Wars I Have Seen

by Gertrude Stein

  I was just listening to an account by one of the American generals of the simple things for which Americans are fighting and the first thing they mention is that you can be in your home and nobody can force their way in and authoritatively frighten you and do whatever they will, I think it is very extraordinary that an American general can so simply understand that that is the horrible thing about an occupied country, the uneasiness in the eyes of all young men and in the eyes of their fathers mothers sisters and brothers, and wives, that uneasiness because at any moment they can be taken away at any moment, their papers can be all in order and yet, and then papers can not be in order and also, and just now our neighbors were telling us of a young man we had known him very well in Belley and later here, and he would go out to the nearest town to buy bread, and his mother said no do not, and he said but mother my papers are in order and he went and he did not come back, he was sent, his mother does not know where and his papers were in order and yet, and it is extraordinary that the American general should understand that that is what any American could fight for, that nowhere in the world should those who have not committed any crime should not live peacefully in their home, go peacefully about their business and not be afraid, not have uneasiness in their eyes, not. I do think it very extraordinary that the American general should have so simply understood that. It is now the middle of March and spring has come and with it a little courage, they do think now that it is not going on the war is not going to go on for years and years yet, they do begin to think that, they are not hopeful yet, it is hard to be hopeful, after five years very hard, they are not hopeful yet, but they do lead their lives, and they do think that now perhaps it will be over some time. It is Sunday to-day and our maid Jeanne who is not a hopeful person came in just now and said they say in Culoz that the Germans are retreating, where we said, why in Russia, she said, so they say, they say it in Culoz, but of course we said, ah yes she said, they do say it to-day in Culoz. Well that does mean they do not any longer expect it to go on forever, and as I went walking to-day, they all began to talk crops and potatoes, and planting, to be sure when the French people can begin to dig up the soil and plant vegetables they always feel more cheerful, and to-day is the day to do that, so even if Culoz had not decided that the Germans were retreating in Russia, still they would begin to feel more cheerful they just naturally would now that they can dig and plant, they must do that.

  The middle of March and it is as if it were almost most likely to end some time, the winter and the war, the war and the winter. We like to take the train to Chambery, we always see something or somebody, everybody travels, the French people do like to go up and down on trains, and to stand and wait in stations, and there is so much of that. Day before yesterday we were waiting at the station at Culoz and among them all was well he certainly was an American, only an American could wear his hat like that, only an American could balance his body like that, and he had a pinched nose like a certain kind of an American boy has and he was about twenty-five and he had a pack on his back and he did not notice anybody and he stood on the edge of the platform very near where the train was to come along, and I said to Alice Toklas do not notice him, we naturally of course did not want that anybody should notice that we noticed him, but if any of the French people did notice that he was not a Frenchman, well nobody noticed him and we supposed he was going somewhere probably into the Haute Savoy, perhaps yes, and we carefully did not notice where he went but he undoubtedly he certainly was an American and it was the tenth of March nineteen forty-four here in the station at Culoz.

  It made us feel funny, and yet it was so natural it certainly was. It reminded us of nineteen eighteen when we used to see the American soldiers in the south of France a. w. o. ling absent without leave and they would say to us are there any military police around here, and we used to tell them well not just here but they had better look out in the next town, but that was a joke compared with this, we do hope he got safely to where he was going.

  You meet so many people from so far away any day and you meet no one, but then railroad stations and trains are made to do this thing and they do it.

  Spring snow is prettier than winter snow. This the first real day of spring and I can say so. Spring snow is prettier than winter snow. Yes and no. This spring it certainly is, there was no winter snow and there is spring snow and everybody well not everybody but quite a few are beginning to be hopeful again, that spring snow is prettier than winter snow.

  Some one in the village just told me that the German station master, they have two at the station here, which is for a small town an important one because you change there for Italy and Switzerland and Savoy and the south, and so it is important and as many very many German troop trains go through they have a German station master. To-day the middle of March nineteen forty-four he said to the French trainmen, in three months Germany is going to go smash caput, and then instead of going back to Germany I am going to stay here to celebrate with the French, back there in Germany they have nothing to celebrate and they do not know how to celebrate but you French do, so I am going to stay here and celebrate with you, naturally nobody said anything but it was comforting not that he was going to stay to celebrate but that in three months time he thought the French would be celebrating. When I tell the story everybody says a little sighfully let us hope so. Hope deferred, we have felt sure so often but at last the Russian steam roller that was to roll in the last war and did not looks like being one really being one. I have to explain over and over again that the Americans even if they have not taken Rome have the airplane bases where they can go a bombing and without that bombing the Russians would not be able to roll, I get impatient and I say you French you have such old fashioned ideas of war, you just think about land fighting and taking places but we Americans we believe in destroying the production of the enemy. Yes they say, yes that is true, but, well they do wish that we would take some and go faster, but I tell what I always told them that Americans like a long preparation and then when they are really ready then something does happen, look at Tunis I say you complained just like that then, yes they say convinced but not believing and I understand I do understand because five years is a long time for their prisoners and themselves, and said one of them and if the allies win will our prisoners remain in Germany as hostages, hostages to whom I asked indignantly, I do not know she answered, I just wondered would they stay on as hostages, no America will insist that they be immediately released, oh she said if America will do that. It is always hard to understand anything but at the end of five long years understanding gets more and more difficult there is no doubt about that, yes and no, spring snow is prettier than winter snow, certainly this year we all do say so.

