Wars I Have Seen (16 page)

One of our neighbors a charming boy went to Germany with his class and although he had never driven a truck he volunteered for that work, and so they gave him a tryout in Paris and naturally he stayed as long as he could and then he went to Germany and they gave him a job with a man who had a business of moving furniture. And sometimes it was with a camion and sometimes with horses, and Christian de la Flechere wrote and said it was not too bad only he quarreled with the wife of his boss because she did not give him all of his bread, but just the same he had a room to himself and it was not too bad and would his family send him some make-up and perfumes, because he could trade these things off and be much more comfortable, and they did and he was. Then one day his boss got the bill for the days in Paris when Christian was learning to drive the camion, and it was sixty marks and he said he would not pay it Christian should pay it, and Christian said he would be damned if he would and the boss could go further and the boss said he was fired and Christian should get out and get a job and he did he got a job in a dairy where he would be better paid and fed and he came back and his old boss began to apologise and said he easily got mad, but he wanted him to stay, and Christian thought a bit and remembered even if he was better paid at the dairy he would have to get up earlier and it was winter and any way it was better to accept the troubles you knew than to try out new ones and so he stayed. We were all after all we heard and knew
we were all surprised at this story, it was so not like war at all, except that of course Christian would never have been there if there had not been war not at that kind of work if there had been war and yet it is just like any boy who went out to earn a living at any work he could get.

It is funny and his sister who told us the story, said and I have just met a friend and she was radiant and I said and what is it, and she said my son who was a prisoner in Germany has just escaped into Sweden and he was received with open arms and said at the embassy find me a job but you must find one for my buddy and they were both put to dish-washing at a big hotel and they liked it because there was lots to eat and they were not interned.

Yes yes.

Unconditional surrender very strange that.

Everybody is getting somber, the winter weather and the war not over, everybody is getting somber and a little dreary, in the summer they think it will be over this year but now that the fifth winter has commenced nobody can believe that it will ever be over. Nobody. The only thing that cheered anybody was the speech of General Smuts, against France, it made everybody feel alive, he said France was dead and as France does naturally rise from the ashes it made everybody feel very much alive. Naturally nobody was grateful to General Smuts but I was because everybody cheered up and it is better to have everybody cheered up rather than not. Decidedly yes.

Unconditional surrender.

The Europeans are fascinated with the idea of unconditional surrender. Nobody in Europe had ever heard of that, there are always conditions there have to be conditions, life in Europe is conditional and the words unconditional surrender is like a new thing, jazz or automobiles when they were new or radio, it is something new, and the Europeans like something new, it is an old civilization and they like something new. I like to tell them about it, about General Grant having the initials from Ulysses Simpson Grant. U. S. Grant and being called United States Grant or Unconditional
Surrender Grant. I like to tell them about this but they really do not listen to me, they are not interested not even in its being American, unconditional surrender, they are just fascinated and find it very original and the meaning of it does not really penetrate, it is a new form of jazz, unconditional surrender, and when the Germans say the Japs wont and they wont they say but they will but even then it does not mean anything to them, because it is not really war, war is something else it is defeat and armistice and conditions, unconditional surrender has nothing to do with war not for them.

There are so many refugees, roughly speaking one might say everybody is a refugee, nearly everybody certainly every city, town village and hamlet has its refugees, and plenty of them, this Culoz, is a little town of two thousand inhabitants and there are lots of them, Alsatians and Lorrainers and Poles and Americans, several besides us, working people that somehow are Americans and any town is like that and French quite a few French and Belgians, and anything else and lots of Persians so the Swiss Consul told us and every refugee is certain that he likes neither the climate the landscape the earth in which they garden nor the mosquitoes and if he does not say so certainly his wife does she most certainly does. To some it is a mountainous climate very cold and very savage, to some it is a warm moist climate never cold and the mountain disgracefully covered with rocks instead of pine trees and so many mosquitoes, as a matter of fact last summer there were none, however it was our first summer here, perhaps there are more sometimes, with all the marshes of the Rhone, anyway everybody is a refugee and it is a puzzle a considerable puzzle how everybody goes on living and spending money and looking fairly well fed and well clothed it is a puzzle, and then of course there are lots of Jews French and every other kind refugeed anywhere in any small place and then young men who do not want to go to forced labor and they change their town oh dear everybody is a refugee and how do they go on spending money and being fairly well dressed and well fed how do they.

