H.E. Bates Companion

Bates describes the George Lucas farm of the Midlands where he spent many boyhood days, now bulldozed into a vast air-force base run by Americans. He contemplates the resulting deep ties created between two peoples, and then reminisces about the German war-prisoner "who worked on this hillside, on our farm" from 1914 to 1918 and bemoans that his return home apparently had no effect on his country's thirst for war. Bates wrote about this prisoner, Johann, in The Vanished World (95) as well as in the fictional account "The Hessian Prisoner." Overall, this short piece is a tribute to the collaborative efforts of Allied forces in the English countryside. A year later, Bates would publish an update on the land called "They Have Left the Farm." In the New York Herald Tribune (July 16, 1944, p. F1), Los Angeles Times (July 16, 1944, p. F4, in a short version), the Atlanta Constitution (July 16, 1944, p. 4, also in a short version), Baltimore Sun on July 16, 1944, p. T4), the Royal Air Force Journal (October 1944), Slipstream, A Royal Air Force Anthology (1946).