Wars I Have Seen

by Gertrude Stein

  Is life real is life earnest, no I do not think so, it certainly is not real.

  This kind of war is funny it is awful but it does make it all unreal, really unreal.

  They must have been lonesome in the middle ages and that was natural enough because busy as they were with getting enough to eat they were pretty well cut-off from communication with everything and it is kind of lonesome in this present war which is so much like that, with trees cut down to block the roads and everything but still our friends did get over in a pony cart from Belley to see us and it was a pleasure, and besides they brought us some money which was also a pleasure because the traveling banker who used to come once a week to this town has not come and money is certainly a very great necessity these days.

  To-night the Americans have just had a victory and are going to take Cherbourg and that is a pleasure. To be sure in the middle ages they did not have a wireless and although it was threatened that they would take them away from us they did not and now it would be rather late for it to happen and I do like to hear their American voices. Everything is quiet around here now, nobody seems to know just what happened but it is all quiet around here now and we even had letters from Lyon to-day.

  Bread and cake cake and bread which is better, I myself think that bread when there is good butter is better than cake, bread and butter but when there is no bread and butter then there is cake Marie Antoinette was quite right about that.

  Some refugees have just come here from Normandy, they are friends of the wife of the mayor, they left Normandy just seven days ago and they progressed partly by bicycle partly on foot and partly by train, it took them seven days to get here, they were a party of seven with three children and the mother just about having another baby, they stopped at night and dug themselves a trench in which to sleep on account of the bombardments they describe the railways all through the north completely blocked and the German material scattered all about, and the Germans take the little roads because the big roads are bombed all the time, it is like well like nothing, although Wells did describe it in a kind of a way, and nobody says anything except it’s long c’est longue, which is I suppose the inevitable human cry, in the meantime the eagles are carrying off all the baby chickens and ducks because not having guns nobody can shoot them, we had seven baby chickens and now we have only two, and the poor hen screams and goes pale but what is the use, there is no use in screaming or going pale when nobody is allowed to shoot the eagles in the air. On the other hand the wheat the vines the potatoes all are growing well, and so if there is anybody there to eat when it is all over there will be eating for them, the refugees from Normandy said you could buy a kilo of butter for ten francs in that part of Normandy but there was nobody there to buy, there seemed to be people to sell but nobody there to buy, and it made us all sigh naturally enough although we did not want ourselves to be there to buy.

  Now they have made the curfew at six o’clock of the afternoon it was just to-day and all windows that face toward the street have to close from then until seven in the morning, and everybody is pretty unhappy because domestic animals will not feed in the heat of the day and farm work in the summer is from sunrise to sunset and everybody is worried, naturally enough and nobody knows why but really I imagine it is because the Germans are afraid of the mountain boys or the parachutists, but really since it is daylight until ten o’clock why should they make it at six. Of course the French population take it very simply that it is done to annoy. They take this for granted with all the German regulations, they only do it to annoy because they think it teases. Oh dear as the French say of the allies all the time if they only would hurry up. It is their only cry hurry up. The Germans are convinced of the efficiency of the new bomb, but not any Frenchmen, one German was telling about it to some Frenchmen and one of the French said to him but you are silly if you believe that, any soldier ought to know better they all say, but the German did not take offense, he just went on believing or did he. After all any hope is a hope to a dying man. All the French population can say is of the allies is if they only would hurry up, although they do admit that two weeks after the landing a great deal has been accomplished. One village to another is full of rumors. In Belley they think we have guns all around us, here we were told that all sorts of things have happened in Belley, but so far it is all rumor, the latest rumor is that the maquis the mountain boys have caught a colonel a captain and two ladies with whom they were out walking, and that is the reason they have made the curfew at six o’clock. The hide of a German comes high, said our cook why don’t they send them back, they are no use to anybody and then we could go and take the potato bugs off our potato plants. Well life in an occupied country is like that.

  I am going on cleaning the weeds off the terrace so when the American army gets here it can sit comfortably on it, Alice Toklas thinks the weeds may get a chance to grow again but I hope not, anyway I am making it nice and neat, and as the terrace is not on the road side of the house, I can go on working at it after we have to stay indoors, that is to say that we cannot go out of doors on the roads.

  In all these years I never had a wrist watch, watches to wear never particularly interested me, I like clocks and I am always buying them any kind of clock any kind of fountain pen, but watches seemed kind of dull, I like to know what time it is in the house but out of doors it is less interesting to know about the passage of time and in a city particularly in France you see so many clocks you hear so many clocks to be sure they do not tell the same time but no matter they do tell some time and when you are going to an appointment sometimes you go quickly because you are late by one clock and then you go slowly because you are early by another clock, but now that the curfew is at six o’clock, and I am sure to be out on the road somewhere and they do shoot you if you are out I thought it best to have a wrist watch and so out I went in our little village and asked the local jeweler lady whether she had a wrist watch, yes and a Swiss one and brand new and made for sport for women and men and I thought it perfectly lovely and I came home proudly and now I wear it with immense pride and joy and it seems to keep time and I get home in time and do not get shot by the Germans.

