THAT autumn and winter there was a lot of talk in the papers about food. Wedged into news of the Ancre and Beaumont Hamel, the crumpling-up of Roumania under von Mackensen, and President Wilson’s Peace Note, came paragraphs and letters and articles on food and the ways of economising and producing it. The latter most troubled Harry, as he thought of the modest spring-sowings of Worge. If it was indeed true that the German U-boats were threatening the country’s wheat supply, might it not be as well to reclaim the old tillage of the Sunk Field or even break up grass-land in the high meadows by Bucksteep?

Harry did not often read the papers, getting all his news from the Daily Express poster which Mrs. Honey displayed outside the shop when the papers arrived at noon; but when paper-restrictions brought posters to an end, he went skimming through Mus’ Beatup’s Sussex News, and one day skimming was changed to plodding by a very solid article on wheat-production and the present needs.

In many ways it was a revelation to Harry. Though he had been a farm-boy all his life it had never struck him till then that grain-growing was of any importance to the nation, or imagined that the Worge harvests mattered outside Worge. The fields, the stock had been to him all so many means of livelihood, and the only motive of himself and his fellow-workers the negative one of [116] keeping Worge from the auctioneer’s. If he ever realised his part in the great adventure, it was only when he saw his duty to keep the place together for Tom to fight for. This was his newest and highest motive, and when he refused the call of distant woods, broke with the Brownbread rat-and-sparrow club, and paid no more than a business visit to Senlac Fair, it was so that Tom’s sacrifice should not be in vain. But here was a chap making out that a farmer was very nearly as important as a soldier, and that it was on the wheat-fields of England as well as on the battlefields of France that the war would be won....

After this, Harry always read the food-supply news, and pondered it. Was it indeed true that the war which was being waged with such gallantry and fortitude abroad might be lost at home? For the first time he had a personal interest in the struggle, apart from the interest he felt through Tom. Hitherto the war had meant nothing to him, because he had thought he meant nothing to the war—he was too young to be a soldier, probably always would be, since everyone said that peace would come next year. All he had had of warfare was the distant throb and grumble of guns a hundred miles away—not even a prowling Taube or lost Zeppelin had visited the country within the Four Roads. First the lighting order, then the liquor control, then the Conscription Act—only thus and indirectly had the war touched him, requiring of him merely a passive part. But now he saw that he also might take his active share, and the realisation set fire to his clay.

The winter was a bad one—bitterly cold, with thick green ice on the ponds, and a skimming of hard snow on the fields, where the soil was like iron. The marshes of Horse Eye were sheeted with a frozen overflow, and the wind that rasped and whiffled from the east, stung [117] the skin like wire, and piercing the cracks of barns, made the stalled cattle shiver and stamp. There was little work on the farm, though Harry had done his best to fulfil Tom’s injunctions, and had carted his manure and turned a strong furrow to the frost. The lambing had been got through somehow—but two ewes and three or four lambs had died, as they would never have done if Tom had been there. At every turn Harry was faced by his own inexperience, and learned only at the price of many disappointments and much humiliation.

But he was the type which failure only makes dogged, and his unsuccessful winter helped his new sense of the country’s need in making him plan daringly for the spring. He resolved that his apprenticeship should not last beyond the winter—it was his own fault that it had lasted so long—and in March he would get to business, and start his scheming for doubling the grain acreage of the farm.

There were several acr............