Wars I Have Seen

by Gertrude Stein

  Some one has just told me that in 1918, two little children had a vision that they saw the Virgin and she told them that the world was going to have a much worse war than the one they had just had, and when that came and the roads would be full of fleeing people the Pope would be imprisoned in his house, the square of Saint Peter’s would be filled with a fighting multitude and the Pope all alone in his home would be sitting and weeping. That is what the Virgin told them.

  I suppose in a kind of way what the nineteenth century really meant was that they believed in free will, they did not believe in the inevitable, and this 1939–1943 war makes people know that the inevitable is inevitable and that everybody wants to be free, and needs to be free, which really makes the present life an absolute realisation of the old scholastic arguments about free will, and necessity. The nineteenth century did not understand this, not even in the 1914–1918 war which tried to end the nineteenth century but since it itself did not understand it, it could not end the nineteenth century, but now now we all realise, the inevitable and the thirst for freedom, we all do.

  It is all right, and a funny story. Everything is so logical, in this war, it was much more confused in the 1914–1918 one, and therefore the things one predicts are truer for this war than they were for that one. A German whom we know, and have known all this time, calls me the general, because I have been right about what has been happening, but that is only because this war is logical, more so than most wars, and I will tell you why.

  As I said the grapes are being gathered to make the victory wine. It is funny anything is funny. The 1914–1918 war made everybody drink. There was never so much drunkenness in France as there was then, soldiers all learned to drink, everybody drank, and after war, and now in this 1939–1943 war, nobody drinks not here anyway not in France, the wine is all taken away and there is only enough even for the wine growers to have a bottle a day, they who used to drink anything from four to nine bottles a day, and those who are on the regular supply only have four bottles a month, and oh dear me, after all is it better or is it worse. It is pleasanter for the women and the children when men drink less undoubtedly pleasanter, and the men’s health is in general better, that is if they could have a little more meat and fats, well anyway are they healthier or are they not anyway they want to be free, and not have the wine taken away from them. They want to be free.

  Undoubtedly this war is more logical that is more inevitable than any other war. They say there have been surprises but actually there have not been surprises. It all has been inevitable so much more so than the 1914–1918 war so much more so.

  The 1914–1918 war was just like our civil war, it was that kind of a war and that made it possible for Elmer Harden to make Pierre Caous admit that it was a nice war. A nice war is a war where everybody who is heroic is a hero, and everybody more or less is a hero in a nice war. Now this war is not at all a nice war. The English are still feeling that there are nice modest heroes in this war but actually this war which is an interesting war is not a nice war, people are sacrificed and imprisoned, so many of them so very very many of them and in such very different ways, and there are so many that hide in the heather as it is called which may be anywhere, or not at all and the police who want not to arrest them get killed because they have to arrest them, and some are called one thing and some are called another thing, and everybody can change about what they call them and everybody does, and there is nothing to hope for, and yet it will end because it is inevitable that it should but nobody really can call it a nice war, not really, not really a nice war. The children play being taken to prison, and the children play the commandos in the heather, and anywhere from two years old they sit behind some one who is on a bicycle, and nobody pays any attention to them but they do not fall off not any of them, they hold on to whoever is in front of them and they go miles and miles like that because everybody has to go miles and miles in the hope of getting something to eat miles and miles, on foot or on bicycles. It is only the French who could make the bicycles last so long. They make noises all of them but they keep going that is somebody makes them keep on going and always with a very little child on behind the seat and holding on to the person in front of them. In 1914–1918 they did not do that.

  To-day October 1943, I was very pleased to hear about somebody’s troubles that had nothing to do with the war. It was like in 1916, when our servant was so proud of her brother who was dead having had a civil and not a military funeral. Our young servant was telling us to-day that in a working-class family it was better to have more daughters than sons. The son when he is little is not a help and when he gets older he is apprenticed to a trade and earns very little and then for a little while he contributes to the family purse and then he gets engaged to be married and he has to save for the marriage and then he gets married and that is the end, so if there are three or four boys and only two girls the mother has to go out working to help support the family and then has to come home and do all the house work and not get to bed until two o’clock in the morning, while if there are four girls and two boys it makes out very much better. The mother can stay at home and do the housework in the daytime which she does. It was pleasant listening to this which had nothing to do with war nothing at all, to do with war.

  Sometime and every one is hoping it is going to be pretty soon now there will be everything happening and nothing at all to do with war.

  It is the story that they all told last fall. They were talking people in a position to know and one of them said it was going to be over now, and they all said eagerly how do you know and he said very easily, my wife has had enough of it.

  Yes everybody has had enough of it everybody’s wife and everybody’s husband and everybody’s mother and everybody’s father and everybody’s daughter and everybody’s son, they all have had enough of it.

  In 1918 they did not all feel like that, there had been a great deal of it, a great deal of war but not everybody was fully simply naturally and uninterestedly tired of it, they all have had enough of it. That is all.

