Inside the French First World War Soldier’s Memorial Bedroom
(video at link)
His moth-eaten officer’s tunic hangs on a coat stand, a cobweb linking it to the leatherbound desk where his Gold Flake cigarettes and his collection of pipes are neatly arranged.
This is the bedroom, revealed to the world earlier this month, of a young soldier preserved exactly as it was the day he left home in 1918 to meet his death in the battlefields of Flanders.
The Telegraph is the first British newspaper to be given a tour of what is perhaps France’s most touching war memorial.
Only a handful of people knew that Second Lieutenant Hubert Rochereau’s parents made sure his modest room in the sleepy village of Bélâbre in central France would forever remain a shrine to their only child.
They had it sealed when in 1935 they gave the house to a military officer in return for a promise he would never change the bedroom. And they made him sign a document that the room where their son was born on October 10 1896 would be kept intact for the next 500 years.