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^[[1]]        March28, 1973.

Dear Alice:

Saumur is on the south (left) bank of the Loire, about 40 miles downstream from Tours.  I loved the town and its surroundings.  In my lifetime the area has changed in ways that doubtless have made life more comfortable for the inhabitants.  But when I revisited it in 1938 it had become less picturesque than it had been in 1917.  Then the countryside had been dotted with windmills, and many of the people lived in cave dwellings with neatly built-in fronts.  By 1938 the caves were abandoned and the windmills were nearly all gone.

Once each week we were taken in Peugeot trucks with bench seats to the champ de tir, the firing range (I never heard of Peugeot passenger car until long after WWI).  From the beginning I was impressed by the excellence of the French roads, as compared to ours.  On that particular stretch of road I was surprised at the abundance of Mistletoe growing in the trees.  Later I found that mistletoe is very common all through the region southwest of Paris.  Our route first followed the river for about six miles, then turned away from it to the right for another four or five miles.  A little while after leaving the river road we passed the entrance of the abbey of Fontevrault.  It was closed to the public for the duration of the war, so I never got inside the grounds.  The high stone wall surrounding them made the abbey an excellent prison camp.  German war prisoners were lodged there.  During the day they worked in gangs, under guard, on the firing range or on the local roads.  They wore green denim clothes with "PG" in big letters on the back.  I suppose they were locked out of the abbey church, which holds the tombs of Henry II of England, his wife Eleanor of Aquitaine, and their son Richard Coeur de Lion.  This was Anjou, Henry's homeland.

Coming from Saumur you had the river on your left.  Beside it were fields of low land that were flooded in rainy seasons.  Those fields were used for a kind of agriculture that was quite new to me.  Each field had rows of willow stumps, from which each spring new sprouts grew out.  They were called osiers and were harvested for the making of baskets and other wickerwork.  I understand that there are similar