Wars I Have Seen

by Gertrude Stein

  And so just at the time of the Spanish-American war, there commenced the difference between Kipling’s realism, which was romanticism, but real enough, and the French and Russian realism, which was so real that it was real enough. Was it real as anybody could know realism, or was it not. Just at the time of the Spanish-American war and later the Russo-Japanese war this question of realism was becoming the vital question for Americans who having a land with a clear light manufacturing light and resistant steel, their life needed a clean and resistant realism but at the same time they needed to move around and you cannot keep moving around without feeling romantic. The nineteenth century was then in its full strength and everybody knew it, and everybody knew that when a thing is like that you have to begin to try to forget it, and they all began to they all began to begin to forget it.

  It is funny about things being real. Something happened a few months ago like that, in February 1943.

  We had been in Bilignin all these years of the war and now our lease had run out and our landlord and his wife wanted their home back, not that they needed it just then, but they did want it back. And so for the first time in my life, I had a lawyer and a law-suit, and we lost but nevertheless, they gave us longer, and the authorities said as long as they did not consent that we should be put out the others in spite of what the law said could do nothing about it. And then the situation changed, the French army was disbanded, and our landlord who was a captain did have more reason in asking to have his house back again and so finally some one offered us this house in Culoz, and it is quite wonderful even though modern, but after you have been living in an old house for so long a new house has pleasant things about it, windows that fit and light and air, well anyway we told the lawyer it was all right, and the new law-suit we were about to start did not go on, and we had made all our arrangements for moving including our electric water heater and our bathtub and our electric kitchen stove and our refrigerator, and we had made all preparations, and our late landlords had decided to behave nicely at last and I went down to say good-bye to everybody in Belley and first of all to my lawyer. I had always been so much taken with the way all English people I knew always were going to see their lawyer. Even if they have no income and do not earn anything they always have a lawyer and now for the first time in my life I had a lawyer, and so I went down to say good-bye to my lawyer.

  We had recently quite a number of difficult moments. America had come into the war, our consul and vice-consul in Lyon with whom we had gotten very friendly because they had taken a summer home right near us and kept a white goat called Genevieve, and there we first found out that you could have goat’s milk that did not taste of goat, had been interned first at Lourdes and then taken to Germany and now I went to Belley to say good-bye as we were moving. My lawyer said that everything was nicely arranged and we thanked each other and said what a pleasure it had all been, and then he said and now I have something rather serious to tell you. I was in Vichy yesterday, and I saw Maurice Sivain, Sivain had been sous-prefet at Belley and had been most kind and helpful in extending our privileges and our occupation of our house, and Maurice Sivain said to me, tell these ladies that they must leave at once for Switzerland, to-morrow if possible otherwise they will be put into a concentration camp. But I said we are just moving. I know he said. I felt very funny, quite completely funny. But how can we go, as the frontier is closed, I said. That he said could be arranged, I think that could be arranged. You mean pass by fraud I said, Yes he said, it could be arranged. I felt very funny. I said I think I will go home and will you telephone Madame d’Aiguy to meet me. He said shall I walk home with you, I did feel very funny, and I said no I will go home and Madame d’Aiguy will come down to see you and arrange and I went home. I came in, I felt a little less funny but I still did feel funny, and Alice Toklas and Madame d’Aiguy were there, and I said we are not moving to-morrow we are going to Switzerland. They did not understand that and I explained and then they did understand, and Madame d’Aiguy left to go and see the lawyer and arrange and Alice Toklas and I sat down to supper. We both felt funny and then I said. No, I am not going we are not going, it is better to go regularly wherever we are sent than to go irregularly where nobody can help us if we are in trouble, no I said, they are always trying to get us to leave France but here we are and here we stay. What do you think, I said, and we thought and I said we will walk down to Belley and see the lawyer and tell him no. We walked down to Belley it was night it was dark but I am always out walking at night, I like it, and I took Alice Toklas by the arm because she has not the habit of walking at night and we got to Belley, and climbed up the funny steps to the lawyer, and I said I have decided not to go. Madame d’Aiguy was still there and she said perhaps it was better so, and the lawyer said perhaps we had better go and then he said he had a house way up in the mountains and there nobody would know, and I said well perhaps later but now I said to-morrow we are going to move to Culoz, with our large comfortable new house with two good servants and a nice big park with trees, and we all went home, and we did move the next day. It took us some weeks to get over it but we finally did.

  But what was so curious in the whole affair was its unreality, like things are unreal when you are a child and before you know about realism as we did in the Spanish-American war and the Russo-Japanese war just that.

  And also the strange quality of government employees, I know a great deal now that and Russian literature about that same time of the Russo-Japanese war taught us about that.

