The Nonpartisan Leader Newspaper, June 17, 1918, Page 3

In the interest of a square deal for the farmers VGL. 6, NO. 24 Here’s another letter to the Nonparti- san farmers from E. B. Fussell, who left the service of the Leader to enter the ordnance department of the United States army. There is good cheer for all pérents of soldiers in this article. - BY E. B. FUSSELL HE other day I saw a joke that made me mad. It was in a weekly magazine that is sup- posed to be humorous, and it was supposed to be really funny. It was a cartoon showing two sentinels talking “about a third soldier, a lazy lopking fellow, who was going past them in the dark. One sentinel asked how it happened that this passer-by never seemed to need any sleep at night -—how he could be out at all hours. And the other sentinel replied: 3 “That's easy. He doesn’t need any sleep at night. He works in daytime for the ordnance department.” Why did the joke make me mad? Well, if I hadn’t .got up at 5:30 that morning, worked with the sanitary squad for two- hours, put in three then some more “fatigue” to round out a day that ended at 10 o’clock, I might have been in better humor to take the joke. 3 If T hadn’t, just a few nights before, finished a S 24-hour guard tour, if I hadn’t spent a long, greasy, back-breaking day shortly before that on kitchen 2 police, I might have laughed, too, when I saw a B - funny cartoon ‘of this nature, intended to prove that B9 - the men of the ordnance department do nothing but sleep in the daytime, and so don’t need to sleep > at night. 4 But I didn’t laugh. Instead, I gritted my teeth e and said to myself: 2 THE FARMERS KNOW - HOW IT IS the. middle of your back in a newspaper office for six hours a - day, spending an hour at your drawing board and five hours rolling cigarettes, I wish I had ~you here. 'I'd like to see you go through 24 hours of guard duty, without a chance to take your shoes Nonpartidsn hours: of drill, six hours of class-room work and - “You lazy, good-for-nothing cartoonist, sitting' on . commanding officer, doing or- S Teader Official Magazine of the National Nonpartisan League SRR T T A magazine that dares to I3 print the truth ST,\..PAUL, MINNESOTA, JUNE 17, 1918 Why Farm BoYé Make the Best Soldiers Westerners Are Used to Toil, and That’s What Life in the Army Is Made of, E. B. Fussell Writes From Camp in California off once. I'd like to see you drill for three hours under a broiling Georgia sun and on a field ankle deep in slippery sand. I'd like to see you swab out three dozen greasy kettles'and then bend down on your knees and mop up a mess hall about a million feet long. And then I'd like to see you compelled to stand up and laugh for 30 minutes, by the clock, at your own car- : : toon, hinting that in the ordnance department -they do nothing but sleep all day long. I'd like to see this, and then I'd be willing to go out. and be shot at sunrise.” I think the way I felt made me realize, more than I have ever realized before, how the farmers of the Nonpartisan league feel about the gibes and jokes and insults and advice that is solemnly hand- ed them, 366 days in the year and 866 days in leap year, by the “friends of the farmer” on the staff of the St. Paul Profiteer-Press. And I presume the men who give the farmers this advice about how to run their farms and their political affairs, know about as much about farming as the New York cartoonist knows about running the ordnance de- partment. Of course, if the men who are attacking the ord-- nance department are run into a corner, they al- ways say: ! “It’s not you privates we’re after; it’s the men who are running things, the officers.” Just as Jerry Bacon and his friends in Minnesota ‘ .and Montana and other states say: “It’s not the farmers that we are fighting, it is just their leaders.” But in the case of the ordnance department, I can testify to this—long after we go to bed at nights, lights are burning down in the officers’ quarters, and officers are down there, bending over their desks and not laughing or chatting either, ~ and they are up as early as we are in the morning and going all the time. , And I have been around the quarters of my derly work, long enough to ob-. serve these facts—that he has a room about 10 feet long and WHOLE NUMBER 143 ’ eight feet wide for himself, that his one article of furniture (not counting a dinky little box trunk) is a canvas cot with a straw tick for a mattress, and that he doesn’t even have sheets to sleep between.. And I have an idea that most of the farmers of the Northwest know that their leaders don’t have much easier lives than the ordinary run of farmers. In fact, the more I think of .it, the more the cases of the farmer and of the soldier seem to be parallels. I worked on a farm myself for about a year. We work- : t ed an eight-hour day—eight hours before dinner and eight hours afterward.’ I saw a chance to get out and I did it and got into newspaper work, where I worked gen- erally eight or nine hours a day, sometimes less, seldom more, but never 16 hours a day. So I refuse to be kidded into taking very‘seriously the men who sit in a newspaper office and with the inspiration of a sack of Bull Durham tobacco, tell the farmer how to run his farm and the chief of ordnance how to run his ordnance department. HAVE THE BEST OF MEDICAL CARE But leaving this matter to one side for a few minutes, perhaps some of the farmers of the North- west will want to know how their boys, who may be sent to some of the southern training camps this summer, will get along. They will strike a hot, muggy climate that will take the “pep” out of some of them. But the first thing that they will notice and the thing that they probably will kick about worst, will be a 14-day quarantine order. For the first two weeks after they reach camp they will be restricted to their company streets and their own tents. The idea of this is to prevent. the spread, around an entire camp, of any di- sease that the men may have brought with them. In spite of