Wars I Have Seen (6 page)

In Shakespeare’s Henry VI I just found that he said that Joan of Arc and she was not yet dead not in the play in fact she was just beginning and Shakespeare said that she would be the great French saint that she would replace Saint Denis, and she was only made a saint very late, very late indeed, just in time for the war of 1914 but she undoubtedly and Shakespeare was right she undoubtedly is the great French saint and has completely replaced Saint Denis. It is funny this business of being right. Everybody wants to be right, even the one who said he would rather be right than president. It is so natural to say and I was right was I not.

I am wondering if Laval and the rest of them think they are right now in 1943, to be sure the Kiddie wrote to me in 1942 and said that at the end of 1942 there would be good news and in the spring of 1943 there would be more good news than bad news and as the summer came on the summer of 1943 the good news would be so good there would be no letters in the newspaper printing presses big enough to make headlines to celebrate them, and now the Italian islands are going one by one, one by one and there is only one more water to cross, and everybody who knows what an enemy was is now worried because and that is very strange, everybody knowing that everything is coming to an end every neighbor is denouncing every neighbor, for black traffic, for theft, for this and for that, and there are so many being put in prison, poor Madame Berard said it was so sad to see her husband going off between two policemen just as if he was a criminal and to know
that some of their neighbors were pleased to see it. To be sure he had been killing meat and did he sell it or not or only serve it in quantity in his restaurant and her boy has to go to Germany because he is twenty-one even though he is a great mathematician and is to be a great man in the university of Lyon and the family were always gentle and kindly and obliging and never charged too much even when they might have and indeed it was all true they never did.

It is hard to know about enemies at fifteen it all begins, knowing everything and never being happy again, excited yes but never happy again. And now Olympe has to go away and she knows what enemies are, they are Germans that is what enemies are and here there are none and she has to take a train and there she has to see them and the thought of it is making an old woman of her and she does not want to go, no no she does not want to go, but her mistress says the duty of a servant is to obey her mistress and not to follow her own changing fancy, but her fancy has never changed, she has always known what the enemy is what her enemies are, yes she has always known and more than ever since they have been in her home.

And so the Boer war was disagreeable but not really serious not even for the Boers, like all defeated people they got the best of it, it is better to be defeated and win than win and be defeated. Now here in 1943 it seems so strange to see the enemy weakening just slowly weakening, quickly weakening, not being defeated or anything but just weakening, the French do better, they get defeated but they do not weaken, while the Germans do not get defeated they weaken, and when they weaken enough to go out like a lamp with no oil, or with no wire, out, it does not die it just weakens to nothing. Until they weaken everybody says about them but they are still strong, and then they weaken. There you are, that is to say here we are 1943.

After the Spanish-American war there was the Boer war, and that was no longer fifteen that was older, I was in the medical
school then the first year and I went out to San Francisco to see my brother Mike who had just been married.

The Spanish-American war was the first to me modern war. Modern is like realism, modern is always modern to some one as realism is always real to some one, not to some one but to a great many at one time. Modern, how nicely it is modern now then and when.

What was modern then was seeing all the middle western men, young men, boys too many, going out to San Francisco, and catching everything and then going off in boats to the Philippines. I was just reading Shakespeare’s Henry the Fifth and I found it astonishing how easily they talked of transporting ten thousand, fifteen thousand even twenty thousand soldiers across the water from England to France. How when they had such comparatively little tonnage, did they get so many of them across, how did they, well anyway so they say they did. Call it modern if you like but soldiers any quantity of them at any time can be carried across the ocean, any quantity of them at any time and now here in June 1943, we are waiting for them, waiting for them, to bring us shoes and stockings and dental floss, here in the country we have plenty to eat although we would like more cake and sugar and butter but still here in the country having a goat and chickens we do have plenty to eat and fish, we do have plenty to eat. But one does get so tired of seeing everybody planting and growing vegetables you think how nice it will be to have those happy days come back when vegetables grew not in the ground but in tins. A vegetable garden in the beginning looks so promising and then after all little by little it grows nothing but vegetables, nothing, nothing but vegetables.

Well anyway the Spanish-American war was modern but it was completely nineteenth century, there was nothing but the question of sea power and whose sea power was it, we all read a book that told us it, but then we had known it anyway, because of Nelson, and now we were doing it again, and it was very exciting, we were all finding out about the difficulty of having to have two
fleets a Pacific one and an Atlantic one, and we were all getting to feel that we were to be, well there it was still nineteenth century completely nineteenth century and we were not thinking about a twentieth century, and we were so excited that we were not realising that the nineteenth century was beginning to be over, not the least bit in the world. I was young then but I can still see those young men in San Francisco, those middle-western young men of twenty and twenty-one, with their undeveloped necks, their rather doughy faces, I see why they call them dough-boys, they are like that between twenty and twenty-one, they go to sleep anywhere sitting or standing, their heads and their mouths and their eyes can go to sleep anywhere, and open or not open, that is what it is to be twenty or twenty-one, and now here and now, it is just the same, the young of twenty-one, the young Frenchmen of twenty-one are all being deported to Germany, two came to see me to say good-bye to ask how I could encourage them and all I could say was try to study them and learn their language and get to know their literature, think of yourselves as a tourist and not as a prisoner, and they were worried and nervous and they said will the Americans like it if we think of them like that, sure I said all the Americans want is to make you free, and they said yes we know that. It makes me feel very very much like that, I used to say to any Frenchman or Frenchwoman who complained of anything, I said but every time I go out in the village of Bilignin there I see all your young men whatever is happening they are still there and that is everything that they are not gone. But now they are gone and going. Some of them betake themselves to the mountains others are conspiring, the son of our dentist a boy of eighteen has just been taken because he was helping and will he be shot or not. Oh dear. We all cry. But there is nothing to do but wait for us to come nothing to do. And they look so, I saw a train full of them, everybody was handing them up wine and bread, although nobody has much of it for themselves or to give them, and there they were with the gendarmes, going away. And they were awake then and pretty soon
they will be tired out and go to sleep any way that it is possible to be sleeping, in a chair or standing or in any way.

