Wars I Have Seen (21 page)

As I say everybody feels as if it was like the beginning of the invasion in forty, but then it was a beginning a long beginning and a very long middle and now everybody feels that it is an ending and the French have always felt that a wounded beast is always worst when it is cornered, and the winter has been pleasant and long and now it is snowing and dreary and everybody feels it so except the young boys who are up and down on their bicycles on their feet all day long and they stand and laugh as the others go past. Everybody else feels like crying but not they, and so it is to-day.

And so it is to-day. Yesterday I went to see the mayor and the mayoress of our little town and we talked about everything. Naturally she is very nervous. These days, nobody knows why the Germans surround a town take the mayor prisoner and sometimes they let him go and sometimes they do not. So naturally the mayor’s wife is nervous, the mayor too a little but he does not say so. The mayor’s wife does. And they have been doing all this to the towns around here and about and will they do so here.

Here they are. Our neighbor a nice old maid who lives alone in a little house and has plenty of land and has plenty of everything and is sometimes double faced and can be called a viper by our cook but mostly is very kind and nice. She came in to say that they had come. They knocked at her door, she was not dressed yet and she called out what is it and they said it was the German army so in fear and trembling she opened the door and they said are there any men here and she said no, and they said honestly and she said yes honestly there are no men here, and they said pointing to our house are there any men there, and she said no two ladies and two servants all women, and they said honestly and she said yes honestly there are only four women there and then they went away. Later in the day naturally we did not go out but later in the day I saw her going out to look every time any soldier went up or down the steep mountain road, and I said what’s the news, and she said I am so scared, well why said Alice Toklas if you are so
scared do you go out to look. I go out to look she said because I am so scared.

Then later the boy that carries our wood up-stairs three times a week came in. He was very sad, his father who is an Italian has been taken and is being sent to Germany, but said I he is more than forty-five, yes I know said he sadly but although he has always lived in France he is an Italian and they have taken him. They are still here the Germans and Basket our dog has gone out for the evening it worries us but we expect he will come back again. Although you never can tell with soldiers, they like dogs and he is a very pretty one. And nobody knows why they are here nor how long they will stay, and no one can come in to the town and no one can go out not even the priest, and nobody knows why, all this country is so peaceful. Of course there are a great many young men who have not gone to Germany who have been called but that is all yes dear me that is all. To be sure those who go up into the mountain and do behave a good deal like Robin Hood, they carry off a doctor and his wife and all their possessions, so that the doctor can take care of them and his wife take care of him, and his possessions so that nobody takes them away to punish him. They are careful to choose a doctor who has no children. Everybody says and that too does sound so like the middle ages, we are between two armed forces, the mountain boys shoot if you do not do what they say, and the Germans shoot if you do not do what they say, and what can you do, each side blames us if we do what the other side tells us to do but what can we do. And indeed what can they do. Anyway it goes on and it goes on just like that. And how many have been caught, here and in Belley, oh dear we do not know, everybody says something but nobody knows.

It is funny why do the Germans wear camouflaged rain-coats but not camouflaged uniforms now why do they. The first I saw was the other day, they went by on bicycles, and they reminded me of the chorus of the Tivoli Opera House in San Francisco, it used to cost twenty-five cents and the men in mediaeval costume looked so like these camouflaged coats, with sort of keys and crosses on
them in contrasted colors. Oh dear. It would all be so funny if it were not so terrifying and so sad, this in January forty-four.

Ma foi it’s long is what they say. Everybody in the country in France says ma foi, a nice mediaeval expression, you say anything to them and they say ma foi, that can mean yes or oh hell, or no, or just nothing. At present any of them can say, it’s long, and the answer is ma foi, which also means to be sure. In this particular part of the world they have another thing, they say taisez-vous, or shut up, or shut it, and they say it as they are talking, they are talking along about something and they say, oh shut it, and it is not to themselves, nor to you, it is of the facts of which they are speaking, sometimes they say taisez-vous, taisez-vous, and the sentence goes on, it is rather delightful, I do not quite know why, they may say and the war is long and the Germans might be coming this way again oh shut up oh shut up and do you think it is possible that they will. This is a kind of a sentence it makes, and it is enjoyable. Ma foi.

