Wars I Have Seen (2 page)

That was the thing that interested me the most in the memoirs that he wrote and that I read.

And so to go back to historical wars. I naturally liked history and Shakespeare’s plays and historical novels and there was always war. Of course ancient history was full of wars and the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire was full of war but these did not any of them interest me as wars. English wars interested me, some French wars and the American civil war. And I was right because the American civil war was the prototype of all the wars the two big wars that I have completely lived. Also the American civil war.

Naturally my mother being Baltimore there was the South, and naturally there was the north. My father I never took on in war although he was north.

Of course there were Indian wars naturally there was no cinema then but if there had been, Indian wars would have been like that, although one could know people who had been in them and could see them the real Indians on the stage and there was Fenimore Cooper they were not real wars, not as real as some English wars in
history and certainly not as real as the American civil war. A very real war.

But naturally all my childhood was not taken up with enjoying past wars, although as an omnivorous reader naturally there was a great deal of war. There was one very funny thing about wars as a child sees it, although there are so many killed there being so many dead is not very real at all, my feeling about that was quite a separate thing and had nothing to do with wars. And that is natural enough. However near a war is it is always not very near. Even when it is here. It is very funny that but it is true. Perhaps if one were a boy it would be different but I do not think so. I think even when men are in a war actually in a war it is not very near, it is here but it is not very near. That is the way it seems to me from all I can hear and from all I can see. But the civil war was quite near. As near as a war can be. But as I say my childhood actual childhood had nothing to do with wars. As it really happened there were no wars just then none at all. There were just at the end of my adolescence but never before. From babyhood to the Boer war there was no war. No war at all.

So I had my childhood and my adolescence without outside of me there being any war.

What is there inside in one that makes one know all about war. You ask questions now why in Russia do not the Germans surrender when they are surrounded. And there is no answer except that perhaps they are afraid to. Perhaps. What is there inside one that makes one know all about war.

Death starts history and fears. And that begins very soon and dies out little by little or not at all or all.

A farmer on a hill said of the Germans, do not say that it had to do with their leaders, they are a people whose fate it is to always choose a man whom they force to lead them in a direction in which they do not want to go.

This same person on this same hill was saying, it was after a thunderstorm and we were talking about it together. Yes he said it is like them to call it a thunder and lightning war. Thunder and
lightning a storm of thunder and lightning can cause a fair amount of damage and frightens you enormously but leaves nothing else behind it, no after-effect at all.

And so from the time I was little all through my adolescence although I read and read about wars, if you like history and historical novels you have to and historical plays, but there was no really outside war at least none that I noticed or that anybody around me noticed.

For a very long time I did not know what it was to be a child although I remembered it so well and I wrote as if I knew but actually there is a great difference between having it and remembering it, and there are so many children just now and as many ages as there are in a country school.

I went out in the moonlight, and it was so lovely and not cold although January and in the mountains and I took a walk and I met on the road a young gendarme who the French army having been demobilised had gone into the gendarmerie. He was not of the village that is to say he had married a girl in the village as he had been in garrison at Belley and they had had a simple wedding and had brought their own champagne and sausages and now they had a baby. And I said how goes it and he said I have just been appointed to the personal guard of the Marechal. Marechal petain. Why that I said is a great promotion. Yes he said I do not know why, well I said you are rather better educated than your comrades, no he said just primary school, like they all have. And now he said I am going to Vichy and they are having my uniform made and I accompany him wherever he goes on my motorcycle. You know how to ride one I said. Oh yes he said I rode one in the war I was in the cavalry. Oh said I you were not then always in the Alpine troops, no he said after I escaped, I was a prisoner, I thought I would like a change. And said he now I am the personal guard of the Marechal and I am permanently attached to the government and if he dies whoever succeeds him, whether it is a dictator or something different I will be the personal guard of the government. He was only twenty-two and I wished him good luck and said
perhaps we would meet in Paris and said he if the government goes there I will but I hope it will be free and I said I have good hope and he said I always have had and he said he was would say goodbye to me before he left and I said surely, and I went on walking with my white dog in the moonlight.

So as I say I know what it is to be any age now that there is a war and so remembering back is not only remembering but might be being.

It is funny about wars, they ought to be different but they are not.

In a way that is what makes it nice about France. In one war they upset the Germans by resisting unalterably steadily and patiently and valiantly for four years, in the next war they upset them just as much by not resisting at all and going under completely in six weeks. Well that is what makes them changeable enough to create styles.

So I was five years old when we came back to America having known Austrians Germans and French French, and now American English, a nice world if there is enough of it, and more or less there always is.

Back to America and Baltimore where my mother’s people came from, I do not know why but one is always proud of the places your people come from, you may never see them or perhaps never see them again as a matter of fact I did but nevertheless, that is where your mother came from and I suppose there is more meaning to that than where you were born particularly if you never saw it again there where you were born that is where I was born. In Allegheny Pennsylvania. Anything can be a dream, and in war it is more a dream than anywhere. Just now they have sent forty thousand people out of their homes in Marseilles, it is so real to me that it is a dream, not that I know any of them, if I did it would not be a dream but we were in Marseilles so much during the last war and that makes it a dream and in San Francisco when I was a child along the water front, the women of the town all of them came from Marseilles, and when I saw them in Avignon and Arles along
the river front and at Marseilles they all seemed to be wearing the same wrappers, that is the kind of dressing gowns that they wore in San Francisco not far from Chinatown and that we used to see when we went to San Francisco with our parents, so that is what war is it is the inhabitants in geography.