  It was around those days that three things happened that made me know about those kind of things. There was my eldest brother coming home from the East as a member of the G. A. R., he had to grow a beard to look old enough, of course he did not belong but there were privileges in traveling and other things so he came along with them. It was then I first knew about officialdom and what one did by bribing. Of course that has to do with war, because the ordinary person that is one leading a peaceful life particularly men comes in contact with officials but in war-time, sooner or later everybody does. The second thing was the famous Oscar Wilde trial and the question of public opinion and the third thing was the Dreyfus case and anti-semitism.

  Anybody can ask a question and anybody can answer a question, and during war-time they ask questions more than ever particularly in war-time like this one of 1943. Who said Christine aged six of her mother who is the Italians, Italians being in occupation it was a natural question, why the Germans said her mother, and who are friends of the Germans, why the Italians said her mother, and who are friends of the English said Christine, why the Americans said her mother, and is Stalin friends with Germans said Christine, no with the English said her mother, and who are the French friends of, said Christine, why no one said the mother.

  So if you ask questions and there is an answer it is not nevertheless any less illuminating, but anybody can ask questions in the year 1943, in July.

  Nevertheless there are more public servants than ever, more police, more regulations, more avoidance of the law, more prisoners, more coming and going and everybody sooner or later has to know a great many public servants a very great many, and certainly very certainly they do not ask or answer questions, and if they do they do not mean to they ask them because that is what they are told to do. We have an acquaintance, she was taken by the Germans because well there was a reason, there usually is a reason one might say there always is a reason. And they asked questions and she kept answering saying she did not know the answer to the questions. Nobody does know whether she does know the answer to the questions they asked her. And all the time all around her, there was opening and closing of revolvers and police dogs coming and going and lying down and getting up and suddenly she laughed, quite pleasantly and the man asking her questions said do not laugh at me and she said I am laughing pleasantly that is to say I am laughing at the absurdity of my being here not able to answer the questions you are asking and so she was in prison for two months and then once more they c
alled her to ask questions and as she did not know the answers any more than she had before the man asking said now you can go, and she said where and he said wherever you like and she said you mean I am free and he said yes you are free, and she said but I have no money left, it all went in prison and I have none left for car-fare, and my friends live quite a way off, could you give me twenty soux for car-fare, and he said yes he could and she said do, and he gave it to her and she went away and she was free.

  The thing that is most interesting about government servants is that they believe what they are supposed to believe, they really do believe what they are supposed to believe, which has a great deal to do with wars and wars being what they are. It really has.

  I once asked some one who should know why public servants in the army in every branch of government service did not seem to have the kind of judgment that the man in the street any man or any woman has about what is happening. Oh he answered the reason is simple, they are specialists, and to a specialist his specialty is the whole of everything and if his specialty is in good order and it generally is then everything must be succeeding. In the German army they call these specialists the bees, because in their cells they are supposed to make honey, not money honey. And so this is what makes war, and then makes the failure of war. I have said so often between 1939 and 1943, I cannot understand why men have so little common sense why they cannot understand when there is no possibility of their winning that they will win, why they cannot remember that two and two makes four and no more. And now everybody knows except the public servants they are still believing what they are supposed to believe nobody else believes it, not even all their families believe it but believe it or not, they do still believe it, believe what they are supposed to believe. And so naturally they believing what they are supposed to believe make it possible for the country to think they can win a war that they cannot possibly win, and so they go to war, and all because the public servants really believe what they are supposed to believe they really do. Of course most people in peace time do not realise this because the public servants who are like that practically never come in contact with them, and as nobody believes what they are supposed to believe, really one might say nobody believes that is nobody in ordinary life believes what they are supposed to believe because they are too busy making a living to have time to believe what they are supposed to believe, but public servants not having the necessity of making a living because their present past and future are secure, and practically unchangeable, they have all the time and strength to put into believing what they are supposed to believe and the result of this is war, the wars, that they are sure to lose, I suppose even the wars they are sure to win, well anyhow. It was Lee in the civil war, who was such a typical public servant, and who believes what he was supposed to believe, and at that time when my brother who did not belong came out to California with them all he had to do was to wear a beard to look old enough I vaguely began to know that public servants have nothing to do with the business of living because they do believe what they are supposed to believe, it makes a certain kind of clergyman, and school teacher as well as army, and government employees. Oh dear me, and will we have more to eat to-morrow, we always worry but as yet we always have had, in spite of the government servants believing what they are supposed to believe.

