Selected Writings of Gertrude Stein (89 page)

It is nice that the forces of the interior the French are helping things along so well, it makes all the French people content that they are taking part and everybody is happy and gay.

When bread is the staff of life then we eat bread and butter yes we do eat bread and butter.

I remember when I was young and in a book we had with illustrations there was one where the Goths and the Vandals threw around and broke all the works of art in Italy, and

I remember being terribly worried about all this destruction and then one day when I felt very worried about it all about the destruction of even more ancient monuments in buried cities I suddenly said to myself well after all there are miles more of works of art that even people who are really interested in them can see in their life time so why worry. But now with Florence being destroyed and Normandy and marching on Paris they are near Chartres to-day the Americans and it does kind of make one feel funny really feel funny it seemed endless this occupation of France and now there they are the American tanks near Chartres, dear me oh dear me it does make one feel funny.

Here we are so excited and rather querulous with waiting except that our minds are pretty well taken off our troubles by our own local excitements, we still have our fifty odd Germans in the region but they are frightened and they stay where they are they were in a village near by to buy some wine and the maquis heard they were there and they came along and shot dead an officer and two soldiers and now well naturally the village is frightened the maquis go away but the Germans well they are afraid to come back but now they
have an evil habit of sending over five or six airplanes from Amberieu near Bourg and they drop bombs on a village, three days ago they did this completely wiping out a village and killing most of the population and almost every day these six odd German airplanes come over our heads, and what will they do, this we do not know, but something horrible that is certain.

Besides all this and which is really most exciting are the Robin Hood activities of the maquis. Night before last they came into the town, and they visited three of the principal shops whose owners aided and abetted the Germans and from one they took his car and fifty thousand francs from another they took all his hidden provisions quantities of macaroni and oil and twenty-five thousand francs and now all the rest who have either profited or been for the Germans are naturally most nervous. The maquis are using this money to help the villagers whose homes have been burnt by the Germans. They say the friends of the Germans should pay for the victims of the Germans. And then there are the shop keepers who are on the border land between friend and enemy and they are frightened, and then there are the type of old grumblers who always find everything the young generation do frightful and naturally they have talked too much against the maquis and they are worried and then there are the decayed aristocrats, who are always hoping that a new regime will give them a chance and they are the most furious of all against the defeat of the Germans they and the decayed bourgeoisie, who feel sure that everybody but themselves should be disciplined, I had a row with one of them on the street last night and my parting word in a loud voice was that she should be more charitable, using it in the American sense of charitable in thought, and the whole population laughed because she is notoriously not in deed, and everybody thought naturally I meant that but of course I did not. Then there is a very funny thing about the church bigots, they are all for the Germans, the clergy in general in France not, distinctly not, but all the old men and women who are known in France as the frogs in holy water or the mice of the sacristy they strangely enough considering how the Germans have
treated the catholics in Germany are all for the Germans. It is like in the last war all the pacifists were for Germany. I used not to understand but I am beginning to now. The feeling is that all that makes for liberty and liveliness is against those that either by weakness or by strength want to suppress the others and so the Germans who are the Germans who are the arch-disciplinarians because both of their weakness and their strength they want to stop liberty so those who want liberty suppressed because liberty is a criticism of them are pro-German.

It is funny really funny, the maquis have taken charge of Culoz, they have put up notices under the heading of the fourth republic telling the population what to do and all the time there are twenty-five German soldiers at the station as frightened as rabbits, they stay out only long enough to buy their provisions and retire back to their station, across the river there are still fifty to two hundred but nobody does seem to pay any attention, the maquis do not even take the trouble to gather them in, but they will so they say and put them to work. I like their calling it the fourth republic, the French dearly love a new form of government, they do love a change, they might have thought that the third republic was just going on but not at all there was an in between, the dictatorship or the oligarchy of Vichy so you just could not have it the third republic it has to be a fourth republic. There have been so many these last hundred and forty years, I think I have counted them once already in this book, three different varieties of monarchy, two empires three republics, one commune one oligarchy and dictatorship, and now here we are at a fourth republic and everybody is pleased. It makes them feel gay and cheerful. The German captain who left with the hundred and fifty soldiers was driven to Lyon by one of the taxis from Culoz, the taxi man came back and he said the German captain cried when he said good-bye, he said he had been so happy in Culoz and had hoped to once more see his wife and children but now he was ordered to Normandy and of course he cried and expected the French chauffeur to sympathise with him. They certainly are a funny people they certainly are

Alice Toklas has just commenced typewriting this book, as long as there were Germans around we left it in manuscript as my handwriting is so bad it was not likely that any German would be able to read it, but now well if they are not gone they are so to speak not here, we can leave our windows open and the light burning, dear me such little things but they do amount to a lot, and it is so. They have left Florence, that is something to the good and everybody cheers up, they are now expecting it to be all over by the fifteenth of August. The French like to set a date it cheers them, but it does seem rather soon, they all also say that in this region there is an English colonel and fifteen Canadian officers, but are they, sometimes we believe it and sometimes we do not. If they are here it would be nice to see them.

There are the Germans still here some forty odd but we never see them in the village the way we used to, why not, I asked the mayor, he twinkled he said they sleep all day, because they mount guard all night, they are afraid I said like rabbits he said. Everybody is so pleased that the overbearing Germans are afraid like rabbits, everybody is pleased.

