Selected Writings of Gertrude Stein

by Gertrude Stein

  Are we excited yes we certainly are all around us there is fighting, the conversation in the village sounds exactly like the communiqués of the Yugo-Slavs in their early days of guerrilla fighting only we have we hope one great advantage, the Germans cannot get reinforcements because all the railways are cut and all the roads guarded by the mountain boys and anyway these days the Germans have other uses for their men even if they could send them here which they cannot. All day long the Germans rush forward and back through the town they requisition all the trucks and alas with their French drivers and then they go first in one direction and then in a very short time back they come with guns sticking out in every direction, the other day they stationed such cannon as they had everywhere in the village and we all a little fearfully went down to look at them and then later in the day they took them all away, there had been no fighting, they had been told when they were elsewhere that the mountain boys were here but they were not of course they were not, that is what wears the Germans out to be continually going where there is nobody and then when not expecting having a truck with its German contents blown off the road suddenly, we are in the high hills and of course that kind of thing happens easily with everybody against them and helping the others, it must be pretty awful to be surrounded but completely surrounded by hate, it must be pretty awful really pretty awful. One German told the baker who had been a prisoner in the last war and so had learned a little German that the population had better be a little careful, he himself did not mind very much when the children called him a pig but there were others of them that might and there might be trouble. Sometimes there are a lot of them in the village and sometimes very few but few or many they certainly do look worn out, and the mountain boys do kill and wound a lot of them there were five ambulances came over from Aix, German ones of course and big ones, to take off the wounded in yesterday’s fighting, and the German captain who was here has just been caught at Amberieu. The mountain boys do not stay in the towns, they keep to the hills descending into the town to barricade all the roads and then they go back to the hills, they are always up and down, they have cut all the telephone and telegraph wires. and so the Germans cannot communicate with each other and they have to go on the road, the other day just a little further along an Italian in the ditch at the side of the road killed two motor cyclists as they were going along, and then he quietly got out of the ditch and went on, how can the Germans tell which is which, they cannot, it is most exciting, nobody works except in their gardens because the railroad and the few factories that are here have stopped working there being no material and no way of sending things in or out, it is a mighty effective blockade and the Germans who are gradually getting killed can really do very little except move forward and back they should have gotten out as soon as communication with Italy was cut, because after that there was no reason for their staying here, but they are slow, they always manage to do everything just too late, just too late, thank heaven they do. I suppose they are human but they do look pretty awful, and even in their most uppish days they were awfully dead and alive more dead than alive. This is not a prejudice it is a fact.

  We are excited.

  Perhaps the department of the Ain will be the first department to be completely cleared of the Boches. That would be nice.

  They are fighting all around us this afternoon I was raking the hay with a neighbor and we heard the sound of cannon fairly near, nobody seems to know very much of what is happening, the mayor who is usually very well informed has no time to think about things like that, he has to find calves to butcher to give us all something to eat, we ourselves are very well off because they have been bringing us fish and nice lake fish they are, the bread question not so serious for us because we do not eat much bread but terribly serious for the French population, potatoes no matter how many they eat after an hour or two leave them hungry, but since either the mountain boys or the Germans cut down trees to bar the roads that lead to the mills that grind the com even if the mayor can get some wheat together how can it turn into bread, but there is always the Savoy, mysteriously the Savoy always has everything, some one has just given us a kilo of delicious butter from the Savoy and the mayor is hoping he really is hoping to get flour from the Savoy, the Savoy is always rich in food no matter what happens you can always get meat and fish and fowl and butter and cheese and honey from the Savoy and meat, I do not know why this is so but it is so and as we are just across the river Rhone from the Savoy we do not fare too badly, even if we are completely cut off from the rest of the world which we certainly are. To-day for the first time since the landing we had some letters from Lyon they came from the Swiss consul who has charge of American interests and they solemnly ask us to make out a paper stating if we wish or do not wish to be repatriated. It is a charming thought, ten days after the landing in France the American authorities seem to be quite certain that as soon as they like they can repatriate all Americans still in France. We giggled we said that is optimism. Naturally American authorities not really realising what it is to live in an occupied country ask you to put down your religion your property and its value, as if anybody would as long as the Germans are in the country and in a position to take letters and read them if they want to. The American authorities say they are in a hurry for these facts but I imagine that all Americans will feel the same better keep quiet until the Germans are gone just naturally play possum just as long as one can. Just that.

