Yes, this ignorant woman, white and thin and ragged, sitting on the wreck of her home, said this. "Did you hear how they took every single thing in copper or brass--Grandfather's candlesticks, the andirons, the handles of the clothes-press, the door-knobs, and all, _every one_ of my saucepans and kettles?" Her voice trembled at this item. "The summer after that, it was everything in linen. I had just the chemise I had on my back ... even what was on the clothes-line, drying, they took. The American Committee distributed some cotton material and I made a couple for me and Berthe, and some drawers for Jean-Pierre and the baby. That was when we could still get thread. The winter after that, it was woolen they took, everything, especially mattresses. Their officers made them get every single mattress in town, except the straw ones. Alice Bernard's mother, they jerked her mattress right out from under her, and left her lying on the bed-ropes. And M. le Curé, he was sick with pneumonia and they took his, that way, and he died. But the Boches didn't dare not to. Their officers would have shot them if they hadn't." "I can make beds for you," he said. "There must be trenches somewhere, near,"--she nodded,--"they'll have left some wire-netting in an _abri_. You make a square of wood, and put four legs to it, and stretch the wire-netting over it and put straw on that. But we had some wire-netting of our own that was around the chicken-yard." "Oh, they took that," she explained,--"that, and the doors of the chicken-house, and they pried off our window-cases and door-jambs and carried those off the last days, too ... but there was one thing they wouldn't do, no, not even the Boches, and that was _this_ dirty work!" She waved her hand over the destruction about her, and pointed to the trees across the road in the field, all felled accurately at the same angle. "We couldn't understand much of what happened when they were getting ready to leave, but some of them had learned enough French to tell us they wouldn't 'do it'--we didn't know what. They told us they would go away and different troops would come. And Georges Duvalet's boy said they told _him_ that the troops who were to come to 'do it' were criminals out of the prisons that the officers had let out if they would 'do it'--all this time we didn't know what, and somebody said it was to pour oil on us and burn us, the way they did the people in the barn at Vermadderville. But there wasn't anything we could do to prevent it. We couldn't run away. So we stayed, and took care of the children. All the men who could work at all and all the women too, unless they had very little children, were marched away, off north, to Germany, with just what few extra things they could put in a big handkerchief. Annette Cagnon, she was eighteen, and had to go, but her mother stayed with the younger children--her mother has been sort of crazy ever since. She had