234 ENGLISH AGRICULTURAL LABOURER. 



still fed on the best oatmeal, the gamekeeper still kept 

 his job and the landowner still reared pheasants on the best 

 wheat. 



As autumn passed and winter wore on, the stay-at-homes 

 who were needed to grow food, corpulent farmers and lean 

 labourers, stood side by side in the ranks of the Volunteers 

 forming fours. This comradeship, and the feeling amongst 

 fanners that as labourers became scarcer they should behave 

 more kindly towards them, as well as the common danger 

 threatening all classes, broke down for a time that barrier 

 which had divided them since comparative comfort had 

 been the lot of one class, and poverty that of the other. 



The quality of the education meted out to our rural 

 democracy became strikingly apparent in these early days 

 of the war. Maps exposed at village clubs and inns were 

 almost meaningless to the farm workers. The treasure 

 houses of the mind had been closed to them, and their imag- 

 ination failed to grasp even vaguely the disposition of the 

 far-flung battle line. 



" Do Belgium belong to us ? " asked a cowman I knew. 

 " Is India this side or t'other of Egypt ? " anxiously ques- 

 tioned an old man whose son had gone to the banks of the 

 Nile. 



The women, puzzled and distraught at the son or 

 husband slipping away in the dark to some unkrfown bourne, 

 were perhaps in the most pathetic plight. 



Those who lived close to the sea, men who were jerseyed 

 seamen to their waist, and corduroyed labourers from their 

 waist to their boots, would steal away in the night on some 

 dangerous mine-sweeping adventure, and many a branch 

 of a labourers' union recently formed during the stressful 

 months of June and July rapidly dissolved, and in some 

 cases every member of a branch joined either the Army or 

 the Navy. 



The farmers were losing the services of the strong, active 

 young men this winter, yet the step they took to replace 

 this skilled labour was as foolish as it was mean. 



Men and women were beginning to register themselves 

 at Labour Exchanges volunteering to work on the land 



