Until this year, few would have known the name of Dragoons officer Hubert Rochereau, or heard of the tiny village of Bélâbre in central France. But the revelation this autumn that the young soldier’s bedroom, complete with his feathered dress helmet and military jacket, had been preserved for almost 100 years after his death on a Belgian battlefield in the first world war brought unexpected recognition to both, reports The Guardian.
Now Laurent Laroche, mayor of Bélâbre, is hoping his commune’s new-found fame will also bring a benefactor to save Rochereau’s room for posterity. “When you walk into it it’s as if time has stood still,” he told The Guardian. “On a much smaller scale, I imagine it’s how the explorers felt when they opened the first pyramid or ancient tomb.
“It would be a great shame for it to disappear. As someone who loves history, I feel it’s is also important not to forget the sacrifice made by men like Rochereau.”
Second Lieutenant Hubert Guy Pierre Alphonse Rochereau, 21, a graduate of the elite French Saint-Cyr military school, died in an English field ambulance on 26 April 1918, a day after being wounded during fighting for the village of Loker in Flanders. His parents had no idea where he was buried until 1922 when his body was discovered in a British cemetery and repatriated to the graveyard at Bélâbre.
They turned the room where their son had been born on October 10th 1896 into a permanent memorial, leaving it largely as it had been the day he went off to war.
On the shelves his school books and military manuals collect dust. On his desk lie a filled pipe, Gold Flake cigarettes, two pistols, a knife; keys and a notebook remain untouched alongside a small vial labelled as containing “the earth of Flanders in which our dear child fell and which kept his remains for four years”.
On the lace counterpane that covers his iron bedstead are Rochereau’s medals – the Croix de Guerre and the Légion d’Honneur – and photographs of friends who also died in the war.
The grief-stricken Rochereau, a distinguished military family whose forefathers were believed to go back to the French Revolution and Napoleon Bonaparte, then bricked up the entrance to the room.
However, Laroche revealed that the sealing of the room was just the beginning of the property’s extraordinary and controversial history.
In 1935, Hubert Rochereau’s parents bequeathed their substantial mansion house in Bélâbre to a military friend, General Eugène Bridoux, on the express condition that their late son’s room would remain untouched and unchanged for 500 years.
Seven years later, Bridoux became secretary of state in the Vichy regime and was responsible for organising the deportation of Jewish families to the Nazi concentration camps. During the Allied liberation of France, he escaped to Germany before being captured and returned to France where he again escaped and fled to Franco’s Spain where he remained until his death in 1955.
Bridoux was condemned to death by the French authorities in absentia and his house in Bélâbre confiscated as the property of a collaborator. Laroche said it was rented to a family of solicitors until it was reclaimed in the 1950s by Bridoux’s granddaughter, whose husband, Daniel Fabre, still lives in the house.
Read more of this report from The Guardian.
See also: Postcards from the WW1 frontline: 'I have lost courage and I will go to bed in tears'