Wars I Have Seen

by Gertrude Stein

  And so many people are afraid and some cry all the time but most of the French people just go on taking trains and traveling about and really do not stop to bother about anything except how to get something extra to eat. We all do, we all keep on doing it, and everybody does it and now nobody really pays any attention to it. But really what they all need now is a little rain, quite a good deal of rain, the ground is dry and the wind blows dryly, and that at the present moment that and the landing and the bombardments seem to be about all there is that is going on. It is funny about dates, the last time we all were told and the information I imagine comes generally through the Germans, that there was to be a landing and the Germans expected it in France so did we all and then not at all, it was the landing at Nettuno in Italy and the day that we were told to expect it, and now once again we were all told definitely that there would be a landing on the tenth or eleventh of May and instead there was the general offensive in Italy, it is funny that we are always being given the right date but the wrong event. There is nothing stranger than the way everybody knows everything, everybody does, but there is always a catch to it, that is the way it has been from the beginning and I suppose will go on being.

  To-day when I was crossing the railway track I saw a long train filled with soldiers and each freight car had a flag that at a distance looked like the tricolor of France, and I had a funny feeling, naturally, but when I came near I saw that instead of red white and blue, it was black white and red, and I did not understand because the German troops never have flags, it is funny, I just realised it now, but all the German soldiers that we have seen and gracious goodness we have seen an awful lot of them on foot in cars and in these last years on the railroad, but never never at any time did any of them have a flag, it is rather strange that and strange that I never was conscious of it before until to-day the fifteenth of May nineteen forty-four, when I did see a flag hanging out of each freight car filled with soldiers, the train had paused and I asked the woman at the crossing what that flag was, oh she said those were Italians and that flag is the one they use for the soldiers that fight for Hitler, so that was the flag of the new fascist republic. At least they have a flag, even if German soldiers have none.

  I suppose these Italian soldiers are being brought into France to fight, but well they never not any Italian soldiers that we have seen and we have seen a lot of them were ever very enthusiastic about fighting even when they looked like winning and now, well it certainly is and now. We all are impatient but hopeful, and the three saints of ice and snow have brought the cold weather back into this mountain country, and everybody says what is the use of a war when the war is over, why does not everybody know that it is over when it is over and it is over.

  Just now everybody here forgets the war because of the red moon. The April moon that is the after Easter moon is the one that always is dangerous for agriculture because it has in it the days of the three saints of ice and snow, and Assumption which is always dangerous for harvest because it is in the middle of the saints of the three saints of ice and snow and besides it had the further difficulty that if it rains on Assumption then it will rain when the hay and the wheat are cut. We first heard of this dreadful lune rouge or red moon from Mildred Aldrich who during the last war lived in the country and thought agriculturally and in this war we are living in the country and thinking agriculturally and alas to-day the second day of the ice and snow saints everything has frozen and as Easter was late and that made the red moon come late it is now the middle of May alas all the grapes were forward and the potatoes well up and they are all as the French say, scorched they use the word cooked for the action of freezing, and indeed the frozen vines and the frozen potato plants down in the plain do look as if a fire had passed over them. And of course as they all say ordinarily it would make a difference but not such a difference as now when all that they have to eat is what they grow, on the hillside the freeze cannot freeze so badly but in the fertile plain oh dear me. It is extraordinary though how philosophically they all take it, they are sad and they did work so hard, but as all French people are terrien as they call themselves people who think and act and work in the ground, it is because of that that they can so well resist the disasters of war, they are so used to think in terms of farming, and a harvest is in constant danger until it is gathered, and so war is like that it is in constant danger and you are all in constant danger until it is ended and so it is like a harvest and it is all natural enough, and so French people take it as it comes and recover from it so quickly and go on to the next harvest so naturally.

  To-day on the road I met a woman from Modane a refugee, and she said although her home was still standing though it had no roofs and no windows it was useless going back because as it was just at the railroad tunnel leading into Italy it was bound to be bombarded again and again. She had two goats and three black faced sheep and she said her father was a government employee, and she said as all refugees say, ah there again there is something not like this barren country where nothing grows. All refugees have a firm conviction that their home was in that favored part of France where agriculture develops admirably and here where they are refugeed the soil is bad the people ignorant and the animals starving. Undoubtedly this was true in the last war and it is true now, and also undoubtedly this conviction that where you live is the real right place makes the will to live, without that conviction anybody could give up the struggle but as long as everybody is convinced that where they live is God’s country there will be the will to live. A little later two little baby goats followed my dog Basket and there was great trouble in sending them back because their mother having died they had been mothered by a sheep, and they took Basket for a sheep and their mother. Basket was not flattered, he was very annoyed.

