In the autumn, there would also be a thousand other picking tasks to be performed, and the only livestock left were three oxen between ten farms – old, limping creatures the army did not want. Women were not used to handling oxen, and they found them impossible to manage. Children helped their mothers lift the yoke over the horns of the huge beasts, saving the women hours wrestling with the harnesses and becoming exhausted before they set to work. Old heavy oxen required strength to master them and, once harnessed, the women struggled with the mass of uncooperative muscle to get them to work. They had to coerce and shout at them, and control them very tightly, particularly when it came to ploughing between trees and turning at the end of the furrows, when there was not a centimetre to spare. After these intense days of work both women and children slept soundly. Fatigue was a blessing, blurring their thoughts and dampening their fears. In the morning when the howling of the lions drove them from their beds, mothers arose thinking of the thousand things they had to do. The children on the other hand lingered in bed, savouring their dreams of who knew which African country, where they were surrounded by loving felines, without an ounce of malice in them. They imagined exotic bulrushes on the banks of a stream, luxuriant oxbow lakes, a beautiful river, immense and warm, unlike the river down below which you could cross in three steps and was nothing more than a stream edged with purslane.

Then one day irrationality took over. In mid-October the sun sank all of a sudden, as was the case each autumn. But the old people decided that the shadow which lasted until midday was this time the fault of the German. Couderc kept saying that the shadow projected by the rock had been there since Jurassic times, that Mont d’Orcières had always cast one side of the valley into morning shade. But for every ill, someone must be held responsible, and everything was laid at the door of the Hun. He had become the thief of their mornings; he kept the sun for himself, and the closer they got to winter the worse it would become. Until April, he would keep the sun to heat his animals’ fur and would not let it go until midday, like a half-empty watering can.