#engineering efficiency

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“Unfortunately for Vauban’s method, the generals did not consider themselves nearly as dependent on the engineers as the engineers were on the generals. Vauban had first recognized the dangers of the noble officers’ independent mindset during his service in the Fronde. Whereas James II saw the competition between officers in the trenches a benefit, Vauban focused on its inefficiencies: The competition that exists between these generals often makes them expose their troops to little purpose and demand that their men do more than is possible, so that the offoicers concern themselves not at all with the loss of thirty men, as long as they advance four steps further than their comrades. By their own authority they order the trenches in whatever direction they please, breaking the design and all the measures that the engineer had taken by their failing to observe the proper conduct [conduit réglée] that would lead to a good end. The engineers are forced to serve as an instrument of the generals’ different caprices. I say different because one general commands one day in one fashion and the general that relieves him the next day orders differently. And as they are rarely imbued with the greatest capacity for this kind of work, God knows the shortages and outrageous expenses they cause, as well as how much needless blood they spill by prolonging the length of a siege.

Such competition required Vauban to gave constant reminders, thus we find his dispositions for Ath 1697 reinforcing yet again that the brigadiers in the trenches were to coordinate every day with their peers in the other attack, so that they would not deviate from the carefully-designed plan. Depite such admonitions, the chevalier de Quincy, himself with a noble pedigree, illustrated how difficult it was to eliminate all such examples by the end of Louis’ fifty-year reign:

It will not suffice to leave to the desires and caprice of the general officers of the day in the trenches to attack the covered way or other works that we besiege; because we can say, to the credit [à la louange] of the majority of these Messieurs (we have already remarked on it far too often), that they are extremely ignorant on the day they find themselves in the trenches...To remedy this abuse, it will be necessary that the chief engineer be called by the generals of the trenches to determine if the work that is to be attacked is indeed ready to be assaulted. Certainly, this precaution would save many men and we would no longer make such stupid mistakes [et on ne ferait pas de cacade].

If the ranking generals did not wsh to provide the engineers with the requested number of troops, there was little that the engineers (and even the commanders of the approaches) could do other than complain. In addition to informing the generals of the number of men necessary for the trenches, the engineers also drew up lists of all the supplies that would be needed (fascines, gabions, tools, wooden planks...). But it was up to the army administrators – whether French provincial and army intendents or Dutch field deputies 0 and their civilian subcontractors to transport the supplies on site, where the lieutenant-generals and their subordinates were charged with bringing them into the trenches. Besieging the Cologne city of Bonn in 1703, Cochoorn had to draft a Memoire preparatif pour l’ouverture de la trenchée to remind the generals to provide the tools, fascines, wagons, and munitions that he would need for the trenchworks – his authority did not allow him to requisition the supplies directly, nor did he have the engineers to transport these materials to the trenches himself. In every aspect of implementation, engineers had to rely on men who cared little for Vauban’s efficiency.

The engineers’ corporate authority was weakened even further when they engaged in internecine arguments over seniority and e ven tactics. Coehoorn had difficulties with his superior officers from William’s death onward, and when Coehoorn himself died in early 1704 the Allied engineers were left without an obvious successor. A replacement would not be named until five years later. Vauban’s long tenure likely allowed him to shape the French corps in his own image once the Marine and Army corps were united in 1691, although this conventional wisdom deserves further analysis. The Allies’ engineers, composed of many nationalities, came from varying traditions and did not always mesh well together. The example of the Austrian service is perhaps an extreme example, but instructive nonetheless. La Vergne lamented that as a result of widespread insubordination ‘each [engineer] thinks himself in command...no matter who the commander or what the orders, one will reverse what the other has just finished, so that instead of advancing we go backwards, to the extent that if we need a trench they’ll make a redoubt, if we a redoubt they’ll make a trench.’ The frustrated technician also spent several pages contrasting his motley crew with the ‘well-paid, well-respected and well-honored’ French corps, led by the properly-vested Vauban, a leader who held his subordinates ‘in fear, respect, good order and friendship, and rewarded them according to their merit.’ We will soon enough discredit La Vergne’s overly optimistic view of what French generals thought of their own technicians, but this underlying tension between engineeers was real enough and is most visible in Dutch service during the War of the Spanish Succession. Upon Coehoorn’s death in early 1704, candidates began jostling to win the posts he left behind. With no single individual firmly in charge of the engineers, it was not until June 1709 that the States-General appointed director of approaches Des Rocques as director-general of Dutch fortifications. Disputes over status festered in the interim. At the siege of Menin in 1706, Marlborough informed Heinsius: ‘The reason of our siege going on so slowly proceeds from all our Inginiers being on a leavel, so that no one has the directions which occasions many unreasonable disputes.’ These disagreements notwithstanding, the town capitulated the next day, one of the strongest fortresses in Spanish Flanders last only eighteen days of open trenhes. At the siege of Lille in 1708, the Allied dispositions were designed to minimizes these continuing quarrels: the junior Du Mée was charged with conducting the attack on the town, while Des Rocques was slated to lead the subsequent effort against the citadel.