  And in between there is our goat. We have lots of food now, really more than we can eat, lots of everything butter cheese eggs meat sugar everything but milk, and so we had and still have a goat, but a goat has to have kids so as to go on giving milk, so ours went to the male and now in a week she is to have kids, and so of course we ask everybody what to do, they say, she should have an infusion, the kind the French take whenever they feel badly, of linden tree, or mint or verveine, or something, and somebody says either she or the kids should have warm wine, and she should have bread with oil and a certain herb on it, I think both mother and child and it was all a confusion, and some said she could manage to have the kid all by herself, and somebody else said we should be there but how can we if we do not know when it is going to happen and the stable is far away from the house, and some say we can have milk as soon as the kid comes and some say not, anyway, I took her out for a walk this afternoon and she seemed a little heavy but cheerful so we are hoping for the best. In the meanwhile day before yesterday I saw the first yellow butterfly and to-day I saw the first white butterfly and to-morrow so they tell me is the day the birds begin to find their mate the day of Saint Joseph, and they have two days to decide about husbands and wives and then no nonsense they go on to building their nest
s, to be sure it was a nice sunny day so perhaps they all did get it done but if not, well if not nobody tells me anything about if not, there is no if not, in country life in France, there just is not any if not.

  And so everybody is beginning to feel a little cheerful again except that young men and young girls are newly being rounded up to go to work in munition factories and where, well nobody is certain about that, they say in France but is it to be in France, and everybody has to decide something and they say, oh they say so many things, they can be worried about so many things, there is no logic to this war in nothing that is a war, well if and when the war is won will the prisoners be kept where they are as hostages, hostages to what I ask impatiently, so they say, they answer me, so they say. That is what makes it so extraordinary, everybody listens to the radio, they listen all day long because almost everybody has one and if not there is their neighbor’s and they listen to the voice from any country and yet what they really believe is not what they hear but the rumors in the town, by word of mouth is always the most convincing, they do not believe the newspapers nor the radio but they do believe what they tell each other and that is natural enough, all official news is so deceiving, so why not believe rumors, that is reasonable enough, and so they do, they believe all the rumors, and even when they know they are not true they believe them, at any rate they have a chance of being true rumors have but official news has no chance of being true none at all, of course not.

  We spend our Friday afternoons with friends reading Shakespeare, we have read Julius Caesar, and Macbeth and now Richard the Third and what is so terrifying is that it is all just like what is happening now, Macbeth seeing ghosts well dont they, is not Mussolini seeing the ghost of his son-in-law, of course he is you can see him seeing the ghost of his son-in-law, his last speech showed that he did, and any of them, take the kings in Shakespeare there is no reason why they all kill each other all the time, it is not like orderly wars when you meet and fight, but it is all just violence and there is no object to be attained, no glory to be won, just like Henry the Sixth and Richard the Third and Macbeth just like that, very terrible very very terrible and just like that.

  A long war like this makes you realise the society you really prefer, the home, goats chickens and dogs and casual acquaintances. I find myself not caring at all for gardens flowers or vegetables cats cows and rabbits, one gets tired of trees vines and hills, but houses, goats chickens dogs and casual acquaintances never pall.

  The children of course play funny games, yesterday I saw a little girl of seven putting two little ones of two and three under a piece of tin and saying now that you are safe I will say good-bye. What are you playing I asked, we are playing abris, shelters she said and that was that.

  I was talking to Claude Malherbe she had just come from a widow whose husband had died suddenly, yes she said they do now, they were very young men in the last war, they were in this war, but what is so terrible for them is that France was beaten, it eats them she said, I sometimes say to my husband but after all France was beaten, and he says do not say that, it is not true I cannot hear it, but said Claude it is true but of course women cannot suffer from it the way the men do, men after all are soldiers, and women are not, and love France as much as we do and we love France as much as the men do, but after all we are not soldiers and so we cannot feel a defeat the way they do, and besides in a defeat after a defeat women have more to do than men have they have more to occupy them that is natural enough in a defeat, and so they have less time to suffer, yes said Claude I do understand that.

