Claire's family - and taxis to the trenches
Every town and village in France has its 'monument aux enfants morts pour la France'. Moux too paid its price for the failures of politicians and princes.
Claire Escourrou had already begun to learn the meaning of loss.
Claire's mother, Marie Hospitalot of Serviès-en-Val, married Paul Escourrou in 1885 when she was 19. She gave birth to Jacques a year later. She returned to her parents in Serviès for the birth of Claire in 1890.
But before Claire had reached 16 she had lost both of her Moux grandparents - old Hippolyte and Anne - and her mother. She was left with the men of her family: father Paul and brother Jacques, and the cook/housekeeper Maria Oulieu. There were maids and servants, ostlers and gardeners.
She was sent to boarding-school in Carcassonne - less than an hour away with the newly-arrived railway service stopping at Moux station. She received many invitations from family & friends, and travelled a good deal. Girl friends of her age and social class came to stay for religious Fete-days, and the more frivolous Fair-days. She was the young lady of a large mansion with her own maid and a car and chauffeur at her disposal. After the early losses in her life one hopes that the half-dozen years before the war, before she turned twenty, were happy and unclouded.
Within a month of the outbreak of war - it is indeed like an eruption of disease, or madness - her beloved cousin Philippe Hostalot was killed in the first battle of the Marne. Together with his wife Marthe and their children he had given young motherless Claire holidays in the elegant spa towns of the Pyrennees and by the sea in Brittany.
The war cemetery for the French regiments of this battle - so near Paris that an emergency battalion of troops was driven to the front in a fleet of 300 taxis, has only a few hundred graves. Outnumbering them by far are the plaques commemorating the lost men. Philippe Hostalot was a professional soldier, a captain. He led his men into a hail of machinegun fire: there were not enough remains to allow a burial. The Legion d'Honneur award was sent to his widow in the little hamlet of Seviès-en-Val. Claire's visits there to see her Hospitalot grandparents would no longer have the carefree joys of those years, before the War to End All Wars began.