WORK UNDER FIRE

Wairarapa Times-Age, 19 February 1943, Page 4

WORK UNDER FIRE

DONE BY THE FARMERS OF STALINGRAD FIRM BELIEF IN VICTORY. AS IN SUNRISE & COMING OF SPRING. At this time of year the fields round Stalingrad are full of luscious water- j melons that fill the vast steppes of the Volga with a fragrance of honeysuckle. ■ Lev Gumilevsky wrote in “Soviet War News” at the end of last October. The crop has been good this year. Much will be ungathered. Soviet tanks move against the enemy, leaving a trail through rye and wheat fields. Aerodromes have been built on patches of buckwheat. But most of the harvest has been got in. The farmers have grown contemptuous of Nazi bombers. The whirr of an engine does not make them even raise their heads. Only when a party of war prisoners is escorted through the fields do the workers—mostly women —trouble to look up. They lean on their pitchforks and stare fixedly at strangers whose way of thinking they cannot fathom. Stalingrad’s fields are being prepar- x_ ed for next winter, next spring. Day long, night long the farmers plod the black earth. In places they work all night to the illumination of searchlights. It was the idea of an old peasant, Rodion Vlassov. One night he noticed how the searchlights of a battery some distance from th’e front line were raking the autumn sky. He thought it a pity that they should waste good light on the sky when they could use it to more profit to light up the dark earth. So he went off to see the battery commander, who agreed that when things were quiet the battery might well help the farmers to make the land ready for the winter sowing. There is a little yellow strip of millet that has not been cut. Two young girls died there. They were helping the farmers when a Nazi plane ma-chine-gunned the field. The stalks are still flattened earthwards where their bodies lay. Russia has known times of devastating drought, when the fields yielded not even enough to sow next year’s harvest. Yet the peasants would rather swell with hunger than touch the grain reserved for the spring sowing. With his dying gesture, the starving man flings his last piece of bread into the earth so that his children may reap a harvest. Today, the farmers of Stalingrad work in the fields under fire, to the beams of searchlights, because they believe in victory as they believe in sunrise, in the coming of springy