Wars I Have Seen (20 page)

The young ones who come back from Germany on leave are puzzled by one thing, any Frenchman would be why are the Germans so sentimental, when they are what they are why are they so sentimental. No Frenchman can understand that.

Yesterday I was out walking and I met a man I used to know, a casual country acquaintance, that is to say he and his family were cousins of some very old friends of ours, and they own a place around here, they used to be here for only a few weeks in the summer but now, things being as they are, they live here altogether. The father is a big gay man about town, who has lots of property is a good business man and used to spend all his life between here and other places and the Cote d’Azur. His wife was born in Washington U. S. A. her father having been in the French embassy and he is an amusing man, of course he says we live here now, the country is lovely in winter, I never saw it before but it is, it is like English pastels such a delicate color, and besides we all get all we want to eat, dont you, and I agreed that we did, as much of everything that we want, butter eggs meat cake and cheese, and I had to agree that we all did because we all do. Just why we do now when the years before we did not nobody seems to be able to explain but we do, is it because the army of occupation is getting smaller and smaller or is it, that everybody knows how now better and better, anyway it is undoubtedly true everywhere in France now, everywhere and nobody seems to know quite why. Well anyway,
the other day I met him M. Labadie, he saw Basket and he waited for us he was on his bicycle and I was on foot, and we stopped to talk together. I thought he had very funny clothes on and when I came nearer I said to him these are funny clothes that you are wearing what are they. Ah he said you would never guess look at the buttons and I did, they were large American army buttons with the eagle and the shield, nice brass buttons on a khaki coat and I said when in the name of wonder did you get that. Ah he said I bought it after the other war from the American stocks and I kept it here in the country and now it is very handy, and it was, some German soldiers on patrol had just passed but M. Labadie did not mind that, you know he said everybody wants to buy one off me, look he said counting them there are twelve of them, quite a little fortune, just to-day again they offered me forty francs for one, but not I, I keep them and wear them. Well we went on talking and I said your boy who is twenty-one, has he gone, oh dear no, he said, you see I keep him traveling, that is the way you do you either go off to some little bit of a place and stay there quietly and nobody bothers you or you keep moving, now I keep my boy moving, I have lots of business to attend to, and I send him around to attend to it, and if you keep on traveling for business your papers all always have to be in order which of course they are so no one bothers, that is the way he said, and of course he is right that is the way. And then we went on talking. We talked about the war, why not since there is this war. He said of course the Germans cannot win, which is natural enough because their country is so poor they know nothing about cooking and eating, people who know nothing about cooking and eating naturally cannot win. He went on reflectively, France always seems to be beaten but really a country that can see and shut one eye and then shut the other eye opening the first eye, is bound to come out of any mess not too badly, you see he went on meditatively, one must take care of oneself and be brave and be excited and at the same time must take care of one’s business must not be poor. War said he is inevitably connected with money and naturally when two people
want the same money or more money they must fight, and he said reflectively nowadays when one wants to spend so much money when everybody wants automobiles and electrical installations and everything else well naturally the more money everybody wants to spend the more men have to be killed when it comes to a war. People who spend little money when they make war kill few people, but the more money you want to spend, the more men you have to kill when you begin to go to war. And there is another thing if you can really spend the most money then you have less of your own men killed than the other side who wants to spend more money but has not got it to spend. And so America has less men killed and Germany more and that he said is natural enough. And just then another man whom we both knew was coming along, now said M. Labadie he is a poor thing an unfortunate man, he has a wife but one never sees her she is always away and a forsaken man and he shrugged his shoulders and we each of us went on our way.

To-day was another day, as usual in France feeling gets more and more complicated, and now when those who have taken to the hills come down and take food off the railways, well will it get them in the habit of stealing and should it, and they all worry, and there was one woman who was visiting and she quarreled with every one in Culoz, and when she left she said they needed the Germans to come to whip them into subjugation, and some one said and she an idler who has money what does she think will happen to her. Well anyway one thing is certain every day brings the war nearer and nearer to an ending but does any one around here believe that, certainly not, so little do they believe it that although we know it we do not really believe it ourselves. As one woman said well now as we have all made all our arrangements to live in a state of war I suppose the war will go on. We all suppose it will and it does this the first day of February in nineteen forty-four.

