Wars I Have Seen (15 page)

When I first came to France it was before there were automobiles in Paris, and almost everybody who was not otherwise engaged was pulling or pushing a push-cart and quite rapidly, the French move very quickly with them and then gradually the automobiles filled the streets and the roads and pushing and pulling of push-carts became too dangerous an occupation and so gradually nobody had one and nobody pushed or pulled them. In those early days all artisans had them all house painters and all plumbers and all sellers of anything, there are still a few who push them even in the days of automobiles but that is only to get to a corner somewhere and sell something, even that does not seem to be too legal because they are always being carried off to the police station, and there is nothing more helpless than a pushcart filled with vegetables or anything and standing all alone and neglected in front of a police station. I always wondered if anybody would ever push them again, but I suppose really their owners were never sent to prison probably they just had to pay a fine or something, or their licence was not right or something and they come back to push or pull it before the vegetables and fruit were too faded to sell.

But now in this year of 1943 push-carts every kind of push-cart on every kind of road and all ages pushing and pulling and so many
kilometers and filled with anything and everything, the roads are full of them, every size and shape from small baby-carriages to almost a full sized wagon. They push them twenty kilometers sometimes when they go off to get chestnuts and besides that there is the constant carrying of grass to feed rabbits and goats and anything that can be fed and then eaten. Bicycles and push-carts, rarely anybody not carrying or pushing something so rarely that it just does not exist.

But to come back to Victor, Victor and his father have hunting dogs two of them but of course they cannot hunt and they grow vegetables and these get pushed in the push-cart and the family are bakers and Victor is the only boy and he has three sisters and how they all love Victor. He is very sweet is Victor and fond of children and now he is twenty years old and has gone to the Camp de Jeunesse, and he was always very well fed and he caught a bad sore throat and he came back and he looked very thin when he came back for twenty days’ convalescent leave. And he was a little better but not well enough and he decided he did not want to go back, and his family who loved him did not want him to go back because any day he might have to go further, so he must hide himself and that is very easy, from one village you go to another village and in that other village nobody says anything and nobody hunts him up because it takes the papers a very long time to go forward and back and when he is not where he was the papers have to go back again and sometimes they just stay where they were and where their family is but that is more difficult, the time might come but going forward and back between these villages that is fairly safe quite safe enough for any of them except the mother who does tremble, they all love him but the mother does tremble, every once in a while she trembles a little every once in a while.

Anything can happen in such a time and to-day it was very funny, there are now everywhere and particularly here where there are mountains and wood is very easy to get, the automobiles go with wood, the engines are the same as they were, but anyway it works very well, there are lots of trucks and lots of autobuses and
every fair sized town has several taxis. French people naturally like luxuries and although they are not supposed to take you except in case of great need, actually everybody takes them to go anywhere which is too far to walk, and if you have no bicycle. So we wanted to go to Belley on Friday and I telephoned to our taxi man and he said he had stalled just in front of his house and would his car go again, well of course it would sometime but would it go again by Friday and besides just now they had telephoned to him that he must go immediately and get some German officers who had to get somewhere immediately, and he said he could not his car had stopped going, and the authorities said they had telephoned to five different taxis and all of them had broken down and was his really not working and he said no it was not and it was not, not just then. It is an extraordinary thing so extraordinary that only we here notice anything but an extraordinary thing none of them not any one of the German officers have a car that goes, if they cannot take a train, they have to get the wood heated French cars to take them anywhere. It is the most extraordinary thing, I cannot say it too often it is the most extraordinary thing, the most extraordinary thing, really the most extraordinary thing of all the extraordinary things that happen, the most extraordinary thing, the motorised German army being carried around by French taxis.

Now that the end is more or less in sight anybody can be just foolish, not very happy, but quite foolish. They are foolish everywhere, everybody is just foolish anywhere, not funny but just foolish.

Really and truly this time nobody in their hearts really believe that everybody that anybody will be peaceful and happy, not anybody, not the immense majority believe any such thing and that proves that the nineteenth century is dead completely and entirely dead. Even the propagandists on the radio find it very difficult to really say let alone believe that the world will be a happy place, of love and peace and plenty, and that the lion will lie down with the lamb and everybody will believe anybody. They all know that none of them believe anybody that not any of them believe anybody.
There is neither unanimity nor faith in peace and progress, the nineteenth century is dead but there is no particular peace for its ashes, although there is no resurrection none at all for the nineteenth century, none.

