Wars I Have Seen Read online

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.

  So then between babyhood and fourteen there are all these things, and romantic war with them, not to believe in but to dream.

  Between babyhood and fourteen there was frequent change of scene. Modern wars all wars are like that, they go places, where they never heard of in many cases, and between babyhood and fourteen there had been so many changes of scene. And different ways of traveling about, and that also is like war. Just now all the young men of France have to go, they do not know where, some of them run away and when they run away they do not know where and a great many of them are taken away they do not know where and this is all as it was between babyhood and fourteen. Europe and America and railroad and water and stage coach and walking and horse back and in every there was no astonishment and that is the way war is.

  I remember being very worried in reading, if anybody in the book died and did not have children because then nobody in that family could be living yet, and if they were not living yet how could they hear what was happening. This always bothered me from that time on until just now and now well now it does seem that the future is not important any more, the world has become so shrunken and it will never be different and so it does not mean much and there is no love interest, it is mostly parents who suffer, perhaps it was like that between babyhood and fourteen.

  Dear Life life is strife Claribel used to say, but she did say dear life and in any way it is and she d
id say life is strife but is it.

  It was all that between babyhood and fourteen, and it was the nineteenth century between babyhood and fourteen and the nineteenth century dies hard all centuries do that is why the last war to kill it is so long, it is still being killed now in 1942, the nineteenth century just as the eighteenth century took from the revolution to 1840 to kill, so the nineteenth century is taking from 1914 to 1943 to kill. It is hard to kill a century almost impossible, as was the old joke about mothers-in-law, and centuries get to be like that they get to be wearing like a mother-in-law. So as I was saying from babyhood to fourteen and of course longer much longer it was the nineteenth century and the wars civil domestic and foreign were nineteenth century wars, naturally enough.

  Saint George and the Dragon, Siegfried and the dragon, anybody and the dragon, the dragon is always the century any century that anybody is trying to kill, and the worst of it all is that the one that says he is trying to kill the century that has to be killed is the last piece of the century that has to be killed and often the most long-lived, such as a Napoleon a Hitler or a Julius Cæsar the century has to be killed and they are the embodiment the most persistent end of it they are to live while really in its being killed they have to go, only nobody does tell them so, nobody and so they never do know, never do know.

  However when I was a baby and then on to fourteen, the nineteenth century was full on.

  In the nineteenth century, there was reading, there was evolution, there was war and antiwar which was the same thing, and there was eating. Even now I always resent when in a book they say they sat down to a hearty meal and they do not tell just what it was they ate. In the nineteenth century they often did. And in these days 1943 when eating well actually it is like prohibition one is so certain that one is never going to eat again that one is not greedy but one does eat everything well in these days you would imagine that you would not take pleasure in what the characters in a novel ate when they did eat, but one does enormously, well anyway the nineteenth century, liked to cry liked to try liked to eat liked to pursue evolution and liked war, war and peace peace and war and no more.

  When I was then I liked revolutions I liked to eat I liked to eat I liked to cry not in real life but in books in real life there was nothing much to cry about but in books oh dear me, it was wonderful there was so much to cry about and then there was evolution. Evolution was all over my childhood, walks abroad with an evolutionist and the world was full of evolution, biological and botanical evolution, with music as a background for emotion and books as a reality, and a great deal of fresh air as a necessity, and a great deal of eating as an excitement and as an orgy, and now well just then there was no war no actual war anywhere.

  In the nineteenth century there was nothing more exciting than climbing a high hill or a mountain and seeing the rain driving across a wide plain or valley with the sun following.

  There was nothing more interesting in the nineteenth century than little by little realising the detail of natural selection in insects flowers and birds and butterflies and comparing things and animals and noticing protective coloring nothing more interesting, and this made the nineteenth century what it is, the white man’s burden, the gradual domination of the globe as piece by piece it became known and became all of a piece, and the hope of Esperanto or a universal language. Now they can do the radio in so many languages that nobody any longer dreams of a single language, and there should not any longer be dreams of conquest because the globe is all one, anybody can hear everything and everybody can hear the same thing, so what is the use of conquering, and so the nineteenth century now in ’43 is slowly coming to an end.

  Between babyhood and fourteen years, it is hard to know whether it takes a long time or whether it does not and if it does any part of it is interesting but very little of it is recollecting, very little and so emotion is remembered, a few dimensions, and what is seen and any day.