  That shows the complete difference between the 1914–1918 war and this war, both world wars, but one did not end the nineteenth century it tried to but it did not succeed but this one did or does. It does end the nineteenth century, kills it dead, dead dead.

  There is another nice story that always pleases me, in a bus in Paris, there were on the back platform a German soldier and some Frenchmen and the soldier accidentally stepped on the foot of the Frenchman and he having sensitive feet hit out and hit the German, before anything more could happen a very little Frenchman at the completely other end of the bus came rushing and he too hit the soldier. They were all three taken to the police station, and the first Frenchman explained about his sensitive feet and how sorry he was he had made this instinctive action and he apologised and the soldier accepted the apology, and then the second and little Frenchman was asked why he had rushed out and hit the soldier. Well he said it was like this, I suddenly saw a Frenchman hit out and strike a German soldier and I said hello the war must be over let me go to it and I rushed forward and hit him. And now he said it was a mistake the war is not over.

  Sometime it will not be a mistake the war will be over at any rate France will be free. And we. Nobody felt like that in the last war. It is like that other joke, in the 1914–1918 war everybody always used to say, we’ll get them yet, and they did they got the best of them and somebody said in this war, they used to say in the last war we’ll get ’em yet, and now he added we have them. It is nice to say in French very nice. But now everybody has had enough enough. That is the difference between the 1914–1918 war and the 1939–1943 war everybody has had enough.

  Eating too much meat gives you indigestion and evil thoughts make you eat too much meat.

  The funny thing about the ’39–’43 is that anybody can feel anything can think anything. In ’14–’18 everybody well if not everybody the great majority knew who was an enemy and who was a friend, if they did not kn
ow they were pretty sure, and they mostly were not mistaken an enemy was an enemy and a friend was a friend more or less. Life in the nineteenth century and ’14–’18 was just going on with that although there was Clemenceau who said that nobody was what they were supposed to be the English who were supposed to be so calm tended to be hysterical, the French who were supposed to be so light-minded were terribly serious and sober, and the Americans who were supposed to be so quick were so slow. But even so almost everybody continued to feel simply, an enemy was an enemy and a friend was a friend and war was war and peace was peace, to be sure there was Trotsky who said to the Germans he wanted to make a treaty that was neither peace nor war, all these things showed that the nineteenth century had been pretty nearly killed but still it was very much alive, it believed in peace and in war, it believed in a possible Esperanto, and in progress, it believed in humanity and the white man’s burden, it believed in a nation in arms, it believed in a future and a past it believed in veterans, in short it really was the nineteenth century. And now, except Germany there is really nothing left of the nineteenth century and when that will be exterminated then the nineteenth century is over, and the twentieth century has come to stay. I belong to the generation who born in the nineteenth century spent all the early part of my life in escaping from it, and the rest of it in being the twentieth century yes of course.

  Wilson spoke of himself as having a single track mind, Americans are like that, they see what they see and it bothers the European. They see in this war that the only thing necessary to do is to destroy the German material at its base, nothing else is worth while doing or being killed in doing, there is no use fighting until the German material is destroyed at its base and then it is only necessary to do enough fighting to make them know that they have no material and then the war is over. Europeans do not understand that, they believe in fighting first and then destroying material as the completion of fighting not as prevention, and so the American has a single track mind and it all seems so slow to the European because nothing happens until nothing has to happen. Enough said that is not the way the French mind works.

  In the last war 1914–’18, it was not so evident that they could take six different roads at once because after all it was a nineteenth century war, and the way was a comparatively simple way and the way to go had some variation, but on the whole they were fairly united, they did want to win the war and that was quite simply that, but the ’39–’43 war not at all, not, at, all.

  After the armistice in ’40 I was surprised, I can always be surprised but I was decidedly surprised, so many of them were not sure that they did not want the Germans to win. And I said why, I do not understand, how can any Frenchman feel that way, why, I said why, and I said it pretty violently and pretty often. The man at the bank explained something. He said there are a great many different points of view and one single man can have quite a great number of them.

  Is it worse to be scared than to be bored, that is the question.