Everybody knows it, nobody says it, because the twentieth century is too troublesome and too certain to be difficult and distracted, but everybody knows that the nineteenth century is dead dead as a door-nail.

Now everybody knows that there is no use in being too successful, look at the Germans they began with the Ruhr, I will never forget that it was a Sunday evening and I was out walking and on the Boulevard Saint Germain and there were lots of people out and the eyes of the men had that troubled look that men’s eyes have when they may have to go to war, when the last one is near enough so that there is no illusion and no glamor, none at all, and the women with them were talking and talking not about war of course nobody mentioned that and the men for French men were silent and the women were very talkative and their eyes were not as troubled as the men’s eyes. And the Germans were successful and then there was Austria and they were successful and then there was Munich and all the Frenchmen were easier in their minds, no war, certainly no war, not for their generation, and then came Czecho-Slovakia’s annexation and the Germans were once more successful and the French paid no attention, and then every year there was mobilisation and everybody was irritated and resentful and then there was Poland and by this time the Frenchmen kind of relieved, to really have war, and they knew the Germans would be successful but all the same it was a relief that they really had to begin war, and once more the Germans were successful and there was not much fighting and then very soon it was all over and the Germans were still successful, and then the Germans began not to be successful and now they are not successful at all. Now the wisdom of the ages, that is everybody really knows that if one thing goes well nothing else must go wrong, you cannot have a house, wood to burn and food to eat and the servant to stay, not all at once and
there must always be setbacks, and there must always be the need of superstition to stop anything from going too bad or too well just like that, and people like the Germans never understand that, they dream fairy tales where everything is as it was or was not, and they make music which makes them feel like that but the French know that you must not succeed you must rise from the ashes and how could you rise from the ashes if there were no ashes, but the Germans never think of ashes and so when there are ashes there is no rising, not at all and every day and in every way this is clearer and clearer. And now almost anybody can again remember Petain, not that they say it, no indeed, once the French have stopped saying it they do not begin again, and they had and they have stopped saying it. All the same they are relieved that he wants a republic, there may be royalists but really the French like a republic, I imagine all Europe will be republican pretty soon, it is like South America, the Brazilians had a very nice emperor indeed, they liked him and he liked them, but they said regretfully it is no use it is not the fashion to have an emperor on the American continent, and we are so sorry but you must go away. And I imagine that is going to be true in Europe. The fashion is the fashion, and republics simply republican republics are going to be the fashion. You can see that the nineteenth century is dead, quite dead.

And now it is the first of December 1943 and everybody is cross just as cross as they can be and there is a reason why. Everybody well they did not think it but it was possible and they did hope it that the war would be over. Oh dear they say another winter, well but it is always winter in December yes but we did not think that this December would be another winter, we did not think there could be another winter and now it is December and there is another winter of war. And certainly there is another winter, everybody is so tired of having wood and not coal, of eating quite well but always worried of having it all be such a bother and not being able to go out and buy something if you have the money and worst of all well of course it is the worst of all, that it is is the worst of all, the worst of all.

How lightly the troubadour plays his guitar. How easily the radio tells you what they all say. How often they say what they all say, and how much there is to tell when well when very well there is nothing to tell.

The case of Petain is typical, he has so little to tell now November 1943 and he had it to tell and they would not let him. That made everything difficult, everybody remembered him because they would not let him tell what he had to tell over the radio, and everybody wanted him and he was just as peaceful about it is as if he had told what they would not let him tell.

If they believe it but they do not, Petain does tell what he has to tell even when they do not let him tell what he has to tell, and this time again the end of November 1943 it happened again and everybody almost everybody remembered him again and he went on peacefully again as if everybody did remember. How long will it last. Well that is not the end, not the end, not that.

It is funny they all act as if they believe what they say, and they do, they do believe what they say and it is so funny that they all act as if they believed what they say.

There is no use, everybody might just as well be funny, and some of them are, they really are.

