i2o6 Farewell Rally, Women's Land Army. [mar., 



to a remarkable degree, adaptable to certain aspects of farm 

 life, and the consequent opening out of a new career to women 

 with pluck and determination, may be called the professional 

 triumph of the Land Army. 



But there are other and more human issues none the less 

 valuable, and one felt that it was essentially the human and 

 individual point of view that was touched upon that night of 

 farewell. The atmosphere, as one by one the women walked 

 unostentatiously up the dais to receive their honours, suggested 

 to those who understood the needs of the working girl nothing 

 so much as a great awakening and a great renewal. It was 

 charged with hope and with infinite possibilities for her future 

 as well as of her present triumph against odds. The hope 

 indeed touched upon other results of the great struggle made 

 by women on behalf of women than one newly-opened career, 

 and suggested for the years to come a raising of the whole 

 status of the industrial class of working women, and of new 

 efforts to be put forth by those who had the results of her 

 training before their very eyes that night of commemora- 

 tion. 



For those who knew the conditions under which the poorer 

 class of girls worked before the War have been literally amazed, 

 not at the change that had been made in them — for the}^ had 

 long ago realised the good stuff they had in them — ^but the 

 rapidity in which this change had been brought about. The 

 loafer and the unintelligent factory hand have left incon- 

 sequence and apathy behind, and from the mere wage-earner 

 had developed into the enthusiast. One has only to know one 

 or two cases to realise how wonderful this transformation has 

 been. Patriotic instincts, for the most part unborn in this 

 class of girl, gave keenness at the start and esprit-de-corps 

 as time went on. The training and the individual care filled 

 as large a blank in the life of the poor worker as she and her 

 kind had done in the labour shortage, and their hope lay also 

 in the new knowledge of those who had not realised this be- 

 fore. There had been something else in the making of the 

 successful land girl than the freshness of open-air life and the 

 mysterious contact with Nature which has power to touch the 

 fundamental in the human being. The mere deahng with the 

 Natural elements without the accompanying use of the brain 

 and the perceptions is apt to dull, and it was because the land 

 girl has been inspired at the start to work with a purpose and 

 an ideal, that her development was so sound, and her progress 

 so marked. The new effort literally kindled her into life. 



