For three weeks we had no bread at all; then the Germans vouchsafed us flour of their own, so much a day; a loaf made with this powder took the shape of a small, flat, brown and heavy crown, which gave us such acute pains that we often preferred being hungry to having our fill of this dough. We were all poor wretches and starvelings, but we were fellow-citizens, and we arranged to keep a certain level of the provisions. But a hundred times more wretched and starving were the refugees who, when their villages were burned to the ground, had been shared among the communes throughout the country. For months they had neither house nor home, and about forty of them had taken shelter in Morny, where they were huddled in one or two empty houses, lived but scantily, and slept on straw. Several died during the winter. Laon was also overrun with hundreds of those poor fugitives, and throughout the town you were assailed and pursued by small ragged beggars who made you think of Naples or Marseilles. The poor things moved your pity the more deeply as you were compelled to think: "Such is perhaps the fate that is awaiting me." Indeed, nobody was sure that a whim of the Germans would not turn him out of doors. It was seen more than once. So many things were requisitioned. First of all, the invaders laid the absent people under contribution, and as long as their houses had window-panes and furniture, they were sufficient for the plunderers. But afterwards? A large manufacturer of the neighbourhood, M. Vergniaud, had built a castle a few years before in the Renaissance style, and filled it with Renaissance furniture. When the rumour of invasion came, the owner took flight with his household. The first soldiers quartered in the villa knocked off the sculptures of the cupboards with axes, while others carried away what pleased them. We saw a china bath taken away to the trenches; it contained two small pigs. In the luggage of an officer who lodged in our house there were damask curtains, plates of old Strasburg ware, and even children's clothes, all of which came from that castle. In the end what remained of the furniture was taken to the station, loaded upon railway trucks, conveyed from one place to another for a fortnight, and then sent to an unknown destination. To Germany or to the trenches? Some officers, who lived in Laon, did not approve of the costly furniture about them, so they sent for three civil prisoners. The orders they gave them were simple: "Take the furniture into the garden and break the whole in pieces with your axes; it will serve as firewood." The house thus cleared, these gentlemen had but to look elsewhere for the wherewithal to furnish their rooms.