  The maquis are beginning to fight again, there was a lull for a bit and now it has commenced again and the Germans are taking all the gazogene automobiles and they are threatening to take away some of the radios from some of the people not to prevent the people listening they do not seem to care very much about that but presumably to get ready to get their orders that may come by radio when all the telephone and telegraph lines are cut which they certainly will be soon. Everything does seem as if something is going to happen that is what everybody keeps on saying. In the meantime our mayor has most efficiently gotten meat and bread and wine and corn meal and butter and everybody is very cheerful because they stand in line for hours but they finally get something and that is a pleasure. How they love a piece of bread. They certainly do. And I am going on scraping the weeds off the terrace so as to be all ready for the American army when it comes, one boy who came to-day and brought us fish said that he had seen an English soldier with his own eyes we none of us believed him naturally but it was a pleasure to hear and he did believe it.

  The Germans are very uncertain in their minds now, they decided to-day to give us the curfew at ten instead of six in the evening, it was posted up at the mairie and everybody was happy and then at half past five they sent the local policeman around to announce that they had changed their minds and it was back to six o’clock again, then a half hour afterwards they sent him around again to announce that it was changed back to ten and that is where it is now, or so we hope. But that is the way they are about everything, they come and go and they are afraid of their shadow, it is very hard to believe but it is true, and now everybody knows it, guerrilla warfare gets on their nerves it is so darn individual and being individual is what they do not like that is to say what they can not do.

  It is exciting to me to hear over the radio about Lake T
rasimena, when my brother and I were still at college we spent one summer some weeks in Perugia at a pension and there were lots of us there and one day some of us went off to see Lake Trasimena because there was supposed to be a whole army at the bottom well an army of ancient days naturally with gold chariots, and we thought we would like a swim in the lake, and the young men took the boatmen with them at one end of a little island in the middle of the lake and we girls went to the other end to swim, and we swam without clothes in the sunset in Lake Trasimena, and I have swum in lots of lakes and oceans but there was something special about that and now well it is being mentioned every day. And Cherbourg, when my eldest brother was coming to Paris with his family, my brother and I had been living there some years already, my eldest brother was a little nervous about the trip and he had not much confidence in the ability of my brother and myself getting to the station in time to meet his train from Cherbourg, and so for several months my eldest brother wrote letters and each one of them ended up with a postscript it is six and a half hours from Cherbourg to Paris, six hours and a half. We used to laugh about it, it was a family joke six hours and a half from Cherbourg to Paris. Well perhaps, anyway it is Cherbourg, yes it is.

  Everybody is excited so very excited and all around us there are explosions, we do not know what they are whether they are cannon or bridges blowing up or avions or just thunder but there is a lot of it and everybody hears and tells of a different lot, the Germans in French local trucks, not having any of their own, rush forward and back, and nobody seems to know just why or where. When I was out yesterday, I met five Germans with guns on bicycles and they were followed by a truck from Grenoble with soldiers having mitraillettes pointing in every direction and then followed by a local taxi-cab containing two officers of a higher rank than we are accustomed to see around here, and where they were going nobody knows, do they, and then there was a private car that went to Aix, and in this was an officer who had been here and was not popular and he was in a car with two soldiers each carrying a gun and the officer was driving and the car swerved and one of the soldiers dropped his gun which went off and killed the officer. And then there was his funeral with all the officers present. Then I have been seeing a German soldier working lately in the local carpenter shop, and I asked the carpenter why, well he said he told me in his own country he was owner of a carpenter shop and had six men working under him and he said as he has nothing to do he would like to handle tools and as I am short handed I let him, he says the war has settled his hash all right, when and if he gets back to his home he certainly will find nothing there for him.

  It’s a funny life all right, so far we ourselves have not seen any maquis, I went on a long walk yesterday and went over a road that had been barricaded, just trees pulled to the side of the road, all the telegraph and telephone wires down, they had not fought there but it was certainly like a battle field, it is hard to tell who is maquis and who isnt, they have an arm-band but naturally when they come home to see their people and they all do they keep it in their pocket and then there are still some firm reactionaries who are convinced that all maquis are terrorists, we have some charming neighbors who are like that and it worries me because after all people get angry and things might happen to them and we are very fond of them, it kind of reminds me of the description of the marauding bands in Cooper’s Spy, but that of course is the extraordinary thing about this war it is so historical not recent history but fairly ancient history, not I suppose where the armies are actually fighting but here where we are. The mayor keeps us pretty well fed, there are no more tickets because there is no contact with the authorities, there is only the mayor, there are no police but we are all peaceable and we are very well fed, we seem to have everything but sugar. We even had a lemon and an orange which should have gotten to Switzerland but did not, the bridges keep being blown up and nobody wants to go out to repair them it is too dangerous, the Germans tried to pass an armored train through the other day, but did it get there, nobody seems to know.

