Wars I Have Seen (23 page)

And in between there is our goat. We have lots of food now, really more than we can eat, lots of everything butter cheese eggs meat sugar everything but milk, and so we had and still have a goat, but a goat has to have kids so as to go on giving milk, so ours went to the male and now in a week she is to have kids, and so of course we ask everybody what to do, they say, she should have an infusion, the kind the French take whenever they feel badly, of linden tree, or mint or verveine, or something, and somebody says either she or the kids should have warm wine, and she should have bread with oil and a certain herb on it, I think both mother and child and it was all a confusion, and some said she could manage to have the kid all by herself, and somebody else said we should be there but how can we if we do not know when it is going to happen and the stable is far away from the house, and some say we can have milk as soon as the kid comes and some say not, anyway, I took her out for a walk this afternoon and she seemed a little heavy but cheerful so we are hoping for the best. In the meanwhile day before yesterday I saw the first yellow butterfly and to-day I saw the first white butterfly and to-morrow so they tell me is the day the birds begin to find their mate the day of Saint Joseph, and they have two days to decide about husbands and wives and then no nonsense they go on to building their nests, to be sure it was a nice sunny day so perhaps they all did get it done but if not, well if not nobody tells me anything about if not, there is no if not, in country life in France, there just is not any if not.

And so everybody is beginning to feel a little cheerful again except that young men and young girls are newly being rounded up to go to work in munition factories and where, well nobody is certain about that, they say in France but is it to be in France, and everybody has to decide something and they say, oh they say so many things, they can be worried about so many things, there is
no logic to this war in nothing that is a war, well if and when the war is won will the prisoners be kept where they are as hostages, hostages to what I ask impatiently, so they say, they answer me, so they say. That is what makes it so extraordinary, everybody listens to the radio, they listen all day long because almost everybody has one and if not there is their neighbor’s and they listen to the voice from any country and yet what they really believe is not what they hear but the rumors in the town, by word of mouth is always the most convincing, they do not believe the newspapers nor the radio but they do believe what they tell each other and that is natural enough, all official news is so deceiving, so why not believe rumors, that is reasonable enough, and so they do, they believe all the rumors, and even when they know they are not true they believe them, at any rate they have a chance of being true rumors have but official news has no chance of being true none at all, of course not.

We spend our Friday afternoons with friends reading Shakespeare, we have read Julius Caesar, and Macbeth and now Richard the Third and what is so terrifying is that it is all just like what is happening now, Macbeth seeing ghosts well dont they, is not Mussolini seeing the ghost of his son-in-law, of course he is you can see him seeing the ghost of his son-in-law, his last speech showed that he did, and any of them, take the kings in Shakespeare there is no reason why they all kill each other all the time, it is not like orderly wars when you meet and fight, but it is all just violence and there is no object to be attained, no glory to be won, just like Henry the Sixth and Richard the Third and Macbeth just like that, very terrible very very terrible and just like that.

A long war like this makes you realise the society you really prefer, the home, goats chickens and dogs and casual acquaintances. I find myself not caring at all for gardens flowers or vegetables cats cows and rabbits, one gets tired of trees vines and hills, but houses, goats chickens dogs and casual acquaintances never pall.

The children of course play funny games, yesterday I saw a little girl of seven putting two little ones of two and three under a piece of tin and saying now that you are safe I will say good-bye.
What are you playing I asked, we are playing abris, shelters she said and that was that.

I was talking to Claude Malherbe she had just come from a widow whose husband had died suddenly, yes she said they do now, they were very young men in the last war, they were in this war, but what is so terrible for them is that France was beaten, it eats them she said, I sometimes say to my husband but after all France was beaten, and he says do not say that, it is not true I cannot hear it, but said Claude it is true but of course women cannot suffer from it the way the men do, men after all are soldiers, and women are not, and love France as much as we do and we love France as much as the men do, but after all we are not soldiers and so we cannot feel a defeat the way they do, and besides in a defeat after a defeat women have more to do than men have they have more to occupy them that is natural enough in a defeat, and so they have less time to suffer, yes said Claude I do understand that.

