There is trouble in the Balkans, that is what made the first Balkan war, and to-day September 1943 the Serbs have captured a port in the Adriatic, and the English in the south of Italy are moving forward into the Adriatic to join them and to move into the Balkans.
We have had the enemy in the house again and this is what they said.
Unconditional surrender.
There is trouble in the Balkans and what is the use of science if it goes on like that.
As I said we have just had both the enemies staying in the house September 1943, and this is what they said.
To-day, the eleventh of September 1943, after all Saint Odile was right, she said, that Germany would conquer the world would be drowned in blood and tears, and fire would be thrown from the sky upon the earth beneath and everybody would say that nothing could defeat the power and the force of that army and everybody would say let us have peace at any price rather than go on suffering and then Germany at the height of its power would throw themselves against a mountain, a holy mountain, that certainly was Moscow because in the time of Saint Odile Moscow was a city of convents and was called the Holy Mountain and from then on there would be a weakening because from then on they would weaken although every one would still say they are terrible they are strong let us have peace and then would come fighting in the streets of the city of cities in the citadel of citadels, and we all wondered could that be Rome well it certainly could be and should be Rome but since it was not very likely to happen we said perhaps it is Jerusalem, perhaps it is Constantinople, well anyway here it is, in the tenth and eleventh of September it is Rome, she said there would be fighting in the streets of Rome and then there would be the beginning of the real end of Germany, and it is all true, as we all have been cherishing copies of this prophecy ever since 1940, and as there is a copy in Latin of the original prophecy in Lyon, which one of the young Seminarists at Belley translated for me into French, there is no doubt about it.
And it is true we can all prophesy to a certain extent depending upon our knowledge of people and things, some can prophesy from day to day, some the life time of some one, and Saint Odile five hundred years that’s all. Believe it or not it is very simple, it is the same thing only a little longer. And that is the reason why the world is interesting and science which meant progress in the nineteenth century in the twentieth century means simply useful things and now in this war not really that since we all have to eat what we grow and milk in the shape of a goat and feed in the shape of chickens and goats, and smoke in the shape of tobacco they grow in the garden and coffee made of barley toasted and shoes of wood, and clothes left over, and wool made of their own sheep, the discoveries of science are only used for war and destruction, to live it is just what everybody has done since animal life began and not more or less complicated than that.
So a few weeks ago we had here in the house first the German officers and then later on the Italians. It is funny to be Americans and to be here in France and to have that.
I like a thing they say if they say it every time they feel it. They say it of my dog Basket, every time they see him and they see him any time and they always say look at him you would take him for a sheep. And so all this time everybody in talking speaks of the Germans, they always were saying, but they are still strong, they are still powerful, just as Saint Odile said they would say and they have been saying it any day and every day and in every way whenever the Germans were mentioned by them and naturally with the war going on and the Germans being in occupation they were mentioned every day and any day and they always said well until a month ago, they always said with meditation or conviction depending upon the person speaking they said they are still powerful, they are still strong. To-day and every day they go on mentioning the Germans, and now any one of them and every one of them as they speak of them they say in the same way, they are pretty sick, and nobody says anything when the Germans are mentioned except that the Germans are pretty sick now, quite sick now, and that is what I like that they repeat every day what they feel each day and that is not repetition that is saying each day what they are knowing, that Basket the poodle you would think he was a sheep, that the Germans until September 1943 were still very strong, that the Germans in September 1943 are sick, pretty sick, quite sick.
So Saint Odile did prophesy.
We had the Germans and then the Italians in the house in the months of August and of September.
When the Germans were here it was very different from ’40, then every one was frightened of them and now it was unpleasant as one of the women said of course it was unpleasant but not unpleasant as if we had been conquered.
And she was right, the Germans not being conquerors any more nobody feels conquered.
It is full of excitement to know that Shakespeare and everybody is right about how people are. By this I mean, anybody can mean, that when you are in a country that is being occupied by an enemy, by two enemies in a manner of speaking, everybody is funny, that is they feel and they act in such different ways at any time. You think they think one thing and they act another. One country priest who outrages his congregation by preaching against the Americans, is delighted to meet me and makes a special effort to love my dog and love me. Others who are said to be one thing say other things and under conditions distinctly unfavorable for them, oh it is all so complicated and every day and in every way I like the complications being so complicated. The 1914–1918 war was a simple war with simple feelings and all the veterans of that war are confused with this war, they do not understand, and they cannot find themselves, everything is so opposed to anything that is straightforward, I must say I like it, I like things that look as if they were there when they are elsewhere. I do like it. I do not like to fish in troubled waters but I do like to see the troubled water and the fish and the fishermen. I suppose I do not like to fish in troubled waters because I do not care about fishing at all, but that is another matter.
