Or in other words, 45 times as many field-gun shells, 73 times as many medium, and 365 times as many heavy howitzer shells, were turned out in 1917 as in the first year of the war.

These shells were manufactured in buildings totaling fifteen miles in length, forty feet in breadth, with more than ten thousand machine tools driven by seventeen miles of shafting with an energy of twenty-five thousand horse-power and a weekly output of over ten thousand tons' weight of projectiles--all this largely worked by the women of England.

While the fleet had increased its personnel from 136,000 to about 400,000, and 2,000,000 men by July, 1915, had voluntarily enlisted in the army before England gave up her birthright and accepted compulsory service, the women of England left their ordinary lives to fabricate the necessaries of war.

They worked at home while their husbands, brothers, and sons fought and died on six battle fronts abroad--six hundred and fifty-eight thousand died, remember; do you remember the number of Americans killed in action ?--less than thirty-six thousand;--those English women worked on, seven millions of them at least, on milk carts, motor-busses, elevators, steam engines, and in making ammunition.

Never before had any woman worked on more than 150 of the 500 different processes that go to the making of munitions.
They now handled T.N.T., and fulminate of mercury, more deadly still; helped build guns, gun carriages, and three-and-a-half ton army cannons; worked overhead traveling cranes for moving the boilers of battleships: turned lathes, made every part of an aeroplane.