IN THE SHADOW OF THE FACTORIES
Dressing the Eagles
The engineer that showed us over this particular
Royal Ordnance Factory was energetic and cheerful.
All his life he had made guns and to-day he is making
more guns and better guns than ever he did. His was
the clear conscience of the man with a trade. He it
was who went in 1938 to find all these beautiful
machine-tools—in the United States, in France, in
Germany even. He looks at a well-made gun with
an aesthetic pleasure.
'When we put this factory into production it was
anything but suitable. All sorts of things were
missing. There were no cranes to lift the machines:
we had to put them in their places with our own
hands. But now. . . /
With a happy gesture he indicated the enormous
sheds that housed ten thousand workmen. Giant
presses came to grips with the glowing iron: long
gleaming gun-barrels slid out of their furnaces,
turned a quarter of a circle and plunged vertically
into cold water that greeted them with jet after jet
of steam. Regularly the piles of finished tubes grew
—so many of them that one might perhaps have
been in some match-factory of the giants.
'It's the quantity they want/ he said, 'the demand
comes from everybody—England, your own army,
the neutrals. At the moment the best form of
propaganda is this. . . /
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