Wars I Have Seen (30 page)

And now the cook has just come up to say that the maquis are on their way and may get here at Culoz not any day but at any moment of to-day. I wonder. It is now the fourth of July and things certainly are moving.

It’s the fourth of July and everybody is on the broad grin. The French black troops with regular French officers are now within eight kilometers of us, they have been parachuted in the region and the Germans scared to death are packing up their bags and moving away and everybody stands around and laughs and with reason. It is a happy day.

To-day I took a long walk and all along there were groups of people telling each other all sorts of things, some had seen Canadians and some had seen English and some had heard on the radio that this department of the Ain was going to be completely emptied of Germans by the fourteenth of July and others had seen the black troops and anyway there was a sound of cannon firing and somebody had heard one of the German soldiers say, the only thing to do to shorten this war is to kill our chiefs, and sometimes when you realise that there have been twenty-four German generals killed or imprisoned in three weeks are they doing it, are they.

There is one thing certain now it is very bad form to mention maquis or mountain boys, you speak respectfully of the French army, in two days the word maquis no longer exists it is with great
pride the French army. There are such funny things the new prefect was talking of having he himself been condemned to death by the maquis and the wife of the mayor said yes he will write about it in his memoirs and then she added meditatively condemned to death we are all condemned to death.

It is very pleasant to have a new army with an old name or an old army with a new name, very pleasant.

We were in Belley yesterday and there everybody was excited the night before the maquis had come into the town and walked off with the sous-prefet with the chief of police with a thousand kilos of sugar that one of the cake shops had and lots of other material, and everybody of course was excited and upset, six of us had gone over in a taxi including our mayor, and it was very exciting and then we came home and then that evening the maquis came very near to Culoz and the Germans took out cannon to shoot at them and all to-day they were firing around the mountain and we all stood around talking and everybody said if the maquis come they bring food but if the maquis come and do not succeed then the Germans will take hostages and burn up the farms, oh dear do they want maquis or do they not want maquis, it all is very exciting we now have one hundred and sixty Germans in the town and they are not leaving, we all hoped that they would leave and that would be very comfortable for everybody and they would like to leave but Hitler likes everybody to stay where they are until they are all killed, he likes it like that, so I suppose even these few will stay until they are killed so that now that the railroad is not working any more there is no use in staying but their orders are to stay anyway. A lot get killed when there is a lot and a few get killed when there are a few but the idea is to always stay and get killed. That is the way to create the last battalion which will then be killed and we will all be happy, yes quite happy.

I had seen many things in this war a great many but I had never seen an armored train and to-day as I passed the railroad track I saw one, with the engine with a sort of tea cosy made of metal over it and behind cars with sand bags and Germans and we wondered
because there was no way to go the railroad being all broken up except just to Chambery and I came home to tell about it and it was almost nine o’clock of summer night just a little later and Basket barked and I looked out and there was a German officer and a soldier and they said in French they wanted to sleep and I said have you a paper from the mayor because they are always supposed to have and he said like an old time German officer I must see the house, certainly I said, you go around to the back and they will open, and I called the servants and told them to attend to them, I thought with that kind of a German it was just as well to keep our American accents out of it, and then they were at it, the German said he wanted two rooms for officers and mattresses for six men and he did not want any answering back and he did not care how much he upset the ladies of the house, and the servants said very well sir and he left and as soon as he left the soldiers were amiable and they carried around mattresses and they had three dogs and we locked up as much as we could and took Basket upstairs and went to bed, finally there were fifteen men sleeping on the six mattresses and the two dogs the third one would not come in and in the morning after they all left we could not find my umbrella it turned out that it was used by a poor devil of an Italian whom they kept outside all night in the rain to sit with the horses, and they took away a new pair of slippers of one of the servants and they broke the lock and stole all our peaches and they took away with them why nobody knows except to be disagreeable the two keys of the front and back doors, and then they left but the third dog would not go with them and he is here now, there were six hundred of them in the village and they are supposed to be on their way to fight the maquis, but actually they themselves thought they were going home, they were sixteen and seventeen years of age and when they were alone any one of them with the servants they told about how hard their life was and what an unhappy country it was where there were maquis, and one of them said, now the Russians are getting in to our country we will have to go to our country we will have to go back to Berlin to defend it and we will have to leave you French
people to defend yourselves as best you can against the English. The servants just listened and then when another German came in then the one who was crying got the same brutal expression on his face as the others, oh said the servants the miserable assassins. We heard firing all this afternoon and the rumor is the maquis had mined the road they went over and caught them, anyway that is the last we saw of them and that was only yesterday. All the same said the mayor they are not quite what they were, they threatened to shoot the mayor of the next village because he had not notified the Germans that the maquis were there, but how could I said the poor mayor when they imprisoned me and, said our mayor, four months ago they would not have listened to him but now they did and let him go. The rumor to-night is that they are all quitting the country and they should go the ill-omened birds that they are, say the country people. So far we none of us have seen any maquis, nor the Canadians that are supposed to be with them, but we will they all say we will. Everybody is worried and a little confused in their minds except about the Germans that they will go, that they will only go, where does not interest anybody.

And now the unhappy description of how a very small percentage of the French population feel, I just had a violent quarrel with our nearest neighbors and I will try to tell just how they do feel.

I forget to say that when these Germans came they came in trucks big trucks pulled by horses, gasoline they have none.

