A good many of these ouvroirs are still in existence, but many have been closed; for as the shops reopened the women not only went back to their former situations but by degrees either applied for or were invited to fill those left vacant by men of fighting age.

III

And then there were the munition factories!  The manager of one of these Usines de Guerre in Paris told me that he made the experiment of employing women with the deepest misgiving.  Those seeking positions were just the sort of women he would have rejected if the sturdy women of the farms had applied and given him any choice.  They were girls or young married women who had spent all the working years of their lives stooping over sewing-machines; sunken chested workers in artificial flowers; confectioners; florists; waitresses; clerks.  One and all looked on the verge of a decline with not an ounce of reserve vitality for work that taxed the endurance of men.  But as they protested that they not only wished to support themselves instead of living on charity, but were passionately desirous of doing their bit while their men were enduring the dangers and privations of active warfare, and as his men were being withdrawn daily for service at the Front, he made up his mind to employ them and refill their places as rapidly as they collapsed.

He took me over his great establishment and showed me the result.  It was one of the astonishing examples not only of the grim courage of women under pressure but of that nine-lived endowment of the female in which the male never can bring himself to believe save only when confronted by practical demonstration.

In the correspondence and card-indexing room there was a little army of young and middle-aged women whose superior education enabled them to do a long day’s work with the minimum output of physical energy, and these for the most part came from solid middle-class families whose income had been merely cut by the war, not extinguished.  It was as I walked along the galleries and down the narrow passages between the noisy machinery of the rest of that large factory that I asked the superintendent again and again if these women were of the same class as the original applicants.  The answer in every case was the same.

The women had high chests and brawny arms.  They tossed thirty-and forty-pound shells from one to the other as they once may have tossed a cluster of artificial flowers.  Their skins were clean and often ruddy.  Their eyes were bright.  They showed no signs whatever of overwork.  They were almost without exception the original applicants.

[Illustration:  Making the shells]

I asked the superintendent if there were no danger of heart strain.  He said there had been no sign of it so far.  Three times a week they were inspected by women doctors appointed by the Government, and any little disorder was attended to at once.  But not one had been ill a day.  Those that had suffered from chronic dyspepsia, colds, and tubercular tendency were now as strong as if they had lived their lives on farms.  It was all a question of plenty of fresh air, and work that strengthened the muscles of their bodies, developed their chests and gave them stout nerves and long nights of sleep.