Show laimi alil army clarifies policies 1 1 regarding farm labor military Nili military tary units may be employed on crops during emergency situations individual furloughs furroughs not contemplated by news analyst and commentator service union trust building washington D I 1 C 1 home on a furlough I 1 wonder how many of my read ers era remember that very popular print of two or maybe more generations erat ions ago well never mind it if you dont though thou gl I 1 would appreciate a letter from any who do home on a furlough is going gobig to mean something quite different now I 1 remember the original picture only vaguely I 1 know what the word furlough meant but I 1 know there was a tousle headed blond boy in the middle of an admiring farm family telling his ad ventures today the farm boy with a conscience and the farm family with a farm are looking forward to the furlough that will bring the boy home for work not the telling of his tales of adventure it going to be quite that way the president when the farm bloc was riding the administration its hardest last month went into considerable sid erable detail as to what was to be done to solve the farm labor question since then some concrete steps have been taken but riot not the ones the farmers or some of them would have liked they would have liked their own sons or their own hands who enlisted because they simply stay out of the show back doing the old chores they used to do but this is what the army said I 1 the army does rot not contemplate turlough furloughing ing individual soldiers to work on farms the war department announced in a statement clarifying policies and procedures by which soldiers sold lers may be e used to alleviate the farm labor shortage world war I 1 experience demonstrated that such temporary releases of individual soldiers were of little assistance to the agriculture industry and disrupted the organization and training of the army if furloughs furroughs were granted for this purpose neither agriculture nor the army could be assured that the soldiers thus furloughed actually would be engaged in agricultural activities certain emergency situations may develop in which vital crops may be endangered because of critical shortages in local agricultural labor in such cases military units may be employed under command of their own off officers leers to supplement the local farm labor until the crisis is over troops so employed will be housed and fed by the army and will be subject to military control at all times requests for use of military units for emergency farm duty must be transmitted to the war department by the chairman of the war power commission another loophole however t there is another loophole which chall all of the farmers or the farm men in service may not know about A soldier over ever 38 years of age who is on active duty in the continental united states can get his discharge right now if he can get a statement from his local farm agent to the effect that he is needed but the application has to get in by may 1 the same thing applies to men overseas and they have until june better tell them by V mall the president explained to us twice why a batch of young men be pulled out of a division and sent home you can take ID 10 or 20 soldiers out 0 of f an outfit that has just started t training raining anait and it make much diff difference arence butyok cant take that many men out of an outfit already trained and booked for overseas overseas not without crippling the outfit so badly that it really interferes with battle plans his explanation and he made it to us the other day leaning back in his chair and obviously olivious ly trying hard to get over an idea that he believes is right there is going to be a land army he said he like the term because it made the farmers think they were going to have a lot of green city folks descend on them he knows what the farmers think about folks who will scare the horses sprain their ankles try to milk a cow and when she give say the valves are stuck one farmer wrote me hed rather have grasshoppers than city folks on his place glands glanda En method the president resl dent said to us that in england they have increased food production CO 60 per cent and they did it with the help of a land army mostly women with no previous training they got the training A lot depends on the training I 1 talked with a farmer near here w who ho took on a city boy green as grass the boy probably thought shorts were something you wore and probably would have looked in th the toolbox for a boar maybe you heard him hain talk on the farm and rome home hour well I 1 met him and the farmer too the kid is crazy to get back this summer and the farmer told me he was sick when he had to let him go back to school city folks are dumb in a lot of ways but so are farmers its true you can lead a horse to water but you cant make him drink also a lot of horses have got the sense to drink if youve got sense to lead them to the water in spite of dumb help or none at all in spite of lack of machines and a lot of red tape the farmers of the country have signed up to raise a bigger crop than ever raised I 1 believe with a little horse sense and patience k they are going to pull through no team pulled together until they were in harness if they dont god help us and the army at meal time the weather A dead topic As you know mention of the weather on the radio these days is forbidden the newspapers can describe a snow storm or a hot spell buethe but the radio commentators cannot there is a good reason for this A lurking submarine could pick up a newscast and if enough facts concerning the weather were revealed by stations in enough widely separated localities even an amateur meteorologist and the germans are no amateurs could make a pretty good weather forecast by putting two and two together but being unable to describe the manifestations of nature that I 1 see on my way to work in the morning is a terrible handicap to me recently ive gotten around the difficulty by talking about last weeks weather and before going on the pir air reading what I 1 was going to to say to the censorship officials and getting their 0 0 K in no case did they restrict me the other day however I 1 forgot to call up the censorship office but the blue blua network forget I 1 got this message censorship says you have to cut out all references to weather from now on they say that there was nothing actually in what you vou have said or what you have written vr itten today but so many complaints have come in from other stations that you were violating the regulations and so many other stations have been using your comments on the weather as an excuse for violating the rule that we will have to ask you to stop discussing the subject entirely the following is what censorship let me say but what it has no objection to my printing it was pretty hard the past wiek week not to mention the swiftly changing scene which nature provided wash ington ians fans one day not so long ago a top coat was far too heavy for comfort arid and in the park the dark patches were beginning to be studded with jeweled buds and the sunlight seemed to turn into solid gold on the bursting forsythia on that balmy day I 1 remarked well we must be due for a blizzard twenty four hours later the line fine snow began to fall and late that afternoon and the following morning the tree limbs and trunks were wrapped in great soft blankets of down even the high branches were wide bands of white but when we went home from work jn in the evening the streets were dry and clean again and only here and there in the shadow of a hedge or in the sheltering cups of the brown ivy leaves was a dust of snow like a meager sprinkling of precious sugar on the rim of a doughnut |