  Sometimes it none of it is very real, but what is real, what you used to do or what you do now, well I used not to sit in a field and watch the goat eat, but I do now, which is real what you do now or what you used to do.

  It is funny that men who are supposed to be scientific cannot get themselves to realise the basic principle of physics, that action and reaction are equal and opposite, that when you persecute people you always rouse them to be strong and stronger, as the French say, sugar attracts bees more quickly than vinegar, or the fable of the wind and the sun to make a man take off his overcoat, it is funny it has been going on so long, persecution to make men weak and it makes them strong, and if you do not persecute them then they do get soft, well naturally if action and reaction are equal and opposite what else can they do, when people have too much peace they want war and when they have too much war they want peace, what else can they do, just now nobody seems to really know what they do want, peace seems to them almost as dangerous as war, it was the last time, and war is not dangerous any more it is endless and miserable, miserable and endless, and peace will peace be endless and miserable too or just miserable and not endless, and still yes still they do want peace, at least they want it different from what it is now. Some one was telling me, we were talking about eating, one does naturally frequently talk about eating or not eating, and we were saying how difficult it was to know whether people in any given place were eating or not eating, some who come from there, say there is plenty and some say there is nothing and anyway how can you tell. Yes they said eagerly, there is a woman of ours a neighbor who kept saying there is no trouble in getting anything one wants, why she said I can even get candied fruits, oh dear, they said and then gradually they found out that the woman had very little to eat, and it was not to make others believe that she talked that way but just to make herself believe it, and she did believe it. Generally speaking here in France more people eat than not, but then the French are pretty good at eating and eat they will, if one way of getting food fails they try another, and one way and another they do achieve food that is their way, they must eat and in order to eat, they must find food, so they find it, if at first they do not succeed try try again but incidentally they do succeed somewhat even the first time, but certainly they do succeed ultimately to get a good deal of it, they certainly do, it is their way, as they called it in the last war, the system D, debrouillez-vous, that is look around and find the way.

  Our goat died in not giving birth to her little one. Domestic animals so often die in childbirth, which is very discouraging, it does happen again and again, and now it did happen to our goat, our neighbor sat up all night with it and he and another neighbor worked three hours over it trying to get the dead little thing out of it but they did not succeed, this is what can happen even now, when each one of them is working in a factory and do special duty in guarding the railway, the French are like that, you must always do what you can to save the life of a domestic animal whether it does or does not belong to you, they are like that.

  It gets more and more perplexing about what they are feeling more and more perplexing. Was there could there be anything more dangerous than a war that is finishing, nothing, that is to say a war like this last one, not a war like ’14–’18 which was still a nineteenth century war but this thirty-nine to something war which is undoubtedly a twentieth century war undoubtedly.

  I like what they say here in this country, in the spring the trees weep, they shed tears, they do not say that the sap runs they say the trees weep and actually they do, they exude drops and the newly cut vines they weep too, they let fall a drop and another drop, that is what they do, I keep telling the French people that they do not understand twentieth century war-fare, I get angry I say after all if the Anglo-Americans had not blown up as they did everything in Germany and in the countries working for Germany the Russians would be still where they were in the elbow of the Dnieper but all you French people can think about is taking a little more or a little less territory, no destroy the provisions of the enemy and they must die of attrition, cant you understand, they say yes but really not, what they want is nice eighteenth century fighting that is what they really liked, not even nineteenth century fighting the French liked it best in the eighteenth century. Sometimes I wonder was Kansas before the civil war like it is in France to-day and like during the revolutionary like it was described by Fenimore Cooper in The Spy, everybody denouncing friends a
nd enemies, everybody being hidden in the mountains, patriots false patriots, bandits making believe being real or false patriots, the trains being blown up and now the French say it is being done by the Germans to make the French angry with each other and to-day at the station there was a whole train full of gendarmes, the national police and they had brand new automobiles and all sorts of armament and what were they going to do, and trains going one way or the other nobody ever knows what they are doing where they are going and do they know, very likely nobody can say so. All the French people are on the trains all the time, French people do like trains they are always going even for no greatly important reason, just to keep going, they like to move around, they like the social life of the trains and the stations, they like the regularity the irregularity and the coming and going, it is more sociable and more regular than an automobile, very few regret automobiles, very few indeed, they really do not worry about that.

  No thank you, and then so sadly because the little girl was tuberculous and they loved her so and the doctor said he could do nothing further for her and they bought a place in the cemetery for her and she began to get better and began to move around and they were so happy that they bought her a radio apparatus to amuse her, she had had a little one and now they bought her a bigger one. These things can happen when everybody is busy with perhaps the end of this war. They can happen because they do.