  Any one man, so said the man at the bank, could want the English to win, because as he was in business he wants business to be secure, and if the Germans win business would not be secure not for him, at the same time he has a son who is a prisoner, his only son, and he wants the Germans to win because his son would come home to him, and if the English were to win the war would be long and his son might die before he came home to him, then at that time Germany was allied to Russia and might that mean communism and then he would want the English to win, and then there is another point of view, the French love to talk about discipline, they always think their country is very disorderly as a matter of fact they are so traditional, and they love so passionately to grow vegetables that they can really only be orderly, and never anything else but they like to think there is no order and that there should be. That is Petain’s point of view, that was the point of view of a crazy man at the end of the last war in 1918, who one day started to ask everybody to show him their papers at the station, and everybody did, naturally one does when asked to do so authoritatively and finally there was a big crowd waiting to show him their papers, military and otherwise, and a policeman came up seeing the crowd and said what is all this, and everybody said he asked us to show him our papers, and the man when he had been taken to the police court and had been asked why he had gone on like that answered, because I want to put a little order into my country. The other day, when everybody was growing potatoes and everybody was putting on all they could in the way of disinfectant and hard at it they were and one day I was out walking on a little road and a nice elderly, retired civil servant came along and he had a blower in his hand, and I said pleasantly and you are disinfecting your potato plants, and he said yes, but it would be more useful if everybody did, but I said they all do as much as they can, not as much he answered as they would if there was more order in the country. That said he is what we French suffer from a lack of order. I was polite but I wanted to say oh Hell, you all feel you are in prison because you are always being ordered, and it is funny, if anybody is alone they want company and if they have company they want to be alone. Human beings are like that, finite and infinite, when they have peace they want war and when they have war they want peace, Well anyway. Then gradually things changed the Russians became Germany’s enemy, and the French were having more points of view in one man than ever. The middle classes were once more torn, if the Russians win, would there be communism, if the Germans win would there be misery and oppression, if the English win would they lose all their colonies. Shall we, said the people of Lyon, shall we lose our land or our pocket books, which will we mind less. They even began to make jokes about it although it was very real, it is very real. The most astonishing people, astonishing to me, that they should feel like that, said they would if they were younger go and fight the Russians, what I said with the Germans well not exactly, against the English well not exactly, well what then I said, and they said well what, and that conversation ended. Conversations were leading very strangely in those days, in the days after the armistice. And then there was Petain. So many points of view about him, so very many. I had lots of them, I was almost French in having so many. This was what happened to me about him.

  When the farmers heard that the Russians had come in to fight the Germans, they were single minded about it, they all got drunk with joy quite simply drunk with joy, and later when the Germans did not get to Moscow, just the same they said the French army under Napoleon, did take Moscow they could not hold it of course but they did get there, they were on foot, on foot you understand and on foot they got there and these others with all their automobiles they cannot get there. We got there they said we were on foot but we did get there. The French all this time were making jokes very funny jokes they still are but there was this nice one about Napoleon. They said this was in ’41, they said that Hitler went to visit Napoleon in his tomb that time he was in Paris, and Napoleon reluctantly came out of his tomb to speak to him. Hitler said I am a great conqueror, perhaps not quite so great a conqueror as you were, this he said politely, but pretty nearly as great a conqueror, I too have conquered all Europe. And England, said Napoleon, not yet, said Hitler, Napoleon sighed I didn’t either, and Russia said Napoleon, not yet said the other. I did not either said Napoleon, go away, said Napoleon, and he went back to his tomb, and shut himself in. It was pretty good for the Parisians to have invented that story in the winter of ’40–’41, pretty good. They tell so many funny stories, and the Parisians are funny, that is what bothers the Germans so, the jokes are never what they expect, no never.

  But to tell about Petain and all the things one could I could think about him.

  It’s funny about honey, you always eat honey during a war, so much honey, there is no sugar, there never is sugar during a war, the first thing to disappear is sugar, after that butter, but butter can always be had but not sugar, no not sugar so during a war you always eat honey quantities of honey, really more honey than you used to eat sugar, and you find hon
ey so much better than sugar, better in itself and better in apple sauce, in all desserts so much better and then peace is upon us and no one eats honey any more, they find it too sweet and too cloying and too heavy, it was like this in the last war ’14–’18 and it is like this in this war, wars are like that, it is funny but wars are like that.

  And just now there is also what happens in this war, not in the last war, but in this war, as it happened in Napoleon’s wars and the wars before that, any war before that but not in the nineteenth century wars not in ’14–’18 war.

  Anybody can be taken away from where he belongs and put somewhere else to work, or to live, far away from where it is natural to be. That is the way it was in the history of baronial wars and all that, in all the historical novels that was what was so awful anybody can be taken away, taken up in the street, taken at any time and carried away to work in a far away country and perhaps never to come home again at any age and in any place.

  Victor is the son of a baker, a nice boy, and fond of children and a kind of easy coming and going, he has four sisters and a father and a mother and they all love Victor, he is the one each one loves the best, each and every one. And Victor, is strong and well-fed and at twenty he went to the Camp de Jeunesse, which replaces military training in France, and he caught a bad cold and he was in the hospital and then he was given convalescence leave and he came home and he was not as well fed as he had been but that was no matter it was easy to feed him up again, particularly as he was to have ten more days of leave. This evening going up the mountain I met his father and another man. We stopped and talked, but not as much about the war and Victor, but about the weather and the moon and the mountain and my being fond of walking and then I left them and they went on up the mountain, and I made a round and I came in front of the bakery and there Victor’s mother was fumbling at the door not going in but not not going in, and I said good-evening how is Victor, and she said he is not to have any more leave, but I said he is really not well yet, and she said yes he was to go to-morrow to Lyon for an examination, and she said no, no he will not leave, not leave and she went in and I went on, and he has not gone, oh dear me, we like Victor, if it all will finish fast enough it is all right but if not, you cannot stay on the mountain all night not in the cold but anyway they always come home at night why not if nobody wants to find them, why not.