Women and War Work

by Helen Miller Moyes

CHAPTER X

FOOD PRODUCTION AND CONSERVATION

"The whole country ought to realise that we are a beleaguered city."

—The President of the Board of Agriculture.

"If you have any belief in the cause for which thousands of your fellow-countrymen have laid down their lives, you will scrape and scrape and scrape, you will go in old clothes, and old boots, and old ties until such a mass of treasure be garnered into the coffers of the Government as to secure at the end of all this tangle of misery a real and lasting settlement for Europe."

—The President of the Board of Education.

In this great struggle the food question assumes greater and greater importance.

The production of food has been affected by the raising of great armies—more than twenty million men are in arms in Europe—by the feeding of armies, for which we must, of necessity, provide food in excess of what these men would need in civil life. The ability to get the food has been made difficult for us by the submarine warfare. Thousands of tons of wheat lie in Australia, but we cannot afford ships to bring it. Tea has been very short in England, though again there are thousands of tons waiting in India. The most urgent need of the Allies is for ships and more ships. There has been great loss of tonnage and the needs of the Army and Navy absorb the service of vast numbers of the available ships. We have moved 13,000,000 men since war broke out, and the supplies and munitions they have needed, to our many fronts. Ceaselessly we move the wounded. We have to bring into Britain half our food. That we have done this, has been due to the British Navy and the Reserves—the patrols and the mine sweepers—the Fringes of the Fleet—and not least, the merchant seaman. About 6,000 merchantmen have been killed by the enemy, some with diabolical cruelty. These men are torpedoed and come into port, and go for another ship at once. On the ship on which I crossed there were seamen who had been torpedoed three times In its submarine warfare the enemy has broken every international and human law—has used "frightfulness" to its fullest extent, and the answer of our merchant seamen is to go to sea again as soon as the ship is ready, and the older men, who had retired, return to sea. The seaman of our country know the enemy. It was our Seamen's Union that refused to carry the Peace Delegates to Stockholm, and it is they and our fishermen who, in the Reserves, man the patrols and mine sweepers, and who, on our little drifters and trawlers, have fought the enemy's big destroyers—fought till they went down, refusing to surrender.

It is not strange that the best-liked poster in our Food Crusade, and the one people want everywhere, is a simple drawing of a merchant seaman, and under it the words, "We risk our lives to bring you food. It is up to you not to waste it."