Eight weeks after the doctor had been declared missing, the mayor received more detailed information. One morning he passed this on to Joséphine in the utmost secrecy. He hated having to impart the terrible knowledge and prayed never to have to do it again, although he feared he would. When Joséphine heard him knock on the door at such an early hour and then saw that he was immaculately dressed, she immediately understood what he had come to say. As he struggled to find the right words, she made him coffee. In the report on military operations, it had been noted that Dr Manouvrier had acted heroically. In the official language, he had had the opportunity to ‘demonstrate proof of his courage’. But at the end of August – already in August – he had been captured by the Germans as he was treating wounded men on the battlefield who had just been caught in machine-gun fire at the Battle of Morhange-Sarrebourg. In spite of his armband and those of his adjutants, in spite of the ten injured men they had just loaded onto a requisitioned livestock truck, in spite of the evidence of their status, they had been taken prisoner and escorted to a presbytery that had been converted into a hospital by the Germans.

In the makeshift hospital, the Germans neglected French prisoners. They kept the tincture of iodine and the dressings for their own wounded, and also the meat and the potatoes. All they left for the French was milk and water, and morphine so that they would not howl and disturb the Germans. But the front line was getting nearer. Although the flag of the Geneva Convention flew from the roof of the hospital, a hundred-kilo shell landed in the courtyard, followed by a second one, and then others. Yellow smoke spread through the hospital, stopping dead the wave of cries and noise, ending the wails of the wounded, the shouts and the shattering glass. They had all been scattered; their bodies did not lie under a cross, not even one of those wooden crosses on which names were written in lead pencil, becoming unreadable after the second shower of rain, and erased after the third. Joséphine imagined all the scattered bodies like bits of carcass flung into graves which would also be blown up or trampled over by passing troops. What would be left of her husband now? Surely nothing, apart from his communion chain which he had left for her when he departed and which she wore.