"It is fine and dry," I suggested.
"Not dry," he answered, pointing to the roof. I felt it. It was wet and cold.
"I slept here," he said, "away from the entrance where I could be seen."
His wife was made easier by talking with us.
"How many milliards will bring us back our happiness?" she asked. "War is hard on civilians. My husband is seventy-eight years old."
The cupboard in her new home stood gaping, because it had no doors.
"I have asked the carpenter in Revigny to come and make those doors," she explained, "but he is always too busy with coffins; twenty-five and thirty coffins a day."
These are for the dead of Verdun.
When the Germans left Sommeilles, French officers found in one of the cellars seven bodies: those of Monsieur and Madame Alcide Adnot, a woman, thirty-five years old, and her four children, eleven years, five, four, and a year and a half old. The man had been shot, the young mother with the right forearm cut off, and the body violated, the little girl violated, one of the children with his head cut off. All were lying in a pool of blood, with the splatter reaching a distance of ninety centimeters. The Germans had burned the house, thinking that the fire would destroy the evidence of their severity, but the flames had not penetrated to the cellar.