INTERNATIONAL: Europe's Harvest

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Last week found Europe's peasants repairing machines, mending carts, sharpening scythes. In southern France, Italy, Russia, a decisive harvest began. A peasant army hundreds of thousands strong, strung out on a vast peaceful front from Siberia through France, was advancing by successive mobilizations as yellowing grainfields quickly ripened northward. To war-anxious Europe this peaceful mobilization meant a kind of armistice. For while peasants in uniform fight Europe's wars, they could hardly be set to fighting until they had got in the grain. And since even modern mechanized armies still travel on their stomachs, no nation could well afford to risk losing its grain supply by attacking another nation during harvest. Though Nazis defied this law of Europe's military history by keeping close to 2,000,000 men under arms as the harvest began, few Believed even Germany would risk a crisis until September when its own essential crops are in.

>Sturdy French Algerian and Tunisian farmer in one of Rome's old granaries had their crops gathered, their barns bursting with a big wheat surplus before harvest began in France. There it was three weeks late because last autumn's freezes killed out 25% of the winter wheat which then had to be resown. Adequate snowfalls and spring rains helped, but the French wheat crop will be well under last year's, though ample for French needs even had 268,000,000 bushels not been carried over. The great French need was not wheat but field-hands to reap it. France, which relies on about 500,000 migratory laborers and their families from Belgium, Poland and Czecho-Slovakia to gather its crops, this year expected Germany to hire away the Belgians while Czechs and Poles would be kept at home.

> In Italy all last week Benito Mussolini's self-flown, trimotored airplane zoomed down from the sky into the busy countryside as II Duce kept a weather eye on the vital 5,400,000-hectare wheat harvest now in full swing. High winds, heavy rains and floods in May kept the wheat crop close to last year's figure of 293,600,000 bushels though 4% more land was seeded. Quality was poor, too, and favorable weather would be needed even to equal official forecasts. Though in southern Italy recovery from rain and rust was quick, around Bologna 75% of the wheat was so dashed that machines could not be used and peasants were bringing out their sickles for a slow, back-breaking harvest by hand.

Once more Italian peasants seemed to be out of luck. Last year the Government mixed wheat flour with so much corn there was not enough left for polenta (corn meal mush) without which life for an Italian peasant is not worth living. Polenta-less peasants raised such a howl that this year Il Duce ordered mixing to stop. But cold wet weather reduced the Italian corn crop to less than last year's 121,110,000 bushels. The fruit crop too (which in orange-and-olive-growing Italy is important) is poor and late.

>Very different were crops in Hungary where peasants were waiting to declare Peter-Paul Day, their traditional day of harvest. They expected to cut 96,000,000 bushels of wheat, 35,000,000 bushels of rye from Hungary's immensely fertile Alföld (plains). Well might Nazis, who take about 60% of Hungary's exported wheat, look pleased.