You never can tell who is going to help you, that is a fact.
French people are awfully careful of their money, so careful and so hard and yet so many of them most unexpectedly are helpful, not those whom you expect to help you but just anybody. Take our case. After we came into the war it began to get very difficult extremely difficult, and nobody among my old friends nobody asked me if we were in any trouble and it was getting a bit of a trouble, of course if we had wanted it we could have gotten some from the consul but with the price of things going up and up and up that would not have helped us, and so there we are, and so much worse than that there we were, and one day a young man his name is Paul Genin and we had come to know him because they had bought a house in the neighborhood, he was a silk manufacturer from Lyon and he was interested in literature one day he said to me are you having trouble about money, I said not yet I still have a supply but it is beginning to run pretty low and he said can I help you and I said what can you do, well he said write out a check in dollars and I will see what I can do, and then a little while after he said I have been looking into the matter and I think it might possibly get you into trouble and I think I had rather not have you do it, I could have it done but I would rather not so here is your check tear it up and let me be your banker, but, I said, Oh he said, why not, how much do you spend a month, I told him, he said all right I will give you that a month and I said what do you want me to give you in the way of a paper, oh nothing he said, I think it is better not, but said I if I died or anything you have no evidence of anything, oh he said let us risk it, and he did, and every month for six months he gave me what I needed to live on for the month and at the end of six months I sold a picture I had with me quite quietly to some one who came to see me and so I thanked Paul Genin and paid him back and he said if you ever need me just tell me, and that was that.

Life is funny that way.

It always is funny that way, the ones that naturally should offer do not, and those who have no reason to offer it, do, you never
know you never do know where your good-fortune is to come from. The most experienced person can never tell, never never never.

At the same time you can tell that Secret Service is an amusement of peace it is not an amusement for war. I have just been reading a secret service novel a quite good one, in which the secret service agents save Hong Kong, to the British. That is all right in peace times like finding out all about new weapons and secret treaties and all that sort of thing and the other secret agents but once war begins well it is not of any use, really it is not, when it is peace time it is drama when it is war time it is melodrama. No information gotten within in a country is of any use to anybody by the time it comes out, anyway information like that is not much use, one does see and hear a good deal of the secret service, bound to, you just cant help hearing more or less actually about it, but it does not seem much good in war time, really not much good, when a country is in revolt as everybody is now who is occupied that is different, but that is not secret service in an enemy’s country that is the organisation of resistance within the country, and of course when the whole country is in sympathy with them messages do go in and out, surely not otherwise, why are they not more often stopped and they never are, the conferences of the important people continue, why are none of the important people killed, nobody really finds out anything and all that secret service agents do in war time is to feel melodramatic and occasionally get shot up, it is indeed a peace time occupation, it really is. We know one of them pretty well, and he is supposed to be a pretty good one and beside upsetting his own nerves and changing his name constantly and his papers and occasionally frightening us rather badly by mysterious messages, which might have to do with him and perhaps might have to do with us, but would he know and being very frequently condemned to death but being still alive, well it is the changing of their name that is the chief occupation, I remember when I was young I was fascinated on the stage that anybody came on disguised by changing their wig, that is the way you knew they were the same but some one else. Well secret service people seem to achieve the
same thing by changing their names, once they are Hubert and then they are Henry and then they Charles and the last name changes the same way. Why should it deceive anybody since they remain the same but it seems to, everything is peculiar but that seems to me one of the things that are the most peculiar, what is in a name, for a secret service man everything is in a name if they can find a new one and they undoubtedly always can, and that new name seems to completely throw the authorities out, I used to read about it and I thought it was just in the books, but no they do it they do do it and it seems to work in spite of the horrid suspicion one has that perhaps nobody is really interested in finding them but apparently they are any way it is very funny, a bit frightening from time to time but really very funny. The times are so peculiar now, so mediaeval so unreasonable that for the first time in a hundred years truth is really stranger than fiction. Any truth.