This conflict between Des Rocques and Du Mée came to a head during the siege of Tournai in late July the next year. Des Rocques had still not received his new rank, which only fuelled the continuing feud with the younger director. The resulting disputes precipitated a field deputy’s report stating that Du Mée flatly refused to serve under the newly-appointed director-general, complaining to anyone who would listen that his older rival was being far too cautious in his attacks. With the experts squabbling among themselves and the siege dragging on, it was with evident relief that Vegelin van Claerbergen could report at the end of his 28 July missive that the town had finally beaten the chamade. Goslinga’s suggestions to craft a compromise that would appease both Des Rocques and his junior became moot when the younger engineer suffered a fatal head wound during the attack on the citadel. Despite the elimination of this particular conflict, complaints continued to filter in from the Dutch administrators the next year. At Béthune, the Raad van State’s deputy complained of the animosity that now surfaced between Des Rocques and another director of the approaches, Hertel. Infighting and accusations of incompetence weakened the corps from within and gave generals yet another reason to hesitate before following their advice.

The artillery proved just as difficult to manage as the generals. With a separate chain-of-command (except in England), and headed in France by the grand-maitre d’artillerie and in the Netherlands bby the maester-general der artillerie, this autonomous arm guarded its privileges as closely as did the other branches. Its mission also differed from the engineers and thus they held divergent interetss. Whereas the engineers’ wider interests encompassed military architecture, cartography and hydrology, the artillerists’ purview included not only the siege trains and garrison pieces, but also extended to the use of lighter cannon in field batttles, their movement and safeguarding. They were further charged with the design, construction, provisioning and maintenance of artillery and all the infrastructure such responsibilities required – cannon foundries, arsenals, artillery schools and gunpowder mills. As with the military engineers, the artillery of France has received the most attention from European historians and its structure illustrates the many potential areas of dispute they shared with their sister service. In addition to those who commanded the corps, the cannoniers and the administrative personnel, the corps of artillery also included ‘fire-workers’ (i.e. pyrotechnicians), bombardiers to man the mortars and pierriers, fusiliers to guard the gun trains, various metal-workers and carpenters, and even miners, those expert in the underground use of gunpowder. Unlike the military engineers, the French artillery established their own schools under Louvois’ supervision as early as 1679, and these included an extensive curriculum that focused on casting, firing, transporting and repairing a wide variety of artillery pieces. In this formal setting gunners developed a professional identity that stressed their autonomy from their sister service. Pierre Surirey de Saint-Rémy’s two-volume textbook for aspiring gunners was full of technical details on guns, their carriages and artillery parks, but mentioned the critical topic of artillery-engineer coordination in sieges only long enough to discourage gunners from following engineers’ orders to place their batteries in the trenches rather than construct separate batteries. Even Vauban’s good friend Vallière sought to stress the independence of his artillery in his post-war reflections. Though he highlighted the need for both chief engineer and artillery general to work in concert, he underscored that the gunners should rely on their own judgment rather than give in to the engineer’s demands. Not surprisingly then, relations between these two branches were problematic, as is illustrated by the abject failure of a 1755 French experiment to combine the two sister branches under a single administration. For all these reasons, gunners were hesitant to surrender their initiative and follow the orders of engineers.

