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had not yet been discovered.  As to firewood, the French had long since imposed on themselves the obligation to grow trees as fast as they cut them.  The only firewood was in the form of fagots, bundles of sticks gleaned from fallen branches in the woods and from pruning hedges.  Fagots burned so fast that in this country we would never think of using them except perhaps as kindling.  But you saw small piles of them in the market place at Saumur, brought in for sale by peasants.  Housewives used them, we were told, for cooking.  In a stove I suppose their rate of burning might be somewhat slowed by adjusting the draft.

Our barracks had no central heating.  A nearby building, which housed the dining rooms, kitchens and a cafe, did have central heat.  Our bedrooms did have fireplaces, but no fuel was provided for them.  Saumur has a climate almost as mild as that of Tennessee, but in November the rooms became chilly.  We asked Thery, our orderly, if he could buy some fuel for us.  There was none to be had, he said, except fagots.  They were expensive, but we were being highly paid in comparison to French soldiers.  So Thery bought fagots for us.  To economize all six of us sat in the same room in the evenings and we built only one fire.  Even so, a fagot burned up in the open fireplace in about ten minutes, so it took a lot of them to last through an evening.  And we found that nearly all the 400 Americans there were likewise burning fagots.

We should have realized, I suppose, the hardship we were bringing on the civilians of Saumur.  But I did not at first, and if anyone else did he did not mention it.  A fuel shortage was just something outside of American experience.  The first intimation I had that we were hurting others came when our housekeeper, a gentle, motherly widow whose name I have forgotten, told me one day that she could no longer get wood for cooking.  We had noticed that the price of fagots had gone up.  Soon they disappeared entirely from the local market.  An order from our American commandant, too late to do any good, forbade us to buy fuel from civilians.

We had simply failed to realize what the war meant.  At the front officers and men were living and sleeping in unheated dugouts.  At least there was a warm cafe where we could sit in the evenings, and through December we made use of it.