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branches in the woods or from pruning hedges. They were brought into town and offered for sale by peasants. Fagots burned so quickly in an open fireplace that even today they would find no market in the United States except perhaps as kindling. They were expensive by French standards, but we Americans were highly paid. We had Thery buy fagots for us to keep a fire going in one bedroom in the evenings. Our party of 6 assembled there, leaving the other two bedrooms cold. But there were 400 Americans in our building, and others besides us were burning fagots.

The first intimation I had that we were causing trouble to others came one day when our housekeeper, a gentle, middle-aged widow, told me that she could no longer get wood for cooking. I learned that housewives in Saumur, when they could afford it, burned fagots in their kitchen stoves to supplement the meager ration of firewood allowed them. In stoves fagots could be made to burn more slowly than they did in open fireplaces. Stoves had dampers.

We had noticed that the price of fagots kept going up. We had not realized the hardship we were inflicting on the civilians of Saumur. Eventually an order was issued by our American commandant, forbidding us to buy fuel in the local market. For our last month or so at Saumur we lived and slept in totally unheated quarters. It made us finally realize that there was a war going on. After all, Frenchmen (but not yet Americans) at the front were living and sleeping in unheated trenches and dugouts. And in the evenings we could still keep warm in a a cafe on the school grounds.