Every morning, for two or three weeks, I prepared the questions for him, and he never answered one of them, but he got to muttering to himself most of the day, and he complained bitterly that he could not sleep in anticipation of the questions in the morning. However, there was no evidence, except his word, that he could not sleep. He claimed that the horror created in his mind by my questions had set him back intellectually forty years, or, roughly, to minus ten years.

Capa had stolen books in Moscow to bring along, three detective stories, the Notebooks of Maxim Gorki, Vanity Fair, and a report of the United States Department of Agriculture for 1927. All these books were returned to someone before we left Russia, but I am quite sure they were not returned to their owners.

On this day, August 9, we went to the farm village called Shevchenko. We called it in the future Shevchenko I, since another farm village we subsequently visited was also called Shevchenko, named after a much beloved Ukrainian national poet.

For a few miles our road was paved, and then we turned to the right and went along a dirt road, cut and torn to pieces. We went through pine forests and over a plain where vicious fighting had taken place. Everywhere there was evidence of it. The pine trees were ripped and ragged from machine-gun fire. There were trenches and machine-gun placements, and even the roads were cut and jagged by the tracks of tanks and pitted by shell fire. Here and there lay rusting bits of military equipment, burned-out tanks, and wrecked trucks. This country had been defended and lost, and the counterattack had fought slowly over every inch of territory.

Shevchenko I has never been one of the best farms because its land is not of the first quality, but before the war it was a fairly prosperous village, a village of three hundred and sixty-two houses, in other words, of three hundred and sixty-two families. It was a going concern.

After the Germans passed over it, there were eight houses left, and even those had the roofs burned off them. The people were scattered and many of them killed, and the men were in the forest, fighting as partisans, and God knows how the children took care of themselves.

But after the war the people came back to their village. New houses were springing up, and since it was harvest time, the houses were built before and after work, and even at night, by the light of lanterns. Men and women worked together to build their little houses. The method was invariable: they built one room and they lived in it until they could build another room. Since it is very cold in the Ukraine in the winter, the houses are built like this: The walls are of squared logs, mortised at the corners. To these logs heavy laths are nailed, and then a thick plaster is applied inside and out to turn the cold away.