IN A MUNITION SHOP.

New Zealand Herald, Volume LIII, Issue 16300, 5 August 1916, Page 1 (Supplement)

IN A MUNITION SHOP.

HOW SHELLS ARE MADE.

[BY OUR LONDON CORRESPONDENT.

A distinguished engineer, with a reputation in former wars, took me on a tour through the shell shops of his firm. On either side of the main door there were a set of boilers painted for preservation against the weather. "Those are for the King of Siam." he said waggishly. "But he can't get them now, because he won't join in the war." To such straits are we pushed for help. In another yard I sawsome torpedo craft for our ally in the Far East. They. too. were making slow progress, for the naval equation in the East is not pressing.

Now, what is to be said of a shell shop? Not one of these genteel *' munition factories" (some of the Minister's 4000), where so many volunteer ladies are working harder than they ever worked before, putting together the component parts of the shell, but the shop where all these things are first forged and cast. In a Shell Shop. We began at the better end. After a most inspiring ramble through acres of heavy artillery of new patterns, just off the machines, we entered the shell works. There is heaps of groundroom. and it is used methodically, but the thing looked a perfect tangle of pulleys and shafts and belts. Tins shed is 400 yds long, and down the whole length are a dozen rows of pulleys and driving-gear, and beneath a dozen rows of lathes turning the shells true, or drills testing them, or punches pounding the brass cases into the right thinness. The avenues between the rows of machinery are quite plain as the eye becomes accustomed to the maze of things. -Many of the workers, seated beside the machine, are not at first visible, go that fully half the population of the sheds does not appear on the face of it. Girls are working with the men (usually at the lighter processes of drilling and some, assembling). Boys and men are incessantly pushing great lumbering barrows of the metal shapes from process to process, from washing to washing, from row to row, from inspector to inspector. Every heap of small shell, every individual la'-ge shell, bears chalked the mark of the worker and the instruction of the inspector. Fancy being told to take 21b off a common 13.5 in shell. Dangers of Shell-making. What a weariness of the flesh to throw faithfully all these myriad shells, one at a time, across on the territory of the Hun. hoping for hits ! And this is only one of a multitude of shops doing the same work. 'The war through these glasses seems interminable. Yet there are encouraging signs. Far through the forest of rods, great phantom shells, finished and polished, and finally balanced in the chain slings, are seen hastening away into the wings like the. fairy godmother in the pantomime. Here, at length, is finality. There is danger each end of a shell's career. Tn the casting shop they look like golden coffins, swinging in the air from process to procsss. And if one class of men in England has gone through most of the horror of a bombardment without actually drawing the shilling a day for it and wearing the uniform, they are the casters and forgers of big shelfs. From the time the metal is poured into the first mould and punched down with a 6in ram. until the finished forging trundles heavily away on a truck to the next process—the lathes—it is one long agony for the shell and its tormentors alike. Everything is white hot. Nothing is allowed to cool even for a second. Having been hollowed by punching, the shell, still pale red, is swung without respite to another great crucible and heated up again relentlessly. Through the Fiery Furnace. j To us the very breath of the furnaces, for the few seconds they are open, is overpowering, and we stand in a respectful ring apart. But for the men the struggle is never-ending. Away overhead delicate electric cranes, stretching from side to side of the shed, move silently to and fro on their gliders. Keen eyes in eyrie cabinets, fixed always on the crucible of torment, control and guide and direct the pendant claw grips and the reaching chains. The moment the shell emerges from one crucible, clever pliers attach the claw grips so nicely that the brutal thing hangs poised to a fraction, skilfully imprisoned. A faint puff, as of compressed tair, and the whole thing is sailing through the air to the next crucible. There is no rest for the golden coffin, no hitch, no breath of coolness. The forgemen have been through the fiery furnace in the fullest maze. If the quality is defective the whole cast goes back into the crucibles. Day and night, week in and week out. this "ordeal of fire goes on. There are no rest-days in billets. There is no day on duty that is not full of many of the nerve-wracking horrors of bombardment. Clang, clatter, hard lifting, delicate balancing, and, over and above all, heat, terrible beat. This is the " mark time." the " right and left turn," and the pack drill of war. There is pay for it. but there are no medals and there is no public recognition. At the Lathes. 'To return to the lathes now is like taking an evening's stroll after a hot. dustv day. Everything looks pleasant and interesting, and easy hv comparison. The lot of the big gun looks serene and dignified and cool. The forges and casting shops have, taken all the iron and heat out of everything else. Mv tour was an encouraging bewilderment of quantities. Shell- of all shapes and qualities and sizes in thousands kept passing me in review for hours afterward.-. Ihe thought constantly running through my brain was that somebody is going to be awfully tired before all this mass of projectiles has been dulv ticked "across the line." and I 101 l asleep at last, hastening northward-, and dreaming contentedly of the 509 other munition factories which Mr. Lloyd-George controls, and which I need not visit in detail. Essential Work. But 1 -hall never agree that all single men or all men of military age can be combed out of our iron and steel industries or that they can he regarded as shirking there from something more rigorous and shattering. These processes, shipbuilding and gunmaking aud munition-making, are essential and vital to our cause. Just as surelv as the men in Flanders, just as surely as the watchers on the destroyers and the trawlers buffeting and searching and chasing about in the .North Sea, are these boatbuilders and riveters of the Black Country doing their duty in the struggle, forging the prows, true and stout, and pushing them forward to the fray, seaward, eastward, always eastward where the van of civilisation stand on. guard against the. Hun,