Sometimes it none of it is very real, but what is real, what you used to do or what you do now, well I used not to sit in a field and watch the goat eat, but I do now, which is real what you do now or what you used to do.

It is funny that men who are supposed to be scientific cannot get themselves to realise the basic principle of physics, that action and reaction are equal and opposite, that when you persecute people you always rouse them to be strong and stronger, as the French say, sugar attracts bees more quickly than vinegar, or the fable of the wind and the sun to make a man take off his overcoat, it is funny it has been going on so long, persecution to make men weak and it makes them strong, and if you do not persecute them then they do get soft, well naturally if action and reaction are equal and opposite what else can they do, when people have too much peace they want war and when they have too much war they want peace, what else can they do, just now nobody seems to really know what they do want, peace seems to them almost as dangerous as war, it was the last time, and war is not dangerous any more it is endless and miserable, miserable and endless, and peace will peace be endless
and miserable too or just miserable and not endless, and still yes still they do want peace, at least they want it different from what it is now. Some one was telling me, we were talking about eating, one does naturally frequently talk about eating or not eating, and we were saying how difficult it was to know whether people in any given place were eating or not eating, some who come from there, say there is plenty and some say there is nothing and anyway how can you tell. Yes they said eagerly, there is a woman of ours a neighbor who kept saying there is no trouble in getting anything one wants, why she said I can even get candied fruits, oh dear, they said and then gradually they found out that the woman had very little to eat, and it was not to make others believe that she talked that way but just to make herself believe it, and she did believe it. Generally speaking here in France more people eat than not, but then the French are pretty good at eating and eat they will, if one way of getting food fails they try another, and one way and another they do achieve food that is their way, they must eat and in order to eat, they must find food, so they find it, if at first they do not succeed try try again but incidentally they do succeed somewhat even the first time, but certainly they do succeed ultimately to get a good deal of it, they certainly do, it is their way, as they called it in the last war, the system D, debrouillez-vous, that is look around and find the way.

Our goat died in not giving birth to her little one. Domestic animals so often die in childbirth, which is very discouraging, it does happen again and again, and now it did happen to our goat, our neighbor sat up all night with it and he and another neighbor worked three hours over it trying to get the dead little thing out of it but they did not succeed, this is what can happen even now, when each one of them is working in a factory and do special duty in guarding the railway, the French are like that, you must always do what you can to save the life of a domestic animal whether it does or does not belong to you, they are like that.

It gets more and more perplexing about what they are feeling more and more perplexing. Was there could there be anything
more dangerous than a war that is finishing, nothing, that is to say a war like this last one, not a war like ’14–’18 which was still a nineteenth century war but this thirty-nine to something war which is undoubtedly a twentieth century war undoubtedly.

I like what they say here in this country, in the spring the trees weep, they shed tears, they do not say that the sap runs they say the trees weep and actually they do, they exude drops and the newly cut vines they weep too, they let fall a drop and another drop, that is what they do, I keep telling the French people that they do not understand twentieth century war-fare, I get angry I say after all if the Anglo-Americans had not blown up as they did everything in Germany and in the countries working for Germany the Russians would be still where they were in the elbow of the Dnieper but all you French people can think about is taking a little more or a little less territory, no destroy the provisions of the enemy and they must die of attrition, cant you understand, they say yes but really not, what they want is nice eighteenth century fighting that is what they really liked, not even nineteenth century fighting the French liked it best in the eighteenth century. Sometimes I wonder was Kansas before the civil war like it is in France to-day and like during the revolutionary like it was described by Fenimore Cooper in The Spy, everybody denouncing friends and enemies, everybody being hidden in the mountains, patriots false patriots, bandits making believe being real or false patriots, the trains being blown up and now the French say it is being done by the Germans to make the French angry with each other and to-day at the station there was a whole train full of gendarmes, the national police and they had brand new automobiles and all sorts of armament and what were they going to do, and trains going one way or the other nobody ever knows what they are doing where they are going and do they know, very likely nobody can say so. All the French people are on the trains all the time, French people do like trains they are always going even for no greatly important reason, just to keep going, they like to move around, they like the social life of the trains and the stations, they like the regularity
the irregularity and the coming and going, it is more sociable and more regular than an automobile, very few regret automobiles, very few indeed, they really do not worry about that.

