Wars I Have Seen

by Gertrude Stein

  But at fifteen there was no war when I was fifteen no war at all.

  Between fifteen and twenty-two it is not natural that some one surrounded by enemies who would not speak to him ate the only piece of chocolate and they were men not boys and they all wanted it. Naturally enough in 1943. When you are fifteen it is rather wonderful that any one can do such a thing, have enemies who will not speak to him and eat the chocolate cake the only piece and all the enemies who would not speak to him wanting it. It is a funny thing about enemies. It does take such a long time to believe in them believe that they are enemies, and then after all nobody really does seem to believe in them believe that they are enemies. It is about when one is fifteen that one first begins to hear about enemies not in books of course books are full of enemies, but in life. What are enemies and what is war, and are there enemies in war or are they not. From fifteen on one can begin to wonder about such a thing, along with eternity and clouds and beauty and faith. Enemies are not important whether they are real or not, I can remember when I was sixteen seeing a play then modern in which a woman or was it a girl had so many enemies among the other women or girls and could I believe it, no I could not. But he who in 1943 ate the chocolate cake he always believed that he had enemies and that enemies were real even when one was fiften. But about war well he was not so sure that enemies are enemies during a war. And perhaps they are and perhaps they are not.

  Our two servants, they are sisters, we are just in this house a nice big modern house alone against a mountain with a lovely park all full of bushes and big trees, and firs, and the two sisters one a good cook and the other a very perfect chamber maid, they know all about enemies, in war and in peace. Now in 1943 they have forgotten about peace, perhaps there is no such thing but they know all about enemies in war real enemies and enemies that are enemies. It sounds like the same thing but it is not.

  There are so many enemies in Shakespeare.

  Between fifteen and twenty-four there is so much time in which you do nothing but stand around and wait for it to happen. Now in 1942 in April 1942 there is no longer any standing around waiting for something to happen that is among those who are not fighting of course those who are fighting are like that, they are standing around waiting to do something but everybody else is now as is normal in adult life they are busy not necessarily with everything but they know from day to day that they will do something to-morrow. From fifteen to twenty-three or four nobody does know really know that they will do something to-morrow.

  Between the ages of fifteen and twenty-three nobody ever can get back in time.

  And now in 1943 at any age nobody can get back in time. And for the same reason, there is so much to do, there is nothing to do, there is no way for anybody to leave home and everybody is on the road and everybody talks to everybody and beside sometimes you know them all of which makes it impossible for anybody to get home in time. In time for what. Well just to get home in time or to get back in time and that is the way it usually is between fifteen and twenty-three. Nobody can get back in time.

  War and enemies.

  As I was saying there are so many enemies in Shakespeare.

  We have now two sisters no longer young who run this house which we have taken and where we are very comfortable and even rather magnificent and they know what enemies are.

  They were born in the upper reaches of the river Rhone. We always like Thornton Wilder’s story of the American tourist who said that there were two schools of thought about pronunciation, some said it should be pronounced Rhine and some said it should be pronounced Rhone. Well anyway they were born on the upper reaches of the river Rhone, a nice river that is always accompanied by a great deal of wind, a little wind or a big wind but it is always accompanied by wind. They were born and they had strange names given to them, they were not twins in fact one is definitely older and the other is definitely younger, and the strange names which were given to them were Clothilde and Olympe although to them they were natural names not strange names at all. The family around them died and then the younger one was quite young, seventeen she went to be a chamber-maid in Moravia where they talk a strange language but where life was pleasant, the older Clothilde had a son, this son was killed in the beginning of the war 1914–1918 and she never had another one. So every one was dead around them they had a little furniture, and in the meantime each one of the two of them separately were personal maids to different Italian countesses, they always like them to be noble and they lived 1914–1918 and a little later then with the Italians who were not enemies not to them then. Then they came back to the valley of the Rhone Clothilde a cook and her sister a maid and they did and they did not know what enemies were. Here they were very comfortable and relatively magnificent. And then many natural things happened and things changed the way they change and then came ’39, and their mistress went away because bombardments might come that way and so they stayed on here alone that is sometimes two alone and sometimes one alone but always alone in a big house and park and alone. Then the war came to be a little more war that is soldiers were there and then soldiers came and soldiers went away and it was disturbing but they did not realise that enemies could be more of a bother than that but they can. And then the enemy came, it was here right here right here in the house and remaining in the house and they were enemies and nobody could deny that they were enemies certainly not Clothilde and Olympe. Olympe and Clothilde and they knew what enemies were enemies were like that.

  Enemies being like that make enemies tremble. They made so much noise they said to them you are vanquished and they knew the enemies were there, but that was not what being vanquished was, being vanquished was a sadness and a sorrow and a weakness and a woe, but it was not a horror. The enemy there, here, that is a sorrow that they wished they could be spared but they were not. The enemies were there. They were all alone in the kitchen, they did not sleep there, they just could not do that, they could not sleep with the enemy there, they found a little room outside to which they went to sleep, but all day and each day they were in the kitchen and the enemy were living there, not in the kitchen but in the house. It was awful, they can never forget.

  The day they won the enemy came in one by one to tell them so not only that they had won but that the others were done and that every one would be done one by one. Alas it was too true only two years after it was not so, that is to say if they had won the enemy had not finished everything it was only beginning and perhaps they were not winning.