After the Germans left we had Italians in the house. They were rather attaching, foolish and could not keep away from the young servant, they went in one door and came out another and then they were still there, but otherwise they were sad, and they hated the Germans and they liked everybody else, and they were sad, they said if this went on they would have no country, they hoped some of them would still have a family but would they, oh said they holding their heads. Milan, and Turin, and Genoa and Cremona, oh dear. And we were sorry for them and they said they hoped they would stay here until the end of the war and the next day they had to go away, and they went around saying good-bye to the village where they had only been for eight days as if they were saying good-bye to the village in which they had been born.
The Balkans, first came to be something for me, from Tolstoi, and our Slav brothers and then freeing them, it is extraordinary how Bulgaria, which is the most Slav of all the Balkan peoples is the one that has most passionately been ungrateful to the Russians who freed them, but that makes it all like Shakespeare too which is very exciting, and so from that time through the two Balkan wars, and hearing lots of Serbs in 1914–1918 war, and visiting the sick Serb men in France and the children to now when we have a Servian dentist and his son is in prison for having ammunition stored in his room to give to the young men who have escaped into the mountains to avoid going to Germany as forced labor, and they were so frightened that he was going to be shot, but fortunately he was in the hands of the Italians and they do not shoot any one if they can avoid it and they can always avoid it. We have a young maid working for us and she is Italian, that is French-Italian and I tease her because she spends her Sundays visiting her relations in prison. There is an uncle who was a restaurant keeper and he is in prison for having given and sold food, which is known as black traffic, and yesterday she went to Chambery to see a cousin who was in the Italian army and now September ’43, the Italians have been put in prison by the Germans but this cousin seems to have escaped in a truck, which he was driving but where to nobody knows. It is a str
ange confusion nobody knows. Some one was just telling of trying to find somebody who was in prison, and so they took a bundle of clothes, and they went to all the prisons in Lyon and in Paris and at each one they said they wanted to give this bundle to such and such and they always said there is no such name here until finally they found there was such a name there and they found him.
The Balkans have always been confused like that from all accounts, but now everybody and everything is confused like that, peas and beans and barley grows, you nor I nor nobody knows, where peas and beans and barley grows. I never did think that everything and everybody would be naturally like that.
The prisons are all so crowded, there are so many things that happen, there was one chronic thief in Bilignin who always stole a turkey or grapes or something, and the last time when he was condemned to two months’ imprisonment he had to wait three months before there was room in the prison to serve his two months. In between they let him stay at home. At the Hopkins’ hospital when I was a medical student, when we asked some Negro where another one was, the frequent answer was oh he is in jail, but Miss, that is no disgrace. And it is like that now, what with black traffic, and this and that and politics, and this and that it is no disgrace.
And so there was the first Balkan war and the second Balkan war and then there was the first world war. It is extraordinary how having done a thing once you have to do it again, there is the pleasure of coincidence and there is the pleasure of repetition, and so there is the second world war, and in between there was the Abyssinian war and the Spanish civil war.
The French like variety, that is what makes them pleasant to live with. I like to think of all the forms of government they have had since the revolution until now, in very little over a hundred years I like to tease them about it, when they go solemn about their future. I tell them why worry when they have had such a record.
This is it.
In a little over a hundred years, they have had three different republics, two kinds of kingdoms, a commune, a dictatorship, and this present government of 1943, and yet they worry about what the next government is going to be. I say why worry, it can be anything and if it is it can change to anything else and after all what difference does it make except to the people in power. It certainly does not make any difference to anybody else ever, certainly not.
