Wars I Have Seen (32 page)

When we had the couple of hundred Germans here, there was with them an interpreter a tall dark man who wore eye-glasses. One day he came here to arrange to have the German soldiers come here when there was an alerte. I was not here and he had a long conversation with Alice Toklas. He talked very good French without any definite accent. He said that as the lower gate was closed he had entered as a brigand over the wall, and could we give him a key to the gate. Alice Toklas said the mairie had one he could get it there, no he said he wanted one to have in his own pocket so she gave him one, and after a little gay conversation he went away. He never came back. We used to see him around the town but the soldiers never came here when there was an alerte and we never had the key back. When I came home Alice Toklas told me about the conversation and said she was puzzled, he was not like a German neither his manners, nor his French nor his looks, later on we were told in the village that he used to keep a hotel in Paris and that his wife was still there keeping it and that is the reason he spoke French so well even though he was only a simple soldier.

From time to time the mayor’s wife mentioned him as asking for this or asking for that for the Germans and when German troops passed through the town they never had anything to do with those who were here permanently. Mrs. Mayor said that he was always polite and helpful the interpreter and did what he could to make everybody comfortable, and that he had allowed a taxi to help get some friends of theirs to their home, these friends had come down from Normandy just after the beginning of the fighting there. And then the Germans here left and the interpreter and the captain came to say good-bye to the mayor and his wife and the captain who could not talk much French just said a few words politely and the interpreter said, after all the war is going to be over soon it will only mean killing two men and then it is finished,
and said he three months after the war I will come back here to call on you.

Then they went away and a few days after Madame the mayoress told me this story, that was only yesterday.

She said what was your impression of the interpreter and I told her what Alice Toklas said about him that he was not very German and seemed a gentleman which was strange as he was a common soldier. Yes she said it is strange he was a common soldier, and he took his turn at guard like any of them, I do not know whether he slept and ate with them but otherwise he acted like a common soldier, excepting when he was with the captain and then it was very evident that it was the interpreter who was in command, he did not go when he was sent for by the captain until it suited him and anyway there were thousands of little signs that showed that he was the superior in rank. I told you she said about how he arranged for a taxi for our friends who came from Normandy but I never told you what happened. I was with the husband and wife and children and mother at the mairie waiting for my husband to come in and he came with the interpreter, the husband looked startled when he saw the interpreter and the interpreter hesitated a moment and then came in, ah said my friend I am not mistaken we have met in Normandy, oh yes said the interpreter and you were Doctor Fisch and were in command, oh yes said the interpreter and said my friend it was I who succeeded in arranging about your having chocolate, from the chocolate factory there, oh yes said the interpreter politely and there the conversation ended, and the interpreter went and got a taxi for them and I have never seen them again.

The interpreter came to see us on business very often but after this he always stayed and talked, he never referred to the conversation but he became more intimate. He once said that he knew who the members of the maquis in the town were and the captain had wanted to seize them but said the interpreter he would not allow it they are the kind of men I admire patriots and fathers of families. Then one day he asked the mayor if he would do him a
personal favor, the mayor said yes of course, he said he would like him in his capacity of mayor to write to two towns in Normandy and ask for information about a certain lady, he said she is my wife, she is a Frenchwoman and she is my wife that is to say we are not married but she is my wife. The mayor did so and as yet had no answer. When the interpreter with the other Germans left he said to the mayor if you should ever get an answer, give it to the German station master and I will get it. Naturally enough there has been no answer. He also mentioned several times that he was a Luxembourgeois, he also said that he had bred and trained horses for the race track in Paris, he never said anything to them about a hotel in Paris, and as I say when he left he said he was coming back three months after the war, and he said there need only to be two killed to put an end to the war.

After the wife of the mayor was all through telling me the story, she said you know I think he was an Englishman, sometimes his French reminded me of yours, it seemed to be you speaking, but of course we will never know, and this is a true story.

There was a young woman in a village near here and of course we were all of us very envious and she had made herself a blouse out of parachute cloth that had been sent down with supplies, now we all want parachute cloth, I would love to have a shirt waist made of parachute cloth from an American airplane, a friend of ours told us that the other day he was out on his bicycle and he was stopped by the maquis who patrol all the roads that the Germans do not patrol. These boys were in a truck and they had an American flag on it, and they said we are not like the other maquis, we are American maquis, and under the direct orders of General Eisenhower, you see even in these days the French have to get gay.

It is very funny really funny, when the mayor went to Bourg to try and get some flour for bread, in order to have the truck of flour pass first you have to get permission for it to come from the Germans and then you get permission for it to pass from the maquis, we all laughed and said the only people who do not have to give permission are the people of Vichy, the prefet and sous-prefet
have all fled, there is nobody left except the mayors the maquis and the Germans, it is really very funny, the mayor on his way to Bourg saw the armored train that we had seen at Culoz lying peacefully in a mountain stream at the side of the rails, naturally it never did get to Lyon.

It is wonderful the Americans just chasing around France, everybody used to say, if they only would hurry if they only would hurry, but now they all laugh and they all say but they are hurrying you bet your life they are hurrying up. And Saint Odile, she did say that when Rome fell it would not be the end but the beginning of the end and then she said that the Mohammedan sickle moon and the Christian cross would shine together in peace and look at Turkey, well well, as the Englishman who does the propaganda in English from Berlin always says, well well.

It is nice that the forces of the interior the French are helping things along so well, it makes all the French people content that they are taking part and everybody is happy and gay.

When bread is the staff of life then we eat bread and butter yes we do eat bread and butter.