It is funny but my memory of those middle-western boys going out to the Philippines was that they were just like these French boys twenty and twenty-one going off to Germany, as deported and held away from every one. Dear me.

So that was realism. Anything is realism but that certainly was realism.

And it all made me remember the impression I have when I read Wyandotte or The Hutted Knoll which was about then, the shock I had in reading that book because for the first time I realised what it meant not to know whether any one was loyal to you or not, did they or did they not believe in you, were they interested in your interests and how can you tell. I had read laments of great men and many novels but in some strange way Wyandotte or The Hutted Knoll made me understand that you could think that some one was devoted to you and loyal to you and really not at all they were opposed to you and would if such a thing were necessary denounce you. And now and again in June 1943 it is happening all around one.

Well in the first place Olympe who knows who her enemies are, and are they, could they become another thing or rather could those to whom she was loyal could she stop being loyal to them, could she want so much not to leave you and when she really did have it to leave you did she at the last hour turn against you so as to prepare her mind to be attuned to the other to whom she was going. Could she and did she. She did. Might she and would she denounce the first one the second one or any one or would she only prepare herself in case she had to do something and it might be that something and would any one she was leaving realise that she had not been very serviceable in fact that she had been rather useless although everything made any one think that she was perfection and almost saintly as a character. Dear me. It is like a detective story particularly as her sister Clothilde used a cheap enemy perfume to drown out the smell of onions and cooking on
her and does it came to be known that she slept in her mistress’ room. Dear me dear me.

How many mirrors there can be in a house when all the doors and the doors are many and very wide and tall are filled with mirrors and what a pleasure to see one’s self in them. Expectedly and unexpectedly what a pleasure.

And now in June 1943 something very strange is happening, every day the feeling is strengthening that one or another has been or will be a traitor to something and what do they do they send them a little wooden coffin sometimes with a letter inside sometimes with a rope inside to tell them to hang themselves, and sometimes it is sent by post or by railroad and sometimes it is hung up in a tree and sometimes hung up in front of the front door. Oh dear me. When this you see remember me is what they mean because some of these people have told where young men of twenty-one were hidden, and it was not necessary to tell they just did tell and so somebody sent them a small wooden coffin. Of course they had to find a reliable carpenter to make the coffins but they did find him.

So the Spanish-American war and seeing all those middle-western men in San Francisco, made me realise what realism is.

Just to-night June 1943 I was out walking in the twilight in the mountain village of Culoz where I live now and my dog Basket was running around and a young man in working clothes said he is a nice dog but I have been whistling to him and he wont come. Oh I said you have to do more than whistle, you have to talk English and he said my father could and I could too once but I now have forgotten. And I said but how is that not that you have forgotten but that your father talked English, that he said is very simple he is an American, ah I said yes, he came to France in the last war as a soldier he married a Frenchwoman, he got a good job at Chaumont and he stayed, and in ’38 we intended to go away but my mother fell ill and we did not leave. And she, I said, oh she is dead, and he, oh he is in a concentration camp when America came into the war they came and took him, and you, we are four
brothers and a sister, and the oldest is an actor in the Comedie Française and the second is a plumber and the third is head butcher in a camp of youth and here I am working for farmers and my name is Robert Nelson White and I looked as if I was not sure that all he said was so and he said here are my papers, they do not spell white right, but my name there is Robert White, I left out the Nelson all right. And it all made me feel a little funny anything these days these strange days can make you feel a little funny so I shook hands with him and we went up Basket and I up the hill and he Robert Nelson White went on down, down the hill.

Now all that made me feel all the more how different was that Spanish-American war. I asked Robert Nelson White if his father was a Frenchman by blood, if his grandfather or grandmother either one was French but no he said he was always American his people never had been anything but American and his little sister of fourteen was at school and he and his brother had crossed the lines at night to come into the free zone and here he was.

In the Spanish-American war romance was simple and realistic like the young Californians who went to the war and General King wrote novels about it and in one he said and I threw the bridle of my horse to my orderly Ned Hanford, and it was Ned Hanford and when he read these simple words, he had a thrill he always had a thrill. That was the way it was then in the Spanish-American war. It was then that they began to think about realism. The Red Badge of Courage by Crane, and any simple description of war as done by the Russians, later on a naval battle in the next war, the Russo-Japanese war, which described it just as it was not as it felt or looked. But anyway there they were they middle-western boys in San Francisco, and there was Chinatown and there was the French quarter, and there were the Lurline baths and there was everything that they never had seen before. It is always that way in war, always.

And now in June 1943, it is trying, there are so many sad things happening, so many in prison, so many going away, our dentist’s son and he was only eighteen and he should have been taking his
entrance university examinations and he with others in a camion took shoes and clothes and weapons to give to the young men who had taken themselves to the mountains, to avoid being sent away and what has happened to him and to them. I have just met a very charming woman courageous and lives in an old castle and has five children and the youngest one is twenty-one and he has gone, she has never lost any money but life is always dearer and she and her children have worked very hard to keep their castle sheared their own sheep, and everything, and now she said, of course she would not mind Christian’s going away, that is to say not to mind if it were not the times are so uncertain and so troubling, and he is very sweet and he is big and tall and very winning and since he was born there have never been three months without their seeing him, never and now, well I said he hopes to come back for the vintage and she had clear eyes very wide open and she said yes.