Wars I Have Seen (17 page)

But to get back to train traveling more and more I like to take a train I understand why the French prefer it to automobiling, it is so much more sociable and of course these days so much more of an adventure, and the irregularity of its regularity is fascinating. As I said we were going to Chambery and we got ready and got to the station well ahead of time as is our custom and with all our papers in order as is our custom.

When we arrived at the station of course the train was not there it never is and we had a long conversation with our friend the gendarme who helps us get around and helps us get a goat, and helped us every way they help anybody every day often to get away, they do do that. Well anyway we waited for the train and at last it came and it meant to go to Chambery but not the car we were in that did not mean to go to Chambery and so all of a sudden the landscape ceased to be familiar and naturally I was talking to a young woman about Paris and Lyon and about her being a coiffeuse and having a studio in Paris some day, now she was only in Lyon, and she had a girl friend and we were all talking and I said dear me this does not look like Chambery, why no they said it goes to Annecy, oh dear we said what can we do and we all talked and everybody gave advice and a German officer looked as if he wanted to join in but naturally nobody paid any attention to him nobody ever does which makes them quite timid in a train, and they wanted us to go to the biggest town and we said no we would get off at the first town which after all was not more than ten kilometers from Aix-les-Bains and if the worst came to the worst we could walk there. And we got off dog and all because of course Basket is always with us he likes train trips he did not at first but he does now because they admire him and they feed him, French people even in these days of no bread and no sugar cannot see a dog without offering him some bread and some sugar if they are eating and in these days anybody in the train is eating. It is like America was during prohibition you never know when it will happen again so you eat when you can which these days December almost Christmas ’43 seems to be about all the time. Well anyway
we stopped at the small station and we asked advice of the station master and he said we were in luck there was a train to Aix in two hours and then at eight o’clock at night there was one from Aix to Culoz and we just had to give up Chambery and just try again later and we did and we were all talking so much that he did not ask us for tickets and we were talking so much that we forgot to give him tickets or pay him, and then we went into the town and they all told us where we could eat in a little café and eat we did and very well for very little and there were a number of us and there were two German soldiers standing at the bar and one of them looked like Hemingway quite a bit when Hemingway was young, he probably was not a German but a Czech or something, they mostly are these days and like Hemingway he was drinking, he had a brandy and then he had an eau de vie and then he had a glass of sparkling white wine and then he had an Amer Picon, and then he had a glass of sparkling wine and he looked more and more like Hemingway when he was young and the other one with him a shorter and fatter and a married man and frankly German only drank a glass of wine and when it came to pay it came to considerable and there was an Alsatian with them interpreting and the one the good-looking one who looked like Hem when he was young when they were leaving put out his hand to shake hands with the proprietress and the proprietress could not refuse of course but she was red in the face and pushed her daughter back and nobody said anything when they left, but everybody understood what everybody felt, to sell and take money is one thing but to shake hands is another thing and the proprietress knew it was not her fault and still she knew it should not have happened she did know that and so did everybody.

So then we bought some pears and went back to the station and then we heard that the proprietress was Swiss and not French and so we understood that though she felt the same way she did not know as well as any Frenchwoman would know to have a thing like that not happen.

So then back we were in Aix-les-Bains and there were so many
Germans there and there was an alerte but nothing happened and we went to all the shopkeepers we knew and we know a great many in Aix to pass the time and get warm because it was cold and we bought real silk scarfs and a pair of woolen stockings and we went to a tea place where they gave us chocolate and where funnily enough there was a German officer who looked just like Goering though surely he would not be there drinking chocolate too and having bread and jam but there it was and at last everything was closing up and we had to go to the station to wait two hours there for our train.

We waited and I went in and out and walked up and down and Alice Toklas sat on the bench near where they sell tickets because the waiting room was full of everybody sleeping because you might wait all day for a train or you might wait all night to leave your train because the curfew does not ring but it is there any night and every night and very often you have to wait all night to go home until the morning. It is all like other times, the curfew and in French it is cover fire, and it is cover light and they cannot have midnight mass although it is Christmas because of the curfew. You do not think much about it unless you are traveling because there is nothing to go out for in the winter and so everybody stays at home. So we waited for our train, and I went in and out and there were a good many Germans about and German nurses in and out, and the dog and I went in and out and then suddenly there in the night and in the newsstand outside I saw a copy of Alice Toklas’ Autobiography in French there for sale on a shelf, and I was very excited and went in to tell Alice Toklas and the ticket seller heard me he was a pleasant young fellow and he said yes in ten minutes in English he thought I was asking about the time of the train I had already asked him and so I went up to talk to him, and he said and these gentlemen, that is the way the Germans are always mentioned and these gentlemen do not bother you and I said no we are women and past the age to be bothered and beside I said I am a writer and so the French people take care of me, and what may I ask he said do you write oh I said it just happens that one of my books is for
sale outside on the newsstand and that is what I was just telling my friend, and the young woman ticket seller said and might I ask what is the name of the book and I told her and without any hesitation she took up her handbag put a scarf over her and went out to the newsstand and came back with it triumphantly and she said will you sign it? and I said why yes I will and I asked her name and I wrote it in and we were all very pleased and Alice Toklas thought it was all very funny, with all the Germans coming in and out and all about. Anything can happen in France and that makes it what it is, just that makes it what it is.

