American Agriculturist 
THE FARM PAPER THAT PRINTS THE FARM NEWS 
“Agriculture is the Most Healthful, Most Useful and Most Noble Employment of Man .”—Washington 
Reg. U. S. Pat. Off. 
Established 1842 
Volume 114 
For the Week Ending August 2, 1924 
Number 5 
The Harvest More Precious Than Jewels 
A Frenchwoman Tells Americans What the Land Means to Her People 
A FRENCH WOMAN, before the war one of 
the wealthy landed proprietors of the 
Aisne, was entertaining the women of the 
Good Will Delegation at tea. The tables 
were spread not far from the ruins of her former 
homestead. Looking about at the scene of des¬ 
olation, the blasted trees, the wasted ground and 
the shattered farm buildings, this Frenchwoman 
spoke of the day in 1914 when news reached the 
Ainse that the Germans were coming. 
“I lost all my jewels,” she said. “ We had only 
an hour’s notice before leaving. I did not nave 
time to get them.” 
Some of the Americans were 
puzzled. Finally one of them spoke. 
“But you had an hour,” she said. 
“Wasn’t that time enough to get 
your jewels? ” 
The Frenchwoman looked sur¬ 
prised. “Why, that last hour,” she 
explained, “we were all busy getting 
the harvest into the barn.” 
It was a new thought to the 
American women who were studying 
conditions in France under . the 
auspices of the American Committee 
for Devastated France. They were 
silent for a moment, endeavoring to 
grasp the implications of what this 
Frenchwoman had said; that the 
fields and the harvest are.to the 
country people of France, rich and 
poor alike, under all conditions, the 
things of supreme importance. 
In their trip through France, the 
Good Will Delegates had seen much 
of the countryside. What they saw 
had impressed them deeply. In the 
faint evening light they had seen the 
men and women working in the fields, 
still seeking to catch a few more 
moments of daylight. In the roads 
they had met the peasants walking the long miles 
between their cottages and their fields. They 
had seen the women carrying on their heads or 
pushing in wheelbarrows the piles of fodder for 
the barns. Especially they were impressed by 
the thrift and the untiring capacity for labor. 
Every corner, every hillside was planted, ex¬ 
quisitely tended. They had been able to guess 
something of the passionate love of the soil which 
dominates the country people of France. After a 
week of observation one of the delegates put her 
feeling into words. 
“I never realized before,” she said, “that we 
are just colonists temperamentally. We can’t 
know what it is to care for the land, our piece of 
land, the way these people do. I. suppose it’s 
because the tradition of change, of being uprooted, 
isn’t more than three centuries old in any of us, 
and in most of us not a third so old. These 
people are as much a part of the land as their 
crops or their trees or their vines.” 
These impressions recurred to the women of 
the Good Will Delegation as, several days later, 
they drove through the Zone Rouge, the section 
of France condemned as irreclaimable after the 
ravages of four years’ war. There are miles of 
French road along which no patient peasants 
trudge homeward in the evening light. The 
landscape is still unrecognizable. The beautiful 
By MARGARET K. LEECH 
French trees are dead, or slowly dying, blackened 
by gas. The fields were ploughed for the last 
time by shells and the deep, transverse alleys of 
the trenches. 
Sacrifice All for Land 
The impression of desolation and disuse is 
terrible. But the French will not admit that the 
condemnation of the land is permanent. Wonder¬ 
ful things have been done in the way of reclaiming 
- the areas devastated by war. To awaken the 
Good Will delegates visiting farm of M DeBussy near Anizy (Aisne), viewing the 
ruins of the home destroyed by the invading army- Four years ago the farm produced 
nothing, while now it is almost back to normal. 
fields to life again the French peasant will sacrifice 
his health and comfort—everything—for years to 
come. 
Wherever their limited resources permit, the 
peasants have returned to reclaim their land. It 
is a labor demanding devotion, skill and a great 
patience. First the shell holes and trenches must 
be filled in and the barbed wire combed from the 
fields. This last is in itself no unimportant task. 
Still, after four years of work, the job of clearing 
the barbed wire goes on, and seems to be without 
end. Along the roadside are ranged the bundles 
of wire, neatly coiled in great burrs for collection 
and removal. Trucks piled with these bundles 
passed the motors of the party of Americans, as 
they drove through the countryside. In the 
stations they saw them being loaded on the freight 
trains and carried away. The business of tearing 
down the appurtenances of war is in itself a tre¬ 
mendous task. 
Harvesting a Crop of Shells 
When the land has been cleared and filled in, 
the farmer must wait until the dry season to burn 
the weeds from his fields. Then he is at last 
ready to till the soil and prepare it for planting. 
Slowly and laboriously every foot of the fields 
must be turned over by hand, for it is not possible 
to use a plough at first. The soil is still sown with 
explosives. When his implement, delicately manip¬ 
ulated, strikes metal, the farmer stops and digs 
around the spot. He carefully removes the shell 
and sets it aside to be exploded later. On their 
drives through devastated France, the American 
delegates learned to recognize the significance of 
the rows of shells along the road. Sometimes they 
could hear the muffled reports of their explosions 
in some unfrequented valley. 
The fields represent a triumph of the courage 
and devotion of the French peasant. In the 
country of the Aisne the American delegates 
learned of the help which the peasants have 
received from the American Com¬ 
mittee for Devastated France. 
Through the initiative and help of 
this committee more than thirty 
agricultural syndicates have been 
formed. In these syndicates the 
farmers are united for the restoration 
of their land. American tractors 
have played an important part in this 
agricultural reconstruction. 
The French peasants of the de¬ 
vastated regions did not need to 
journey for great adventure. They 
simply came home. The familiar 
place, in which before 1914 their 
roots had been, was unrecognizable. 
They found a place to live. Perhaps 
it was a dugout or a cave or a quarry, 
a hole in a cinder pile, a corner of a 
ruin. They cooked their first meals 
over a fire made in the ground, w r ith a 
German helmet for a soup kettle. 
There xvas no privation that they did 
not suffer, but they resurrected their 
fields. Their little money, all their 
effort, went for that. They might eat 
and sleep in a damp cave, but the 
fields were cleared and the crops 
sown. All of them worked, the old 
women and the small children. All of them are 
working still. 
For the simple duties of the routine of the 
fields, these peasants of France have endured 
perils and hardships indescribable. They are 
quite unconscious of heroism. They have no 
time for it, because they are too busy with their job. 
For them the important thing is getting the harvest 
into the barn. 
One Way of Solving Community Problems 
(Continued froyn page 66) 
One problem recently taken up was the support of a 
county travelling library. When such a proposition 
is to be put up to the voters, it is necessary that a 
petition be signed by a certain number before the Free¬ 
holders are authorized to place the question on the 
ballots. When the list of voters was counted Wayside 
was outdone by no other community in the county. 
Two other small rooms on the second floor are used 
for committee meetings or for groups of Club or Home 
Economics workers; while not infrequently more than 
one meeting is in progress at the same time. Since the 
community house is the result of their combined ideas, 
labor and interest, each one feels a personal interest and 
respect for it. Consequently, they carry away from 
meetings held there many more facts than they would 
do from a building which meant nothing to them in¬ 
dividually. 