Vauban, despite his close relationship with Louis, would experience this conflict first hand. Before rising to prominence in His Majesty’s armies, he had already discovered examples of the artillery's ignorance as they consistently failed to ‘site the batteries according to a well-designed plan, [instead] battering whatever first comes into view without paying attention as to whether the fire is direct or oblique. However, many of the shots intended to breach the walls are not direct and thus have little effect as they glance along the revetment.’ At a number of subsequent sieges he lamented his continued inability to convince the gunners of the error of their ways; his lack of authority over them prevented him from fully systematizing the attack in spite of his friendship with several of their highest-ranking officers and with Louvois, who served as the de facto head of the corps until his death. Besieging the hexagonal fortress of Charleroi in 1693 Vauban identified several weaknesses that eroded the siege’s efficiency:

I have moreover suffered greatly from the ignorance of the cannoniers and bombardiers, who, with the exception of a small number, I cannot be pleased with. The proper use of artillery and bombs requires an exact art with precise rules that not a single of these people know. They do things as they have always done them, and have [primarily their own interests in mind, which means that all the batteries are defective and imperfect. Furthermore, as none of them understand the principles of fortifications, they know neither where nor how to fire against the works. They are not familiar with their own guns, which does not surprise me, because they are only infantrymen that serve the cannon and who obey the artillery officers only when it pleases them; and since there is usually only one artillery officer for several pieces and because the officers cannot keep an eye on everything when they are aiming a piece, it is often the case that more than half or two-thirds of the rounds are squandered or miss the target completely.

Once Louis-Auguste Bourbon, duc du Maine and a legitimized bastard son of the King acquired the post of grand-maitre d’artillerie in 1694, he moved to further assert its independence from the engineers. The journalist of Ath 1697, echoing this divide, described the gunners’ traditional ineptitude and initial conservatism in very similar terms to what Vauban had described thirty years earlier:

Every body knows that the common practice of the officers of the train is to fire at all before them, with all the fury that is possible, ruining without distinction all objects that present themselves to view, whether works, batteries, towers, or cavaliers; they even forget themselves so far as to fire upon any building which affords a fair mark, as gates, bridges, corps de gardes, sentry-boxes on the walls, sometimes at houses and steeples, for the mattrosses [gunners] only want to make havock appear, which was not Monsieur de Vauban’s taste, who had so frequently seen the fruitlessness of it at so many sieges....Bounce and clatter and readiness for action had hitherto composed the whole merit of the train at sieges. 

This success was exceptional, however, as the Ath journal identified: ‘Monsieur de Vauban had appointed commissaries, men of understanding, to each of the batteries, to whom he had given directions for the conducting and serving ‘em, without any alteration to be made, or being reliev’d themselves, during the whole time of the siege; by this means every one was well informed as to the intent of his own battery, and with the range of his pieces.’ As engineers were rarely afforded the opportunity to choose the artillerymen, little had changed by the end of Vauban’s life, witness his admission that ricochet fire remained poorly known almost a decade after its introduction. The same old complaints of poorly-constructed battery breastworks and poorly-served guns can also be found in his final siege, (Alt-)Breisach 1703, where he was driven to write:

if the artillery had done its job, we would be very soon be inside the town; but it is infinitely difficult to direct them. They are all men who have hardly ever seen a siege and who know only how to fire straight ahead; they do not even know how to construct proper ramparts. I must exclude from such ignorance the person who commands them [La Frézelière], who is a man of qualité and very well cultured, who has more ability than his age suggests.

In his final treatise on the attack he concluded that ‘Nothing is more important in a siege than the proper use of cannons; but it is very rare to see them well served, much less used how they should be. One is quite rightly surprised at how much variation there is from one volley to the next as well as their small effect, but few people see the problems.

At the end of his career, Vauban was forced to acknowledge he had been unable to change the employment of the siege guns or the training of its crews. Nor were such complaints limited to the commisaire-général. Bombarding Huy’s hill-top forts in 1705, the French commander noted that the gunner’s profligate consumption of powder was having very little effect; he concluded that further improvements were needed in the artillery schools. Evidence of continued friction between engineers and artillerists comes from the Secretary of War’s reiteration to an artillery officer of the rather fine division of labor between the two branches: ‘All your capacity must be confined to promptly constructing the batteries and serving them with as much dexterity as diligence; but it is up to the engineers to indicate where they want them to be placed.’ Forced into intimate dependence on each other, it was not often that commanders could write, as the maréchal de France James Fitz-James Stewart duke of Berwick did in 1707, of the assez rare coordination between the two arms. After Vauban’s death, the French author Guignard noted in 1725, the lieutenant-generals of artillery quickly reclaimed their control over the construction and siting of siege batteries. Pierre d’Artaignan, the comte de Montesquiou and newly-minted maréchal de France personally attest to the resurgence of bickering at Douai in 1712:

This siege is going too slowly for my taste, there is too much division between the engineers and the artillery, and since no one person is charged with overall command of the siege, the service is often delayed. To negotiate such dialogues we need a man who follows each step and who has complete command, but as no one has overall authority each general officer in the trenches follows his own ideas.