And now we are going to Chambery again the train was late again and it was raining, but anyway there were all kinds of them traveling, we and they and every one. French people love to get on a train and now the difficulties are just as they used to be in America in the early days when there were wash outs and snow slides, and train bandits and strikes, and breakdowns and everything, I once crossed the continent during the Pullman strike and traveling now is just like that, anything can happen and nobody expects anything everybody just goes on traveling. The government begs everybody to stay at home unless the reason for traveling is very urgent but of course it is urgent, why not as long as trains go and there is somewhere to go and so we went to Chambery again and it was raining. The dentist’s son after having escaped from jail and having been all through Italy and home again and gone away again to join his comrades and be a commando, little boys in the streets play at that, after all that, he went to Lyon on business for his friends, and was caught by the Germans and now is in prison again and his mother is desperate. But he has written to his grandmother and says she cannot sent him food but she can send him clean linen which she does and he says he is with comrades and they are all well, and the only comfort is that he writes back-handed and people who do that usually manage to take care of themselves so perhaps he will get away although it is now more dangerous for him than it was his father and mother seem to worry less than they did, I suppose there comes the saturation point of worry and then
normal life begins again and just goes on being. I met another boy he was an Alsatian and he was visiting in the neighborhood with his mother and all that had happened to him, he had escaped from a train and he had been let out finally and now all he had to do was to avoid big cities not that he really did, they never do and I asked him how he managed to get out of his troubles and he answered by patience and address, and I suppose that is the way to get away.

Everything is dangerous and everybody casually meeting anybody talks to anybody and everybody tells everybody the history of their lives, they are always telling me and I am always telling them and so is everybody, that is the way it is when everything is dangerous.

Life and death and death and life.

I like to listen to the Germans talking English on the radio. There was a very funny one the other day.

He said he was very much in earnest, he said that the English were a terrible people and he gave two examples of their passion for unusual cruelty.

In the first place there was the horrible fact that they killed unborn children, they believe and they preach that most horrible of horrible doctrines, birth control, can, said he, such a nation remain in the ranks of nations called human, no he thought not, and then he went on there is something almost more frightful there is Malthus one of their great men who says people should be killed off by plagues, by famine, and by wars, can went on the radio speaker can a country whose acknowledged great men preach such a doctrine, can they be called human.

And so he goes on and so they go on, and all the radio stations interfere so that nobody can hear any one and in the midst of all the misery it is not childish but very small boyish. It is strange the world to-day is not adult it has the mental development of a seven year old boy just about that. Dear me.

And so the world is mediaeval just as mediaeval as it can be.

They look like men they look like men they look like men-of-war.

I had that over the radio in 1939 and now it is January 1944, and they still look like men, and they still look like men, but and they still look like men, of war.

They do and they do not.

I often think that the real beginning of this plunge back into mediaevalism was the abdication of Edward, it was it undoubtedly was just like a bit of mediaeval history, and since then it has become more and more mediaeval, The abdication of Edward, Jew baiting, and the plunging every individual into mediaeval misery, and perhaps it will all have to be done over again until a new nineteenth century and a new plunge into mediaevalism, who can know, history does repeat itself, I have often thought that that was the really soothing thing that history does. The one thing that is sure and certain is that history does not teach, that is to say, it always says let it be a lesson to you but is it. Not at all because circumstances always alter cases and so although history does repeat itself it is only because the repetition is soothing that any one believes it, nobody nobody wants to learn either by their own or anybody else’s experience, nobody does, no they say they do but no nobody does, nobody does. Yes nobody does.

It is very strange, for the last two years everybody was wearing shoes with wooden soles there were no others to be had and now there are no others to be had nobody wears shoes with wooden soles they all wear leather shoes like anybody did and there are none to be had but everybody wears them. It is a pleasure that it is like that, quite a pleasure, almost a contentment.

I was asking some people to-day how it happened and they said quite naturally, near Christmas ’43 everybody knows it is bound to be over some day, this war in spite of the fact that a number of people say that it is to be a hundred years’ war so why pay any attention to it, but nearly everybody thinks that now sometime there will be an end to it, as the peasant says everything that has a beginning must have an end so may not the war, and so everybody
instead of keeping their leather shoes for later are wearing them now and besides that all the shopkeepers who have stocks of prewar shoes and in France there are always stocks big stocks of everything, why not, they are a saving and a secretive population why not, so now they are bringing out all these stocks to sell at big prices before prices become normal, so what between those who buy and those who wear what there is no longer any need of keeping, wooden shoes, which were really not very practical, have been given up and now suddenly everybody wears leather as if it were a fashion, now when there is supposed not to be any.

There are so many things that happened, we are burning peat, one used to read about that being done in Ireland, and here there are a great many marshes and there is peat and although it smells a little and smokes a good deal it is not bad to burn not at all, and as the windows in Grenoble and Annecy are all broken by explosions they all have paper windows, and as I say it really is like pioneering, we are all on the roads all the time going here and going there to find things to eat, in the country of course you do find plenty and at last there is so much that you can even refuse to buy more of it, of which we are all inordinately proud, up to date we all have bought anything anybody has brought us.

So many funny things one of our neighbors a very charming oldish lady who lives in a castle has three daughters and two sons, which is another matter. I am just now writing a novel about them Castles in Which We Live and the daughter Claude was in Chambery having her first baby, and she telephoned that the baby had come, the mother said she must go to her at once, but the husband said there is no train to-day, and she said but there is an autobus from Ruffieux, Ruffieux is ten kilometers away and she started off walking and she saw she would not get there in time so she stopped a man on a bicycle who was passing her and told him about her daughter and he said but the car will be gone before you get there and she said yes I know and he said I will take you on my bicycle and she said but there is no place behind for me to sit and he said no but I will take you on my handle bars and he
did and she caught the car and she got to Chambery and she saw her grand-daughter.