Even though the Germans are still here the maquis have taken over the victualing of our town as they have done in all the region, they are distributing lots more butter and cheese than there was. They take all that was being prepared in the dairies for the Germans. Look said the cook excitedly, it is butter done up in tinfoil, oh it was prepared for those dirty Boches for the evil birds and now we have it come quick Madame and taste it. She is keeping the tinfoil as a sacred souvenir, the first spoil from the enemy. Ah she said they made us cry since forty and now they cry. Naturally it is difficult to get medicines, even the Germans have not much of that so the maquis cannot take it from them so everybody is going back to old herb remedies. The old people are always being consulted to remember what they did when they were young, for bruises you use wild verbena pounded and for disinfecting and reducing swelling application of the petals of the Easter lily preserved in eau de vie and foot baths of boiled ivy.

Just how I do not know but the French workers in Germany
commence to come back. How they get away they do not say but in the last few days three of them have come back. And they describe Germany as she is.

And just to-day we are most awfully excited because the allies have just made a landing in the south of France and we will be on their way up and it is most exciting. One woman just told me that she had two spare rooms and although it was Assumption and a holiday she was immediately starting to fix them up for the first American soldiers, and the whole population wants to learn English and quickly.

As I was saying some forced workers in Germany have made their way back, you never do know how the French do it but they always keep wandering back and apparently without very much difficulty, they decide that they want to come home and they come.

As I say their descriptions of Germany are funny. They say the civilian population still stupidly believes in victory, they have not changed but that the army is completely discouraged, and besides they are comforting themselves by shooting their officers, it would seem that Hitler has ordered that any soldier should shoot any officer or soldier whom he heard talking against the government, and say the French naturally any soldier who has a grievance has nothing to do but shoot the man against whom he has it and say it was because he spoke against the government and then instead of being punished he is congratulated. And moreover the German army is beginning to mutiny, so these French boys say, but as long as the civilians still believe in victory Germany will not give in. The thing that fills all the French in Germany with horror is the way the Germans treat the Russians, women as well as men, the Germans fear them so that they go quite crazy with brutality, that is the French explanation of the situation.

All this reminds me that one day in Paris, we had a lot of people for dinner it was about ’35 and they were talking Nazi and Hitler and I said it was Hitler’s intention to destroy Germany, and that was because he was an Austrian and an Austrian in his heart has a hatred for Germany so great even if unconscious that if he could he would destroy Germany
and Hitler can and will. They all thought that I was only trying to be bright but not at all it is true, if Hitler had been a German he could not destroy Germans the way he does, it is like Napoleon who was an Italian and naturally was indifferent as to how many Frenchmen were killed. It is the judgment of Solomon over again, there is the call of the blood, but funnily enough the foreign monster has a glamor for the nation he is destroying that a home grown monster could not have. And so Hitler is quite comfortably waiting for the last battalion to fight and win or be killed, presumably killed but he has made them all feel like that because he is a foreigner and not a German, it is the other way to of a prophet not being recognised in his own country.

Oh well these days nobody minds death from fear of heaven or hell but there is there always is with death the cessation of life and life is interesting, and certainly it is for Hitler so why stop.

The little groups of Germans all over are still all over, ours just left yesterday, they were as inoffensive as Germans can be, but then they were really not soldiers they were mostly railroad workers and the few soldiers they had with them as guards were rather miserable specimens victims of Russian rheumatism, as they call it, and now they are gone to join up with the others across the river and the five hundred at Aix-les-Bains left to go away, but to the distress of the Aix population they have come back, the maquis have cut off all the means of communication and they are back again. The maquis say they are going to mop them up and I suppose they will. We see the maquis now, they have big trucks and all camouflaged, I saw one like that to-day the first one at a little town where I occasionally buy cake, and when I saw that truck I had a shock, have the Germans come back but no there was a little tricolor cheerfully waving from the front, and everywhere the cross of Lorraine and the tricolor painted, and it was all gay and cheerful not German at all. I heard to-day that Captain Bouvet is the chief of this region, he was a nice man, he and I in the darkest days of the war used to have long conversations on the cold winter days between Belley and Bilignin, being cheered by the battle of
London being cheered by the Russian entrance being cheered by being cheerful, and of course I did not know he was mixed up with the maquis, until just before the Germans left Belley they tried to catch him and his son-in-law but they managed to hide away not too difficult there in the mountains, and the Germans did not get them, he was a retired army officer who had specialised in the chemical side of explosives so naturally he has been wonderful in stopping all railroads and destroying bridges, and now everybody can know that he is he and it is a pleasure.

But really you can understand how the Germans could never have had colonies, when you see these isolated pieces of the German army get to be like hunted rabbits as soon as they are not winning, they are always frightened even when they are winning the most and you really had to be in a country occupied by them to realise it and if you are always about to be frightened you naturally cannot impose yourself upon primitive races. Unless there were a lot of Germans about they never moved without a gun on their back and that was before there were maquis. And this is undoubtedly true, how could they ever be a dominant race, just how could they. Everybody is so cheerful now, they are all making their little flags for the allies everybody the farmers even in the midst of the harvest, the wives are taking time to make flags. Very nice, oh so very nice, we can have our windows open, and everybody is cheerful. The poor people of Aix-les-Bains with their five hundred Germans back again, it is too bad, but it is better and the Aixois know that, that they were unable to get away, even if they have for a little while to have them back again. All the men young and old want to be in it they are all for being up and at them, they are very envious of those who already joined up are in it, and the French troops landed in the south and now oh how they all want to be with them.