  Some days there are coincidences and some days there are none and when there are coincidences as there are coincidences that does make superstition and at any age, there is the same astonishment and the same belief, and between babyhood and fourteen there were coincidences and astonishment. There are coincidences now yesterday and to-day and to-morrow and then for some time there are none, but any time they are astonishing when they come. It is a long time that there has been no correspondence with America and then some one offered to make one by cablegram and the next day a cablegram came, which is what makes superstition and when you are young very young superstitions are frightening and when you are old quite old superstitions are comforting.

  War this war can neglect superstitions the war of 1943 because all the superstitions have been used up used up and passed away, and there is no feeling about having any new one or any old one. Some wars make everybody tired, not many of them, this one makes everybody more tired than most, I think the American civil war made everybody tired but it did not quite exhaust coincidence and superstition but this 1943 one, well in a way yes, and when I was in babyhood to fourteen little by little and all the time there was the excitement of coincidences, and of superstitions, coincidences were more exciting than superstitions in between superstitions were more exciting than coincidences and now again coincidences are not exciting but they are soothing now in 1943.

  Everything begins again, now they denounce one another, why nobody knows, just perhaps to make coincidences now that there are no superstitions. Madame Chaboux just told me this one.

  There is a woman living in the country, her husband was a farmer, there are more farmers than not. She was not well and she asked a neighbor to come and tend to her, she said she had pneumonia. The neighbor lived with another woman and the husband of each one of them was a prisoner a war prisoner. Well the one went to see the other, and she saw that the sheets were bloodstained and she said to the woman you have had a miscarriage have you not. And the other said how dare you denounce me. And she said but I did not I just asked to know. Well anyway she went home and about a week after a man in a uniform came and said the two women had to pay a thousand francs for having falsely denounced a neighbor and they said they had not and he said pay, and they paid. And they saw the other woman and she said she would take everything away from them and they all three had husbands who were prisoners and they were frightened and they told Madame Chaboux, her husband had been their doctor and Madame Chaboux told the mayor and he told her to go to the magistrate and she did and the police were pleased because they had always wanted a witness against the man and now they had two, and everybody was pleased and relieved even if they did not get their money back and their neighbor was still their neighbor and all the husbands were still prisoners.

  Well between babyhood and fourteen no one could believe any such thing, not in the nineteenth century but now well 1943, what can stop anything since although there are still coincidences they are not, not really any superstitions because there are not. Everybody is too tired to have them even when they get one thousand francs which they do.

  Such is war.

  Between babyhood and fourteen there is if not everything a great deal there is the suspecting of life and death not being sure of the same but beginning to be doubtful that it might be the same. And there is nature and its evolution and then there is coming home before it is dark in the evening after playing and then there is the beginning of being a legend. One can become a legend any time between babyhood and fourteen and one can one does they do know how it can come to be true that they are a legend. It is easy to become a legend between babyhood and fourteen, and so ever afterwards books can be read, because books are all about anybody who has become a legend, and I can remember becoming a legend again and again between babyhood and fourteen, and seeing the others between babyhood and fourteen and they can become a legend. They know they can they can become a legend if they have a dog behind them on a bicycle in a basket, they can become a legend, if they hold a flower in each hand, they can become a legend if they had
an accident and lost a finger, they can become a legend, if they walk up and down hand in hand, and one eye of one of them is always closed. They can become a legend and they do because a legend any one between babyhood and fourteen does become a legend, a pure legend. Later on the legend is not so pure because you mix yourself up with it but between babyhood and fourteen becoming a legend is just that it is becoming a legend. I can remember becoming a legend, I will tell several of them, several of those becoming legends and what they have to do with war. This war 1943 is not very legendary, that is one of its troubles, it is not like ’14–’18 war and other wars which naturally became legendary. This is more like the beginning of middle living when being legendary does not happen, but as I say between babyhood and fourteen everybody is a legend just anybody, and I was.

  Coincidences come to be stronger and stronger between babyhood and fourteen, they replace faith, coincidences are the foundation of games, they are the foundation of faith, coincidences, in between are not so important but from babyhood to fourteen and then again much later, very much later when one is old coincidences are important, they are real, they recreate faith they are not games, but they are the reality that makes a present and a future when perhaps there could not really be any. Take war, in time of war 1943, there have happened so many coincidences and they are always happening little coincidences, nice little coincidences, later on when I tell all about this coincidental war this meaningless war, this war that put an end a real end an entire end to the nineteenth century there were so many coincidences and they were the only reality in this time of unreality. The nineteenth century called coincidences a law of chance and worked it out but now that the nineteenth century is dead, coincidences are real again, they recreate faith they make a future, and they will make the twentieth century. Everybody, wait and see.

  But between babyhood and fourteen, coincidences were only really used as the really necessary basis of games, and what was real then were not coincidences but being a legend and I was, we were.