Wars I Have Seen (25 page)

How the wind blows but it always does blow in the valley of the
Rhone and we are in the valley of the Rhone, and we are still in the period of the red month where although it has been very hot it can freeze and nip everything and there are in this lunar month three days of the three saints or are they only two saints of snow and ice and until these days are past nobody can be sure but for all that there are nightingales and there are swallows and there are cowslips and even a few bats and they ought to know but do they, well and they all also say that this is a month when a landing should take place, there seems to be some reason for it connected with the sea, but will they neither you nor I nor nobody knows and that is certainly true enough.

To-day it is almost at the end of April and the bombs fell on Paris and Petain went up and flew the French flag upon the top of the city hall of Paris and had a triumphal entry into his capital, and, and you see the woman at Aix is right, they the occupants are phantoms otherwise how could it have happened. The Germans are right in calling Petain a foxy grandpa, he most certainly is, the country had forgotten him, so many other things seemed to be so much more important and he seemed since the young men had been taken away so frightfully helpless and not interested in doing anything and now little by little the interest has been coming back again and when he so simply went in to Paris following his flag met everybody in the streets and said I am coming back of course he was real and the others were the phantoms. It was Virgil Thomson who said that the French can accept everything that has the vital principle of longevity in it, in other words they dont like anything to die on them, death should be durable like everything else, their great men, like Jules Ferry, Clemenceau and now Petain they all have this quality of longevity, they are in a way like Chinamen, they are not in a hurry, it’s other people whom time kills not they, they are the only ones to persist that are like Chinamen about that, they do just go on, they do rise from the ashes, they do just go on, Petain’s going to Paris was really wonderful so simple so natural so complete and extraordinary, it was all that. Sometimes we complain of the French as is natural enough many strange things
happen in these days but when they do what they have just done, it is like Verdun again it is complete and incomparable.

To-day we had the first lilies-of-the-valley and that is a pleasure, the room smells sweetly even if the wind is blowing a hurricane, and we are all waiting for everything.

And then the next day we were all disappointed because Petain had to go on talking about the partisans and all the rest of it but I suppose he had to to quiet the Germans after what he did do, whatever the intention to every one it is a sign that the Germans are weakening. Here in Culoz the Germans have gathered themselves together from the surrounding country and have shut themselves in with barbed wire defences at the station and put in mines to blow up and they flatter the population or try to and say that they have never done anything wicked here in Culoz they have always been very nice and the population say perhaps but look what others of you have done and they say that was only Hitler hang him but not us, but this time really this time it is not the same, as the farmer did once say to me, the Germans are like that it is not their leaders who are to blame, they are a people who always choose some one who will lead them in a direction which they do not want to go, it is their instinct for suicide, the twilight of the gods, they are always going to pieces and when that happens they have neither pride nor courage, and that is the reason as a farmer once explained to me that he preferred that the Germans should win rather than the English, you see he said, the Germans after all even if they win we can always get the better of them, but if the English win well we are not so sure, and they really prefer that the Americans and the Russians win because these two have other things to do and they will not very long bother them, that is the way they feel about it and from their point of view there is a good deal of sense to it.

It is darkest before the dawn at least we all hope so, we are all terribly worried these days, alerts and airplanes and everybody wondering if everybody in Paris and Lyon are starving and indeed it is not impossible because with all the transport cut what can
happen to them. Of course we in the country here are better off for food than we ever have been, we have as much food and as much variety of it as we can eat, because now that there is no transport all the food that the country produces remains right here, and the quantity of food that the fields of France can produce cultivated by a few oldish men and women and young children is perfectly extraordinary. It is a miracle that never ceases to amaze me, a father and mother not very strong with a very aged parent and one or two young children, and the amount of food, of wheat, of wine, of brandy, of potatoes of vegetables of cows and goats of butter and milk of pigs and chickens and ducks and geese and oxen and food for all these animals and for themselves, the amount of food that these five or six people can produce in a year and not working very hard, all the time but not awfully hard, the quantity of food that they produce is an eternal miracle, and we even after this fourth year of occupation by an enemy which takes the biggest part the amount that there is still here to eat is extraordinary, it is extraordinary, it remains extraordinary. Of course every workman has a garden and that garden does produce a lot of food, for himself and family, of course and I forgot rabbits, everybody keeps rabbits and eats them, it is extraordinary. We are wondering and we are waiting and we all say to each other but of course it cannot be to-day or to-morrow, and one old man said to me when I said that well you mean that it is going to last two years yet not that I said and he laughed, any way it is the first of May nineteen forty-four and certainly it will not last two years yet certainly not, certainly not. I am wondering well better not wonder, better wait than wonder, and we are all waiting.

