The House of Adventure by Warwick Deeping

There were two very happy men in Beaucourt during that miraculous spring, Anatole Durand and Marcel Lefèbre.

Things went well, amazingly well. There were no quarrels, very little jealousy, and no slacking. At the end of the first month more than half the people were out of the huts and back in their own houses, and though the roofs were of black felt and the windows of canvas, the critical period had passed. The Philipons had sent for their children; so had many others. Mère Vitry was back in her cottage, with the picture of the Sacré Cœur hanging on its nail, and in her garden were crops of lettuce, spring cabbage, peas, beetroot, potatoes. There were days when the whole village went out into the fields, with Monsieur Lefèbre heading the pilgrimage, and the seed-sowing was a public sacrament. Durand's tractors had ploughed up hundreds of acres, and though the season was too late for wheat, these peasants, labouring from dawn to dusk, seeded those great brown fields with beans, potatoes, cabbage, beetroot, turnips, peas and swedes. The luck of the season was with them. It was sunny and dry, and the battle was with the weeds. A hundred hoes and a blazing sun fought and suppressed grass and charlock, dock, nettle, sorrel, buttercup and poppy.