The Germans had withdrawn to the strongholds of the marble quarries, just above the village. The village was crossed by the two fires. The poor people were killed in their little houses.
Men who went up on the château roofs to reconnoitre, were brought back dead. An officer was killed by a shell on the terrace, under the big chestnut tree.
Claire had to leave her tower room, and next day it had fallen with all the roofs of the east wing of the castle. Two men were killed in the fall of the east wing roofs, and the chestnut tree of the terrace, that had shaded generations of pleasant dreaming, was struck down under falling of tiles and stone.
They established the staff of the Etat-Major for greater safety in the cellars.
More than half the village was destroyed in those days. Claire and her husband lodged the homeless people as best they could in the dairy, the ground floor of the château was already crowded with the officers, and the stables and farm-buildings with the men.
For Rémy and Claire there was left one room, not too exposed, on the first floor.
From the window of it, together, one night, they watched the burning of a village over across the valley. It was a village of nearly all thatched roofs: it must have caught fire from the shells, and in that one night it was burnt to the ground.
As she and Rémy stood in the window, with nothing left about them but ruin and death, she remembered how, just before all this, they had thought they were come to the end of their life together; they had thought they were nothing to one another any more. And then suddenly they had come to be everything to each other. How could they either of them have borne it without the other?
Now their intense, their desperate solitude, together, was at an end. Others had come to share with them the burden of these things. There were others to whom they could turn now for comradeship. All of it was horrible, but now the world was again about them, life was opening its ways again.