  It is funny, all this time the French population managed to ignore the Germans round and about them, the younger generation even made a cult of not knowing that there were any Germans existing, either in France or at home, but now that the Germans are being defeated and defeated by French troops everybody is willing to be conscious of them. Said one woman to me, they all say the German soldiers say that they are not Germans that they are Poles or Serbs or Czechs or something but that is too easy, naturally they are getting ready to be spared but after all there have to be some Germans in the German army said the woman. It is true they look longingly, when people are talking together. Basket the dog and I were standing before a window talking to a little boy and his aunt, and we were laughing together and three Germans came past and they wanted to look friendly and nobody noticed, of course nobody noticed but we knew they were there and wanted to be friendly and for all this long time we would not have known they were there and they would not have wanted to be friendly. Any thing changes even a German and nothing changes not even a German. We are all a little nervous these days a little discouraged because will it ever end and a little happy because the news from Italy is so very good and a little troubled because our friends in Paris are having a good deal of difficulty in keeping alive, we send them a large cheese from time to time but it is only from time to time and they have no gas and no electricity and no wood and no coal. Here in the country we have all we want to eat, more than we need to eat, such funny things happen some one sold us the other day a pound of rice. You have no idea what a pleasure it is to have a little rice in the soup, I used to be very indifferent to rice, but rice has become so rare that it is really angel food now, food for the gods, wonderful rice. When the Italian soldiers were here they always used to have rice in their soup and we used to envy them but just at this minute we are having rice in our soup. And not because we have lots to eat, butter and cheese, and bread, white bread and fish and meat and vegetables and cake and honey and plenty of it but as I keep saying on account of the lack of transport, everything that is produced in the country stays there and that is the way it is here. You certainly do not want to live in cities when there is a war, the country is the place, but the two things that we think of
the most besides is rice and orange marmalade. Well life is like that and appetites are like that.

  Can you think that two makes three after a war, that is as to nations and eating, I wonder.

  Certainly nobody no not anybody thinks that this war is a war to end war. No not anybody, no well no certainly nobody does think about it, they only think about this war ending, they cannot take on the future, no really not, certainly not as warless certainly not as a future. Better get through with this war first.

  To-night I was listening to the wireless from America, and they began to give us directions in English how we should know all about roads and places for landing and woods for hiding and depths of rivers and it was just like being in a theatre with a romantic drama, the things we heard when we were young, Secret Service and Alabama and The Girl I Left Behind Me and Curfew Shall Not Ring To-night and Shenandoah, they were real American voices talking American and from headquarters and here we are in the heart of the French country with near a hundred German soldiers right in this village and wire entanglements and little block houses all around the railway station and it is exactly like a novel or a theatre more theatre than novel, and very exciting, and will they ever come well anyway I have always been quite certain that there will be no landing until Rome is taken, I have been certain of this more than a year more and more certain, certain because it is reasonable and then there always is Saint Odile, and a saint having a vision has to be reasonable and it would be reasonable to wait for the landing in northern Europe until Rome is taken, and Saint Odile did say that when Rome was taken it would not be the end of this war but it would be the beginning of the end and that too is reasonable. It is very reasonable to be a prophet if you see a thing completely and reasonably and even if it is five hundred years away that makes no difference being reasonable and complete and have a complete vision is all right and natural, and anybody is more or less a prophet more or less more or less, but Saint Odile is quite completely a prophet and Rome will be taken and then a week or two after there will be a landing and we are listening in American English as to what everybody is expected to do.

  Everybody is so tired of darning everything, that is of course Alice Toklas who does all the darning, and darning darns and then darning the darned darns everybody is getting tired of darning everything, everybody is.

  Just now near the first of June and there is a moon, only the bombardments the worst of them are done in the daytime. It was rather awful, when there are other places that are bombarded places one only knows a little there is not so much feeling about it but Chambery, we do know Chambery so well we go there so often everybody there is so kind and nice and obliging and just as it happened René Reulos was lunching with us and there was an alerte, and we paid no attention to it as one does not, and then we left to go in a taxi to Belley and he left to get back to Chambery and when we got to Belley we heard that Chambery had not only been bombarded but all the shops we always go to and nice elephant statue and the arcades were all wrecked bombed to bits and burned and then we thought of René on his way and his mother there alone with her invalid husband it was all so awful, to be sure it is necessary because well because it is necessary but oh dear me, it is so near and dear, I mean the places one sees every few days so pleasantly. They are courageous about it, they complain but who would not and a railroad employee whom I just saw this afternoon and who had been in Amberieu when the station was bombed and I said it is dangerous and he said no bombs always go down into the earth and we are not in the bowels of the earth we are on top so why be afraid. We have a shelter here in the garden and the children and the women are supposed to go into it but of course they do not, they pick daisies in the field instead and the women stand around and the siren takes so long to blow the second time and the littlest boy said but why do they not press the button. Naturally he knew that. And then yesterday a German soldier came to ask if the German soldiers could come into the cellar or into the shelter and Alice Toklas said no that was for women and children he should go and ask the mayor, and then they decided to make trenches for themselves but when they started to dig they found that the subsoil in this country is granite so they came back to-day to say that they would just come and sit in the park when there was an alerte and Alice Toklas told them if they did they should not make a noise and they said they would not.

