Page:Our Girls.pdf/33

 and clank, which makes your temples throb, sings (after their first days in the factory) like music in their ears and they would miss it if it stopped. They work day and night, in two shifts of twelve hours each, with a break of an hour for dinner and half an hour for tea. Their pay, which is by the piece, is generally large, the minimum being, I think, a pound a week, and the maximum five to seven pounds.

But you realize that the lure of money is not the sole or yet the chief magnet that draws women to work for the war when you leave this immense workshop for the sinister-looking sheds in which the finished shells are filled. Everybody knows that a shell is not merely a lump of dead steel, but a living reservoir of compounds which have been brought up from the bowels of the earth and transformed into terrible explosives. Everybody knows, too, that somewhere the womb of the shell has to be loaded with its deadly charge. Therefore there ought not to be