So after the Balkan wars, and as we had a Serb in the court, who was sensitive to noise, and a great patriot, and we knew a Bulgarian but that was later that was after the 1914–1918 war and he took care of my Ford car and we still know him, so after the two Balkan wars, and there will naturally be plenty more of them, our dentist is a Serb and he wears his linen blouse with extraordinary elegance, the Serbs are like that, and so as I say the world war 1914–1918 began and the nineteenth century a very resistant strong obstinate and convinced of its service to humanity and progress was trying to be killed that is to say they were trying to kill it but could they. No. Not even by the 1914–1918 war, they could not and they did not and now it is dead Hitler killed it, and like a very Samson he fell down with it and was killed in its ruins. It is rather nice that, no wonder there are predictions that come out right like Saint Odile no wonder when everything is the same with such an intense variety. Including goats and chickens including Saint Odile said that there would be fighting in the streets of the eternal city and that would not be the end but the beginning of the end and after that all the countries that had been invaded would invade the Germans and the countries would then get back all that had been lost and a little more.
I liked that a little more, it was a woman’s thought, that they would need that consolation and that they would have it which they will. They will.
In the nineteenth century of course there were predictions but not important ones and if they were they did not make it be certain that there might be peace and no progress, peace and no progress that is what the twentieth century might do. Peace and no progress.
In the nineteenth century, there is the feeling that one is justified in being angry, in being right, in being justified. In the twentieth century it is not that it is right but that what happens truly happens.
Now in September 1943, just as the vintage is coming and grape juice is intensely sweet and pleasant, they can prepare for the beginning of the end and they do, the beginning of the end and they do.
But before that there is still the nineteenth century and the first world war, 1914–1918, and the witnesses of that war still can remember that war. I remember how amused we were when that war was not yet over that in an American newspaper they once said, for those of us who can remember the beginning of the war. It is difficult to remember the beginning of the war when the war is beginning to end. That is the reason why really although everybody says that they are going to hang everybody who was not patriotic during the war actually the war being over everybody forgets. Kipling made a song about lest we forget, and the French clandestine press says that the French should be taught to hate. But if they could hate how could they make fashions, you cannot make fashions if you are always remembering and how can you hate if you cannot remember. Etta Cone said that she could forgive but not forget and Alice Toklas answered, I cannot forgive but I do forget, Well anyway, there undoubtedly was the first world war and we and many many other veterans went through it and some of us have a veteran mentality and some of us have not.
Incontestably the 1914–1918 war was a nineteenth century war just as the 1939–19— war incontestably is not. And the hopes and the fears, and the relation to finite and infinity of this war and the method of belief and unbelief, and the hope of progress and reform all these things are not nineteenth century not at all not now.
It is interesting. We have Basket II. He is a pedigreed dog, twenty generations are behind him and all of them German. The other Basket was unpedigreed and entirely French. And Basket II, we have a cat, the peasants who gave it to us had called it by a name Hitler because of his mustache and Basket had not been friendly with him but no matter. But now suddenly he chases him chases him away. Is it an omen. Some things can be an omen but is it.
And just as some thing can be an omen but is it, so now in 1943, there is nothing that is nineteenth century, not here in France, except what is here that does not belong here. Believe it or not it is true. But now to return to the nineteenth century, to the 1914–1918 war, and the way veterans feel. They feel disappointed, not about the 1914–1918 war but about this war. They liked that war, it was a nice war, a real war a regular war, a commenced war and an ended war. It was a war, and veterans like a war to be a war. They do.
September 1943 they are harvesting their grapes to make their wine, it will be they all say a victory wine, and it is good in quantity and quality. They do not think of the future they only think of being free.
There is one thing that is certain, and nobody really realised it in the 1914–1918 war, they talked about it but they did not realise it but now everybody knows it everybody that the one thing that everybody wants is to be free, to talk to eat to drink to walk to think, to please, to wish, and to do it now if now is what they want, and everybody knows it they know it anybody knows it, they want to be free, they do not want to feel imprisoned they want to feel free, even if they are not free they want to feel free, and they want to feel free now, let the future take care of itself all they want is to be free, not to be managed, threatened, directed, restrained, obliged, fearful, administered, they want none of these things they all want to feel free, the word discipline, and forbidden and investigated and imprisoned brings horror and fear into all hearts, they do not want to be afraid not more than is necessary in the ordinary business of living where one has to earn one’s living and has to fear want and disease and death. There are enough things to be afraid of, nobody wants to be afraid, just afraid, afraid of things people should not be afraid, they do not. This is true in October 1943, it is true. In 1914–1918, it was still the nineteenth century, and one might still think that something th
at would happen might lead one to higher and other things but now, the only thing that any one wants now is to be free, to be let alone, to live their life as they can, but not to be watched, controlled, and scared, no no, not.
Wars I Have Seen Page 8