War and the occupation of a brutal soldiery had stripped the village of its property, its household goods, its animals, and, alas! Of most of its young men. Gross Anspach had hidden itself in woods and in holes in the ground, had lived like animals in dens. Upon the mountainside wolves had devoured chil dren. What war had left undone, famine and pestilence and fearful cold had completed. The fruit trees had died, the vines were now merely stiffened and rattling stalks, and, though it was June, the earth was bare in many places. There were no young vines to plant, there was no seed to sow, there were no horses to break the soil with the plough.