HARVESTING DELAYED

Evening Post, Volume CXXXVIII, Issue 68, 18 September 1944, Page 5

HARVESTING DELAYED

Many of the French farmers have been unable to gather in all their crops because of the fighting. Some fanners gained by the German occupation, receiving high prices for their produce. While in one farmyard I saw a Russian tractor. The farmer told me it was brought from Russia by the Germans and handed over to him for work on the farm. Judging by what can be seen from the air, however, most of the ploughing still seems to* be done with two horses and a single-furrow plough. Some towns and villages north of Normandy in which the Germans sheltered during their retreat have been almost completely wiped out by Allied bombing, and in many villages one sees occasional houses damaged by pinpoint attacks. The French people show their appreciation of the Allied efforts when casualties inevitably occur. Thus at the funeral of a flight lieutenant who was killed accidentally when a tyre of his Typhoon burst in a take-off, the church was filled with all the villagers, who listened with sympathetic respect to the addresses by the priest and the Mayor and then smothered the grave with flowers. cT? y,illages and towns, where airmen hnd they can buy stockings and per-■ lumes, they are frequently invited into the_ homes, where the people recount their trials during the occupation and bring out a carefully-stored bottle of w^e or cognac to drink each other's healths.