A GREAT EXAMPLE.

Pukekohe & Waiuku Times, Volume 6, Issue 243, 19 January 1917, Page 1 (Supplement)

A GREAT EXAMPLE.

A NATION OF WORKERS. FRANCE, THE INDOMITABLE. WORK THAT WILL NOT END. .-. . . "The plain, the wheat, the mill, contain an invincibility which war wiil not reduce. . . "Under the passing violence, the earth pursues her eternity, and one sees the hands of women tying,the sheaves with a gesture always the same, since the beginning of the world"There are in humanity, force s which the anger of man will never crush, and it draws from theEe forc es nourishment. W&r lives on the imperishable will to labour. "What force here dominated everything? The soldier knows how to conquer the soldier. Work can vanquish death." The greatest virtue of war, declares M. Pierre H.amp in h's new book, Le Travail Invincible, is to make men love work. War is only a momentary disorder. "We must always end by going back to work."

"Tlio author from whom I quote has ever dealt honestly by the French workman," writes Elizal>eth Shepley Sergeant in the New Republic. "In his pjrevioiks writings, Le Rail, for instances, C'ontes ecrits dans le Nord, he has proved himself that rarity in any country, the man who lias come into literature by the door of the working class, and can therefore speak with documented authority of industrial conditions.

whistling of German and English shells over their fields. 'Since the grain is high, one hears less that they are killing each other.' 'Die hj-re or dio elsewhere'—they say. And when a. shell bursts in the next furrow they only shrug their shoulders. 'lf that's all!"

COLLECTIVE COURAGE OF TRADE

"Tho factory-worker has been quite as wonderful. 'J he collective courage of trade has proved superior to that of tho regiment; these women who were under no compulsion to risk their lives daily have found !e metier a potent cuirass for the spirit. Even those who were actually driven out have come back as soon as the tide of invasion turned—come back to towns and factories constantly exposed to shell fire. "Thero are villages where a)! tho inhabitants live in cellars, entrenched like the soldiers behind gunny sacks filled with sand, and much bayonets with sulphuric acid used for bleaching flax, and share strawberry jam and pleasantries with these sturdy girls who even cross open fields to do their journee regardless of daily tragedies. " 'You must work,' they say, 'as it you never had to die.' 'lt doesn't do to get your hand out.' Their work, the manufacture of tent cloth, of jute which is needed in very large quantities for tho gunny sacks, is essential! to the Army. After tho day in the mill many women work at home sewing the sacks, making cartridge-belts. Never was woman's labour so greatly in demand. THE LABOUR FRONT. "So the front du travail, tho labourfront, lias closely followed the battlefront. "This movement will be a magnificent one to trace in a documentary history of industry during the war.' In the valley of the Lys, for instance, the weaving mills stopped work the 6th of October tinder bombardment. Tho 15th the German,-, were repulsed, and tho 2oth the looms were again in motion. ''Nevertheless, the technique of the French white trade is paralysed. Germany holds the most precious part of the textile region, Lillo with its spinpiug mills—where the working woman has shown an almost terrible patriotism in her absolute refusal to run the mills for Germany —in the Cambresi;, where the finest batistes were woven, also the woollen region of Roubaix, Tourcoing. France has been able to hold ortly the jute region about Dunkirk, the flax mills of the Lys, the country beginning at Armentieres wh?re the heavier linens nro made. AN ANCESTRAL TRADE. '• By a singular chance it is the- troops of her economic rival in the cotton trade that are defending her mills against Gvnnan cannon. The Paris white trade is now dependent on England for its finer linens and cottons. How much less fine they are than those filmv webs which the hereditary weavers of Cambrai wrought by hand, from hand-spun t!;ix in their dr.rk cellars, many exquisite American ladies already know. The lingerie that comes from Paris is now so inferior that even the Philippines are getting their chance. "M. Hamp gives a beautiful description of the ancestral trauie of Cambrai, which, because it was practised largely by the old, may now, he suggests, lapse for ever, become a lost art like Etruscan pottery. Nevertheless the ancient textile country has traversed many wars before this one. I'rom the beginning tho generations have woven in cellars whose subterranean damp gave tne st ret.bed flux the necessary supp-eness. Empwors and kings have passed over the roads, and soldiers have trampea the fields, but grain has continued to <»row and looms to move, and women have continued to demand the fine webs of Flanders. . " 'And this is the country where the working woman does not stop her task for the nciso of the cannon say> M Hamp 'There are in humanity forces' which the anger of man will never cru-h.' "

"lye Travail Invincible has heartened ono old-fashioned Francophile; it has confirmed me in my belief that what is taking France through these terrible years is no new set of qualities but a very ancient and familiar French virtuo which may l>e called the love of the job, or, as M. Hamp puts it, the professional conscience.

"This love of work for work's sake, this mil for technical perfection, was common to all classes and both sexes in France before the war; from the farmer with liis single field or vineyard, to tho scrupulous literaly artist; from the humble concierge, who for twenty years liad made one variety of artificial rosebud to the 'great' dressmaker of tho Rue de l,i Paix. they aJI drew on it. as a. deep spring of vitality. Even the sweated lingerie-maker, even the militant industrialist, ground in the wheels of competition, had not altogether lost their pride in good workmanship. PROFESSIONAL CONSCIENCE. "Last Winter at the French official movies I had a startling visual impression of how the professional! conscience, suddenly diverted from its normal channels, had been turned to the trade or soldiering. These men who in civil life had been carpenters, or professors, or pastrvcooks, popped in and cut of their burrows, lifted tlveir wounded, fired their big guns with the same ease efficiency and determined care that had possessed them in days of peace. "The licst soldier and truest hero quite obviously was not the whitegloved St. Cyrien, but the man who did liis drudging part steadily ajid in wholesome fear of bullets. 'Military glorv can only l>o iniquitous,' declares M. Hamp. 'Victory comes to those who do their job well. There was nothing at Thermopylae but the professional conscience." . . "But M. Hamp is more interested in the workman than in the soldier, and after » journey through the northern provinces whose industries he has good reason to know, lie makes us share his poignant impression that Therolsmt. ouv.rier, deserves rather more praise than military heroism.' 'For these old or e'-derfy men, these women of all ages whom he saw tilling their fields and running their machines under shell-fire, might have sought sato shelter further south. The State urged thom to go, offered them free trailsport and an out-of-i>vork allowance, till new homes and occupations were found for them. That they have remained, defending their farms and villages and factories as tho soldier defends his trench, proves them, he says, the truest guarclians of the national resources, of the energy and technical skill which must re.iiivigorate his wounded 1 country. NOT A FIELD LIES FALLOW. "If the inhabitants had fled from the rnn»e of the German big guns 'to the region devastated by war would have been added a> legion devastated bv fear," a band, 3o kilometres deep, of uncultivated fields and factories shut down. Instead, tho vast clayey plain of Flemish France, swept by cannon, covered with the burnt skeletons of farmhouses and villages, whei'e tlu\ few trees spared by the Allied troops have been gnawed white by idle cavalr> horses and even tho agricultural implements have been burned in the camp fires, this plain is now green with wheat. Tt- stretches fair and tail, to the very edgo of the firing-line 'as if nothing had happened in Flanders but sun and wind and rain.' Not a field lies fallow, not a thistle is to be seen. "Tho formers' wives who nave a?complishod this stupendous labour without their men-folk are unmoved by the