Luciano Cumaldi

When Europe was starving in 1945, America's answer was to put 300,000 farm animals on ships and send 7,000 farm boys to look after them. The idea belonged to an Indiana farmer called Dan West. He had spent the Spanish Civil War ladling out powdered milk to children, never with enough to go round, deciding each morning which ones got a cup. He came home saying the same thing to anyone who would listen: "not a cup, but a cow." His church took him at his word, and when the war ended the United Nations' new relief agency needed stockmen. So the Brethren recruited them. They were aged from 16 to 72. Farm lads, schoolteachers, conscientious objectors, a good many of whom had never seen the sea. The newspapers called them the seagoing cowboys. They sailed on converted Liberty ships with the holds fitted out as stalls. Heifers and horses for Poland, Greece, Italy and Czechoslovakia. They mucked out in Atlantic gales, calved cows in mid-ocean, and walked their animals down the gangway into ports that were mostly rubble. Fewer than 4 in every 100 animals were lost on the way. West's own heifers came with a condition. The family that received one signed for it, and the promise they signed was that her first heifer calf would be given to a neighbour. That was the whole of post-war relief as these men understood it. A hungry family needs milk tomorrow, and the year after, and so does the family next door, and only one thing on earth supplies all of that from grass. The agency that shipped those cows is the ancestor of the ones now holding conferences on how many cattle the world can do without. Nobody has ever been asked to pass a sack of flour on to the neighbours.