Wars I Have Seen (19 page)

To-day I was talking to the wife of the mayor, she is a Swiss by birth and had a grandfather who was very Swiss. In a war everybody always knows all about Switzerland, in peace times it is just Switzerland but in war time it is the only country that everybody has confidence in, everybody. They are good for war time, all right for themselves in peace time but good for everybody in war time, and that is because they take everything seriously and calmly, and everything is equally important and everything is accomplished. That makes them very important when everybody needs them and everybody does need them in war time.

So the wife of the mayor who is a Swiss was telling me about her grandfather and she showed me a photograph of him and he was just as Swiss as William Tell. She was also talking about people becoming naturalised, Swiss and that unfortunately they are often guilty of treason. It is she said bound to happen, she said her grandfather had always said that naturalisation was foolishness, consider he said no matter how much you naturalise a Savoyard he remains Savoyard. Savoyards in his day were what Germans are in our day. Well anyhow, I do think he is right, naturalisation is foolishness completely. Nobody not born in a country or if they are born in another country by accident must be born of parents born in that country, nobody not born in a country has really the ultimate feeling of that country. Let them have all the privileges of residence, of earning their living in that country or of enjoying that country but not of becoming citizens of that country. Citizenship is a right of birth and should remain so, I think the old Swiss
was right undoubtedly right. I have lived in France the best and longest part of my life and I love France and the French but after all I am an American, and it always does come back to that I was born there, and one’s native land is one’s native land you cannot get away from it and only the native sons and daughters should be citizens of the country and that is all there is to it. The old Swiss was right, he certainly was and is. It would make everything go better. It certainly would.

Just now January 1944 nobody seems to think that the war will ever end. We all were hopeful in ’43, but in ’44 it is going much better but we have so much less hope of it ever being over so very much less hope.

Such funny things happen.

If the President of the United States has to be born in America then it is only reasonable that anybody who votes to make him president should be born in America, only reasonable.

The owner of the local drugstore is what they call a collabo, that is one who wanted to collaborate with the Germans, there were quite a few of them and they are getting less and less but there still are some and he is one. A German said a nice thing about that. It was in Paris and it was over a year ago it was in the beginning of ’42 and he was talking to a group of French people who had met about some question of protecting French works of art, and he said the French are a pleasant people and I like them but they none of them have three qualities they only have two. They are either honest and intelligent, they are either collabo and intelligent or they are collabo and honest but I have never met one who was collabo honest and intelligent, everybody laughed and it is true there is no such thing as being collabo honest and intelligent. Well the drug store man was collabo and honest but certainly not intelligent. He had already been sent a coffin and other attentions and the other day the Germans went to his house to make a search. Of course he was terribly upset. Apparently some one to tease him sent an anonymous accusation against him to the German authorities giving the detail of explosives that he had
concealed in his premises. As they always investigate these accusations and as naturally they do not know the local political opinions they examine which is natural enough. The unfortunate man went to complain to the gendarmerie, and of course they told everybody and everybody roared with laughter finding it an exceedingly good joke, on all of them.

Around here it is getting to be just like Robin Hood. The young men in the mountains come down, they they took two tons of butter from a dairy and the other day to the delight of everybody they took a pig weighing one hundred and fifty kilos, he had two small ones and they told him to fatten them up and they would take one and leave the other, they took this from the local aristocrat who had been highly unpopular because of his political opinions and because having been a poor man and been put at the head of the local food distribution, he had only given supplies to those who had his political opinions, and they took his automobile from him, saying that he could go to mass on foot the way the rest of the world did and as he had no more food to distribute he did not need it, they also took eight hundred litres of eau de vie, which he had on hand, and as everybody says as they always pay the government prices for everything they take nobody has any cause for complaint. Everybody is excited and pleased, the young men are so young so gay so disciplined and they have so much money, presumably English and American gold and everybody is pleased, naturally enough, as nobody can stop them everybody takes it to mean that it is the beginning of the end of course all except the collabo who say they are gangsters and what will happen after the war. Everybody says the war will go on forever but in spite of that everybody does think that the war is closing in which it is the end of January forty-four.

Everybody wanders and it is interesting to know how much they wandered even before.

I was talking to two young workmen, they had gone twenty kilometers for provisions and I had gone twelve and they walked along quickly and I walked with them and they told me their own
and their families’ history, at least one did, the other only came along.

He was all alone he said, and he did his own cooking. He was a good cook he said, he had even cooked in a restaurant, he had been in the army in Algeria and he had had leave to come back to France to see his family and the day he was to go back the Americans arrived in Africa and so here he was all alone. To be sure his father had been born in Italy in Bergamo and so had he, his father had come to France to earn a living and then had brought his family with him, and he this boy was six years old then and so he too had been born in Italy. He had seen while he was doing his military service the lovely cathedral of Albi he knew it was beautiful although he had never been inside it and now he was all alone. And have you no brothers and sisters, I don’t know where my brothers are and I have a sister married in Italy, to an Italian I asked, no he said to an American, South American I said, this I do not know he said and I have never heard from her since my mother died and I am all alone, and not married I said, no he said I am only twenty-eight and one should not marry before one is thirty, a cousin of my father he said, made a fortune in America, where I said, ah that I do not know, he said, and then we said good-bye and parted.

Workmen have always wandered, just as they did in the middle ages, they wander until they marry and then some of them begin to wander again. In the last war we had a Negro wounded man whose name was Hannibal and he said that he had been a great wanderer he had wandered all over Staten Island, well here in Europe they are just wanderers, they wander all over Europe, and very often they end up all alone very often. And now there is war, and they wander so much that they seem to be not moving at all, not anywhere at all.