  Day before yesterday when I was out walking, I heard behind me some one whistling the Madelon the marching song of the young recruits of the other war, and I said to him, I recognised him as an employee of the railroad of Lyon whom I used to talk to last year, when he came to work in his vegetable garden, and I said you are singing the Madelon and he said we will all be singing it in a month, in a month it will be all over and I said do you think so and he said I do not think it I am certain of it. Well anyway he told me how in the last war he had been taken at seventeen just after Verdun and when he and his baby comrades went to the front the Arab soldiers all chanted, look at the seventeen year olders they are not men they are infants and when the cannon commences to roar they will begin to cry for papa and mama. It was no fun he said and then I was made a stretcher bearer and I was taken prisoner and then thanks to the Spanish ambassador I was sent home and then I went back to the army and I was with the Americans at Saint-Mihiel, and they were great guys, they advanced to the charge smoking their pipes and with their guns on the shoulder at carry arms not at the charge and the Germans shot but not they not until they were on top, they were great guys he said and how we got drunk for armistice and at other times and how we talked French German English but we always understood each other. I can just see them in Italy now, and I asked how about the Germans at the station, he used to tell me funny stories about them last fall, how are they, how are they he said, well he said now if we step on their toes they say I beg your pardon.

  Just to-day they told us again about the date of the end of the war. There was a woman in a hospital, and she said one day to the doctor, it is useless to work over that woman in the bed next to me, she is going to die to-night, and the doctor said nonsense she is doing very well, I am telling you said the woman, and the other woman did die that night, she did other things like that and finally the doctor said to her well since you are an extra-lucide, which means you have second sight, tell us when the war is to end. Ah that, said she I cannot tell you until the day before my death, and one day she called the doctor and she said I am going to die to-morrow, so to-day I can tell you the day the war is going to be over, on Friday the thirteenth, which is in July, and the thirteenth of July the war will be over, and the next day she did die. Well we will see. Anyway Saint Odile did say that when Rome was taken it would not be the end but be the beginning of the end, and she certainly was right certainly was and is.

  One of our friends who is a manufacturer in Lyon used to be of silk and now does rayon and glass to make textiles said that one thing was certain and sure and that is that after the war cotton will be king, everybody he said now has a passionate desire for the real thing, no more substitutes, everybody wants real cotton real coffee real chocolate. They want real mustard real oil real butter real sugar they want things made by nature and not substitutes created by man and they will have them they certainly will.

  One of the things that is most striking about the young generation is that they never talk about their own futures, there are no futures for this generation, not any of them and so naturally they never think of them. It is very striking, they do not live in the present they just live, as well as they can, and they do not plan. It is extraordinary that whole populations have no projects for a future, none at all. It certainly is extraordinary but it is certainly true.

  From war to war. I learned how to drive in the last war and I did drive and drive into this war and now for two years I have not driven and now I have sold my car just to-day and looking at it in preparation of giving it up I seem to have forgotten what a number of the gadgets and buttons were for and so it goes from war to war, you begin a thing
in one war and you lose it in the next war. From war to war.

  Yes just like that you can almost say thank you for not troubling me before and during and after a war.

  The siren that warns for the bombardments is not working any more, I suppose it was worn out as they say here they have succeeded in putting it out of order, but who the they are nobody knows and now the Germans are to warn us by trumpeting but after all that does not really wake one up if one is really asleep so everybody prefers it, that is all everybody talks about is bombardments and naturally nobody is pleased, and whether the aim is good or not is hotly discussed, they say they should not fly so high, though they do admit that the precision of hitting is very great, nevertheless they say if they flew lower there would be less destruction round and about and as the defence is practically non-existent why not fly lower, others say they should not bombard at all and, everybody will hate them and they did love the Americans but I said you know how they are here the French forget the past and enjoy the present yes they answer but our towns and all the dead, oh dear they say to me can you not stop them, alas I say I hate to have lovely places all smashed up and French people killed but what can I do, well they say, anyhow it is going on so long so long, and sometimes we that were most optimistic are getting kind of pessimistic it is going on so long. One woman told me to-day her brother-in-law who is a retired government employee wont even now spend his money all his money on food, he says that he has always been keeping his money in case of necessity to see him through a bad time, well said his sister-in-law indignantly what do you expect, can you expect anything worse than this, and he did not answer.

  Anyway in this little town a hundred and sixty children were confirmed to-day but the bishop did not stay long, after all there are the bombardments and it is just as well not to stay too long anywhere. We have lots to eat except bread, but that is because there is no transport, oh dear say all the French people oh dear if they would only land and fight on land, we would prefer it. Well I say I am sure that a week after Rome is taken they will land. Oh dear says everybody, anyway Saint Odile did say that when Rome was taken it would not be the end but it would be the beginning of the end and this evening the allies are in sight of Rome. I have just sold my automobile to a friend whose own was smashed to bits in Lyon last week in a bombardment, and as he is in the Red Cross he has to have another, and I was sad to see it go but nevertheless there will sometime be lots of others, it is hot weather and we are all waiting yes waiting.