In Orcières-le-Bas, as soon as the husbands, fathers and sons departed, the women took over. As the men were heading in trains to the eastern front where killing was the only way to avoid dying, the women turned the other way, towards life. The men were moved from position to position, mere pawns on the great chessboard of death, while the women kept things alive. On 4 August they started to harvest, cutting and threshing the wheat and then bringing in the straw. They had to pull the ploughs themselves. Before the war, three horses or two oxen had been harnessed to a plough but now they had to make do with a single old ox or nag that could barely shift the plough, so that the women had to use all their force to engage the ploughshare. Because the tools were designed for men, they were always too high or too heavy. As soon as the ploughshare snagged on a stone, the handles of the plough would catch the women in the chest and the earth in the furrows would hit them as if rejecting them. Some women, who had no oxen, hitched themselves to the ploughs like beasts of burden. Working the land was a hundred times harder for the women than it had been for the men, but still they harvested, they threshed, they ploughed and spread the straw out to dry, and on top of that they had to feed the children and look after the old people. Each woman put their own wishes to one side in a world stalked by death. They took it all on. They often worked for fifteen hours straight, did the washing, cooked, sowed and got no sleep. In that village nothing daunted the women. Except the sound of the lions growling and the fear that one day they would meet them face to face.

As weeks passed, the idea of the German and his wild beasts living above them became more and more intolerable. After a month they were very scared, a normal reaction to having lions so close. In the early days of the war, the newspapers reported that the Germans were not to be feared. They fired soft bullets which barely passed through clothing. If La Dépêche were to be believed, the Germans were so weak that the French soldiers could defeat them just by marching at them; the Germans would crumple like old sticks. It was the mayor who received the daily newspaper. Because he had a club foot, he was the only one with the time to read. Sometimes people wondered if he rewrote the copy on the orders of the préfet.