- Jamel Ostwald, Vauban under Siege: Engineering Efficiency and Martial Vigor in the War of the Spanish Succession. Leiden: Brill, 2006. pp. 155-164. 

“From an engineering perspective, the efficiency of Vauban’s vaunted attack was eroded by the intransigence of the artillery - the gunners naturally contended the reverse. Without expertise in both areas, impartial observers were forced to agree with one contemporary’s sensible opinion that ‘the lack of cooperation between these two corps’ was as much to blame as incompetence in either service.

The Allied artillery provided a frequent source of friction in their sieges, and this was further exacerbated by the mix of nationalities in the confederate force. At Kaisersweert in 1702, field deputy Geldermalsen complained of the gunners, ‘It is a pity to see how slowly the gunners are working, they are my principal complaint, but in general I do not know if it is these four years of peace or the large number of new recruits, or new regiments, or because they are without a commander who would be able to discipline and reward them.’ At the next siege, General Obdam continued to bemoan the poor quality of their gunners. Rapid turnover of personnel only exacerbated the confusion in the service. After Coehoorn’s death in March 1704, Johan Wijnand van Goor briefly held the post of meester-generaal der artillerie before being killed later that year in front of the entrenchments of Donauworth on the Danube. The position of head of the artillery remained unfilled for the rest of the war, with the predictable result of further disputes among the artillery officers. When the colonel of artillery Willem Ijssel was wounded at Oostende in 1706, field deputy Goslinga complained of the resulting insubordination among the remaining gunners, while the siege commander Field Marshal Hendrik van Nassau, heer van Ouwerkerk lamented the resulting delays to battery construction. During the bombardment of the town of Dendermonde, located at the confluence of the Dender and Scheldt rivers, the English Lieutenant-General Thomas Meredith expressed exasperation with the Spanish bombardiers and some satisfaction with the Dutch, though these last abruptly decided to ‘work [no] longer without being refreshed’ with bread, beer and brandy – he was forced to search for others with experience firing batteries. Later, at the more demanding siege of Tournai, we find the leaderless artillery officers clashing with the generals in charge of the approaches. The resulting squabbles began to create serious problems for the attackers as described by field deputy Goslinga:

The good of the service demands that we appoint a general of artillery; subordination is not very great in this corps, but it is above all necessary in order to prevent further squandering of our munitions; we have preached this need over and over to the [infantry] generals, and they follow it as long as we are there, but once we leave, things return to how they were before. Each general, low-ranking or high, competent or ignorant, acts as if he was a general of artillery. If the colonel [of artillery] or his subalterns don’t obey them, the generals quarrel and accuse them of sparing ammunition at the expense of the lives of soldiers; they even say such things in the troops’ presence, which can only have a very bad effect on their morale. These reasons will convince you, as they have me, that we must fill the vacancy.

A few days later Vegelin van Claerbergen confirmed the ill-effects of inter-service rivalries: ‘Our artillery are firing furiously here, and perhaps to little effect. The colonel [of artillery] blames the generals, and I do not know if either of them have gone too quickly, faster than the condition of the attack follows.’ Little had changed by the siege of Mons several months later, where the engineers in their dispositions for the siege had to remind the infantry officers yet again to shell only those places that they had identified as targets. The Allied artillery, reluctant to accept engineering leadership and lacking the protection of a general of their own, proved as unmanageable for the engineers as the generals.

