In This District And On Beyond, The Sight Of Women Doing The Bulk
Of The Hard And Dirty Farmwork Becomes Common.
You see women
plowing; women hoeing; women carrying incredibly huge bundles of
fagots and fodder on their heads; women
Hauling heavy carts,
sometimes with a straining, panting dog for a teammate, sometimes
unaccompanied except by a stalwart father or husband, or brother
or son, who, puffing a china-bowled pipe, walks alongside to see
that the poor human draft-animals do not shirk or balk, or shy
over the traces.
To one coming from a land where no decent man raises his hand
against a woman - except, of course, in self-defense - this is indeed
a startling sight to see; but worse is in store for him when he
reaches Bohemia, on the upper edge of the Austrian Empire. In
Bohemia, if there is a particularly nasty and laborious job to be
done, such as spading up manure in the rain or grubbing sugar-beets
out of the half-frozen earth, they wish it on the dear old
grandmother. She always seemed to me to be a grandmother - or old
enough for one anyway. Perhaps, though, it is the life they lead,
and not the years, that bends the backs of these women and thickens
their waists and mats their hair and turns their feet into clods
and their hands into swollen, red monstrosities.
Surely the Walrus, in Alice in Wonderland, had Germany in mind
when he said the time had come to speak of cabbages and kings
- because Germany certainly does lead the known world in those two
commodities.
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