touch of prophetic grimness.

And yet as the cavalcade swept across the fields thrilling us with its
color and its action, the nearby peasants went on spreading
fertilizer quite as calm and unconcerned as we were exhilarated.

"Stupid," "Clods," "Souls of oxen," we commented, yet a
protagonist of the peasant might point out that it was perhaps as
noble and certainly quite as useful to be held by a passion for the
soil as to be caught by the glamour of men riding out to slaughter.
And Zola puts this in the mind of his peasants.

"Why should I lose a day? Soldiers must fight, but folks must live.
It is for me to keep the corn growing."

Deep down into the soil the peasant strikes his roots. Urban
people can never comprehend when these roots are cut away how
hopelessly-lost and adrift this European peasant in particular
becomes. Wicked as the Great War has seemed to us in its
bearing down upon these innocent folks, yet we can never
understand the cruelty that they have suffered in being uprooted
from the land and sent forth to become beggars and wanderers
upon the highroads of the world.




Chapter X

The Little Belgian Who Said, "You Betcha"