I remember when I was young and in a book we had with illustrations there was one where the Goths and the Vandals threw around and broke all the works of art in Italy, and I remember being terribly worried about all this destruction and then one day when I felt very worried about it all about the destruction of even more ancient monuments in buried cities I suddenly said to myself well after all there are miles more of works of art that even people who are really interested in them can see in their life time so why worry. But now with Florence being destroyed and Normandy and marching on Paris they are near Chartres to-day the Americans and it does kind of make one feel funny really feel funny it seemed endless this occupation of France and now there they are the American tanks near Chartres, dear me oh dear me it does make one feel funny.

Here we are so excited and rather querulous with waiting except that our minds are pretty well taken off our troubles by our
own local excitements, we still have our fifty odd Germans in the region but they are frightened and they stay where they are they were in a village near by to buy some wine and the maquis heard they were there and they came along and shot dead an officer and two soldiers and now well naturally the village is frightened the maquis go away but the Germans well they are afraid to come back but now they have an evil habit of sending over five or six airplanes from Amberieu near Bourg and they drop bombs on a village, three days ago they did this completely wiping out a village and killing most of the population and almost every day these six odd German airplanes come over our heads, and what will they do, this we do not know, but something horrible that is certain.

Besides all this and which is really most exciting are the Robin Hood activities of the maquis. Night before last they came into the town, and they visited three of the principal shops whose owners aided and abetted the Germans and from one they took his car and fifty thousand francs from another they took all his hidden provisions quantities of macaroni and oil and twenty-five thousand francs and now all the rest who have either profited or been for the Germans are naturally most nervous. The maquis are using this money to help the villagers whose homes have been burnt by the Germans. They say the friends of the Germans should pay for the victims of the Germans. And then there are the shop keepers who are on the border land between friend and enemy and they are frightened, and then there are the type of old grumblers who always find everything the young generation do frightful and naturally they have talked too much against the maquis and they are worried and then there are the decayed aristocrats, who are always hoping that a new regime will give them a chance and they are the most furious of all against the defeat of the Germans they and the decayed bourgeoisie, who feel sure that everybody but themselves should be disciplined, I had a row with one of them on the street last night and my parting word in a loud voice was that she should be more charitable, using it in the American sense of charitable in thought, and the whole population laughed because
she is notoriously not in deed, and everybody thought naturally I meant that but of course I did not. Then there is a very funny thing about the church bigots, they are all for the Germans, the clergy in general in France not, distinctly not, but all the old men and women who are known in France as the frogs in holy water or the mice of the sacristy they strangely enough considering how the Germans have treated the catholics in Germany are all for the Germans. It is like in the last war all the pacifists were for Germany. I used not to understand but I am beginning to now. The feeling is that all that makes for liberty and liveliness is against those that either by weakness or by strength want to suppress the others and so the Germans who are the Germans who are the arch-disciplinarians because both of their weakness and their strength they want to stop liberty so those others who want liberty suppressed because liberty is a criticism of them are pro-German.

It is funny really funny, the maquis have taken charge of Culoz, they have put up notices under the heading of the fourth republic telling the population what to do and all the time there are twenty-five German soldiers at the station as frightened as rabbits, they stay out only long enough to buy their provisions and retire back to their station, across the river there are still fifty to two hundred but nobody does seem to pay any attention, the maquis do not even take the trouble to gather them in, but they will so they say and put them to work. I like their calling it the fourth republic, the French dearly love a new form of government, they do love a change, they might have thought that the third republic was just going on but not at all there was an in between, the dictatorship or the oligarchy of Vichy so you just could not have it the third republic it has to be a fourth republic. There have been so many these last hundred and forty years, I think I have counted them once already in this book, three different varieties of monarchy, two empires three republics, one commune one oligarchy and dictatorship, and now here we are at a fourth republic and everybody is pleased. It makes them feel gay and cheerful. The German captain who left with the hundred and fifty soldiers was driven to
Lyon by one of the taxis from Culoz, the taxi man came back and he said the German captain cried when he said good-bye, he said he had been so happy in Culoz and had hoped to once more see his wife and children but now he was ordered to Normandy and of course he cried and expected the French chauffeur to sympathise with him. They certainly are a funny people they certainly are.

Alice Toklas has just commenced typewriting this book, as long as there were Germans around we left it in manuscript as my handwriting is so bad it was not likely that any German would be able to read it, but now well if they are not gone they are so to speak not here, we can leave our windows open and the light burning, dear me such little things but they do amount to a lot, and it is so. They have left Florence, that is something to the good and everybody cheers up, they are now expecting it to be all over by the fifteenth of August. The French like to set a date it cheers them, but it does seem rather soon, they all also say that in this region there is an English colonel and fifteen Canadian officers, but are they, sometimes we believe it and sometimes we do not. If they are here it would be nice to see them.

There are the Germans still here some forty odd but we never see them in the village the way we used to, why not, I asked the mayor, he twinkled he said they sleep all day, because they mount guard all night, they are afraid I said like rabbits he said. Everybody is so pleased that the overbearing Germans are afraid like rabbits, everybody is pleased.

Even though the Germans are still here the maquis have taken over the victualing of our town as they have done in all the region, they are distributing lots more butter and cheese than there was. They take all that was being prepared in the dairies for the Germans. Look said the cook excitedly, it is butter done up in tinfoil, oh it was prepared for those dirty Boches for the evil birds and now we have it come quick Madame and taste it. She is keeping the tinfoil as a sacred souvenir, the first spoil from the enemy. Ah she said they made us cry since forty and now they cry. Naturally it is difficult to get medicines, even the Germans have not much of that so
the maquis cannot take it from them so everybody is going back to old herb remedies. The old people are always being consulted to remember what they did when they were young, for bruises you use wild verbena pounded and for disinfecting and reducing swelling application of the petals of the Easter lily preserved in eau de vie and foot baths of boiled ivy.