I was talking to a woman the other day we were both walking carrying our baskets and intending to bring home something, and she told me of her two brothers and her husband who had all three escaped before the prisoners were taken to Germany, she said some
families suffered so much and some not at all, she said it was fate. She herself had five children four of them girls. That too does happen very frequently in this country we both agreed. And then we got talking about the strange thing, that so many of the comparatively few Frenchmen killed in this war were only sons of widows whose husbands had fallen in the last war. Why I said. Well she said, it is probably because they went into the war more worried than those whose fathers had not been killed in the last war. It could be that. And she said might it not be that being raised by a widow they would naturally be more spoilt and not so active as those raised by father and mother. Naturally she said, a mother can never really dominate a son, a mother is bound to spoil children because she is with them all the time and she cannot always be saying no so she ends up by not saying no at all. And besides she said, if a mother had lost her husband in the war her little boy had been impressed by her crying so much and that would make him nervous, when he too had gone to war. It certainly is true that a very considerable percentage of the relatively few Frenchmen killed in this war were the only sons of widowed mothers who had had their husbands killed in the last war.

To-night Francis Malherbe who had been sent to Germany to work came to see us just back and very interesting, January nineteenth forty-four. One of the things he said was that in Paris he had come home that way they all said that there would be a landing on the twentieth of January. Of course everybody supposed it was going to be in France, and at the same time we had word that the man who always knows what the Germans expect to happen said that there was to be a landing between the sixteenth and the twentieth of January forty-four and he always knows what they know and so we were quite excited and there was a landing only it was in Italy instead of in France. Pretty good deception that, because and that must never be forgotten people do know what is going to happen and so far the Americans have been pretty good at it, twice we have known it was going to happen and the right date and everything but not the right place. We are very
pleased with our countrymen, it is a good poker game. Very good indeed and we like them to play poker well. It pleases us.

However that was not all that Francis Malherbe told us. He described Germany the way it is now and the way the French who are compulsorily working there are. He gave such a good description, he said of course there was no food no fat, and the cooking of vegetables always in water, the German workmen were given fats but not the Frenchmen, but I said is there no black market no way of getting any, oh yes he said plenty of that among all the foreign workmen but never with the Germans, but I said where do the foreign workmen get it, how do they get it, they steal it, he said, each one who can steals a certain quantity of something and sells it or trades it with others for something else, and that is all the black market there is but and he laughed it is considerable, and we said how do they the Germans feel, still convinced of victory especially the young, he said but why should they not the world is made for the young, the fifteen year old boys have older men get up in the street cars to give them seats, naturally they are convinced that they will win, if you have such a position in the world as that at fifteen of course you are bound to win. And really we said really he said they certainly can hold out six months longer, certainly. My brother he said he is a military prisoner a lieutenant, and as I was what they call the man of trust, that is to say I had to judge and patch up the incessant quarrels between French and German workers they gave me leave to go and see my brother. He had been a prisoner for four years and of course I had not seen him and now I saw him. He came in with two soldiers with guns and fixed bayonets at his back and it upset me so I began to cry but he said to me sternly control yourself do not show emotion, and we sat down at a table together and we talked and we compared photographs those he had of the family and those I had with me, and the adjutant who was there to listen to us said suddenly he is giving you photographs, how dare you said my brother accuse me of such a thing, apologise I insist that you apologise, first examine these photographs and then apologise, and the man said but it is
all right, no said my brother look, look at them count them and examine them and then apologise, which the adjutant had to do. I was proud of my brother. When he told us this we were of course much moved, it was so real so normal, like a piece out of Dumas and yet happening, happening to a boy we knew very well and are very fond of, and then he went on describing, and telling about the different nationalities with which he was working and making it all real and the Russians he said, they are the most interesting, we Frenchmen get along better with them than with any others except Frenchmen, and they do impress us with their courage and their tenacity and the simple way they say naturally we expect to occupy this country and when we do and we think we will, we will make them very unhappy. And so he talked on and then he had to leave and he has to go back and he has to go back because he has two officer brothers as prisoners and something might happen to them if he did not and so he will go back. We hope to have him back again we are very very fond of him. He is a nice neighbor.

These days everybody hears from their sons or their nephews who are working there, one who really was too small and too weak to go but go he did, his father had been in the navy and then had been in a garage as electrician and we had liked him and when the French were defeated the shock killed him he could not believe it and this only son writes to his mother dear mother I am hungry, I was never hungry before but I am hungry now always hungry so hungry. And then there is a nephew of some one here we know he is an intelligent fellow a designer of machines, and he writes that he is in the capital and that the sky is sad, it is a cold sad sky, and he he plays the violin and draws a little and hopes not very much but a little as most of his compatriots have been killed in a bombardment, and so every day is another day which passes in that way.

Yesterday I went my usual twelve kilometers to get some bread and cake and I met three or four who were on a farm wagon being drawn by a mule and they said come and sit, and I said can the mule stand one more, why not they said and I sat it was very comfortable.
Basket the white poodle was completely upset but finally he decided to follow along and we jogged along and it was a pleasant day although it was January and I said you know you French people you can make a pleasant thing out of anything, but we are not rich like the Americans no I said but you can go on working the kind of working you do until you are ninety or a hundred and you complain but any day is a pleasant enough day which it is not in every other country, and they said perhaps but they would like to be rich like the Americans and then we were on the top of the hill and I went to get my bread and cake and they went on to get their flour and it was a pleasant day.