REAPING THE SOMME CORN.

Taranaki Daily News, 5 January 1921, Page 8

REAPING THE SOMME CORN.

FIRST POST-WAR HARVEST. It sounded like a distant aeroplane. And it seemed the sort of noise one associated, with the Somme. But it was a thrashing-machine up between La Boiselle and Pozieres, perched like some new-fangled, thing of civilisation on the fringe of a waste of weed-scrambled trendies and shell holes. As far as I could discover, there are two thrashing-machines on ;he Somme just now working from < < harvest patch to another, said a i .. Mail correspondent, writing at the.of September. Some agricultural Experts who went out to the Somme during the war gave their opinion that corn would not grow there again, that the ground was poisoned. Bu. just now they are reaping the first post-war harvest of Somme corn. It stands in red-gold stocks in patches over the Somme, full in the ear, plentiful and beauteous to look upon. One comes upon a patch of it amid a heave of chalk and weeds and the last traces of hell. The shells and brokenness of war lie piled beside this patch of stubble; heaped-up wire marks the boundaries of the field. Net far from Warlencowt two patches of corn—five , acres c,ich, per-haps—-and a first-class patch of mangold made me think of England.

An ancient personage was surveying his “farm” carefully. It was all he had, so he told me. When the war-tide came it just washed out his home and everything that was his. He does not know now even where his house was. Trenches massed with wire and wild convolvulus and poppies and red-eyed wild migonette have changed the geography of his lands. But he was proud of his ten acres of corn and his five acres of roots; never had he been so proud of a crop. His wife was dead, his sons killed, but nature had given him back * this little bit of solace. “It’s fine corn,” he told me. “This land never knew better, and I grew corn here for forty years.” “But the poison ?” He shrugged his shoulders. “The Boe.he could not kill France,” was all he said. It is true. Ten thousand guns concentrated on a patch could not hinder the miracle of seed-time. The soil of Pozieres, every inch of it raked yards deep by Australian and German guns, was giving back better corn than it had yielded for years. I The Somme is the earth as it was when the first tares were put into it. Its weed-wastes show spots of gold ■ where little harvests are gathering. Up i at Le Sars a motor-plough was’ at work , to-day, bumping ami rocking like i laboring boat—sludgy, heavy work. But there will be grain at Le Sars next year. i Down by Delville Wood, in which they : are still searching for dead, and have i 3000 yet to find, they are stocking the new corn.