Wars I Have Seen (10 page)

But now not now we are still at the Russo-Japanese war and the first Balkan wars.

Now in September 1943 I am beginning to like trains again. For thirty years I never went into a train, automobiles were the means of transport including airplanes but no trains. When in America I did once or twice have to get into trains I was struck with the fact that there had been no progress in train travel, trains were just as dirty and just as much like themselves, night trains and day trains as when I knew them in the days of the Russo-Japanese war, or any other time. I once mentioned this to a French engineer and he said naturally enough, trains could not improve could not get more comfortable because cars had to keep the same shape. All the tracks having been made that is the road bed of a certain width cars could not be made wider nothing could really change there was too much to do to change anything, not like automobiles or airplanes which can constantly change their sizes and their shapes. And then there is another peculiarity of trains. They spend so much more time in stations than on the road. All of
which made for thirty years made one feel that trains were far away, and now there being only walking bicycling and trains we take trains and all the old delight in trains comes back. The making of so many acquaintances. There being so many people in a compartment and in the corridors, there being so many things happening, there being eating and drinking and very strange eating and drinking these days in a train, everybody carrying something and some quite openly eating what they are not supposed to be having and others not eating anything at all at least it might just as well not be anything, and in a station having a long conversation with a very nice refugee she in one train and I in another one, and telling each other all about what we were and where we came from. It also is very amusing. The German army was a motorised army so everybody said and so everybody thought and so everybody knew and now their automobiles travel on the trains, there are none of them on the road. Here where we see the trains pass, continuously the German army moves with all its automobiles but all of them on the train. No automobile on the road. Not one, not one solitary one. All of them on flat baggage cars with soldiers sitting around them and this must be a pleasure to every one. To be sure in a way trains are more romantic than automobiles but even though Germans love the romantic, it cannot really be a comfort to them. I realised some years ago that trains were really more romantic than automobiles, and it was in this way. They were having their annual fair in Belley and they had as one of the attractions, a little tunnel and a train going in and coming out of it and going around and around. Almost everybody in Belley had been in automobiles some even in airplanes but quite a number had never been in a train, and it excited them going in and out of the little tunnel and around and around. There are two things that are exciting going around and around and around and going straight ahead on rails. Rails are in a way more romantic than a road. A road is picturesque and it can even be endless and straight, but even when it has white lines marked on it to separate one piece of it from the other piece of it which is done in modern highways,
it has not the fascination of the converging lines of rails. Now we are in Culoz, and not any longer in Bilignin, in Bilignin there were roads but here there is a station and trains so naturally I know all there is to know about both of them. Now in September 1943, they are blowing up the trains as they come through the tunnel, just this afternoon, some heard a loud noise and it was the end of a train blowing up just as it came out of a tunnel and a little child was suffocated. Well nobody just knows why they do it, but they do and the young people including the young girls want to do it too. Not blow up trains but blow up bridges and tracks. I suppose it is that the German troops who have gone to Italy will not be able to get back to France. Simple human means have come to replace science. All the science is there if anybody can have anything with which to use it, but everybody is so busy having enough to eat, that science is not important, eating is important, and what can be more important than eating, nothing although everybody is getting pretty tired of growing everything themselves they are to eat or if not walking miles, or bicycling to bring it back, in order to eat it. Interesting if true, and it is true, very true.

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 strange 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.