Day after day, night after night, alarm upon alarm, the summer glided by. Then came the harvest-time. The farmers were much agitated, for the Germans had declared that they would gather in the harvest.
They did so.
Ah, the birds will long remember the summer of 1915!
The harvest lasted three months, and all that time the grain strewed the ground. Every overripe sheaf lost in transport half its wealth.
"They are but lazy-bones, the whole pack of them," M. Lantois muttered between his teeth. "When we gather in the harvest, we get up at three o'clock and work till eight or nine, and we hurry over our meals. But those fellows! they get up at six, leave off work from eleven to one, and have done with it at five!"
If the soldiers did not tire themselves out, the civilians they employed showed no eager haste to do things properly.
The peasants were full of indignation.
"If those idiots had allowed us to gather in the harvest on the condition that we gave them half or even a third of it, they would have had more corn than they have now, and we should have been provided for the whole year!"
However, the Prussians at last understood that more speed was necessary. And since all the able-bodied men were requisitioned, it was the turn of the women. The rural constable announced one evening that women who would work in the fields would receive two francs a day. This aroused a great deal of wonder. In the times we lived in two francs were looked upon as a large sum, and many women hired themselves out willingly. A week after, there was a sudden fall in the tariff. The women heard they would be paid only fourpence a day, and the female workers dwindled to zero. The soldiers, in a rage, tried to enlist the women in their very houses. But they did not succeed. One had a bad headache, another was in bed, a third was nursing her baby, a fourth was sitting up by her sick mother, and so on.
This state of things did not last long. The military authorities issued an order, which enjoined all women from sixteen to fifty to be on the place of the village at such an hour, to be enrolled as day-labourers. Mothers of young children alone were exempt. We looked at one another in bewilderment. Why, then, we had to go too! But if we can wield the pen and the needle, and on occasion the broom, we are not trained to handle the sickle, the spade, and the rake. Besides Geneviève was hardly recovered. Colette is as slender as a reed, and if Yvonne and I are far from being viragoes in times of peace, we were still weaker after a year of privation and trouble.