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Similarly during this summer the price of fruit has gone up in Smyrna, for the Germans have reopened certain factories for preserving it and turning it into jam, which is being sent to Germany. The sugar is supplied from the new beet-fields of Konia. But Kultur must be supplied first, else Kultur would grow lean, and the Turkish God of Love will look after the Smyrniotes.
"Refugees," to be sure, yet one can fancy them looking back some day from their tight little villages, canals, and beet-fields, on afternoons like this, as on the days of their great adventure when they could sit in the sun above the sea at Folkestone and look across the Channel to the haze under which their sons and husbands and brothers and King were fighting for the last corner of their country.
The following case throws some light on this matter, reported in the same pamphlet: "An American family, considered a prize by the agent because of the fact that there were nine children, turned out to be a `flunk. They could not work in the beet-fields, they ran up a bill at the country-store, and one day the father and the eldest son, a boy of nineteen, were seen running through the railroad station to catch an out-going train.
When one sees women and dogs harnessed together dragging carts about the streets; when one sees women doing the lighter work of sweeping up leaves and collecting rubbish in the forests and on the larger estates; doing the gardening work in Saxony and other places; when one sees them by the hundreds working bare-legged in the beet-fields in Silesia and elsewhere throughout Germany; when one reads "Viele Weiber sind gut weil sie nicht wissen wie man es machen muss um böse zu sein," and "Der Mann nach Freiheit strebt, das Weib nach Sitte," two phrases from the German classics, Lessing and Goethe; when one recalls the shameless carelessness of Goethe's treatment of all women; of how his love-poems were sometimes sent by the same mail to the lady and to the press; and the unrestrained worship of Goethe by the German women of his day; when one sees time and time again all over Germany the women shouldered into the street while the men keep to the sidewalk; when one sees in the streets, railway carriages, and other public conveyances, the insulting staring to which every woman is subjected if she have a trace of good looks, one realizes that at any rate Madame Necker was not writing of German women.
Out of earshot, and certainly out of sight of that skirmish, we were speeding at a great rate along a level, lonely road flanked by beet-fields and long lines of graceful elms that shook hands overhead, when: "HALT! WOHIN? WO GEHEN SIE?" rang suddenly out of the darkness as two figures jumped from behind a farmhouse and leveled their rifles at us.
In a very poor kind of trench, hastily constructed in the beet-fields, and little more than body deep, the men lay on their bellies in the mud, nervously fingering their muskets and adjusting the sights. A third company of bicycle scouts were ordered to advance for the purpose of drawing fire. I doubt if that particular body of men had ever before been under fire.
At a Regent Street moving-picture show a few evenings ago two young Frenchwomen sat behind us, girls driven off the Paris boulevards by the same impartial force which has driven grubbing peasant women from the Belgian beet-fields. One spoke a little English, and as the pictures changed she translated for her companion.
We saw the shell hole in the little Mohammedan cemetery, where four people, "come to visit the tombs of their fathers," had been killed, the smashed mosques, yawning house-fronts, and dangling rafters, and there came over one an indescribable irony as one listened, in this Eastern world of blazing sun, blue sky, and blue water, to the same grievances and indignations one had read in London editorials and heard in the beet-fields of Flanders months ago.
Of the three hundred and forty children who were not going or had never gone to school, only four had reached the point of graduation, and only one had gone to high school. These large families migrated to the beet-fields in early spring. Seventy-two per cent. of them are retarded.
A sinister aspect of this is revealed by Theresa Wolfson's study of child-labor in the beet-fields of Michigan. As one weeder put it: "Poor man make no money, make plenty children plenty children good for sugar-beet business." Further illuminating details are given by Miss Wolfson: "Why did they come to the beet-fields?
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