  It is a queer state living as we are all doing, you have no news except for the radio because there are no newspapers any more and no trains no mail no telephone and even going to Belley is impossible there are twenty-three barricades between here and there a distance of seventeen kilometers. As I say we live within the village completely within it, the Germans rush forward and back there are distant sounds of cannonading, some villages have been burned and that is all anybody knows. The Germans threatened to make a curfew at six o’clock and keep all vehicles including bicycles off the road, but the mayor told the Germans it was impossible as it is too hot to take the animals to pasture before half past five it is too hot and nobody can work in the fields until four because it is too hot, and as in France fields are a considerable distance from the house and now it is haying time carts have to move around so the Germans agreed and now the curfew is at nine o’clock.

  Is life real is life earnest, no I do not think so, it certainly is not real.

  This kind of war is funny it is awful but it does make it all unreal, really unreal.

  They must have been lonesome in the middle ages and that was natural enough because busy as they were with getting enough to eat they were pretty well cut-off from communication with everything and it is kind of lonesome in this present war which is so much like that, with trees cut down to block the roads and everything but still our friends did get over in a pony cart from Belley to see us and it was a pleasure, and besides they brought us some money which was also a pleasure because the traveling banker who used to come once a week to this town has not come and money is certainly a very great necessity these days.

  To-night the Americans have just had a victory and are going to take Cherbourg and that is a pleasure. To be sure in the middle ages they did not have a wireless and although it was threatened that they would take them away from us they did not and now it would be rather late for it to happen and I do like to hear their American voices. Everything is quiet around here now, nobody seems to know just what happened but it is all quiet around here now and we even had letters from Lyon to-day.

  Bread and cake cake and bread which is better, I myself think that bread when there is good butter is better than cake, bread and butter but when there is no bread and butter then there is cake Marie Antoinette was quite right about that.

  Some refugees have just come here from Normandy, they are friends of the wife of the mayor, they left Normandy just seven days ago and they progressed partly by bicycle partly on foot and partly by train, it took them seven days to get here, they we
re a party of seven with three children and the mother just about having another baby, they stopped at night and dug themselves a trench in which to sleep on account of the bombardments they describe the railways all through the north completely blocked and the German material scattered all about, and the Germans take the little roads because the big roads are bombed all the time, it is like well like nothing, although Wells did describe it in a kind of a way, and nobody says anything except it’s long c’est longue, which is I suppose the inevitable human cry, in the meantime the eagles are carrying off all the baby chickens and ducks because not having guns nobody can shoot them, we had seven baby chickens and now we have only two, and the poor hen screams and goes pale but what is the use, there is no use in screaming or going pale when nobody is allowed to shoot the eagles in the air. On the other hand the wheat the vines the potatoes all are growing well, and so if there is anybody there to eat when it is all over there will be eating for them, the refugees from Normandy said you could buy a kilo of butter for ten francs in that part of Normandy but there was nobody there to buy, there seemed to be people to sell but nobody there to buy, and it made us all sigh naturally enough although we did not want ourselves to be there to buy.

  Now they have made the curfew at six o’clock of the afternoon it was just to-day and all windows that face toward the street have to close from then until seven in the morning, and everybody is pretty unhappy because domestic animals will not feed in the heat of the day and farm work in the summer is from sunrise to sunset and everybody is worried, naturally enough and nobody knows why but really I imagine it is because the Germans are afraid of the mountain boys or the parachutists, but really since it is daylight until ten o’clock why should they make it at six. Of course the French population take it very simply that it is done to annoy. They take this for granted with all the German regulations, they only do it to annoy because they think it teases. Oh dear as the French say of the allies all the time if they only would hurry up. It is their only cry hurry up. The Germans are convinced of the efficiency of the new bomb, but not any Frenchmen, one German was telling about it to some Frenchmen and one of the French said to him but you are silly if you believe that, any soldier ought to know better they all say, but the German did not take offense, he just went on believing or did he. After all any hope is a hope to a dying man. All the French population can say is of the allies is if they only would hurry up, although they do admit that two weeks after the landing a great deal has been accomplished. One village to another is full of rumors. In Belley they think we have guns all around us, here we were told that all sorts of things have happened in Belley, but so far it is all rumor, the latest rumor is that the maquis the mountain boys have caught a colonel a captain and two ladies with whom they were out walking, and that is the reason they have made the curfew at six o’clock. The hide of a German comes high, said our cook why don’t they send them back, they are no use to anybody and then we could go and take the potato bugs off our potato plants. Well life in an occupied country is like that.

  I am going on cleaning the weeds off the terrace so when the American army gets here it can sit comfortably on it, Alice Toklas thinks the weeds may get a chance to grow again but I hope not, anyway I am making it nice and neat, and as the terrace is not on the road side of the house, I can go on working at it after we have to stay indoors, that is to say that we cannot go out of doors on the roads.

