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, France. They turned the room into a permanent memorial, leaving it largely as it had been the day he went off to war.
Hubert’s bedroom was left untouched in his memorial for over 100 years. His military hat lays quietly on the 100 year-old bedsheets not far away of a dusty military jacket. Pictures of a young man stand on various surfaces. His chair, tucked under his desk, faces the window in the room where he was born on October 10, 1896.
“When you walk into it it’s as if time has stood still,” Laurent Laroche, mayor of Bélâbre, told the Guardian. “Our little village is being spoken about the world over, which makes me proud to be mayor. And maybe it will help us find long-lost Rochereau relatives and save the room. It would be a great pity for it to be lost to future generations.”
(Photos by Guillaume Souvant/Agence France-Presse/Getty Images)
