It is a factory of a new kind we come to next. Not one vast chamber, but a number of small rooms in big, naked, unhomely houses such as you may have seen in some of the meaner towns of Galicia, where, before the war, people seemed to live and work in herds. The girls here are seamstresses, and many of them are plainly of Polish-Jewish origin. Their work is to make Batiste bags (like elongated finger-stalls of rubberized cotton) that are put into the shells, and also the gas-masks which the men now carry at the front. The gas-mask is a canvas hood such as the burial confraternities wear at funerals when they walk in procession through the streets of Rome, covering the head and neck and shoulders, but with eye-places made of transparent mica and an aluminium mouthpiece that filters the air before allowing it through. Looking at the comely, dark faces of the girls who are sewing these canvas hoods in their close workshops in the East End, one has visions of the ghoul-like figures
