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Updated: May 28, 2025
There are places in the Desert, men say, where even now you come across the dead of old battles, all as light as last year's wasps' nests, laid down in swaths or strung out in flight, with, here and there, the little sparkling lines of the emptied cartridge-cases that dropped them.
On the 1st of July, 1916, began those prodigious battles which only lulled down at times during two and a half years more, when our British armies fought with desperate sacrificial valor beyond all previous reckoning; when the flower of our youth was cast into that furnace month after month, recklessly, with prodigal, spendthrift haste; when those boys were mown down in swaths by machine-guns, blown to bits by shell-fire, gassed in thousands, until all that country became a graveyard; when they went forward to new assaults or fell back in rearguard actions with a certain knowledge that they had in their first attack no more than one chance in five of escape, next time one chance in four, then one chance in three, one chance in two, and after that no chance at all, on the line of averages, as worked out by their experience of luck.
The neatly cut swaths of the little man with the jimdandy mower came to a dramatic end in the middle of the yard. Beyond this shorn portion the grass rose in a threatening crest, taller than a man's knees; green, aloof and derisive. But it was not this forbidding sight which gave me such a queer turn.
Yet when he was alone in the evening, a sadness and a horror of what he had done came over him; for he had taken life that day as a man mows down grass, in swaths, and he could not tell why he had slain, for he knew not the men who fought on the two sides, nor their difference.
The lion skin, and his enormous stature, attracted the gaze of all. His club rose and fell, crashing into the groups of fugitives and opening great swaths through their ranks. "It is Hercules!" the besiegers shouted, with superstitious terror. "The god of Saguntum has come out against us!" The presence of the giant accelerated the dispersion even more than the blows of the Saguntines.
The women went after them, binding the sheaves, and singing among the yellow swaths shrill, wild songs, full of simple modulations. The squire's field was busy as a fair; and the idle young people sat under the oaks, or walked slowly in the shadow of the hedges, pulling poppies and wild flowers, and realizing all the poetry of a pastoral life, without any of its hard labor or its vulgar cares.
And what can be more exquisite than the drive out from Clear Lake to Ukiah by way of the Blue Lakes chain! every turn bringing into view a picture of breathless beauty; every glance backward revealing some perfect composition in line and colour, the intense blue of the water margined with splendid oaks, green fields, and swaths of orange poppies.
Louis, and from there to beautiful San Antonio, and when the binders cut wide swaths into the ripening, top-heavy, golden grain on the banks of the Rio Grande, I found myself back in my chosen element, toiling long hours during the day in the harvest field, and then until way into the night dancing the fantastic fandango with dark eyed Mexican Senoritas, to the accompaniment of twanging guitars and squeaking mouth organs, and staking my come-easy, go-easy earnings against the "Monte" layouts dealt by swift-handed Mexican Senores, who had crossed the river from the Mexican side for the double purpose of helping to harvest the wheat and trimming, by means of "sure thing" games, the American harvesters.
"It's out of the question to suppose that Landson has picketed the whole valley with those stakes. It is now quite clear why we were left in peace yesterday. He wanted us to get started, and get a few swaths cut, so that he would know where to drive the stakes to catch us the next morning. Some of these machines can be repaired at once, and the others within a day or two.
"In that field, Adele, I was walking late one evening about a fortnight since the evening of the day you helped me to make hay in the orchard meadows; and, as I was tired with raking swaths, I sat down to rest me on a stile; and there I took out a little book and a pencil, and began to write about a misfortune that befell me long ago, and a wish I had for happy days to come: I was writing away very fast, though daylight was fading from the leaf, when something came up the path and stopped two yards off me.
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