There are such funny thing, how can a nation that feels itself as strong as the Germans do be afraid of a small handful of people like the Jews, why it does seem funny, most strange and very funny, they must be afraid because as Edgar Wallace loves to say over and over again, hate is fear, and why, what can they do to them, after all what can they do to them. Everything is funny. Yesterday was a funny day.

Strangers always have to have papers to move about, they are supposed to stay more or less in their commune, nobody that is the French are not very fussy about it but you are more or less supposed to stay in your commune. We are rather favored strangers, and we can move about fairly freely in our department, but when we go to others we are supposed to have a special pass. Yesterday was a funny day.

To-day was a funny day we expected the son and the mother came. She did say that for the women of France to-day they were a great many who could not remember that there had been peace between ’18 and ’39 it all seemed war and war and no peace in between. To be sure her son had been born in sixteen in Paris, and she had to remain in bed, on the day he was born and risk the
bomb but he had been wrapped up in absorbent cotton and taken down into the cellar with all the others who could move about, and now his son was born in 1940, and living in Lyon, when he hears the right kind of a noise he says reflectively that is a bomb, and it is a bomb. As I say to-day was a funny day but yesterday was an even funnier day. As I say we are very careful about having our papers in order. So many people wander about with false papers, one of our friends who has an automobile buys one regularly when he wants to go anywhere, and anyway anybody seems to be able to have one for the asking but we are not like that, we go to the gendarmerie and we get our papers to go where we want to go to be sure they are very nice to us and always give us whatever we ask for which is very nice for us. So yesterday we were to go to Chambery to visit the dentist, and off we started and all as usual. I like trains now, I perfectly understand why the French people never did care for automobiles, why they so much prefer trains, trains are so very much more adventurous, particularly now, when nobody really knows when they will go or where they will go, and when you get off of them whether you can get out of the station to go home, and then the dark stations, and the crowded train, it is all very exciting. So yesterday we started to go to Chambery.

I had to buy a jar of jam.

You have to buy what you do not want to buy in order to buy what you do want to buy. That is if you have nothing to trade and a good many of us have nothing to trade. Of course if you are a farmer it is all right you have lots to trade but if you are not a farmer then you have nothing to trade. Once when we were in Bilignin during the winter we wanted to buy some eggs and nobody wanted to sell us any because all the eggs their chickens lay they wanted to eat themselves, which was natural enough, and Madame Roux said can we find nothing to trade that is not to trade but to induce them to sell eggs to us, at last we found something, and it was our dish water. Madame Roux had the habit of carrying off the dish water to give to a neighbor who was fattening a pig, and as there was very little milk with which to fatten pigs, dish
water was considerable of a help, this was in the worst days, ’41–42, in ’43 life began to be easier, well anyway Alice Toklas said to Madame Roux, no we will not give away our dish water, if the neighbor wants it she has in return to be willing to sell us a certain quantity of eggs. So Madame Roux went to the neighbor and told her she could have the family dish water only under the condition of our having the privilege of buying from her a certain quantity of eggs, well she wanted the dish water and we bought the eggs, but alas she killed the pig at Christmas, and everybody killed their pig at Christmas and so there was no need any longer of dish water to fatten the pigs and so our right to buy eggs was over, we had not had the idea of making the bargain for longer. Now in 1943, in December, well I do not know quite why but apparently for a number of reasons victualing yourselves is easier. In the first place so many trains being stopped tends to make all the food produced stay where it is made and there is an awful lot of food produced in France and secondly the transport being so bad and the Germans not having any essence and so not having any trucks, and the trains being stopped all the time the Germans are not able to take food out of France so it stays here and then besides it is a point of honor on the part of every one to steal the reserve that is gathered together by the government to presumably give it to the Germans and all that eventually gets back into the black market, and so now everybody who lives in the country at least complains of having to eat too much meat, too much butter, too much white flour, of course in the big cities it is a different matter, there just because of the difficulties of transport they have difficulty in getting material but even in the big cities curiously enough they seem to have many more provisions than they had before, and also it may be because the war looking as if it might be over, and peace might be upon us any moment, nobody wants to hoard any more, and as there were tremendous stocks of provisions everywhere, and as there are very few Germans in France these days to feed, there is a quantity of food, much more than there has been since 1940. Things work out so differently than one thinks for.