Page:The War and the Future (Masefield, 1918).djvu/50

38 where the men have suffered much from tropical diseases, dysentery and malarial fever. We have some hundreds of thousands of men who have been weakened by these complaints; not wrecked by them, but so weakened that they cannot stand the life in the trenches.

And besides all those armies, we have a vast army of the very flower of our race, both men and women. It may consist of four or five millions of men and women who work in treble shifts, day and night, as they have worked for the last three years, making the things of war, not only for ourselves but for our Allies. Our Allies are not manufacturing people. Russia made few things, France's coal and steel are in the hands of the enemy, Italy makes few things. We have had to supply these people not only with equipment of all kinds, guns, clothing and shells, but with ships and coal. Not less than half a million men have done nothing in England since the war began but get and ship coal for the Allies. They have sent not less than 60 million tons of coal to the Allies since the war began.

Then a part of that army builds ships, and ever more ships, and yet never enough ships for