Engineers had one additional management challenge that complicated implementation of Vauban’s efficient even further – the variable quality of the workmen. Getting the officers and gunners (and one’s own engineers) to accept the chief engineers’ authority was not enough to assure an efficient siege, for the rank and file did the digging for the engineers, just as they manhandled the gunners’ artillery pieces into position. Properly-constructed ramparts were only one cause for concern. The most serious problem was flight. Soldiers on guard duty had their weapons to reassure them, whereas the workmen – motivated primarily by money and drink – were armed only with digging tools. With mere pick and shovel to counter matchlock and bayonets, laboring soldiers often chaotically abandoned their works when sallying defenders approached, and sometimes even when they did not: ‘nothing is more common than for the workmen to take to their heels.’ Focusing the troops’ attention on constructing the trenches to the exclusion of thoughts about their own personal safety was a challenge for both officers and engineers alike. His parallels were of limited utility against sorties if the workers ignored them in their flight.

Vauban had recognized how this critical weakness impacted the efficiency of a siege. As a result he petitioned the King for independent sapper and miner brigades (rather than the individual companies incorporated in the Royal-Artillerie regiment), soldiers who would become experts in the dangerous task of advancing the trenches under enemy fire and undermining the garrison’s works. Just as importantly, they would be trained to abandon the advanced trenches for the safety of the rear parallel in an orderly fashion. The best plans accounted for little without skilled workmen, and in 1672 he warned that his method for attacking a fortresses

demands intelligence both on the part of directors and workmen, I should add that we cannot hope to make the best use of it with those whom we usually employ in our sieges. They are naturally maladroit and surly; besides they are neither trained nor drilled to execute with precision the tasks to which they are assigned. It is, therefore, absolutely essential to form and train a special body of well-versed men, either drawn from several regiments or raised separately, as a corps of engineers.

More than a decade later Vauban reminded Louvois of the impossibility of conducting orderly siege attacks with men ‘the majority of whom I do not know, who do not know me, and who absolutely refuse to listen to me.’ His demands rebuffed yet again, Vauban warned of the dire results if his twenty-year old petition continued to be rejected:

as the King will not make the company of sappers that I have proposed to him many times, it must be accepted that we will always have a lot of engineers and many more soldiers and officers, and that it will always cost him more time and money to reduce the places; beyond which from the very first day of the siege it will end up costing me my life, because I am forced to be almost constantly in the trenches due to a lack of skilled people, which is killing me with fatigue and exposes me to death one hundred times every day.

After complaining of a shortage of skilled miners at Breisach in 1703, he repeated at the end of his career the same request for three regiments of artillery and a separate company of sappers. Turning to the younger generation, his treatise dedicated to Burgundy reminded the royal prince of how his many sieges had suffered from a lack of trained men and then explained that sapper companies officered by engineers could quickly learn the trench skills that would spend up the siege attack and at the same time decrease the number of casualties among the engineers, the artillerists and the common soldiers alike – yet another example of efficient improvement. But his requests were continually rejected for being too costly. Here as well Vauban was unable to eliminate the engineers’ reliance on others, a fundamental source of inefficiency. Surprisingly, his complaints sound quite similar to La Vergne’s lamentation of the Austrian service just a few years earlier:

the majority of officers, no less than the soldiers, know nothing of what they must do; this always creates a great confusion in the approaches, it being impossible for the engineer to provide everyone with assistance when there are 500 or 600 men to command, being unable to tell each one what they need to do...this has happened to me many times despite all the precautions I have taken.

The concern for efficiency once again lost out to the short-term desire to save money.

Although participants in Spanish Succession sieges rarely commented upon the skills of the workmen, when they did it was in the form of complaints about their tendency to run or slink away in the dark, particularly in long, difficult sieges. The dispositions for the trenches at Mons had to remind the workers yet again to only leave their trenches with the permission of the supervising engineer. The English Lieutenant-Colonel John Blackadder reported his difficulties at Douai in 1710:

I find the command far less troublesome when the regiment is in [the trenches on guard duty] than with the workers; there is always a great deal of confusion at any business of that nature in the night; and so it was yesternight. We were to make up the lodgement on the other side of the outer fossé [i.e. the advanced ditch at the bottom of the glacis], which we had been chased from the night before; and indeed our workmen did their business very ill, for the French came out several times with great noise on purpose to frighten the workmen, and it had the effect, for they ran away so that it was impossible to get the third part of them kept together. However, there was a lodgement made. These commands are exceedingly troublesome, because of the vexation it gives an officer when his men do not do their duty.

