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March 30, 1973.

Daer Wanda, Jessica and Ted:

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 make 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 nearly all the windmills were gone.

One day each week we were taken in Peugeot trucks with bench seats to the champ de tir, the firing range.  (The French army used mostly Peugeot trucks, but I never heard of a Peugeot passenger car until long after WW1).  I was impressed by the excellence of the French roads compared to ours.  I was also impressed by the abundance of mistletoe growing in trees along the route.  Later I found that mistletoe is common throughout the region southwest of Paris.  We followed a road along the river for the first six miles or so, than turned inland, to the right, for four or five miles more.  Soon after the turn we passed the entrance to the abbey of Fontevrault.  The abbey church 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.  The abbey was closed fo to the public for the duration of the war, so I never got inside.  It was used as a camp for German war prisoners, who lodged there and in the daytime worked in gangs, under guard, on the firing range or on the local roads.  They wore clothes of green denim with "PG" in big letters on the back.

Coming from Saumur we had the river on our left.  The lowlands along the river, flooded in rainy seasons, were used for a kind of agriculture that was quite new to me.  Each field was a sort of orchard of willow stumps in orderly rows.  New sprouts kept growing out from those stumps.  They were called osiers and were harvested each year, to be used for making baskets or other wickerwork.  I understand that there are similar willow plantations in Ireland, called "sally gardens" by the Irish.  You will recall Yeats's line about them.