  They just blew up the electric line between here and Chambery and now everybody is walking, they walk to Grenoble they walk to Lyon, even children of three and five walk along with their elders, and sometimes somebody lends them a bicycle and sometimes the children fall off but not often they stick on holding on to anything in front of them, and so they still move around, everybody has to go somewhere and French people always find a way, they are wonders at always finding a way. The death of Henriot killed by the militia or somebody in their uniform has been an immense excitement, it is hard to make any one who has not lived with them realise how really tormented the population has been in its opinions and Henriot did perhaps more than anybody to turn Frenchmen against Frenchmen, he was a very able propagandist, he used the method not of a politician but of a churchman, he had that education, and he knew how to appeal like a revivalist sermon, and he did do it awfully well, and he held the middle classes they could not get away from him, what said I to one friend whose mother always listened to him, what will your mother do now, oh she mourns but at least for a week she will be busy with all the funeral orations, but after that, good gracious after that what will she do. A great many of the middle classes feel like that, of course the immense majority of French people are delighted at his putting off, they breathe more freely, there was no one else in the government who had the power he had, no one else. I do not think outside of France this was realised, I do not think so.

  And now he is dead and except a few of the die hards everybody is happy and relieved and everybody can now get ready for the end of the war that is to say for the evacuation of France by the Germans.

  One of our friends wants to be taught to say to a parachutist who comes to her door, and upon whom she has closed the door, she wants to say to him in English through the keyhole please break down the door and come in by force and take everything you want by force in that way you will have what you need and the Germans and the government cannot blame me and now said she just how can I say that to the parachutist through the keyhole. The rest of the population just wants to be taught to say we are glad to see you, and some of them are learning to say it very nicely, every one is certain that a large party of Canadians have been parachuted somewhere in our neighborhood and that they are only waiting the arrival of an English general expected any day this is the first of July for the advance to begin. As a matter of fact the forty-odd Germans who are here and who no longer get their pay are getting more and more peaceful, they ask for work they wander around unarmed and they used never to stir without a gun on their back and never less than three together, now they wander all about the country alone and unarmed. It certainly is a change this conquering army this occupying army now wandering around hoping some one will speak to them and that some one will give them a job. It certainly does look like the beginning of the end. The breathlessness of the situation is a bit on everybody’s nerves but the most selfish of all the women here did to-day in a great burst announced that it was all right there must be no bread, no money no anything and then the Germans would leave, that is the way it was going to be. There are no more trains here any more, and this Culoz where we are was a very important railroad junction for Italy, Switzerland the Savoys and Lyon, but not a train not one single or solitary train not one. No wonder the Germans are meek, here they are and here they must stay until the maquis come and take them away.

  They are getting away from here, the last lot that were in Artemarre are leaving and they are trying to sell the wagons that they had attached to their horses and all that is left in the region are right here in Culoz, we still have forty odd and when will they leave very soon we are hoping, they do not do anything very disagreeable here but oh dear what a relief it will be when they are gone, as everybody says even when they are not doing anything they are an oppressive burden, they are.

  The Germans still eat sausages, just like the old jokes, the Hitler regime has not changed that, they borrow a sausage machine from an old woman her
e who is called the old Maria, and they tell her all their troubles and how they are all going home very soon now, and the soldier who accidentally killed his adjutant and who has been crying ever since locked up in a room and he wanted to commit suicide but the officers decided instead of shooting him he would be sent to the Russian front and we all laughed and said by the time he gets there there wont be any Russian front.

  And now the cook has just come up to say that the maquis are on their way and may get here at Culoz not any day but at any moment of to-day. I wonder. It is now the fourth of July and things certainly are moving.

  It’s the fourth of July and everybody is on the broad grin. The French black troops with regular French officers are now within eight kilometers of us, they have been parachuted in the region and the Germans scared to death are packing up their bags and moving away and everybody stands around and laughs and with reason. It is a happy day.

  To-day I took a long walk and all along there were groups of people telling each other all sorts of things, some had seen Canadians and some had seen English and some had heard on the radio that this department of the Ain was going to be completely emptied of Germans by the fourteenth of July and others had seen the black troops and anyway there was a sound of cannon firing and somebody had heard one of the German soldiers say, the only thing to do to shorten this war is to kill our chiefs, and sometimes when you realise that there have been twenty-four German generals killed or imprisoned in three weeks are they doing it, are they.