There was a story written about the war the American civil war called The Crisis by Winston Churchill and it was about Saint Louis and there was the north and there was a southerner and there was a northerner and they had been friends for years but when there was a threat of civil war they said can we meet can we keep off the subjects and of course they could not. The French are like that now they are violently divided and they cannot keep off the subject. Then in the last war there was a funny story. A friend of ours Louise Hayden had been all through the war in one way and another and later when she went home to Seattle a friend said to her, my dear Louise you do not know anything about the real
hardships of war, over there you were in it you were busy every minute in the midst of it but over here we had the real nervousness and anxiety of war we were not in it we could only suffer about it. Well this time the French have been like that, they could only suffer the nervousness and anxiety of wars, they were not in it, that is to say of course now they are in it but from ’40 to ’43 well really into the beginning of ’44 they were not in it, they had all the nervousness the anxiety and the suffering and the privations of war but they were not in it, and when I first heard that story I thought it was only funny but now that I have been with a nation suffering like that I understand the point of view of the woman in Seattle.

The French not fighting had plenty of time to worry and to talk and to listen to propaganda, and they have gotten so that they do not know what they believe in but they do pretty well know what they do not believe in, I laughed the other day when I met Doctor Lenormant because he surpassed most of the Frenchmen, he was anti-Russian he was anti Anglo-American he was anti-German, he was anti-De Gaulle he was anti-Vichy he was anti-Petain he was anti-maquis he was anti-persecutions he was anti-collabo, he was anti-bombardments he was anti-militia he was anti-monarchy he was anti-communist he was anti-everything. It is very complicated, the majority of the middle classes are anti-Russian that is to say anti-communist so they are anti-Anglo-American because they are allies of Russia, they hate the Germans but they admire them because they are so disciplined and the French are not, nobody in France wants to be disciplined but they cannot help admiring anybody who is and the Germans certainly are, and then there is always the real feeling that in spite of the German being so disciplined and so powerful you can always get rid of them but can you get rid of Russians and Anglo-Americans. In the small towns like this we live in the mutual hatreds of course are much stronger than in the big cities where they do not see each other every day, and they get so bitter that is the anti-Germans that they say to the pro-Germans I wish nothing more than that your son or your husband or your brother should disappear in that Germany you love
so, but I hate the Germans the other answers and I hate you and then they hate the maquis because after the maquis have been the Germans come and they shoot and burn and destroy and everybody hates everybody and everybody denounces everybody and then the maquis come and they carry off all the property and sometimes the men themselves who have been militiamen and then everybody gets excited and sometimes they get more fanatical and anyway now that Henriot is dead who heated them up all the time to hate each other and the allies are so undoubtedly winning well there are a good many who are changing opinions, they are quite a few that are keeping still and they are quite a few who are manufacturing American and English and French flags for the day of victory and this is the fourteenth of July, and all the farmers are getting ready to join up with the French army and in a little while they will be so busy eating and drinking and discussing politics that they will all be French together. But there have been moments there most certainly have.

To-day is the fourteenth of July, in Belley they made a beautiful V for victory in flowers and they made American and English and French flags and they were up all day, and even at Cezerieu six kilometers from here they did too but here nothing could be done because we still have over a hundred German soldiers, but we all went visiting and told each other how soon how very soon we expected to be free, and we do expect it.

To-day it was a shock when it was announced that the Japanese had executed the American airmen prisoners, one does hear so many awful things that I do not know why that should have been so shocking but it was and there is no doubt about it one’s country is one’s country and that kind of harm seems to be so far away from our country. It is queer the world is so small and so knocked about. To-night we expected to have Germans come into the house again but they did not, they came in and out and about and they are exactly like an ants nest if you put a foreign substance in it, the Germans run around just like that. The only thing that is human
about them is that they like to eat pork, that is the only human thing about them.

That was yesterday.

I was sitting with the wife of the mayor and in front of us was the main road from everywhere to Culoz. There were quite a few motor cycles rushing up and down with German soldiers and then there was a lull and then there came along hundreds of German soldiers walking, it was a terribly hot day and in the mountains heat is even hotter than below, and these soldiers were children none older than sixteen and some looking not more than fourteen, as they came and I have never seen anything like it since I saw the last lap of the walking marathon in Chicago. Our friend Elena Genin who lives near Belley and who is a Mexican, told us that she had seen the German troops going into Belley and she said I said to Joan, her daughter, this is not a German army this is a Mexican army when I was a little girl, and I did not quite understand but now I understand, these childish faces and the worn bodies and the tired feet and the shoulders of aged men and an occasional mule carrying a gun heavier than the boys could carry and then covered wagons like those that crossed the plains only in small and country wagons with a covering over them and later we were told in them were the sick and wounded, and they were being dragged by mules, it was unbelievable, and about a hundred of them more on women’s bicycles that they had evidently taken as they went along, it was unbelievable, the motorised army of Germany of 1940 being reduced to this, to an old fashioned Mexican army, it seemed to be more ancient than pictures of the moving army of the the American civil war. I suppose said Madame Ray the wife of the mayor that they choose them young like that, because children can set fire to homes and burn and destroy without knowing what they are doing, while grown men even the worst of them draw the line somewhere. It was a sorry sight in every way they had been in the mountains to fight the mountain boys who of course got away from them and killed and wounded quite a few of them and so they revenged themselves upon the civil population who were unarmed shooting
them and burning their houses and driving away their cattle, they had cows and calves with them dangling along on a string, it was absolutely unbelievable that in July 1944 that the German army could look like that, it was unbelievable, one could not believe one’s eyes, and then I came home having put my dog on the leash and when I got home there were about a hundred of these Germans in the garden in the house all over the place, poor Basket the dog was so horrified that he could not even bark, I took him up to my bedroom and he just sat and shivered he did not believe it could be true. They left the next morning and Basket has hardly barked since and I heard to-day that they shot a dog of one of the homes in the village because they said he barked, a big black dog that its owner adored, perhaps Basket will never bark again, I am trying to induce him to bark again, it is not right that a dog should be silent.