the stories that I had heard. Gramophones, for example: they cannot be called in strictness necessaries, but they were undoubtedly finding a ready sale, even in the more expensive brands. And I thought that there were a great many very spick and span perambulators to be seen on the pavement; smart perambulators, painted in tender shades of color and expensively fitted. 

 “And how can you be surprised if people will have a bit of a fling?” a worker said to me. “We’re seeing money for the first time in our lives, and it’s bright. And we work hard for it, and we risk our lives to get it. You’ve heard of explosion yonder?” 

 He mentioned certain works on the outskirts of the town. Of course, neither the name of the works nor of the town had been printed; there had been a brief notice of “Explosion at Munition Works in the Northern District: Many Fatalities.” The working man told me about it, and added some dreadful details. 

 “They wouldn’t let their folks see bodies; screwed them up in coffins as they found them in shop. The gas had done it.” 

 “Turned their faces black, you mean?” 

 “Nay. They were all as if they had been bitten to pieces.” 

 This was a strange gas. 

 I asked the man in the northern town all sorts of questions about the extraordinary explosion of which he had spoken to me. But he had very little more to say. As I have noted already, secrets that may not be printed are often deeply kept; last summer there were very few people outside high official circles who knew anything about the “Tanks,” of which we have all been talking lately, though these strange instruments of war were being exercised and tested in a park not far from London. So the man who told me of the explosion in the munition factory was most likely genuine in his profession that he knew nothing more of the disaster. I found out that he was a smelter employed at a furnace on the other side of the town to the ruined factory; he didn’t know even what they had been making there; some very dangerous high explosive, he supposed. His information was really nothing more than a bit of gruesome gossip, which he had heard probably at third or fourth or fifth hand. The horrible detail of faces “as if they had been bitten to pieces” had made its violent impression on him, that was all. 

 I gave him up and took a tram to the district of the disaster; a sort of industrial suburb, five miles from the center of the town. When I asked for the factory, I was 

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