Wars I Have Seen (28 page)

The mayors now have to have the whole responsibility of their towns, there are no communications, so they cannot get into touch with a higher authority, and so they are the ultimate authority, and they are very capable the French mayors, even in the smallest places. Ours is taking care of us very well, he has managed to get flour for bread and that is important because French people do not like to live by bread alone but without bread they cannot live at all, potatoes they say are filling but an hour after you are as hungry as before while bread is really sustaining so they must have bread and so far our mayor has managed it for us. It would be nice if ours would be the first department to be completely freed of Germans, perhaps, the mountain boys around here are very active, and it would be nice.

A buzzard has carried off one after the other three of our baby chickens, that is natural the hunters usually shoot enough buzzards
every year so that they do not steal baby chickens, but after three years of not hunting, the air is full of buzzards full of buzzards.

And full of everything just now but mostly rumors. There are however some funny true stories, the mountain boys the other day came into Amberieu and one of them got into the post office and sounded the alerte, the whole population and the Germans ran away supposing it was a bombardment and the mountain boys went into the round house and blew up a quantity of locomotives and left before the Germans got back. The latest rumor is that Belley is held by the mountain boys but one thing is certain at the station here no trains pass, I was around the station this afternoon and I never saw a railroad station so dead not since in my youth I crossed the continent during the Pullman strike and what else can we do, it is the third time that we have been deprived of the telephones and this time fortunately they have left us electricity and the radio, which is a pleasure. But for how long this we do not know, anyway the landing goes on and when we hear the official French announcement that the Germans are perfectly calm, we know better, they are not, what we are afraid of now is that German deserters will try to get into the house, one did to-day, he said he was looking for a German lady, but as we are well up the mountain and not in the town it sounded fishy. Basket barks and barks as if he were a savage dog instead of a lamb which is just as well. Everything is going on that is to say nothing is going on no trains no mail no telephone, nothing coming and going except a few unfortunates, I saw one to-day who seemed a little queer, and there is a noonday hush all over the place all day long, the Germans are requisitioning more and more enormous logs to get themselves barricaded, away from the mountain boys and everybody chuckles they say much good that will do them, there are according to all calculations about three thousand of them in the whole department and as the mountain boys are killing them a few at a time it may take some time but on the other hand, they are stuck they can go up and down the road a distance of about fifty kilometers and then they have to come back again, all the youth are joining
up with their friends, the police too, our friend came to see us from Belley yesterday Sunday and everything is peaceful except that everywhere the mountain boys guard the roads but they are very polite and help shove the cars when they get stuck, everybody for the moment is very polite, the mayor on his bicycle goes around gathering in food from the surrounding country to feed his population and so far has succeeded very well, the only thing that is a great trouble, is when there is a need for surgical operations and it is very difficult to get a conveyance, the men with the taxis are always getting their cars out of order to avoid going around with the Germans and they are frightened of putting them in order in order to take the French, but by the end of the week it is now the first Sunday since the landing everybody expects that the Germans will be gone. And they will, yes they will. My gracious they are all happy not the Germans but the population, even those who were collabo as they call them are happy why not they were collabo because they were afraid afraid of communism and afraid of Germans and then too the Germans to some French people did seem to be so strong but now well they are weak nobody uses the phrase that used to annoy us so they are still strong, and so there are no collabos because now that the Anglo-Americans have proved themselves so strong they are less afraid of communism and they are not at all afraid of Germans not at all so the rejoicing is practically universal, a little frightened still but complete. Some one has just told me about how the mountain boys in Bellegarde have taken German prisoners and have put them to work picking potato bugs off the potato plants, the only agricultural activity that every French man woman and child hates, they are looking forward to the clearance of the pests completely by the German prisoners. Everybody is delighted they say potatoes came from America and the potato pest seems to have come over these recent years from America and now because of America they have been able to take German prisoners here very far away from the Americans to be sure and these prisoners can spend their days destroying the potato bugs off the potato plants.

Are we excited yes we certainly are all around us there is fighting, the conversation in the village sounds exactly like the communiqués of the Yugo-Slavs in their early days of guerrilla fighting only we have we hope one great advantage, the Germans cannot get reinforcements because all the railways are cut and all the roads guarded by the mountain boys and anyway these days the Germans have other uses for their men even if they could send them here which they cannot. All day long the Germans rush forward and back through the town they requisition all the trucks and alas with their French drivers and then they go first in one direction and then in a very short time back they come with guns sticking out in every direction, the other day they stationed such cannon as they had everywhere in the village and we all a little fearfully went down to look at them and then later in the day they took them all away, there had been no fighting, they had been told when they were elsewhere that the mountain boys were here but they were not of course they were not, that is what wears the Germans out to be continually going where there is nobody and then when not expecting having a truck with its German contents blown off the road suddenly, we are in the high hills and of course that kind of thing happens easily with everybody against them and helping the others, it must be pretty awful to be surrounded but completely surrounded by hate, it must be pretty awful really pretty awful. One German told the baker who had been a prisoner in the last war and so had learned a little German that the population had better be a little careful, he himself did not mind very much when the children called him a pig but there were others of them that might and there might be trouble. Sometimes there are a lot of them in the village and sometimes very few but few or many they certainly do look worn out, and the mountain boys do kill and wound a lot of them there were five ambulances came over from Aix, German ones of course and big ones, to take off the wounded in yesterday’s fighting, and the German captain who was here has just been caught at Amberieu. The mountain boys do not stay in the towns, they keep to the hills descending into the town
to barricade all the roads and then they go back to the hills, they are always up and down, they have cut all the telephone and telegraph wires, and so the Germans cannot communicate with each other and they have to go on the road, the other day just a little further along an Italian in the ditch at the side of the road killed two motor cyclists as they were going along, and then he quietly got out of the ditch and went on, how can the Germans tell which is which, they cannot, it is most exciting, nobody works except in their gardens because the railroad and the few factories that are here have stopped working there being no material and no way of sending things in or out, it is a mighty effective blockade and the Germans who are gradually getting killed can really do very little except move forward and back they should have gotten out as soon as communication with Italy was cut, because after that there was no reason for their staying here, but they are slow, they always manage to do everything just too late, just too late, thank heaven they do. I suppose they are human but they do look pretty awful, and even in their most uppish days they were awfully dead and alive more dead than alive. This is not a prejudice it is a fact.