I have just been listening to a description of how the mountain boys captured two Germans and took them to the mountains as
hostages and now the Germans even when they want to buy a piece of bread in a store they are all armed and always at least six of them and one standing outside as a guard for them. It makes everybody laugh. Every tenth birthday makes a man afraid and a woman too and even children every tenth birthday does that. Be careful everybody.

Everybody is feeling a little more cheerful about everything to-day even though it is a dark and gloomy day.

Breathes there a man with soul so dead who never to himself has said, this is my own my native land.

Well yes, yesterday when the Swiss radio announced that the Americans had landed on the Marshall Islands and that these islands had belonged to Japan before the war I was so pleased. It was midnight and I was so pleased. As an American and as a Californian I was so pleased. I went up stairs and woke up Alice Toklas who was asleep, and I said we have landed the Americans have landed on the Marshall Islands, which before the war belonged to Japan and Alice Toklas opened one eye slightly and said, well then they are invaded, and slept gently again. Of course that is what every one wants them to be that they are invaded, when that does come to pass it will be a comfort to every one, yes every one but them and they do not want at least their feelings are of no account no account. So that made this day a nice day. Otherwise not such a nice day because they are trying to take younger and younger men away to work but mostly they do not go this is undoubtedly so.

And then to-day when they said, that is to say the announcers said that the Marshall Islands were on the way to the Philippines, it did make all one’s youth come back the days when we saw the American soldiers preparing in San Francisco to go that way. They were more unformed than they are now, their character is more affirmed it was more so in the world war than in the Spanish-American war and now we have not seen them but we hear them they are as simply direct as they were then but not so unbaked, the national security is undoubtedly stronger, we are hoping to see
them soon, yes we are. To-day we were in Belley my birthday the third of February and of course everybody was upset most horribly because there is preparing an effort to round up the mountain boys and as everybody’s boys are there it is rather horrible. One of the Bilignin women cried to me what can I do, my boy was always so fond of you what can I do, and what can she do with a nineteen year old boy, go or not go, stay or not stay, go away or not go away, who can say. Who can. I said the only thing I can advise is to do nothing, just now it is the only thing to do and mostly it does succeed, do nothing but he wont eat, and he got up at four in the morning to work because he says if I have to leave I will have as much work done for you as possible dear me. Our Swiss grocer he is a nice man, he has three sons but as he says they just did not give him his naturalisation papers before this war and now they are all Swiss and so comparatively safe and all the same he said to me, they must come the Americans must come and they must come soon to save the boys to save the boys, oh yes to save the boys. Everybody is unhappy and ashamed, ashamed because French are arresting Frenchmen, the taxi-man said the other day, three of the guard mobile who are going up to the mountains missed their train and they asked him to drive them. For you personally he said or by order, no they said there is no order, well he said if I take you, you who are going to shoot up our boys, if I take you you will have to pay for it, and they asked me how much, and I said double the ordinary fare, and pay they did, the pigs who are going to shoot up our boys. Everybody is ashamed, everybody is crying, everybody is listening to everything and the trains go on, with Germans who are not Germans and French who are not French, oh dear me, there is no nineteenth century about this, hardly the twentieth century, it is terribly the middle ages, and in the meantime Alice Toklas came along with six lemons, that seems nothing but for years there have been no lemons, and there were a few while the Italians were here, and since these have gone none. Where said I did you get them. From the grocer she said, and
where did he get them, he said he had them because there had been a wedding in Tunis.

What that meant nobody can know, of course there has been no communication of any kind with Tunis since the Americans landed there, so what did he mean. Of course one never asks anybody what he means.