We were talking and they said, that a good many people had for a year consciously tried to live on their rations, but now everybody finds that there is no use in doing it, no use at all and so nobody does, nobody does except funnily enough some timid grocery storekeepers, who are afraid. I know one family of them and they are the only ones around here who continue to be thin and to get thinner. Nobody else is, nobody else is thin and nobody else continues to get thinner, nobody not unless they are awfully poor and because of their situation in life unable to work. Nobody.

This is all another proof that the nineteenth century is over. England still believes in the nineteenth century yes she does, she almost wishes that she did not but yes she does. France never did very much belong to the nineteenth century not very much.

Such pleasant stories.

On the road I met a woman an oldish woman and we were going the same way and we talked as we walked. She said a little further along she had a house but she did not live there. She had had a sister paralysed for thirty-five years who had lived there and she died two years ago. She now lived with her brother-in-law somewhere else, he was all she had but of course some one stayed in the paternal house to take care of the chickens. Oh yes I forgot I had Basket on a leash because on the road as there is a cement works there are many trucks, of course there are quite a number of automobiles, no German ones, French ones the French always keep going somehow, well anyway I said I had Basket on a leash because he having worms was a little nervous he almost was run down by an automobile, so I told her and I said a dog is so easily killed, yes she said we had one at the paternal house and he went blind and so we had to have him killed, and I said we had a little dog we loved very much and he had to be killed because he had diabetes, and is he dead she said and I said yes, and she said it is different with chickens, she said just the other day a camion came along and he ran over one of our chickens and he did not notice it he just went on but a little later another one came along and he noticed it and he stopped and got down and gathered in the chicken and went on, just then my nephew came out and saw him and as he went away he noticed the number so a little later when the camion came back again my nephew stopped him and said you have to pay me for that chicken that is to say not money I do not want money I want the chicken, and the man said not at all I will pay you but I will not give you the chicken and my nephew said he did not want payment he wanted the chicken and the man said he did not have it which was probably a lie but still perhaps he had already eaten it, but anyway my nephew said well I will take the money, no said the other I am not paying you anything, why not said my nephew, because I am not said the driver and my nephew said well suppose you give it to the Red Cross to make a package for a prisoner not at all said the driver and he drove away and said I what did your nephew do, I have no nephew she said I only have
a niece that is to say I only have a father-in-law, that is not my house where I live it belongs to my brother-in-law and just then our roads parted and we said good-bye.

There are so many stories. To-day I met a man on the road he had a hunting dog a pretty one a little thin and she and Basket said how do you do the man was pushing a cart filled with cabbages and we stopped and said how do you do, is she very young I said not so young three years old but she is a good hunter, and how he said, but alas now nobody can hunt and I said look there are so many birds of passage and wild ducks, yes he said we used to think them rather tough eating but now it would be a pleasure, I used to be a custom house officer and now I am pensioned and I thought I would spend my last days hunting, but it is not to be, well you never can tell I said December ’43, perhaps it will be like ’18, perhaps it will come suddenly, perhaps he said, but I said surely you were not originally from this country I said, he did not look it, he looked like a man from Normandy, and he said no my father who was a custom’s officer like I am, had a large family, nine children and if you have a large family you want a job in a small town where living is easy, so he had a job here and I was raised here and when I was pensioned I came back here, but you have not a large family no I have only one son and he like I did enlisted in the army and was in it for two years and then the army was demobilised and they sent my son away at the point of a pistol and then they said he should go to Germany and he said he did not like them and he came home and the police took away all his papers, and then he went away that is he is here and he is not dead I said, no he said oh dear no. You see he said I was my father’s second son the older one was not strong so my father said I should join the army young, and the years that I spent in the army would count on my time when I went into the custom’s service as I had a right to being a custom’s officer’s son, and it was all right only the war broke out, not this war I am not a young man the other war, and I was a sergeant and I killed a lot of Germans a whole lot of them and then one day I was sent with a convoy of wood to make trenches, and I came along and
somebody said, there is an armistice, and I said oh go along, and I went on, and then somebody else said sure the armistice has been signed to-day and I said I would not go on with the wood and I dumped it all on the side of the road and I went back, and they all said let us hit it up to-night, and I said no I was tired, really it was because being a member of such a large family and my father thinking I should help the little ones, I did not have any money and one of the comrades said let’s see your purse and he took it and opened it and it was empty, and he said it’s all right, and I said I know we are all comrades, but I have my pride but all the same we did whoop it up and then we shook hands and we parted.