However, after the roots had begun to form and until the potatoes were ripe, these women never left the spot unguarded. One or the other remained there the entire day and night, rain or shine, as did all who had unprotected ground. They erected a primitive sort of shelter, composed of every conceivable thing they could find: bits of rusty tin and old carpets, for the most part, as wood was too dear and too much needed for fuel. Ah, they suffered, these people!—suffered as no one can understand who did not see their daily struggle to live. Young and old women went tramping for hours and _days_ through the woods to gather dry twigs and bear them home in great bundles on their backs;—not only the usual poor wretch, whose patient drudgery so well serves the landscape-painter, but many women who were formerly in comfortable circumstances, now blue with cold and pinched with hunger, trudged through the rain-oozing dead leaves of the woods. Later, they went entirely without shoes, for all leather was taken by the Germans; and until wooden sabots could be produced in sufficient numbers to meet the demand, women and children were to be seen with their feet shod only by bits of carpet and often without stockings. Their patience under these miserable conditions was extraordinary. When told they could have no coal, they made no murmur, but set out to gather twigs as though realizing the uselessness of rebellion, and only impelled by an instinctive impulse of self-preservation. Many hundreds of trees were felled each winter for exportation and other German uses, and the poor swarmed where this was done, waiting eagerly until each superb tree crashed to earth, when they swooped down upon it, like hungry vultures, each securing what he could of the lesser branches, to ensure him some warmth during the cold months. These hapless creatures, terrified by the approach of another season of bitter winds, ice, and snow, gradually became desperate, and were ready to commit any crime to obtain food and fuel. Stealing became more and more common, especially from landed peasants who, owing to the high prices they demanded for their produce, were looked upon as legitimate prey. To some extent this was deserved; but the peasant, after working his very life into the soil, was obliged to resign so much of his crops to the Germans that he would have gained nothing had he sold at normal prices. Potatoes, even in September of this year (1917), were selling at three francs fifty and four francs a kilo, butter at thirty francs rising to forty-eight later, sugar at twelve rising to twenty, coffee at ninety, tea at one hundred and more, while eggs rapidly mounted from seventy-five centimes to two francs sixty each; flour, outside the 250 grams allowed for bread, was unobtainable. The Comitié National provided certain edibles at a low price, but hardly sufficient for each individual to keep body and soul together.