We get more and more excited about the Marshall Islands and being on the way to the Philippines, we cannot help wondering how the American commentator can speak so quietly about all that, shows he is no Californian, for us all of it is passionately interesting, Alice Toklas remembers the man who was second in command with Leahy who took possession of Guam coming back from Manila. They liked that island so they thought they would take possession, and as they had never taken possession of anything before they did not know how, and two of the native girls fell in love with Leahy and as he was reading the preamble to the constitution which he thought was the right way to take possession the two girls right in front began biting each other and as Leahy finished the constitution his second in command Spear hit him on the shoulder and pointing to the girls said you’re it. Well anyway it is all real to us here in a little town in France and everybody fighting. And then there was the young boy Ned Hanford that Alice Toklas knew then and he had volunteered and had become an orderly to General King who afterward wrote novels about it and in one he said and I threw my bridle to my orderly Ned Hanford, well everybody was a hero then and everybody is a hero now only none of it was sad then and it all is pretty sad now and just here, just here now. It is sad when at nineteen and twenty you have to decide for yourself, shall you betake yourself to the mountains, shall you stay at home and risk it, shall you go to Germany and hate it and perhaps be bombed working for your country’s enemies and shall you what shall you what can you do, what will you do, it is hard at eighteen or nineteen to have to decide all these things for yourself, each one for himself, in a war it is comparatively easy, you are drafted you go you are with a
crowd and you are all more or less of an age and you are all together and even if it hurts it is not so bad, but now these French boys have to decide each one all alone by himself which has he strength for, has he people to whom he can go, will he get there, can he be fed, and all the rest, and the winter and the mountains and will he find any one, and if he has not gone what will happen, it is hard at nineteen and twenty for each one to decide things like that for himself. Very hard.

We are in the very thick of it now, rumors and rumors but some of them are true, they have suppressed the use of the telephone all through the region, nobody can go anywhere without very special leave and just to-night we have heard that the captain of the gendarmerie and our very good friend and the father of the most charming little girl, who has a charming curl in the middle of her forehead and a very sweet and attractive wife has just been carried off, whether by the mountain boys whether by the Germans nobody seems to know and we are most awfully upset, everybody is trembling lest anybody is taken as hostage and if they are dear me if they are. Whether it is to put down the mountain boys whether it is because a German colonel has been killed whether it is because they are afraid of a landing whether it is because they expect to retreat into this country out of Italy whether it is because they do not know what to do, whether it is because it is coming to an end and an end has to be like the end at the theatre when the piece comes to an end a state of confusion, whatever it is our good and gentle friend has been taken and we are very sad.

In the nineteenth century we all became accustomed to permanence. Permanence was natural and necessary and continuous. Permanence and progress were synonymous, that seems strange but of course it is natural enough. If things are permanent you can believe in progress if things are not permanent progress is not possible and so the nineteenth century believed in progress and permanence, permanence and progress. And now. Well now there is neither the one or the other. England and Germany who strangely enough are more nineteenth century even yet than any
other part of the globe do still hope to believe in permanence and progress, progress and permanency, but nobody else does and nobody else is interested in their believing in progress and in permanency, nobody else.

In these days January forty-four, here where we are, we are once more as we were in nineteen forty—we have the terror of the Germans all about us, we have no telephone, we hear stories and do not know whether they are true, we do not know what is happening to our friends in Belley, except for the life of this village of Culoz we seem separated from everything, we have our dog, we have the radio, we have electricity, we have plenty to eat, and we are comfortable but we are completely isolated and rumor follows rumor, and on the road for the first time now in two years we meet automobiles with German officers, motor bicycles with Germans on them going by quickly quickly, and at the station are long trains of railroad trucks marked Italy, and Munich and Breslau, and we none of us know why, why this little corner of France which is so very peaceable should be harassed. In the newspapers they say it is Savoy but actually it is not, in Savoy they can telephone they are peacefully left alone and here one little town and another little town is surrounded and the principal inhabitants are taken away and nobody knows why, nobody can think of any reason for it, what is the reason for it, nobody knows, and those who do it, naturally do not say so that makes it that nobody knows. Why. Nobody knows. The young men are getting restless, they stand around and laugh and their fathers and their mothers are very nervous, but the young men just stand around and watch them go by, and they laugh, they laugh at them, and it does seem as if it were not they that are being sought, but others and older and why. Nobody does know why. Nobody can go in and out of Belley, such an innocent town, and for so long there has been a German garrison there, learning its military lessons, and nobody interfered with them and they did not interfere with any one and now they came and surrounded the town and took fifty men away and nobody knows why, nobody knows.