Doing Their Bit

A pair of flame-haired Irish waifs, Kate and Janie O’Dowd, cross the Atlantic in black-veiled orphanhood only to land inside the brass-bright labyrinth of their uncle’s American armaments empire; one moon-pale evening, the factory gates clang shut behind them like the jaws of a mechanical Baal. Through skylight shadows they witness their dissolute cousin Miles—silk-cravat askew, flask-glazed—usher two Teutonic shadows into the munitions sanctum, the same spies who once flashed mirror-morse to a lurking U-boat on the oceanic noir. The girls, small as sparrows but fierce as caryatids, trigger a die-stamp leviathan that pins the saboteurs like insects under glass until whistles shriek and arc-lights flood the cathedral of steel. Cousin Miles, sobered by the children’s courage, ships out with riveter Jerry Flynn—hearts beating drum-rhythms for Patricia O’Dowd’s silk-stocking smile—while plutocrat Alfred Vanderspent, whose mother forged cradle records to keep him from trenches, is dragged into khaki by the same tiny avengers. Thus the war’s grand gears swallow the privileged and the penniless alike, steered by the small hands that history rarely records.