The Birmingham age-herald., 1917-09-30

Somewhere in the Midlands, England,
 September 1s.-(Special Correspondence)
 have to tell. as calmly as possible, the
 inside story of the great miracle of this
 war and to describe the man behind the
 miracle. It is the story of shells, mil
 lions upon millions of shells, and there
 fore it is the story of the Somme and of
 vimy and of Messines. It is the story
 of victory won at the darkest and most
 terrible moment of defeat. It explains
 with equal precision the present position
 of David Lloyd George and the present
 position of the battle line in France. It
 is the dominant dominating, domineer-
 ing fact of the history of the war.
 One man has sent nearly 10000, 900
 heavy high explosive shells to the front
 in the past two years. fe Is the same
 man who has perpetrated the most cheer
 full hoax of the war. His name is God
 frey John Boyle viscount Chetwynd,
 civil engineer former b-flat cornet in the
 band at San Angelo, Tex, and deputy
 sheriff of Tom Greene county, retired
 broncho buster, eighth holder of the 200
 year-old title, tyrant genius and master
 of the shells. His onicial position is managing director of a national shell
 filling factory, situated ina place the Germans would like to see He is an ex- pert in shell shock-for the Germans. NUMBER OF SHELLS I am at liberty to give either the
 actual number of shells sent from this factory or the percentage of the whole which they represent. To give both would be telling a secret, so l choose the for mer In a little over one year the actual number of shells sent from this one fac tory was 100000, ranging in size from 6o- pounders to 15-inch howitzers. Last July alone the factory turned over to
 the ordnance department considerably
 more than one-tenth of that total. By the time this is printed the output will be in round numbers. 100000 shells. In one storeroom of this factory 630,0O0 shells were photographed at one time and the picture was widely printed under the title of Nine and One-Half Acres of Shell" That storeroom can be filled and emptied again every month without ap- preaching the full capacity of the plant. l As Hamlet says, look first on this pie
 
 every man who was at the front in the desperate days of 1915 when the Ger mans used to clean the bore of thelr howitzers by throwing over 50 or 60 shells | into the British lines and when bom- bardments were so ne-sided that they sounded like soliloquy. Think or the men who lay for days and nights in the soggy shellpits waiting for hell to close l up, and of the men who dashed across No Mans Land without the faithful and heartening accompaniment Of barrage fire. Think of the British gunners who
 were rationed to five shells a day to reply l to the Boches 300 or 5000, and of the men who used to cheer every time one of their shells went over-with several ! hours between each cheer. And, If you are so inclined. try to figure out what i would have happened If there had been no shell available on that hot July day when the German line was first broken on the Somme. What would have hap pened if the Sonifne had fizzled as Loos fizzled a year before?
 SCIENCE OF SHELL FILLING l And now to more cheerful things. On August 20. 1915, the second of a series ! Of vivid Examinations came to the mas l ters of ordnance of the British army.
 They had long ago realized the neces- 1 sity for high explosive shell; they were l lbeginning to get the shelcases and the , explosives but they were suddenly met with a new difficulty. It was that you cannot throw T. N. T. into shell any whch-way Shell filling suddenly popped up as a bigger question even than shell ! making.
 l Someone suggested the name of Lord | Chetwynd, who had until a few years before been a director of Messrs. Vickers, It. makers of machine guns, battle ships and other trifles. Lord Chetwynd ] confesses that at the time he heard Of l T. N T. he thought that ammonium nitrate was fertilizer. But he took on 1.-the Job of filling enough shell to supply l the British army. He was offered two fellow directors.
 T never work in a minority of one" was his reply. He got the factory to himself. : l The next day he met the experts.
 The only difference between them was l that Lord Chetwynd knew that he knew nothing about high explosive.
 | On September Lord Chetwynd put nencil to paper and drew a sketch of the l factory he proposed to build. That rough ske etch is in the archives now and close comparison shows that a2,500,O00 or about s12, 10000 were spent in making that l sketch reality.
 The defense of the realm act (affec- tionately known as Darling 'Dora') had l then been passed but its specifications ware still unknown. Acting on an estab- |ljshed principle Lord Chetwynd comman- deared several hundred acres of land un- der the provisions of this act. He found the required site and simply told the 1 occupiers to clear out. They cleared. Later the government regularized the proceedings
 WILD YEAR OF BUILDING