Wars I Have Seen

by Gertrude Stein

  To-day when I was out walking there were five German soldiers repairing an automobile, but nobody paid any attention everybody came and went and nothing happened, this can happen when this war is beginning to look like ending, it can happen because it does. Spring has come, April is here, the birds are singing and a hawk came down in the grass in front of the house to find not a chicken but a bone that a dog had brought there. The hawk seemed a little disappointed but perhaps he was not, April nineteen hundred and forty-four, that is Easter week.

  Publicity, that is what we hear them say publicity, and is not that the real meaning of persecution, publicity, it is not nearly as complicated as it seems. There always has been a great passion for publicity in the world the very greatest passion for publicity, and those who succeed best, who have the best instincts for publicity, do have a great tendency to be persecuted that is natural enough, and here I think is the real basis of the persecution of the chosen people and just now more than ever because as publicity is more and more a conscious process those who have the greatest instinct for publicity are naturally those of whom the others who would want to be masters of publicity are jealous, at least I do think so, and perhaps yes.

  It is very interesting but the end of the nineteenth century and the twentieth century realised the beauty of publicity for its own sake as an end in itself, this is very interesting.

  It is now the eleventh of April the Tuesday after Easter-Monday and everybody had hopes that something would happen and in a way it has, bombardments have been bombing and the Russians have been moving and everybody is expecting everything to be happening and we all talk while we are out walking to find eggs and spinach and cake and everything, one does find everything and I met one of my neighbors and he had a little boy on his bicycle and I said what are you doing with him, I am taking him up into the mountains to be a shepherd, how old is he I said he is nine, and he has two brothers and they are refugees and up there he will be well fed, and said I does he not mind leaving his family even where they are, and he said he is reconciled to it, he was a round faced blonde little Alsatian with a little suit case with him and he was going nine miles up the mountain. To-day it was Easter-Monday that is it was yesterday and we had lots of visitors and they asked about Americans, since Eisenhower is to govern France for a while naturally they want to know all about them, and I was telling about the doughboys in the last war, and one of our visitors said yes I remember in the last war, I was nine years old and my father was a doctor and we lived opposite his hospital in Vichy and there were Americans there and one of them used to take me out fishing, he used to call for me every other day and we used to go fishing, he could not speak a word of French and I could not speak a word of American, so we never said a word to each other but every other day for two months he used to call for me to take me fishing, he had a funny way of fishing, he always had a little bottle of cream in his pocket and when we got to the fishing place he would take out a piece of absorbent cotton and he would twist it around the hook and then he would pour a little cream from his bottle on to it and then he would drop it in the water and our visitor added it would catch fish and after two months he went away and we had never said a word to each other because I did not know any American and he did not know a word of French. This same visitor had a little daughter with him a little seven year old red-headed girl and when she was given cake the plate had painted on it some fruits, oh said the little girl, that is a banana, I remember bananas, but my younger brothers and sister do not, they have never seen them but I remember having had a banana, I remember it very well.

  And so now Easter week being over pretty soon something is going to happen, pretty nearly everybody here has now forgotten about the Germans everybody forgets very quickly but nobody forgets quite so quickly as the French, and although the Germans are still here they have pretty nearly forgotten them and they only think about Americans, yes says our cook, I will cook for them for the Americans, is not that so Madame says she to me and I say yes and I do hope so I certainly do hope so, yes says she we will strew flags everywhere to meet them even on the ground and I will cook a dinner for them, and we all do hope so most certainly most sincerely hope so.

  Every day it comes a little nearer, and we do all most certainly and very sincerely hope so, we do all of us most definitely do hope so.

  I remember being always so interested in the emigrés after the French revolution going to England, and in spite of everything immensely enjoying the complete change in their lives, anything is better than nothing more than more of the same only nobody knows it, and that is what makes pioneering but then those are the adventurous people who would be doing something anyway, but a war that puts an end to a century that makes one century change to another century that kind of a war always makes a considerable part of the population get moving and in a way they enjoy it, the Russians did after the Russian revolution, but now this is on a much larger scale, everybody is moving around, they are on the roads they are everywhere and nothing is as it was, in America and England and the few neutral nations but everybody else is moving around moving around. And now Hungary and Roumania are joining in and it goes on more and more, that is what makes the end of a century, nothing is as it used to be, nothing at all, and that does make an end of a century. I was walking this afternoon up to Ceyzerieu, it is quite a walk fourteen kilometers up and back and I get a little tired particularly as I have a little rheumatism in one knee, one is bound to have rheumatism somewhere in a world cataclysm, but anyway, we got some very good cake there and cake is a comfort, cake certainly is a comfort. I usually talk to somebody on the way, they even sometimes get off their bicycles to walk along a way with me and she did, she was an oldish woman and we compared family histories she was married and had no children, but she had a great-nephew staying with her and she wanted to know all about me and she told me all about herself and then she said her niece from Bourg had just been to see her, she was the mother of the great-nephew whom she had kept with her and she had a young baby and she brought the baby with her and she told her that a woman in the Maternity at Bourg had just been brought to bed that is she just been delivered of six little puppy dogs, not possibly I said, but yes she said, not often but quite often, you see she said, in times like these women do console themselves with dogs and this does happen, of course the dogs dont survive they are kept in museums, but it does happen, not really I said, oh yes, she said, in Bourg they once had it happen to a nun, and when the doctor went to see her the dog would not let him come near her. Did it really happen oh yes, she said it does happen and it did happen.