No thank you, and then so sadly because the little girl was tuberculous and they loved her so and the doctor said he could do nothing further for her and they bought a place in the cemetery for her and she began to get better and began to move around and they were so happy that they bought her a radio apparatus to amuse her, she had had a little one and now they bought her a bigger one. These things can happen when everybody is busy with perhaps the end of this war. They can happen because they do.

To-day when I was out walking there were five German soldiers repairing an automobile, but nobody paid any attention everybody came and went and nothing happened, this can happen when this war is beginning to look like ending, it can happen because it does. Spring has come, April is here, the birds are singing and a hawk came down in the grass in front of the house to find not a chicken but a bone that a dog had brought there. The hawk seemed a little disappointed but perhaps he was not, April nineteen hundred and forty-four, that is Easter week.

Publicity, that is what we hear them say publicity, and is not that the real meaning of persecution, publicity, it is not nearly as complicated as it seems. There always has been a great passion for publicity in the world the very greatest passion for publicity, and those who succeed best, who have the best instincts for publicity, do have a great tendency to be persecuted that is natural enough, and here I think is the real basis of the persecution of the chosen people and just now more than ever because as publicity is more and more a conscious process those who have the greatest instinct for publicity are naturally those of whom the others who would want to be masters of publicity are jealous, at least I do think so, and perhaps yes.

It is very interesting but the end of the nineteenth century and the twentieth century realised the beauty of publicity for its own sake as an end in itself, this is very interesting.

It is now the eleventh of April the Tuesday after Easter-Monday and everybody had hopes that something would happen and in a way it has, bombardments have been bombing and the Russians have been moving and everybody is expecting everything to be happening and we all talk while we are out walking to find eggs and spinach and cake and everything, one does find everything and I met one of my neighbors and he had a little boy on his bicycle and I said what are you doing with him, I am taking him up into the mountains to be a shepherd, how old is he I said he is nine, and he has two brothers and they are refugees and up there he will be well fed, and said I does he not mind leaving his family even where they are, and he said he is reconciled to it, he was a round faced blonde little Alsatian with a little suit case with him and he was going nine miles up the mountain. To-day it was Easter-Monday that is it was yesterday and we had lots of visitors and they asked about Americans, since Eisenhower is to govern France for a while naturally they want to know all about them, and I was telling about the doughboys in the last war, and one of our visitors said yes I remember in the last war, I was nine years old and my father was a doctor and we lived opposite his hospital in Vichy and there were Americans there and one of them used to take me out fishing, he used to call for me every other day and we used to go fishing, he could not speak a word of French and I could not speak a word of American, so we never said a word to each other but every other day for two months he used to call for me to take me fishing, he had a funny way of fishing, he always had a little bottle of cream in his pocket and when we got to the fishing place he would take out a piece of absorbent cotton and he would twist it around the hook and then he would pour a little cream from his bottle on to it and then he would drop it in the water and our visitor added it would catch fish and after two months he went away and we had never said a word to each other because I did not know any American and he did not know a word of French. This same visitor had a little daughter with him a little seven year old red-headed girl and when she was given cake the plate had painted on it some fruits,
oh said the little girl, that is a banana, I remember bananas, but my younger brothers and sister do not, they have never seen them but I remember having had a banana, I remember it very well.