  But the enemy had come in one by one on the day they had won to tell them and they had not stolen what was in the house because that would be stealing but they had broken open the trunks of the two women and taken everything because as they were only servants and were then in the kitchen taking everything away from them was not stealing and so they broke open the trunks and took everything. There was a woman who used to wash the clothes for the enemy in a kind of a way she was an enemy herself, not an enemy who could frighten one but just an enemy and she said the enemies would win because they had wonderful weapons that no one had ever seen, all the enemies had wonderful weapons that no one had ever seen. And now say Clothilde and Olympe and now in 1943, perhaps it is true they the enemy feel the wonderful weapons that no one has ever seen, perhaps they do.

  And so it is true that they are all kinds of enemies, some that frighten some that steal and some that like a fiend make you come to heel. That is what Olympe has to say. To-day it is a fiend that is a mistress who says come and she has to go who makes her so unhappy that she has to cry.

  It is funny and when you are fifteen you begin to know that enemies are not what they seem, and then by twenty-four you know enemies are enemies and in between well and then later and now it is not certain that enemies are what they seem.

  At fifteen man and animals fruit trees and flowers beginning not to be things to pick but to feel. In the year ’43, milk was more and more difficult to have. There was no milk not even skimmed milk and so everybody who could
had a goat. We had a goat. When I was fifteen I did not care for goats I like a wall and I had read about fruit trees growing on the sunny side of a wall and I always said when I was fifteen that when I was older and could have it I would have a wall and have fruit trees growing on the sunny side of a wall. I remember the first time I ever saw fruit trees arranged to grow on a wall. It was just after the Spanish American war and we were in Paris for the exposition and McKinley had just been shot and I saw fruit trees trained to grow on the sunny side of walls and it reminded me of when I was fifteen and I wanted to grow fruit trees on sunny sides of the wall and my brother said that he would keep a goat on the wall to eat the fruit trees. And now it is 1943 and there is no milk and we keep a goat and I walk the goat and I like the goat, goats are very willful and I have found out why we like flowers. Because goats pick flowers to eat, and children pick flowers because animals pick flowers to eat and children pick flowers like that.

  At fifteen flowers commence to have other meanings, beauty is beauty and flowers are flowers and flowers are no longer flowers as the goat picks them.

  Beauty is its own excuse for being, that begins at fifteen that and that enemies are not what they seem, that all belongs at fifteen. At fifteen overbearing that is the need to be the one that has to dominate the other one by not studying, by studying, by fighting, by not fighting, by war, red war, white war, green war and black war. Black war is fighting, red war is war, white war is exciting and green war is disappointing. And at fifteen war has begun, and every one knows that with the sun or without the sun war has begun.

  What happened. She Lucy Lilly Lamont, wanted what she wanted and she was not stupid she was overbearing and crazy and not nervous but obstinate and she felt superior. That can make enemies even if nobody is your enemy. It is just like this but not in a way. In a war anybody can forget about Lucy Lilly Lamont. Why not when she is of no importance in a war. And this is what made us feel as we did about the Boer war, it was the first war that made us feel that wars were wars but that they were not important because nothing changed. We only know now that we felt that way then now in 1943, but we did we most certainly did begin to feel that way then.

  Lucy Lilly Lamont was fifteen all her life, they have a way of saying it here, they say she never left the primary grades, it is that that makes her the other side of fifteen all her life, and it is very interesting, war is and is not like that, a good deal of war is like that and then when everybody is tired of war then it is not at all like that.

  Fifteen.

  Every time I watch them I ask them how old they are. They are usually younger than fifteen or older, it is not very often that they are just fifteen and when they are it is very special. Being fifteen is very special, being eleven or thirteen is not so special, being seventeen or nineteen is not so special. Being fifteen is very special.

  And now it is June 1943 and two of the young men who are twenty-one have come to say good-bye, they hope they are not going to die right away but all who are twenty-one have to go to Germany as hostages to be put in a pen, they say to work in factories but there is no work, and if they go into hiding well it would be all right if it were not for the winter but will it be over before the winter, they ask me to tell them but can any one tell them, do I know, well anyway I can say that they might amuse themselves by learning and reading German and they might amuse themselves by saying that they are going traveling as students, and say they, if we do not consider them as enemies will the Americans like it, will they, might it not displease them, but said I you can learn their language and read their literature and contemplate them as if you were travelers and still know them to be enemies. Why not. Well said they why not. Anyway they said you have cheered us, and I kissed them each one of them and wished them well, and one of them came back to shake hands again and I kissed him again and said be prudent and he said I will and they went away up the hill. Oh dear me one cannot sleep very well.

  But from fifteen on you can think about enemies, quite certainly think about enemies.

  The idea of enemies is awful it makes one stop remembering eternity and the fear of death. That is what enemies are. Possessions are the same as enemies only less so, they too make one forget eternity and the fear of death.

  So many things begin around fifteen. Money, possessions eternity, enemies, the fear of death, disappointments begin a long time before and sorrow, but around fifteen you can begin to write them down, which makes the depth and consolation of disappointment and sorrow. All this can and does begin around fifteen and then a little later came the Boer war, and war as no longer something that belonged to others and to history and to stories but something that was going on now and was a disillusion and disappointing. I did not know anybody who was fighting or any of their relations, but it was the time when anglo-saxonism had come in America to be a very conscious feeling, Dooley had made fun of it and we all felt it and it was disappointing it was not what Kipling and the describers of the Mutiny had made one feel was Anglo-Saxon it was something different it was only we did not know it it was the beginning of the ending of the nineteenth century which now in 1943, is dying quite quickly, but we who were active then we felt it because we already had a beginning of the twentieth century and so although we did not know it we felt that the Boer war was the first shot fired at the nineteenth century, and although we thought we were of it we knew inside that we were not and we knew we should regret what the nineteenth century was but we knew we did not regret it we wanted something else and we were to have it.

  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 k
nown 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.