Agricultural labourers in the Central Empires are poorly paid.
The women do much of the work done here by men. For instance,
once when staying at a nobleman's estate in Hungary, I noticed
that the gardeners were all women, and, on inquiring how much they
received, I was told they were paid about twenty cents a day. The
women in the farming districts of Germany are worked harder than
the cattle. In summer time they are out in the fields at five or
six in the morning and do not return until eight or later at night.
For this work they are sometimes paid as high as forty-eight
cents a day in harvest time. Nevertheless, these small wages
tempt many Russians to Germany during the harvest season. At the
outbreak of the war there were perhaps fifty thousand Russians
employed in Germany; men, women and girls. These the Germans
retained in a sort of slavery to work the fields. I spoke to
one Polish girl who was working on an estate over which I had
shooting rights, near Berlin. She told me that at the commencement
of the war she and her family were working in Germany and that
since the war they all desired to return to Poland but that the
Germans would not permit it.
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