The German engineer second-class Johan Landsberg echoed Blackadder’s frustration at keeping his own workmen together:

The enemies chased my workers away four times. Confusion reigned supreme! I say again...that a soldier is a coward when is working in the trenches, no matter how brave, he may be anywhere else; I’ve seen this many times. The enemies first sortie consisted of only ten or twelve troops and immediately my men ran away over the bridge of the advanced ditch. I sent a few sous-lieutenants to retrieve them which they did, and I put them back to work. Other times the enemies had only to scream ‘Kill! Kill!’ and my men would flee yet again. I tried to encourage them telling them that it was nothing. I even posted grenadiers as guards and I stayed with the workers in the trenches myself, but I was the only one to stay put, and when they returned to the trench and I berated them, they told me that they had neither enough cover nor enough support, that a dozen grenadiers on the on the other side of the bridge was not enough to protect them. The sappers also take flight, and don’t return for the rest of the night.

An engineer defending Béthune reported several occasions where his small parties would charge at enemy lodgements shouting Tue! Tue!, only to see their opponents flee for safety. Proper supervision was critically important to a constant advance; once officers were killed or incapacitated, their troops often halted their assault under heavy enemy fire, or if working on lodgements or trenchworks fled for the safety of the rear trenches, or might simply put down their spades and refuse to work. Similarly, casualties among their compatriots might also frighten the workers, prompting one journalist at Aire to recount: ‘after the first volunteers were killed or wounded, we could not find any more no matter how much money was offered.’ The Allies encountered similar experiences at Béthune and Aire, whose garrisons conducted frequent sorties. So traumatic were some sieges that some workers even deserted into the doomed towns in order to avoid the slaughter in the trenches. The unsuitability of those digging the trenches was yet one more item in a long list of uncontrollable factors that engineers had to manage in order to succeed.

The Vaubanian siege, as it was implemented, was not a model of mechanical efficiency. The scope of the engineer’s managerial challenge is best encapsulated in the initial goals Vauban set for himself in his 1672 work. His second chapter discussed a general list of the more prosaic faults in siegecraft that needed to be corrected, everything from failures of secrecy, camp security, proper investment, locating the artillery park, and proper line construction to assuring communication between the approaches. Such matters were critical to a siege’s success, yet Vauban’s vaunted three tactics had no relevance and Vauban could only hope to convince generals of the importance of proper conduct. In the next chapter Vauban then focused his attention on the faults committed in the trenches, the arena of warfare where the engineers exercised the most control. Here he identified eight mistakes commonly committed by French besiegers on the eve of the Dutch War: poorly-chosen attacks, a lack of quality siege materials, shortages of knowledgeable workmen, poorly-planned trenchworks, poorly-sited artillery, poorly-coordinated responses to sorties, a lack of knowledgeable and patient generals, and finally the weaknesses of the engineers themselves. Of these eight, none was under the complete control of either director-general or the commisaire-général, much less the chief engineer at a siege. The choice of attacks saw the most progress towards engineering control, as the choice was usually dtermined by the engineer in the War of the Spanish Succession, though even here it was ultimately the responsibility of the commanding general. The siege materials were constructed and provided by the soldiers or conscripted peasants, the workmen were drawn from the rank and file of the infantry, the regimental officers were the only people with command authority over their men in the trenches and were hesitant to follow an engineer’s instructions, the artillery was its own independent corps, and the generals were beyond even Vauban’s influence. The engineering corps itself was in many ways at the mercy of funding levels established by the State – Vauban could make few structural improvements to eliminate or educate ‘ignorant’ and ‘incompetent’ engineers without additional money for recruitment, training and retention from the Crown. As a result, the variety of complicated tasks required in a siege demanded a wide range of skills that could only e met by experts in several different fields – engineers, gunners, miners, and sappers to name a few. These independent branches naturally struggled with each other for prominence, while the same tension could occur within each service among its own officers, particularly where the hierarchy was dimly elaborated or constantly changing. From his earliest experiences Vauban recognized the many inefficiencies that resulted, and was able to eliminate or neutralize a few of them in French service over the length of his career by receiving overall authority from the King himself, by carefully planning his siegeworks in advance and carefully managing their implementation, as well as by demanding technical competence in his subordinate engineers. His aptitude in all of these fields is well-evidenced, ranging from his recognition and perfection of ricochet fire and experimentation with stone-firing mortars to his concern with proper trench construction to his attempts to improve the morale of the infantry workmen with better pay and improved safety.