  Well so life goes on, we had just been reading Shakespeare Richard the Third, and the things they say there do sound just like that, so why not, anything is so if the country makes it so, and a century makes it so when it is so, just like that.

  They have just been telling us over and over again that they are going to bombard all the railway stations and we are quite near a fairly important one, are we to be frightened or not we have not quite made up our minds, this afternoon there was an alert but nobody paid any particular attention but that was easy enough because nothing happened but anyway conversations went on.

  Our cook was just telling us that the way to cure dysentery is by taking the white of an egg and beating it up in a cup of water and it stops diarrhea immediately, her sister and it is true that her sister did have a bad colic and she got over it at once and Clothilde said it was done like that. She had it from an old book of medicine written by Raspail, after whom the boulevard in Paris is named and I said but I would like to see that book, ah that she said is not possible, because it was packed away in a case and there are cases and they are old in a little lodging that I have always kept in my native town and all this putting away happened in 1918 and that is the story of my life, she seemed to want to tell some more but her sister Olympe would certainly have been angry just why we do not know but we know she would so we did not encourage Clothilde to go on with the story. To
-day the baker who has just had his shop closed for three months because his eldest daughter has been selling bread tickets instead of giving them to the miller, well to divert his mind he went off to find morilles the best of the spring mushrooms and he only came back with six and we said what happened to the rest did your wife cook them with a cream sauce, and he said no he was in the woods looking for them and his dog was with him, and suddenly his dog began to growl and bark and act strangely so said Bonaz certainly there is a dead boy from the mountains there, there were those that died in the snow and there were those that were killed there, and so he slowly approached not liking to look but his dog made such a fuss that he went on and there he found a wild boar that had been strangled in a trap, and was not dead very long so of course he gave up looking for mushrooms and got the butcher and together they took it back to the butchers, that is to say they butchered it there where they found it and did we want some of the meat. Well we like wild boar but I dont know, I guess we had better not and we did not, but we did want some of the mushrooms and would he go off again and get them and he said he would but as yet he has not.

  Everybody is so excited about everything but nobody is very certain that there is anything to be excited about. We were in Belley to-day the nineteenth of April nineteen forty-four and there were a great many German soldiers there and everybody suddenly seemed to hate them rather more than they ever had hated them before, everybody suddenly began to hate them a good deal more than they had ever hated them before. It is so. It is happening quite suddenly just like that.

  When you are weak and brutal you are very much more hated than when you are strong and brutal, that is natural enough and that is what is happening now, nobody says of them now all the same they are still strong, and so although I am not sure that they are any more brutal than they were their not being strong any more and just as brutal makes them more hated than they ever were before.

  Every day well every day we do not listen much to the accounts of the bombardments, naturally enough when you are among the objects to be bombarded it is not as interesting as when you are not, there was always that amusing story of the earthquake in San Francisco, and a young fellow who was one of the group appointed to dynamite to meet the fire and in that way stop it and who was very ardent and very lively about it and well in the front of the group suddenly realised that it was his own home that they were about to dynamite and it was a shock. Well that is the way we are feeling now toward the end of April when they are beginning to send thousands of bombers down our way. It was all cheerful when they were doing Germany but now not, I must say we were not really enthusiastic about their doing Italy either, but then after all but then.

