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Country life: field, market and harvest, 1937

Workers eat in a field below factory chimneys, a market woman sells eggs, an old woman leads piglets on strings, and horses draw a reaper through the grain.

Men in caps sit in the long grass round their food cans, a town of chimneys and gasholders on the horizon behind them. On a cobbled market by a church a woman in a headscarf laughs behind her crates of eggs and jars of preserves; an old woman in black holds two spotted piglets on strings while a small boy stares. A farmer on a horse-drawn reaper-binder cuts his grain, a busy market is seen from above, and below a steep wooded mountain a family digs potatoes into sacks.

Germany in 1937 was both a peasant and an industrial nation, and Bryan sought out the places where the two met. Most farms still worked with horses; eggs, butter and fats ran short as imports were cut to save foreign currency for rearmament.