We are excited.

Perhaps the department of the Ain will be the first department to be completely cleared of the Boches. That would be nice.

They are fighting all around us this afternoon I was raking the hay with a neighbor and we heard the sound of cannon fairly near, nobody seems to know very much of what is happening, the mayor who is usually very well informed has no time to think about things like that, he has to find calves to butcher to give us all something to eat, we ourselves are very well off because they have been bringing us fish and nice lake fish they are, the bread question not so serious for us because we do not eat much bread but terribly serious for the French population, potatoes no matter how many they eat after an hour or two leave them hungry, but since either the mountain boys or the Germans cut down trees to bar the roads that lead to the mills that grind the corn even if the mayor can get
some wheat together how can it turn into bread, but there is always the Savoy, mysteriously the Savoy always has everything, some one has just given us a kilo of delicious fresh butter from the Savoy and the mayor is hoping he really is hoping to get flour from the Savoy, the Savoy is always rich in food no matter what happens you can always get meat and fish and fowl and butter and cheese and honey from the Savoy and meat, I do not know why this is so but it is so and as we are just across the river Rhone from the Savoy we do not fare too badly, even if we are completely cut off from the rest of the world which we certainly are. To-day for the first time since the landing we had some letters from Lyon they came from the Swiss consul who has charge of American interests and they solemnly ask us to make out a paper stating if we wish or do not wish to be repatriated. It is a charming thought, ten days after the landing in France the American authorities seem to be quite certain that as soon as they like they can repatriate all Americans still in France. We giggled we said that is optimism. Naturally American authorities not really realising what it is to live in an occupied country ask you to put down your religion your property and its value, as if anybody would as long as the Germans are in the country and in a position to take letters and read them if they want to. The American authorities say they are in a hurry for these facts but I imagine that all Americans will feel the same better keep quiet until the Germans are gone just naturally play possum just as long as one can. Just that.

It is a queer state living as we are all doing, you have no news except for the radio because there are no newspapers any more and no trains no mail no telephone and even going to Belley is impossible there are twenty-three barricades between here and there a distance of seventeen kilometers. As I say we live within the village completely within it, the Germans rush forward and back there are distant sounds of cannonading, some villages have been burned and that is all anybody knows. The Germans threatened to make a curfew at six o’clock and keep all vehicles including bicycles off the road, but the mayor told the Germans it was
impossible as it is too hot to take the animals to pasture before half past five it is too hot and nobody can work in the fields until four because it is too hot, and as in France fields are a considerable distance from the house and now it is haying time carts have to move around so the Germans agreed and now the curfew is at nine o’clock.

Is life real is life earnest, no I do not think so, it certainly is not real.

This kind of war is funny it is awful but it does make it all unreal, really unreal.

They must have been lonesome in the middle ages and that was natural enough because busy as they were with getting enough to eat they were pretty well cut-off from communication with everything and it is kind of lonesome in this present war which is so much like that, with trees cut down to block the roads and everything but still our friends did get over in a pony cart from Belley to see us and it was a pleasure, and besides they brought us some money which was also a pleasure because the traveling banker who used to come once a week to this town has not come and money is certainly a very great necessity these days.

To-night the Americans have just had a victory and are going to take Cherbourg and that is a pleasure. To be sure in the middle ages they did not have a wireless and although it was threatened that they would take them away from us they did not and now it would be rather late for it to happen and I do like to hear their American voices. Everything is quiet around here now, nobody seems to know just what happened but it is all quiet around here now and we even had letters from Lyon to-day.

Bread and cake cake and bread which is better, I myself think that bread when there is good butter is better than cake, bread and butter but when there is no bread and butter then there is cake Marie Antoinette was quite right about that.

Some refugees have just come here from Normandy, they are friends of the wife of the mayor, they left Normandy just seven days ago and they progressed partly by bicycle partly on foot and
partly by train, it took them seven days to get here, they were a party of seven with three children and the mother just about having another baby, they stopped at night and dug themselves a trench in which to sleep on account of the bombardments they describe the railways all through the north completely blocked and the German material scattered all about, and the Germans take the little roads because the big roads are bombed all the time, it is like well like nothing, although Wells did describe it in a kind of a way, and nobody says anything except it’s long c’est longue, which is I suppose the inevitable human cry, in the meantime the eagles are carrying off all the baby chickens and ducks because not having guns nobody can shoot them, we had seven baby chickens and now we have only two, and the poor hen screams and goes pale but what is the use, there is no use in screaming or going pale when nobody is allowed to shoot the eagles in the air. On the other hand the wheat the vines the potatoes all are growing well, and so if there is anybody there to eat when it is all over there will be eating for them, the refugees from Normandy said you could buy a kilo of butter for ten francs in that part of Normandy but there was nobody there to buy, there seemed to be people to sell but nobody there to buy, and it made us all sigh naturally enough although we did not want ourselves to be there to buy.