Wars I Have Seen

by Gertrude Stein

  It is funny really funny, the maquis have taken charge of Culoz, they have put up notices under the heading of the fourth republic telling the population what to do and all the time there are twenty-five German soldiers at the station as frightened as rabbits, they stay out only long enough to buy their provisions and retire back to their station, across the river there are still fifty to two hundred but nobody does seem to pay any attention, the maquis do not even take the trouble to gather them in, but they will so they say and put them to work. I like their calling it the fourth republic, the French dearly love a new form of government, they do love a change, they might have thought that the third republic was just going on but not at all there was an in between, the dictatorship or the oligarchy of Vichy so you just could not have it the third republic it has to be a fourth republic. There have been so many these last hundred and forty years, I think I have counted them once already in this book, three different varieties of monarchy, two empires three republics, one commune one oligarchy and dictatorship, and now here we are at a fourth republic and everybody is pleased. It makes them feel gay and cheerful. The German captain who left with the hundred and fifty soldiers was driven to Lyon by one of the taxis from Culoz, the taxi man came back and he said the German captain cried when he said good-bye, he said he had been so happy in Culoz and had hoped to once more see his wife and children but now he was ordered to Normandy and of course he cried and expected the French chauffeur to sympathise with him. They certainly are a funny people they certainly are.

  Alice Toklas has just commenced typewriting this book, as long as there were Germans around we left it in manuscript as my handwriting is so bad it was not likely that any German would be able to read it, but now well if they are not gone they are so to speak not here, we can leave our windows open and the light burning, dear me such little things but they do amount to a lot, and it is so. They have left Florence, that is something to the good and everybody cheers up, they are now expecting it to be all over by the fifteenth of August. The French like to set a date it cheers them, but it does seem rather soon, they all also say that in this region there is an English colonel and fifteen Canadian officers, but are they, sometimes we believe it and sometimes we do not. If they are here it would be nice to see them.

  There are the Germans still here some forty odd but we never see them in the village the way we used to, why not, I asked the mayor, he twinkled he said they sleep all day, because they mount guard all night, they are afraid I said like rabbits he said. Everybody is so pleased that the overbearing Germans are afraid like rabbits, everybody is pleased.

  Even though the Germans are still here the maquis have taken over the victualing of our town as they have done in all the region, they are distributing lots more butter and cheese than there was. They take all that was being prepared in the dairies for the Germans. Look said the cook excitedly, it is butter done up in tinfoil, oh it was prepared for those dirty Boches for the evil birds and now we have it come quick Madame and taste it. She is keeping the tinfoil as a sacred souvenir, the first spoil from the enemy. Ah she said they made us cry since forty and now they cry. Naturally it is difficult to get medicines, even the Germans have not much of that so the maquis cannot take it from them so everybody is going back to old herb remedies. The old people are always being consulted to remember what they did when they were young, for bruises you use wild verbena pounded and for disinfecting and reducing swelling application of the petals of the Easter lily preserved in eau de vie and foot baths of boiled ivy.

  Just how I do not know but the French workers in Germany commence to come back. How they get away they do not say but in the last few days three of them have come back. And they describe Germany as she is.

  And just to-day we are most awfully excited because the allies have just made a landing in the south of France and we will be on their way up and it is most exciting. One woman just told me that she had two spare rooms and although it was Assumption and a holiday she was immediately starting to fix them up for the first American soldiers, and the whole population wants to learn English and quickly.

  As I was saying some forced workers in Germany have made their way back, you never do know how the French do it but they always keep wandering back and apparently without very much difficulty, they decide that they want to come home and they come.

  As I say their descriptions of Germany are funny. They say the civilian population still stupidly believes in victory, they have not changed but that the army is completely discouraged, and besides they are comforting themselves by shooting their officers, it would seem that Hitler has ordered that any soldier should shoot any officer or soldier whom he heard talking against the government, and say the French naturally any soldier who has a grievance has nothing to do but shoot up the man against whom he has it and say it was because he spoke against the government and then instead of being punished he is congratulated. And moreover the German army is beginning to mutiny, so these French boys say, but as long as the civilians still believe in victory Germany will not give in. The thing that fills all the French in Germany with horror is the way the Germans treat the Russians, women as well as men, the Germans fear them so that they go quite crazy with brutality, that is the French explanation of the situation.