We have had two hens and it is very nice because every day one or the other of them have laid an egg and sometimes both of them and for these months now between them they have given us ten eggs a week and now one of them is setting and I have not had anything to do with a setting hen since I was very young, and at first I had to get a neighbor to take it off its eggs so that it could have its food, but now I am courageous enough to do it myself to
take it off and to put it back again, it would appear that they should always sit on thirteen eggs, that is the most lucky but we only had eleven but anyway it must be an odd number and now there are only ten because she broke one getting back on them again but nobody suggests that we should take one away to make it nine nobody proposes that so we hope that she will think there are eleven even if there are only ten and they will all come out and about and later on we will eat them, in the meantime we have found plenty of eggs round about, as I say now that the transport has stopped, all the food remains in the country where it is made and while we eat omelets we worry about our friends in Paris who have none. It is funny about chickens, they so naturally are themselves to themselves and to us and to the other chickens, more so even than dogs are. Dogs have much more social than individual sense, and the most definite thing is the difference in their feeling toward a dog whose acquaintance they have made while visiting in a house from their feelings to the most intimate acquaintance picked up on the road, the difference is complete and when they meet the one they have met in the home on the street, the greeting is completely different from that they have for the even very continuous acquaintance of the road. Everything about a dog is social more than individual, but a chicken not at all, god bless chickens eggs are so nice, I had a fresh egg to-day, to be sure meat besides and potatoes and carrots and apples, so we are not suffering for food, but the poor people even the rich ones in the big cities, it is very bad. Everybody is cheerful because it is spring, and to-day is the first of May and they were all walking about little very little ones as the parents said the new France with sticks and on the end of them banners and that is to say a rag and the front one of course a piece of red rag, it is funny and everybody so pleased, to be sure the birds are singing, and every night and every day the airplanes come over our heads but you get used to everything. If only too many of the young men would not be taken away that one does not get used to, and every time you hear of another one it is awful, a woman was just telling me to-day
that her brother was taken, they said he was in a truck with the mountain boys but he had not been but it is necessary that somebody says that he has been and they take him away, and put him in prison and I used to say when the women in Bilignin complained but after all you still have your sons and your husbands but now they have not got them any more no indeed they have not and it is very sad, nothing makes a country so sad as all the men taken away, when they go away to be soldiers it is not so bad, they come to and fro they have leave or they are wounded or something but when they are taken away like this, to be sure the large majority of them will come home again but oh dear it is awful.

It is still the first of May to-day and little by little we are expecting something every day.

It is certain that in this mountain country winter does most completely suddenly turn into summer, everybody is enjoying that, it is such a pleasure that summer is summer even in the month of May but, and then they all sigh if we could only enjoy it but it is difficult to know that summer is summer with all the boches that are around and about us. I must say that on the whole they are awfully decent about the bombardments even the one in Rouen which by some mistake destroyed the cathedral and the prefecture in the center of the town where there were no factories or railroad stations and incidentally almost killed the favorite niece of our ex-mayoress and even she when she was telling about it was very decent about it, there are a few that are very bitter but most of them do keep saying well you cannot make an omelette without smashing eggs and they admit that if the omelette is well made it is desirable, and indeed an omelette is good, including the surprise omelette that our cook makes with whole eggs inside the omelette, well anyway to-day when I walked my fourteen kilometers to get the cakes a nice country baker makes us and they are mighty good layer cakes, he made a nice one for each of our birthdays, with congratulations written on it in sugar, well anyway he gave me a warm handshake and said it is going to be over soon, what, I said, the war he said, ah I said, yes he said the landing in France is to
take place on the fifteenth of May the thing is to be all over the fourteenth of July, it is to be a national celebration and an international celebration, and he said, how many stars are there on your flag, well I said I do not know exactly how many now but certainly a lot, why, I said, well he said I am going to make you a wonderful kind of a wedding cake for the happy day and I am going to decorate the cakes with American and French flags, and I felt it was very pleasant that he was so certain that he could begin to worry about the number of stars on our flag, and I came home and told Alice Toklas about it and she was very pleased too. On the way home I met a man who was a refugee from Lorraine, he had a shop there and had been very prosperous and now he was working as a day laborer but his brothers helped him and he was sending two daughters to good schools because after all after all, and he has one brother who is a designer in a railroad works at Noisy-le-Sec and he has just been bombarded and the whole place completely destroyed, and he has another brother at Nancy and he was foreman at a factory and that has been completely destroyed, and there is another brother in Algeria but he does not hear from him, and anyway well we said good-bye and each one of us went on our way. In the meantime there are Germans here in the railroad station as station masters and one of them the one that is always hoping that everybody will be nice to him after the German defeat because he has always been very nice, now comes in to the park here of the property to rest himself, it is a nuisance we do not know how to get rid of him, he wants to be friendly but of course we do not, of course we do not, certainly of course we do not. And so we do not forget to remember that they are here, very little just here but still always ever here.

We have very pleasant neighbors and one of them has just had a baby girl and they had to name her Madeleine because the only safety pin gold of course that they had had the name Madeleine on it, you cannot these days buy a pin to suit the baby’s name you name the baby to go with the gold safety pin. We were all pleased with that.

Passing by the railroad tracks there are of course a great many freight cars because the trains go through here all day long and the freight cars seem to come that is they have the name of the town where they belong printed on them, the other day I saw a whole train with Breslau and Koenigsberg and Luxembourg and all the Polish and East Prussian towns that are in these days in the news, it did seem strange to see these freight cars here in this country so far away so awfully far away, and how do they get here and why, well this I do not know nor does anybody else here, but here they are, war is funny because here they are. War is funny.

These days you keep hearing rather worse stories about German atrocities against the civil population particularly in the farming regions of the higher mountains, are they worse than they used to be because they are like rats caught in a trap or are they not any worse and people believe worse things of them because they are hoping to get rid of them, you never can tell or is it that when they were more afraid of them they did not tell of the things that happened, the mental workings of people in a time like this are so simple and natural that they are completely surprising, you cannot tell who are the ones that are feeling one way or another way, you simply have no way of knowing or learning except unexpectedly what some one is believing, it is all very calm and very mixed up just now, every day has something to say, such little things but they do make a day. Every one who is helpful is very helpful. This is so.