And now once more the telephone is working and we can see people and the roads are open and the Germans are gone from the village and everybody is breathing a little more freely not entirely so but a little so, although some few unpleasant things did happen, oh dear me. Everybody looks at their neighbors and says oh dear me or ma foi, and anyway everybody is relieved. Nobody knows what it is all about excepting that it is to find out who is supplying the mountain boys with food. So many strange things the curfew at seven o’clock instead of ten o’clock, two young fellows who had sling shots and had themselves taken away, one young fellow who tried to run away was shot, and one old man who was drunk and out at ten o’clock was killed, and as it was very bad weather, snow and sleet and wind the rest of them stayed at home, it is so difficult to make a French population realise that it is dangerous not to do as they are told, they like to do what they like, and they do. As one Frenchman said to me in France a civilian is always more important than a policeman unless he happens to be a criminal, but just any civilian is always more
important than just any policeman. This is ingrained in every Frenchman and so it is almost impossible to make them do what they are told. Such strange things happen, a funny little man who was known as being a collaborator and had even gotten a coffin, the kind they send to them, had all his things taken by the Germans, it seems that his father in days long gone was a receiver of stolen goods, naturally enough as this town has always been an important railroad junction a small town but an important railroad junction, and his son, well perhaps he did not receive stolen goods, but he had stores of forbidden provisions here there and anywhere, and among them some very ancient fire-arms from the revolution, or Napoleon collected by his father and somebody mentioned them and the Germans went to look for them and they found them and so naturally they took away all the soap and iron and wine and spirits that were there too naturally enough, and he the little man was away and they have given him three days to give himself up, but where is he and does he know, and how can he or anybody else know why they went to him. There are also an elderly man and his sister, here, and it has just been told us that their father who had been a railroad worker, once stole precious jewels and tried to sell them in Geneva and was given five years prison and the son and daughter now quite old were never married and they live together, and the son for all that was employed by the railroad, he still is as a night guard, and she after a long life of domestic service has stomach ulcers, and anyway these stories did distract our minds from anxiety and the distresses of one of our neighbors whose son was finally killed in trying to run away. To-day now that it is all over everybody went to the funerals of every one who had been killed, and now to-day it was Sunday and the sun shone and the snow was on the ground and the whole population were out skiing and sledding and the mayor was tired and so was his wife, and with reason, it is no fun being a mayor these days. The mayor finally persuaded the Germans that there were no mountain boys in the mountain back of us because as he explained there is no water there. In the days when he used
to go hunting we always had to carry a flask of water to refresh the dogs with because the dog could not find any water there so how could men stay there. No it is not possible, and finally the Germans were convinced and they left. They left. And the telephone goes again, and the people can move around the streets again, and I can let the dog out again the dog Basket and we can go walking again and the snow is beginning to melt, and to-day is Monday in February nineteen forty-four.

Tired of winter tired of war but anyway they do hope and pray that it will end some day.

I was talking to Madame Gallais, she keeps a little shop, she was born in this country, but spent most of her life in Paris, and she is Parisian and it is a pleasure. Landscape is all very well but you do long to see a street any street. Once in Belley I went in to see Madame Chaboux and she was not home and I was tired and I lay down on her couch, and she lives in a street, and opposite was a wall just a wall with windows, it was a relief from trees and fields, I remember Janet Sayne, she was a friend before the 1914 war, and she always used to say that she could never understand why trees which look so pretty in a city look so ugly in the country, and in a way she was right, in a way she certainly was. Well Madame Gallais, manages to get anything you want in a small way, they all come and they all go the people of the country and they bring one thing and they are given another thing and we are given something and we give something and everybody has a fair amount of something and life goes on. We do suffer from a lack of dental floss, seems a funny thing to suffer from but we do and we decided whenever the Americans coming up from Italy pass in front of the door we will go out and stop the first dental ambulance and ask them for some dental floss, and Alice Toklas says that they will not have any and besides will they come and I say yes they will have some and they might come. All of which is pleasant enough this cold February day.

Well as I was saying I was talking to Monsieur Gallais, he had fought the last war the 1914 war, of course everybody of that age
in France did, and we were telling each other stories as veterans do about how sweet everybody had been then, ah yes he said the French in those days were a united people, and he told about how every one shared everything with their comrades, and one poor man, who had very few packages and was always joking said when he went on leave that they would be surprised by what he would bring them back, and the others paid no attention but sure enough when he came back he brought with him an enormous turkey that his wife had been fattening up for them and they all ate it and said Monsieur Gallais everybody was like that then, the French were a united people. And his wife said but after all the young ones are just as much comrades, look at the mountain boys look at the forced labor ones in Germany, they help each other, yes said Monsieur Gallais but think of those at home who denounce them. Well after all, of course there is disunion, there are the scared middle classes afraid of communism, there are the military people angry that the army has been taken away from them there are the religious old maids and widows who are afraid that in the future there will be no religion but as Madame Gallais says the young generation are just as united as the poilus in ’14–’18 and she is right they are. Just to-day I met a woman who was on the train to Lyon the other day and there were two hospital coaches on the train with wounded men from the police who were supposed to have been in upper Savoy fighting the mountain boys. They said, and that we had already known because only about half came back through here that had gone there, they said that a good half of the special police had joined the mountain boys and the rest of them the mountain boys had very carefully wounded in the legs, they wanted to put them out of business given an excuse to go on drawing their pay and yet not have a wound that might later stop them from earning a living, only one was wounded in the arm and that was a mistake, they were very careful to wound them in the leg. Of course they were harder on the militia, they hate them, and they kill any of them, well no not exactly and not any of them were hurt, no not exactly, it’s all right, they said and laughed. So after
all the French are a united people, of course there are the Germans, and of course that is completely another matter.

I said the Germans were here and all along here, and here in Culoz, two young ones were killed who tried to run away and one man an elderly man who drank and who was shot by the Germans because he was out on the road after the curfew hour, and what hurt everybody was that he had been left there by the Germans all night, and everybody went to his funeral, but what excited everybody the most was that a woman was found not far from here on an island in the Rhone, and when she was taken out they found that she had a bullet in her head. They then found out that she was a schoolteacher from the town of Seysell where there was the most shooting by the Germans because there the mountain boys were always being fed, and this woman was a schoolteacher there, and it seems that when the Germans came she was badly frightened and wanted to go away and the head teacher said no, he said a teacher was like a soldier a doctor a nurse or a mayor, his or her business was to remain at her post whatever happened but she said she must go to her people and she tried to take the train and they would not give her a ticket at the station and she got more frightened and she put on the trousers of her skiing costume and she walked away to go to another town to take the train and the next thing that happened was that she was dead on an island in the Rhone where drowned people are always found with a bullet in her head.

Just at present we are all quiet in very wintery weather here toward the end of February, and if or where or when or if the Americans will be coming soon, well will they.