  All this reminds me that one day in Paris, we had a lot of people for dinner it was about ’35 and they were talking Nazi and Hitler and I said it was Hitler’s intention to destroy Germany, and that was because he was an Austrian and an Austrian in his heart has a hatred of Germany so great even if unconscious that if he could he would destroy Germany and Hitler can and will. They all thought that I was only trying to be bright but not at all it is true, if Hitler had been a German he could not destroy Germans the way he does, it is like Napoleon who was an Italian and naturally was indifferent as to how many Frenchmen were killed. It is the judgment of Solomon over again, there is the call of the blood, but funnily enough the foreign monster has a glamor for the nation he is destroying that a home grown monster could not have. And so Hitler is quite comfortably waiting for the last battalion to fight and win or be killed, presumably killed but he has made them all feel like that because he is a foreigner and not a German, it is the other way to of a prophet not being recognised in his own country.

  Oh well these days nobody minds death from fear of heaven or hell but there is there always is with death the cessation of life and life is interesting, and certainly it is for Hitler so why stop.

  The little groups of Germans all over are still all over, ours just left yesterday, they were as inoffensive as Germans can be, but then they were really not soldiers they were mostly railroad workers and the few soldiers they had with them as guards were rather miserable specimens victims of Russian rheumatism, as they call it, and now they are gone to join up with the others across the river and the five hundred at Aix-les-Bains left to go away, but to the distress of the Aix population they have come back, the maquis have cut off all the means of communication and they are back again. The maquis say they are going to mop them up and I suppose they will. We see the maquis now, they have big trucks and all camouflaged, I saw one like that to-day the first one at a little town where I occasionally buy cake, and when I saw that truck I had a shock, have the Germans come back but no there was a little tricolor cheerfully waving from the front, and everywhere the cross of Lorraine and the tricolor painted, and it was all gay and cheerful not German at all. I heard to-day that Captain Bouvet is the chief of this region, he was a nice man, he and I in the darkest days of the war used to have long conversations on the cold winter days between Belley and Billignin, being cheered by the battle of London being cheered by the Russian entrance being cheered by being cheerful, and of course I did not know he was mixed up with the maquis, until just before the Germans left Belley they tried to catch him and his son-in-law but they managed to hide away not too difficult there in the mountains, and the Germans did not get them, he was a retired army officer who had specialised in the
chemical side of explosives so naturally he has been wonderful in stopping all railroads and destroying bridges, and now everybody can know that he is he and it is a pleasure.

  But really you can understand how the Germans could never have had colonies, when you see these isolated pieces of the German army get to be like hunted rabbits as soon as they are not winning, they are always frightened even when they are winning the most and you really had to be in a country occupied by them to realise it and if you are always about to be frightened you naturally cannot impose yourself upon primitive races. Unless there were a lot of Germans about they never moved without a gun on their back and that was before there were maquis. And this is undoubtedly true, how could they ever be a dominant race, just how could they. Everybody is so cheerful now, they are all making their little flags for the allies everybody the farmers even in the midst of the harvest, the wives are taking time to make flags. Very nice, oh so very nice, we can have our windows open, and everybody is cheerful. The poor people of Aix-les-Bains with their five hundred Germans back again, it is too bad, but it is better and the Aixois know that, that they were unable to get away, even if they have for a little while to have them back again. All the men young and old want to be in it they are all for being up and at them, they are very envious of those who already joined up are in it, and the French troops landed in the south and now oh how they all want to be with them.

  This morning just before dawn we were all awakened by the rattle of tommy guns and magazine rifles, but they did not last, it seems that the two forces of the maquis did not connect and so the coup did not come off, but all through the Savoy the Germans are giving themselves up and those across the river said that they would like to perhaps they will and then we can be peaceful with the maquis until the Americans come, then that will finish the book the first American tank and surely it will be coming along, one week or two weeks the pessimists say three weeks nobody expects it to take a month, and they are thirty kilometers from Paris it is an anxious moment, dear Paris, we saw it escape the Germans in fourteen and now forty-four.

  To-day we were for the first time in company with a real live maquis, we were in a taxi and he came along to go to Culoz, and we were delighted, he had the tricolor on his shoulder and looked bronzed and capable, we are Americans we said, yes we know he said, and we solemnly shook hands and congratulated each other, he was a captain in the maquis, and he had been a prisoner in Germany, had escaped two years ago and went back to his job in the water-ways and bridges and joined the maquis and has been working with them ever since, we were all pleased, but everybody is pleased these days, one can hardly realise how strange it seems to see everybody smiling and everybody is smiling.

