December 7, 1916 
LAND & WATER 
t9 
of a defence, shooting and stabbing and bayoneting, 
bombing the dug-outs, rounding up the prisoners, push- 
ing on until they came in touch with the swirHng edges of 
the frontal attack's wa\'e, and jcjining them turned and 
overran the last struggling renmants of the defence. 
The \illage was taken ; the hue pushed out beyond it, 
took firm grip of a fi'esh patch of ground, spread swiftly 
and linked up with the attack that raged on out to either 
side and bit savagely into the crumbling Oerman line. 
These wider issues were of course ((uite beyond the 
knowledge or understanding of I^rivate Ben Sneath. 
He had come uninjured to the spot where hisCierman lay, 
found he was an officer and quite dead, snatched up the 
helmet that lay beside him, and turned to hurry f)ack. 
Only then was he aware of the line charging and barging 
down upon him, and understanding nothing of why or 
how it had come there, noticing only from a glimpse of some 
faces he knew that men of his own battalion were in it, 
he slipped his arm through the chinstrap of his captured 
helmet, turned again and ran forward with the rest. 
\^'ith them he played his part in the final overrunning 
of the \illage, the usual confused scuffling jumble of a 
part played by the average infantry pri\ate in an attack, 
a nightmarish mixture of noise and yelling, of banging 
rities, shattering bomb reports, a great deal of smoke, the 
whistle of passing bullets, the crackling snap and smack of 
their striking ground and stone, swift appearance and dis- 
appearance of running figures. He had a momentary vision 
of men grouped about a black dug-out mouth hurling 
grenades down it ; joined a wild rush with sex'eral others 
on a group of grey-coated Germans who stood firm even 
to a bayonet finish ; scrambling and scuffling down and 
up the steep sides of the smaller shell-craters, round the 
slippery crumbling edges of the larger, caught gHmpses 
■ — this towards the end — of scattered groups or trickling 
lines of white-faced prisoners with long grey coats flapping 
about their ankles, and hands held high over their heads, 
being shepherded out towards the British lines by one or 
two guards. All these scattered impressions were linked 
up by many panting breathless scrambles over a chaos 
of torn and broken ground pocked and pitted with the 
shell-craters set as close as the cells of a broken honey- 
comb, and ended with a narrow escape, averted just in 
time by one of his officers, from firing upon, a. group of 
men — part of the flank attack as it proved — wlio appeared 
mysteriously out of the smoke where (K^rmans had been 
firing and throwing stick-grenades a momen|t l?efore. 
Through all the. turmoil Ben clung tightly to his helmet. 
He knew that then' had been a stiff light and that they 
had won, was vaguely pleased at the comforting fact, 
and much more distinctly pleased and satisfied with the 
possession of his souvenir. He took the first opportunity 
when the line paused and ))roce*eded to sort itself out 
beyond the \illage, to strip the cloth off his prize and 
examine it. It was an officer's pickelhaube, resplendent 
in all its glory of glistening black patent-leather, gleaming 
brass eagle spread-winged across its front, fierce spike on 
top and hea\y-linked chain *■' chin-strap " of shining 
brass. Ben was hugely pleased with his trophy, displayed 
it pridefuUy, and told briefly the tale of his duel with the 
late owner. He told nothing of how the securing of J^s 
prize had assisted at the takiuf^; of the \illage, .fO|C tHfi 
good reason that he himself did not know it, and up to 
then in fact did not even know that they had taken a 
\illage. 
He tied the helmet securely to his belt with a twisted 
bit of wire and at the urgent command of a sweating 
and mud-bedaubed sergeant pi-epared to dig. " Are we 
stoppin' 'ere then ? " he stayed to ask. 
" Suppose so," said the sergeant, " Seeing we'\'e taken 
our objective and got this \illa,ge." 
Ben gaped at him, and then looked round wonderingly 
at the tossed and tumbled sheU-riddled chaos of shattered 
earth that was spread about them. " Got this village," 
he said, " Lumme, where's the \illage then ? " 
Another man there laughed at him. " You came over 
the top o' it Ben," he said, " Don't you remember the 
broken beam you near fell over, back there a piece ? 
That was a bit o' one o' the houses in the village. An' 
d'yoa see that little bit o' grey wall there ? That's some 
more o' the village." 
Ben looked hard at it. " An' that's the village, is 
it ?" he said cheerfully, " Lor' now, I might 'ave trod 
right on top o' it by accident, or e\en tripped over it 
if it 'ad been a bit bigger village. You can keep it ; I'd 
rather 'a\'c my elmet." 
Munition Making in America 
Effects Present 
and Future on Natior.al Industry 
War Needs of the Allies 
By Lewis R. Freeman 
of Supplying 
WHATEVER the ultimate effect on American 
industry of turning so great apart of national 
effort to supplying arms, nnmitions and other 
requirements of the Allies in the European 
war, there is no possible doubt that the incidence of 
the war — with the distant demand it brought for so 
much that the United States was able to supply — saved 
the country from what might well ha\e been the worst 
spell of business depression in its recent history. There 
were several causes underlying the unsatisfactory con- 
ditions existing in the summer of 1914, and perhaps 
the chief of them was the widely unfavourable effect 
of two years of low tariff on the manufacturing industries 
of the countiy. 
At any rate, the outlook, e\en in the face of almost 
record-breaking crops, was just about as bad as it could 
be. Speaking in New York just before the outbreak 
of the war, one of the country's most conservative 
financiers and economists said that " there is a sense of 
de])ression and dismay in this great city such as I ha\'e 
not before seen in the whole seventeen years I have been 
here." From the South and Middle ^^■est came still 
gloomier forebodings, and only the comparatively un- 
industrialised West still exhibited some degree of pros- 
perity. Unemployment was prevalent to an extent un- 
precedented in America — running in places from 
20 to 25 per cent.— and public and private charities 
in all of the manufacturing centres wen; taxed to 
the utmost to house and feed the thousands out of 
work, 'llic 18,280 business failures in i<ii4 established 
the worst record ever known. Bank-clearings fell oil 
20,000,000,000 dollars from 1913, or over 11 per cent., 
while the capital in\ested in new industry was less by 
700,000,000 dollars than in iqij, and 600,000,000 
dollars less than in 1912. Iron production had fallen 
off 23 per cent., 40 i>er cent, of the looms in all American 
woollen mills were idle, and 50,000,000 dollars of capital 
invested in the cotton industry was absolutely un- 
productive through spindles that were not turning. 
Chaos to begin with 
The first couple of months of the war only served to 
aggra\ate conditions that were already serious, and 
the same chaos ruled in the American markets and ex- 
changes as in those of Europe. After September, how- 
ever, the huge and ever increasing demands from the 
Allies and neutral countries of Europe^ — demands that 
have, been limited only by the shipping facilities avail- 
able — quickly neutralized, first the bad effects of the 
war itself, and next tho.se of the two whole years of 
financial depression preceding the war. I'^oodstuffs and 
such manufactured goods as were already being turned 
out were, naturally, the first things to figure in the war 
export list. The value of the maize shipped to Eurojw 
in the first year of the war showed an increase of 400 per 
cent. o\er that shipped in the corresponding year pre- 
ceding. Wheat increased 115 per cent., and beef — 
from less than 4,000,000 j)ounds to 127,000,000 — nearly 
3,200 per cent. Motors and motor lorries increased 
