boiler had been dug out from Heaven knows where, and its chimney was pouring out smoke as the temporary furnace prepared for a trial run. When I saw the place, only about fifty working days had passed from the cutting of that first sod, and yet here were rows of completed workrooms, completed in some down to the varnished walls and the linoleumed floors, the steam-heating, and the electric lamps over the work benches. There are a dozen 100-ton stores, miles upon miles of raised board walks (the “clean way” that in a works handling explosives keeps the feet of the workers out of mud or earth or grit), of steam-heating pipes, of railway and trolly rails. There are scores of magazines, many scores of huts and houses, railway sidings to allow of the handling of many hundred tons a day.
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.