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 looted the store of everything of value. During the year that followed, Loos remained in the hands of the enemy. In the effort of the French to retake it, it was often fired upon from the surrounding hills. From the windows in the sloping garret roof, Emilienne and her father watched many a battle until the bombs began falling on the garret itself. They were exposed to constant danger. They had to live on the vegetables they could gather from the deserted neighbouring gardens. By December her father was ill from privation and hunger and anxiety, and one night he died. Emilienne, girl as she was, seems to have been the main reliance of the family, her mother, her little sister Marguerite, and her little brother Leonard, aged nine. The morning after her father's death, Emilienne went to the German commandant to ask for assistance. How should she get a coffin? How should it be possible to bury her father? And the German laughed: "One can get along very well without a coffin!" He finally permitted her four French prisoners to dig the grave and the curé of Loos, he said, could say a prayer. But Emilienne was heart-broken at the thought of putting her father into the ground without a coffin. She and her little brother made one with their own hands from boards she found at the deserted carpenter-shop down the street.

By the spring of 1915 the bombardment of Loos increased in violence. There were days at a time when the whole family, with their black dog Sultan, did not dare venture out of the cellar. In