The Nonpartisan Leader Newspaper, March 17, 1919, Page 9

b o Back to the Farm ' Soldiers’ Hope How Boys of American Army of Occupatlon Feel, Told by One of Them, Former Editor of the North Dakota Leader BY PRIVATE REX H. LAMPMAN (With American Army of Occupation, Coblenz, Germany.) - 'D LIKE to get home in time to help put in the crop this spring!” That is the sentiment, right from the heart, of every farmer lad with whom I have talked in the American army of occupation, now holding the Rhine river from midway to Mamz on the east “and midway to Cologne on the west, with Coblenz, which is headquarters, as a center. “What will I do when I get home?” is not a question with these.country-bred sav- ers of democracy. They know exacj;ly They’re going back “to the land as fast as trains can carry them from the place of their discharge. Some of them already own farms. Some of them had been “running things for dad” for some years before they .. went to camp. But whether it is their own or their fa- ther’s land, they want to get back to it and get back quick.. No“one who' knows denies that the whole American ar- my, as Secretary Baker put it? when he was over there, is “a homesick army.” But these boys who left the plow- ing or-the reaping at their president’s call, to make the world safe for democracy, long for their native land with a deeper longing, I be- lieve, than the boys who left counter shop, desk or school when th: call came. FERTILIZER THE SECRET OF SUCCESS Stationed in towns and vil- - lages up and down the Rhine from Coblenz, members of the army of occupation have opportunity to see the Ger- man farmers at work in their little fields, some of which are tilled entirely with a spade or fork. Each day they march out from their billets over the hard-surfaced roads past these little fields, and in the sticky mud of other little fields that have been chosen for drill grounds they have done—and are doing—squads-right and squads-left and right- : front-into-line, and other things they learned in the training camps in the States, but which their officers seem to have a haunting fear they will for- get. The drill sergeant has right-obliqued or left- obliqued them countless times to keep them from marchmg into the neat little piles of fertilizer which in winter dot the German farmer’s field at -orderly _.intervals. Other countless: times he has let them march right over and through the piles. ; Fertilizer, and more fertilizer, is the keystone in the arch of German agri- cultural efficiency. German farmers know by centuries of experience that it pays. So do the farmers of France and Belgium, with their neatly heaped manure piles in each front dodryard. The Americans. say you may judge the wealth and influence in the com- munity of a French peasant by the size of the manure pile in his front yard, which, by the way, is the' vil- lage street. T “It’s all one-horse farming with thése Hemles," said one of the boys . during a rest in a drill period. We - had been watchmg a one-horse plow at . work, Jumpmg and gouging in an appl__e orehard in the lap of the hill. Yes, it’s one-horsa tdf rming, all nghb but it ‘has mai med a. de@se : N with the army of occupation. populatxon in this narrow valley, flanking the “wide “and winding Rhme” on either bank, for a long, long time. Much of the land, perhaps much more than half of it, in North Dakota, for instance, has not been under cultivation as many ‘years as this land has centuries. Yet this Rhine land still gives back as abundantly—if not more abundantly, owing to careful scientific fertilization—as it did in the ment, the Sixth Marines. ‘billeted. his mess kit. days, some 2,000 years ago, when another army, led by Julius Caesar, marched ' down to the Rhine, occupied both its banks, just as this army has done, and as a sub; stantial Roman notice that it proposed ‘to remam, built a stone wall, traces of which yet remam along the hills to the north % The German farmer uses his land to the utmost. I have seen little evidence of summer-fallow. Not that there are not, for all the intensive cul- tivation of the land in this valley, land monopolists in Germany who hold many thousands of acres out of use for game preserves and for speculation, i Rex H. Lampman, writer of this article, resigned as editor - of the North Dakota Leader to enlist as a volunteer with the marines. He has had a busy time with this hard-fighting or- ganization in France during the war, and now in Germany Because he has been so busy, Lampman has not- been able to learn what has been done in the United States since he left. : Private Lampman and other North Dakota boys in Ger- many believe that congress must be doing something, under Secretary Lane’s plan, to help provide farm homes for the soldiers as flfey were discharged. s The fact is-that congress has been doing nothing except to dawdle and talk and play partisan politics. The only law-making body that has done anything toward providing farm homes for returned soldiers is the North Da- kota legislature. The North Dakota legislature has also gone .far toward the program of tax reform urged by anate Lamp- man in his letter. . Lower left, Private Walter G. Olson, now in Germany with his regi- His father is Gunder .Olson, League member, who has a farm near Fergus Falls, Minn. Upper plcture shows bit of village sftreet in Rheinbrohl, where Private Olson is Such houses are built of mud plaster, reinforced with timbers. The lower right shows the marines getting their “chow.” The line may be seen coming up past the place where the food is - being served. One marine has finished eating and has washed -Another has washed his. get in line on the chance of getting “seconds.” while the German peasant has -been dying by the million for more land to work, or as he was ac- qustomed to put it, “a bigger place in the sun.” But there is mighty little unused land in or sur- rounding the towns and villages along the Rhine. You have to go into a manufacturing town, like Honningen, about 40 kilometers, or 256 miles, down river from Coblenz, to see that in Germany as else- where land monopoly will crowd people who work for their livings into grimy, unsightly tenements, without any front yards, or back yards, either. Grimy little children play on the cobblestoned street between the rows. Just a few hundred yards away is land on which each family might have.its own little home and garden, and wquld have, un- doubtedly, if it were not for the prohibitive price demanded by the landlord. “NOT ENOUGH ROOM” . BOGEY CAUSED WAR And although there are veritable slum conditions even in nonindustrial villages, you must come into Coblenz, a city of 60,000, to see again how com- pletely the landlord is getting in his work of mak- ing people believe there is not room enough for . them on God’s good earth nor under his good blue sky. Assisted by the wrong kind of a government, the German landlord and his allies of industry and finance, covetous of the wealth and re- sources of other na- tions throughout the world, made the peo- ple believe in the not-room-enough bo- gey so firmly that they were willing to go to war against the world under the hallucination that the other nations were trying to “crush” the Father- land. Here in Coblenz, with its spacious public squares and parks and-its mag- nificent public build- ings, I have seen the same row of tene: ments, whole blocks of them, fronting right on the street and the .car line, with families piled one above another three or four stories deep. And just across the street from these Coblenz tenements, are whole blocks of ~vacant lots—land held out of use by the landlord while- improvements are being made Both may again el .. around—so that both time and the enterprise of others makes him richer without any effort on his part. I mention this here bécause there may be many farmers in the Northwest—Wisconsin, Iowa, Min- nesota and North and South Dakota—who may have never stopped to think that-it is largely, al- ~most entirely, their thrift, industry and frugahty that has created the enormous land values in the v Twin Cities, and that the enormous harvest of rents reaped yearly by the landlords of Minneapolis and St. Paul must come from the labor of them- selves and other farmers and work- ingmen in the territory tributary to those cities—and does come from their labor each year, just as surely as water is drawn from a well. * It is never too late nor too early to' point out that there is'a way of am-- putating the landlord from his graft: Every farmer knows that the assessor actunlly fixes the taxes lower ‘on land which is not improved than he does on improved land. Thus he in fact rewards the man who lets his farm grow “up to weeds. Perhaps every farmer has, a feeling of resentment at having his taxes raised when: he builds the new house or the new barn which was needed, and “which im- proves the whole community by add- (Contmued on- page 14)