Thus, if you’ve put in 15, 16, or 18 hours of work under these conditions, you’re dead tired by the end of the day. In fact, the exhaustion is so immense that you can hardly swallow your supper; you’d actually much rather stretch out and go to sleep right away. But sleeping right after quitting time is only an option if the machine remains on the same farm for several days. Very frequently, though, it is necessary to relocate from one farm to another late in the evening or even in the middle of the night, sometimes even to a village hours away, and, as luck would have it, in the pouring rain. If, to top it off, your threshing machine gets stuck in one of the soaked, muddy dirt roads of the marshland, then any type of rest is out of the question. In those cases, levers are used to get the mobile engine and the threshing box going again, and all the men have to actively help the horses by grabbing the spokes or pulling on ropes and chains. When you’ve finally reached your destination, the machine is prepped for threshing by lantern light, and it’s only then that everyone can look for a place to rest for a few hours.
Since the individual farms don’t have enough bedding for so many people, only the machine operator, the stoker, and the two packers get individual beds; the rest of the workers have to crawl into the straw or hay or chaff, whatever is available. Imagine what we poor devils felt like sometimes, camping in the straw during cold autumn nights with soaking wet clothes. Before you settle in and get halfway warm, you can sometimes hear your teeth chattering in your mouth, and just as you’ve begun to sleep soundly, the steam whistle is already calling you back to work again. The water carrier takes the night watch so that we don’t oversleep, and he also makes sure that the engine is fired up on time. After the wakeup call, once all the crew members have crawled out of their straw beds, each man runs his sleeve across his barely opened eyes; and a moment later the threshing begins. No one even thinks of washing up or combing his hair; after all, that would be pointless since a few minutes later this would be undone; all you might manage to do is ruin your eyes even more, as the dust collects more thickly on moist eyelids and exerts its corrosive effect.
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