A very nice kind of war was the Indian mutiny the Sepoy revolt. I always liked reading about that from Jules Verne on, it was such a satisfactory sort of war for the young, it could not be more satisfactory, there were so few killed and even very few wounded and everybody was a hero, and there were no crowds, Hindoos of course but no other crowds to confuse you. In a modern war there are no crowds because everybody is in it, so much so that there are no individuals, well that is something else, it is a queer life one leads in a modern war, every day so much can happen and every day is just the same and is mostly food, food and in spite of all that is happening every day is food, I had a a friend who used to say Life dear Life, life is strife, life is a dear life in every way and life is strife in every way. The Germans say that war is natural peace is only an armistice that the natural thing is war, well that is natural enough because of course it is so, only when you have too much of it it is just as dull as peace, that is when you have had too much of it. And so I was a little girl in East Oakland California and of course one did have to find out that life although it was life there was death although there was death, and you had to find out that stars were worlds and moved around and that there were comets and that there was wind and rain, grass and flowers and birds and butterflies were less exciting in California, but most of all there were books and food, food and books, both excellent things. And then also and this is strange if you like but I was then already sceptical about Utopias, naturally so, I liked habits but I did not like that habits should be known as mine. Habits like dogs dogs have habits but they do not like to be told about their habits, and the only way to have a Utopia is not only to have habits but to be liked to be told about these habits, and this I did not like. I can remember very well not liking to be told that I had habits.

To come back to Shakespeare, Shakespeare which I read so much mostly the plays about wars, English kings and wars often said that nothing was anything that human beings had no meaning, that not anything had any meaning and everything was just like that. And it did worry me even when I was seven and eight not really worried me but it was there and then well not then but all the years I was grown up it was not like that and now when here in France when we all thought the young men were safe they are now all being taken away well it is like that, Shakespeare was right it is all just like that, even superstitions are all just like that, they mostly, said the very tall thirteen-year-old girl, they are always bad luck and then we all hope again, just like that, and although Shakespeare is right, we all do hope again.

Once upon a time the moon shone.

The visitors came.

The piano was struck that is the keys.

The ages although only differing between themselves and fifteen made them polite and complimentary, and no one is careless and if they are there is a loss.

War is never fatal but always lost. Always lost. And as they all said this, they knew that they meant what they said. Always lost.

And this brings me back to the time between eight and twelve when I read and read and in between I read all the historical plays of Shakespeare and all the other plays of Shakespeare and more and more this war of 1942–1943 makes it like that. The horrors the fears everybody’s fears the helplessness of everybody’s fears, so different from other wars makes this war like Shakespeare’s plays. Rose d’Aiguy thirteen years old had just said that now having become superstitious because of course she has now become superstitious she notices that all the signs are bad signs, just like Macbeth just like Julius Caesar, the ides of March, and the general confusion, the general fear, the general helplessness, the general nervousness is just like all the kings, they are like that and they go on like that. The war 1914–1918 was not like Shakespeare but this war is the meaninglessness of why makes all the nothingness so real and when
I read Shakespeare between eight and twelve, I suppose I was drowned in all that but naturally did not believe it or did I. Certainly not later when there was more meaning and more dread. But in Shakespeare there is no meaning and no dread, there is confusion and fear, and that is what is now here.

It was when I was between twelve and seventeen that I went through the dark and dreadful days of adolescence, in which predominated the fear of death, not so much of death as of dissolution, and naturally is war like that. It is and it is not. One really can say that in war-time there is death death and death but is there dissolution. I wonder. May that not be one of the reasons among so many others why wars go on, and why particularly adolescents need it.

It was a very long time between twelve and seventeen, between Shakespeare and the Boer war which was the first war I knew to be a war, a real war where a country that was a natural country was at war.

And in between there was religion, which too had to do with adolescence and with war.

There is no love interest in these modern wars. I am speaking of the world wars but particularly of the 1939 war, there is no love interest, very little religion and no love interest. Religious people in these world wars are religious but otherwise they are like everybody in what they do and lovers the same way they may be in love but otherwise they are like everybody which was not at all as war was to me from babyhood to 1900, not at all.

From babyhood to fourteen which is the beginning of adolescence, life is mostly taken up with slowly knowing that stars are worlds, that words are ways and that force is strength and that wiles are ways as words are, in other words that one is one and that the others can come to be with that one. That is what is most occupying from babyhood to fourteen, and during that time there are things like having apples given one to take home one for you and the other four for the other four and slowly one by one they are eaten until there is none, and there is the reason for eating the last
one because since the other ones are eaten then of course there is no sense in keeping the last one, because then the story has to be told and why should it since after all all your life you can have it as remorse that it has been done. War is like that, it goes on like that it keeps going on like that and soon nobody has anything to eat that is nobody who does not take what does not belong to them and later although there is remorse the very last one has been eaten if not there has to be an explanation and if there is an explanation that does not help remorse nor does it help any one, remorse does not and not eating it does not, and so as I was then so am I now, and war, was not then but the feeling was just the same and eating was just the same in so many ways. A fish bone can even be a worry anything that can happen or has happened or has not happened can be a worry and that is what war is, and so what is the difference between life and war. There is none.