Page:Our Girls.pdf/111

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TOMMY'S SISTER
95

upon her that the State may survive, be brought to bed not of a son but a Hun. The daughters of Britain are free women, worthy of the men they are fighting for. And when our soldiers come back, with their flags torn but triumphant, they can line up and salute them.

But when all is said, and we take a last survey of what we have seen in the vast munition factories of the London area, there remains the grim and perplexing paradox that women, being what they are, should be working there at all. We know what took them into the machine shops—the shortage of shells towards the end of the first year. But when we think of the "long procession" of horrors the war has produced, how the thousand industrial activities, which in times of peace are so dear to women because they make for our comfort and happiness, have been turned from their true channels into this black business of making shells, shells, and yet more shells; how thousands of millions of money have already been spent