  There are so many stories so many stories and so much confusion. I have just been rereading Cooper’s The Spy, and there like later in Kansas anybody could be an enemy and anybody not. Are there really many boys in the mountains, nobody really seems to know, this is what happened to our friend the captain of gendarmes who has always been so nice to us and he says in spite of what happened he does not know if there are a lot of boys in the mountains or not. It was still winter and lots of snow and some mountain boys in a truck were going somewhere and they met some German soldiers in cars and they began to shoot at each other and some on each side were killed and wounded and the people in the village were so frightened they would not come out of the cellars where they had taken refuge, so hearing about it the captain came in his car to be a comfort to them and when he had gotten the mayor and the priest out of the cellars and they had commenced to do their duty by the living and the dead he went into the post-office to telephone all about it to his superior at Bourg and just then at the door were four mountain boys with tommy guns, they all have them and they took the captain away with them right up into the snow up the mountain, and the first night it was all right but the second night it was colder and colder and they climbed higher and higher and then at last they the mountain boys began to stop noticing their prisoner, so he ran away in the snow stumbling along until finally after a good many hours he finally got to a village which he knew and so he got home to Belley, and there he had pneumonia and was in bed and the Germans came to take him away to Germany but he was too sick and he went to a hospital and now the Germans seem to have forgotten, anyway he has had a promotion and for the present he is not very well but not too worried. He says that the mountain boys do not know what to do and if they could only keep away but how to live, it is cold in winter in the mountains very cold. And now it is the end of April and to-day I heard the first nightingale twittering they first twitter in the day-time before they sing in the night time. And of course there are the bombardments, a young fellow whom we just met said that the factory of his father at Lille was just destroyed and he said I have just heard that my mother and father are safe, I did just escape becoming an orphan he said. Everybody is so uncertain as to what they hope for and what they despair of, so confused that it is not necessary to know what they think, they think so many things, so very many things and all of them at once, one thing is certain sure, and that is that the French have not a single track mind, that is absolutely certain. How they can have such a variety of emotions and convictions at the same time and so many of them completely opposed is perfectly wonderful, but one opposition they all have, they want the Americans to come and drive out the Germans and they do not want the Americans to come because in destroying the Germans they will destroy France. That is all reasonable enough. Some one has just come in and said he saw in one town where the Germans had been executing people and they put up a placard signed by the German commanding officer saying that he regretted all these horrors but they were necessary because the civilian population had gotten in the habit of making mock of the Germans and of course that would not do the French would perfectly understand that so what could the occupying forces do than do what they did do.

  The trains are going less and less but still everybody goes on traveling, to be sure they all say it is safer to walk and a good many are walking, the French are good walkers, they have to be because when wars come, they have to walk, yes they said when the Germans did not take Moscow with all their motorized army, yes but the French under Napoleon did get there and on foot, and they always repeated and on foot. It is more certain they say and they are right if you keep walking you are bound to get there but with other things so the French think it is not so sure. They really have more confidence in their legs than in any other form of locomotion, they really have.

  Oh dear we do have from time to time to take a train somewhere just to change the scene, that is to say also to go to the dentist and to buy some English books so we do from time to time go to Chambery for the day or Aix-les-Bains for the day and we did yesterday, only when you do you come back having seen something and it is a change but in a way just saddening. When we got to the station there were about thirty young fellows standing each with their suit case and an overcoat and one does not see that so often, they are Italians who have been taken to go to work or French who have been taken to work in Germany, but they usually go in ordinary passenger trains but these were going into freight cars and that usually is only done with soldiers, any soldiers the German soldiers as well as in the old days French soldiers and American soldiers in the last war, and so it did look rather sad, and they told us they were young men and girls that had been rounded up in Annecy and were being taken well somewhere, did they have any reason for being taken, well probably and where were they being taken nobody ever does know and every day is another day and Pope did say hope springs eternal in the human breast, and it better had certainly just now and it does certainly just now. And then at Aix well there were at least ten thousand German soldiers in the hospital there and everybody was so depressed, they are not real said one woman to us they are phantoms and she was right they were they were just phantoms depressing phantoms who when they marched around singing like automatic phantoms, it is very strange and if it were not true that they are phantoms it wou
ld be so depressing that hope would have a hard time to come springing but they are phantoms and real life can go on just the same and it does.

  To-night that is this evening I was taking a long walk up the mountain and of course it was bright daylight and as I was coming down far beyond any houses, Basket began to bark at a man and I called him and when I came near I saw he was not a man from around here, he had on a grey suit of cloth and a cane and a stiff brimmed hat and a rain coat over his arm, and he had bright blue eyes and a large nose and was very sun burned and had the button of the legion of honor and another decoration that I could not make out and he wore a wedding ring, and Basket continued to bark he does not at the country people because he knows what they are and I said in French he is not dangerous he is only barking, and he said is he a caniche and I said yes and he said in English he is a good doggie and I said in French no he is not dangerous, and it did seem to me that he emphasized the last e in doggie and what naturally did that make him and one always is a little nervous you never know and we went on down Basket and I did and he went on up and after a while I looked up and he was looking down and I came home and I asked Alice Toklas what she thought about it but naturally there was nothing to think about it, there never is, no there never is.

  How the wind blows but it always does blow in the valley of the Rhone and we are in the valley of the Rhone, and we are still in the period of the red month where although it has been very hot it can freeze and nip everything and there are in this lunar month three days of the three saints or are they only two saints of snow and ice and until these days are past nobody can be sure but for all that there are nightingales and there are swallows and there are cowslips and even a few bats and they ought to know but do they, well and they all also say that this is a month when a landing should take place, there seems to be some reason for it connected with the sea, but will they neither you nor I nor nobody knows and that is certainly true enough.