  The next thing that impressed me at that time, was the Oscar Wilde story, and that largely because of the poem he wrote about his imprisonment, up to that time I had never conceived the possibility of anybody being in prison, anybody whose business it was not naturally because of natural or accidental crime to be in prison, and in California in those days of course even natural or accidental crime did not mean prison. And now in 1943 the large part of the men of a whole nation are in prison. Prisoners, prison, of course we did know about Andersonville and Libby prison, but that was romantic, but now there are too many for romance, many many too many. Anybody can be a prisoner now, even those who are only in a training camp feel themselves to be prisoners. We have just had a letter from Victor the baker’s son twenty years old who has been our gardener. He is the only son with four sisters and is much loved by his family. He says,

  Life has completely changed since I have been here, I never stop thinking of my former life, in those days when I wanted to go out, I went out, I remained out as long as I wanted to stay out, I came in when I wanted to, but alas that life is over, for the eight months that I am to stay in this isolated camp where we never see any civilian, the whole round of the week. Sunday we go out but in a group and with our chief, so we are not free. And then to-day too a letter from a real prisoner in Germany, and he says, I always liked you and your country and I have not changed my mind, far from it.

  Well he is free to say what he will but that is very difficult to stop, very very difficult, even in prison.

  Another friend a political prisoner told us, that they never have as much information real information about everything as in prison. And a hotel keeper whom we liked, well there is black traffic, and there is this and there is that, and they all are in prison, and now the Germans and the Italians in July 1943 as the pressure is commencing all around them, they feel imprisoned. There is no doubt that every one really wants to be free, at least to feel free, they may like to give orders or even to take them, but they like to feel free, oh yes they do they do like to feel free, and so Oscar Wilde and the Ballad of Reading Gaol was the first thing that made me realise that it could happen, being in prison.

  And then the next thing was the Dreyfus affair, that is anti-semitism, and that is a very strange thing in connection with mediaevalism and nineteenth century and how a century is so hard to kill, anything is so hard to kill, thank heaven.

  He can read acasias, hands and faces. Acasias are for the goat, and the goat gives milk, very necessary these days and hands and faces are hands and faces, and dreams when one is dancing and falls asleep are real, and all this has this to do with anti-semitism that it is true and not real and real and not true.

  Through and through.

  There is a strange delusion.

  Before industrialism Jews were international bankers and before that international money-lenders, but since industrialism, all the Jewish money in the world is only a drop in the bucket and all of it together could never buy anybody to make war or make peace, not a bit. The Rothschilds in the Napoleonic wars and just after, were the end of the Jewish financial houses. After that began industrialism and in that the Jews have never been an economical power as anybody knows who knows and as everybody knows who knows. But the European particularly the countries who like to delude their people do not want to know it, they must know it of course, anybody must know it, and the Jews do not want anybody to know it, although they know it perfectly well they must know it because it would make themselves to themselves feel less important and as they always as the chosen people have felt themselves to themselves to be important they do not want anybody to know it. But of course everybody must know it, the big names in industrialism and in the financing of industrialism are not in any modern country Jewish and everybody must know it but nobody wants to know it, because everybody likes it to be as it was supposed to be and not as it was because nobody likes anything to disappear, and as for so many hundreds of years it was so and of course religion does get mixed up with it but as it is not any longer possible to keep it strictly a religious question, and complicate life with Christianity, so it is inevitable that they all want to go on believing what they know is not so, and it was first made real for me by the Dreyfus trial and now from Germany who is so desperately clinging to any past century, any past century is a hope and a force any past century even any present century, they to cling to a century and what that century stood for, they have thus to keep themselves together, and so anti-semitism which has been with us quite a few centuries is still something to cling to. When the star is red they will fight in France and the star is red to-night the twenty-third of July, it is red. Red white and blue all
out but you. Anyway financially there is no sense in anti-semitism. That is what I say.

  From the Russian-Japanese war on I became for purposes of daily living a European and so not only were wars different but also the century was different the twentieth century had begun. Science was over, because believe it or not the twentieth century is not interested in science it really is not.

  In these days we have to have animals around us because we have to have milk and eggs and there is no way to buy them so we have chickens and a goat, and I take care of them August 1943. And I have been struck by the fact that do what you like that is what they like and what they are but they always must have five toes, chickens and goats, and dogs and everything. Now there is no reason for it it is just what you might say a mystic number, a number that pleases but having been made it is there, five is there everywhere when there are toes. And this has a great deal to do with that, that the nineteenth century believed in science but the twentieth century does not. Not.

  Saint Odile, oh yes Saint Odile.

  I said once that the farmers of Bilignin just before this war said that if they had to thrash the wheat with flails the way it used to be done none of them would grow wheat, they would only grow wheat if the thrashing machine came around to thrash it, and now 1943, they are all thrashing their wheat with flails, and they fish eels so that they can take the skin, there is no leather left, and the eel skin replaces the leather in the flail, and they do it, not because there are no machines, there are indeed electric ones which they never had before, but if their wheat is thrashed by machine the government can control it, and if it is thrashed by flail, each man when and where he likes, instead of all together with a machine why of course some of it can get kept, can get hidden can get eaten, oh dear, of course beating wheat with a flail is as much science as doing it with an electric machine, but it does not make people feel the triumph of science, not at all it just makes it middle ages and secret, and that is why the twentieth century is not interested in science, so called, not at all, while the nineteenth century had nothing if not that nothing at all.