LUSITANIA
THE MORNING AFTER
The sun of May shone on the great shipyard, on the narrow reach of river, on the green pastures beyond. It shone on the toil of man and his handiwork, on the quietly-flowing lane leading to the war-ridden ocean highway, on the peace that seemed a dream of long ago.
Clamour of human labour in all its harshness rose to pale blue skies kept clear by a light, steady breeze, while tall chimneys breathed forth their blackness, and short chimneys spewed fire, and slender chimneys gasped their vapours. For here were the powers of earth and air and water gathered together and harnessed in man's service, to work his will at the touch of a finger, the pressure of a foot. Fiery furnaces, compressed gases escaping, thundering pumps, prodigious flywheels, droning, buzzing, crackling dynamos—all, and a hundred others—swelled the chorus of work.
Tons of iron ran like ruddy water; masses of metal were hammered and shaped, under a lad's control, to the forms ordained. Brass shrieked in vain against a whirling saw, and suffered trimming under a pitiless plane. Guided by a goggled youth, a little roaring flame ate clean through a slab of steel, with no more disturbance than the sputtering of a squib; electric and pneumatic tools did their wonderful shares.
But men also wrought with brawn, sinew and hands alone, feeding fires, tending engines, heaving and hauling till the sweat dropped, or doing tiny tasks as daintily as a surgeon operating on a brain. Sheer brute strength was spent alongside intelligent precision in its utmost delicacy. And every ounce of force, every gleam of eye, every stir of muscle and move of mind was spent to one and the same end—Munitions of War.
Under the acres of glazed roof stood boilers and engines that seemed to have been almost finished and then forgotten. But hundreds of men toiled on other boilers and turbines for warships, carriages for field guns, mine cases, shells, aeroplanes...
Outside, shabby and forlorn in the sunshine, a vessel towered on the stocks, not far from completion, yet utterly deserted. She was designed to be a peaceful merchantman for a neutral Power. But her near neighbours, two destroyers, resounded with a deluge of blows. And further away a battleship was coming to life in an agony of noise, while a batch of submarines were taking shape amid a frantic uproar of metal.
At the dockside reposed a pair of 12-inch guns in all their tremendous, shapely majesty. One would have liked to know whence they had come and whither they were going, but one refrains from unnecessary questions in these days. To the breech of one of the guns an oldish man was doing something with an odd-looking tool, sweating with his exertions. I watched his work till he paused, from weariness, I thought, for never had I seen human eyes appear more tired. He gazed at me while he patted the breech gently, caressingly, as one might pat a child, and said abruptly:
“I helped to build her.”
Instinctively you would have known that he referred not to the gun, but to the Lusitania.
“I stood by when she took the water,” he added, his grizzled head shaking slightly.
He turned away, possibly to watch a grey liner with guns fore and aft go slowly past in charge of a couple of tugs, though I hardly think he saw her, for he continued:
“Almighty! an' she's at the bottom o' the sea, an' hundreds o' dear souls...”
He turned fiercely upon me, and there was more than sweat on his cheeks.
“God blast the German pirates,” said he, “an' God blast the workin' man here that doesn't do his best now!”...