  In all these years I never had a wrist watch, watches to wear never particularly interested me, I like clocks and I am always buying them any kind of clock any kind of fountain pen, but watches seemed kind of dull, I like to know what time it is in the house but out of doors it is less interesting to know about the passage of time and in a city particularly in France you see so many clocks you hear so many clocks to be sure they do not tell the same time but no matter they do tell some time and when you are going to an appointment sometimes you go quickly because you are late by one clock and then you go slowly because you are early by another clock, but now that the curfew is at six o’clock, and I am sure to be out on the road somewhere and they do shoot you if you are out I thought it best to have a wrist watch and so out I went in our little village and asked the local jeweler lady whether she had a wrist watch, yes and a Swiss one and brand new and made for sport for women and men and I thought it perfectly lovely and I came home proudly and now I wear it with immense pride and joy and it seems to keep time and I get home in time and do not get shot by the Germans.

  The maquis are beginning to fight again, there was a lull for a bit and now it has commenced again and the Germans are taking all the gazogene automobiles and they are threatening to take away some of the radios from some of the people not to prevent the people listening they do not seem to care very much about that but presumably to get ready to get their orders that may come by radio when all the telephone and telegraph lines are cut which they certainly will be soon. Everything does seem as if something is going to happen that is what everybody keeps on saying. In the meantime our mayor has most efficiently gotten meat and bread and wine and corn meal and butter and everybody is very cheerful because they stand in line for hours but they finally get something and that is a pleasure. How they love a piece of bread. They certainly do. And I am going on scraping the weeds off the terrace so as to be all ready for the American army when it comes, one boy who came to-day and brought us fish said that he had seen an English soldier with his own eyes we none of us believed him naturally but it was a pleasure to hear and he did believe it.

  The Germans are very uncertain in their minds now, they decided to-day to give us the curfew at ten instead of six in the evening, it was posted up at the mairie and everybody was happy and then at half past five they sent the local policeman around to announce that they had changed their minds and it was back to six o’clock again, then a half hour afterwards they sent him around again to announce that it was changed back to ten and that is where it is now, or so we hope. But that is the way they are about everything, they come and go and they are afraid of their shadow, it is very hard to believe but it is true, and now everybody knows it, guerrilla warfare gets on their nerves it is so darn individual and being individual is what they do not like that is to say what they can not do.

  It is exciting to me to hear over the radio about Lake Trasimena, when my brother and I were still at college we spent one summer some weeks in Perugia at a pension and there were lots of us there and one day some of us went off to see Lake Trasimena because there was supposed to be a whole army at the bottom well an army of ancient days naturally with gold chariots, and we thought we would like a swim in the lake, and the young men took the boatmen with them at one end of a little island in the middle of the lake and we girls went to the other end to swim, and we swam without clothes in the sunset in Lake Trasimena, and I have swum in lots of lakes and oceans but there was something special about that and now well it is being mentioned every day. And Cherbourg, when my eldest brother was coming to Paris with his family, my brother and I had been living there some years already, my eldest brother was a little nervous about the trip and he had not much confidence in the ability of my brother and myself getting to the station in time to meet his train from Cherbourg, and so for several months my eldest brother wrote letters and each one of them ended up with a post-script it is six and a half hours from Cherbourg to Paris, six hours and a half. We used to laugh about it, it was a family joke six hours and a half from Cherbourg to Paris. Well perhaps, anyway it is Cherbourg, yes it is.

  Everybody is excited so very excited and all around us there are explosions, we do not know what they are whether they are cannon or bridges blowing up or avions or just thunder but there is a lot of it and everybody hears and tells of a different lot, the Germans in French local trucks, not having any of their own, rush forward and back, and nobody seems to know just why or where. When I was out yesterday, I met five Germans with guns on bicycles and they were followed by a truck from Grenoble with soldiers ha
ving mitraillettes pointing in every direction and then followed by a local taxi-cab containing two officers of a higher rank than we are accustomed to see around here, and where they were going nobody knows, do they, and then there was a private car that went to Aix, and in this was an officer who had been here and was not popular and he was in a car with two soldiers each carrying a gun and the officer was driving and the car swerved and one of the soldiers dropped his gun which went off and killed the officer. And then there was his funeral with all the officers present. Then I have been seeing a German soldier working lately in the local carpenter shop, and I asked the carpenter why, well he said he told me in his own country he was owner of a carpenter shop and had six men working under him and he said as he has nothing to do he would like to handle tools and as I am short handed I let him, he says the war has settled his hash all right, when and if he gets back to his home he certainly will find nothing there for him.