Excerpt from The Long Journey War and the occupation of a brutal soldiery had stripped the village of its property, its household goods, its animals, and, alas! Of most of its young men. Gross Anspach had hidden itself in woods and in holes in the ground, had lived like animals in dens. Upon the mountainside wolves had devoured chil dren. What war had left undone, famine and pestilence and fearful cold had completed. The fruit trees had died, the vines were now merely stiffened and rattling stalks, and, though it was June, the earth was bare in many places. There were no young vines to plant, there was no seed to sow, there were no horses to break the soil with the plough. About the Publisher Forgotten Books publishes hundreds of thousands of rare and classic books. Find more at www.forgottenbooks.com This book is a reproduction of an important historical work. Forgotten Books uses state-of-the-art technology to digitally reconstruct the work, preserving the original format whilst repairing imperfections present in the aged copy. In rare cases, an imperfection in the original, such as a blemish or missing page, may be replicated in our edition. We do, however, repair the vast majority of imperfections successfully; any imperfections that remain are intentionally left to preserve the state of such historical works.