  The maquis were pretty wonderful of course now they are armed and more or less superior in numbers to the Germans they attack and besides they are sure of victory but when they first began to block the German transport system, they were practically unarmed, they were inferior in numbers, they were often betrayed by their compatriots and still they managed to cut railroad lines block tunnels blow up bridges, and besides all their other troubles they had to receive the material sent them by airplane and get away with it and hide and manufacture it and use it all in the face of a heavily occupied country with enemy guards all along, and the poor maquis many of them hungry and cold and not too favorably regarded by many of their countrymen, it was a kind of a Valley Forge with no General Washington but each little band had to supply itself with its own food its own plans and its own morale. We who lived in the midst of you salute you.

  While I was walking yesterday evening as I passed through a village little voices came out of the dark saying are not you afraid of the curfew Madame.

  On the other hand the little boys who have been playing at being maquis in odd corners and in secret now play it in the open streets, with red white and blue on their shoulders their fathers’ war helmets on their heads and their wooden mitraillettes in their hands, when some one asked them what would you do if the Germans came back. No Germans can come back.

  Everybody is waiting, they say it goes so fast it makes them feel as if they were at a cinema. They have completely forgotten that they used to moan and say if they would only hurry. And besides they are so very much better fed, not in the big cities alas, but here in the small towns, the maquis, are doing all the policing, they have announced formally that the Vichy government does not any longer function and that they are the government, and with the assistance of the mayor they are going to feed and police the population. Already we have had supplementary butter wine and cheese, and now they are here the people are talking wildly of supplementary white bread and sardines but that is decidedly premature, anyway the maquis are now in command it puts its notices up on the mairie it sends the town crier around with his trumpet to announce what we are all to do and everybody is pleased because it is French and easy, and conversational and all who want can gather together and talk it over. I was coming up the street I heard a man saying yes before the war of fourteen, well yes they can go back to talk about before the war of fourteen it has come now the middle of August to be as peaceable as that.

  It is nice to be free my gracious yes and now we have had our little battle and it was this way. The Germans had left Culoz and they had all gathered together across the river at Vions there were then between two hundred and three hundred of them. About a week ago the maquis decided to take the bridge away from them and get them on the move but there was some difficulty about the signals, they all have to come down from their mountains and there was some mistake. Two Germans were killed on the bridge but they were still there. Yesterday in broad daylight they got a gun up on the hill and attacked the bridge, they first had to warn away the little boys who were bathing in the pools of the Rhone and two women who came along after were wounded a little bit, and then the maquis rushed the bridge and it was most exciting, six maquis attacked eight Germans killed two and the others ran away, in the meantime eight German airplanes came along from Lyon but they did not help their comrades in distress they just went on their way to Germany and we have not been seen again. Just a little while and the Germans got away as fast as they could. The maquis put the flag on the bridge and sent round to the mayor to tell the town crier that the bridge was in the hands of the maquis and nobody should cross it, then came the night, the maquis gathered from all sides attacked the fleeing Germans and killed anywhere from fifty to eighty of them in the marshes, the nephew of our baker killed five and the butcher boy killed four, the Germans were trying to escape toward Aix-les-Bains, but there others of the maquis pushed them back and it became a regular rabbit drive, the weather was hot and the Germans were in a bad way there in the marshes, some tried to surrender but others of the group fired and the maquis killed them all, every one, and then they came back, and everybody was happy and they said everybody must put up flags so we all rushed around trying to get flags, and our general store who had been a well-known collabo unearthed from his stores a quantity of French, English and American flags we got one nice one and in the meantime the maquis had given the mayor a nice big American flag and it and the French flag were hung up in front of the mairie and we were very moved and Mrs. Mayor was teaching all the children to salute the flag to say vive la France et honneur aux maquis. It is rather wonderful when you think that a quantity of little children had never seen a flag never, the Germans never had flags and of course there were no French ones allowed, and the little children go up and touch it timidly, they never have seen a flag. What a town everybody is out on the streets all the time, and in between time they sing the Marseillaise, everybody feels so easy, it is impossible to make anybody realise what occupation by Germans is who has not had it, here in Culoz it was as easy as it was possible for it to be as most of the population are railroad employees and the Germans did not want to irritate them, but it was like a suffocating cloud under which you could not breathe right, we had lots of food, and no interference on the part of the Germans bu
t there it was a weight that was always there and now everybody feels natural, they feel good and they feel bad but they feel natural, and that was our battle, the maquis are all down there at the bridge they do not think the Germans can come back, but they are watchful, there was firing just now but it did not last, so it was probably a false alarm, we like the maquis, honneur aux maquis.