SCENE III
Let all act as if they went away.
SCENE IV
Saint Philip With them and still
Saint Cecile They will they will
Saint Therese Begin to trace begin to race begin to place begin and in in that that is why this is what is left as may may follows June and June follows moon and moon follows soon and it is very nearly ended with bread
Saint Chavez Who can think that they can leave it here to me
When this you see remember me.
They have to be.
They have to be.
They have to be to see.
To see to say.
Laterally they may.
SCENE V
Who makes who makes it do.
Saint Therese and Saint Therese too.
Who does and who does care.
Saint Chavez to care.
Saint Chavez to care.
Who may be what is it when it is instead.
Saint Plan Saint Plan to may to say to say two may and inclined.
Who makes it be what they had as porcelain.
Saint Ignatius and left and right laterally be lined.
All Saints.
To Saints.
Four Saints.
And Saints.
Five Saints.
To Saints.
Last Act.
Which is a fact.
THE WINNER LOSES
A Picture of
Occupied France
This paper was originally published in the ATLANTIC MONTHLY, November, 1940. In EVERYBODY’S AUTOBIOGRAPHY, Gertrude Stein wrote: “It was very exciting selling The AUTOBIOGRAPHY of ALICE B. TOKLAS as I had said I always wanted two things to happen to be printed in the ATLANTIC MONTHLY and in the SATURDAY EVENING POST.… I do wish Mildred Aldrich had lived to see it, she would have liked it, for they did print it, but after all I do want them to print something else to prove it was not only that they wanted.” Miss Stein lived to see the fulfillment of her wishes. The ATLANTIC published BUTTER WILL MELT in February, 1937, YOUR UNITED STATES in October, 1937, and The WINNER LOSES in November, 1940. Her wish about the SATURDAY EVENING POST was realized too.
We were spending the afternoon with our friends, Madame Pierlot and the d’Aiguys, in September ’39 when France declared war on Germany—England had done it first They all were upset but hopeful, but I was terribly frightened; I had been so sure there was not going to be war and here it was, it was war, and I made quite a scene. I said, ‘They shouldn’t! They shouldn’t!’ and they were very sweet, and I apologized and said I was sorry but it was awful, and they comforted me—they, the French, who had so much at stake, and I had nothing at stake comparatively.
Well, that was a Sunday.
And then there was another Sunday and we were at Béon again that Sunday, and Russia came into the war and Poland was smashed, and I did not care about Poland, but it did frighten me about France—oh dear, that was another Sunday.
And then we settled down to a really wonderful winter.
We did not know that we were going to stay all winter. There is no way of heating this stone house except by open fires, and we are in the mountains, there is a great deal of snow, and it is cold; but gradually we stayed. We had some coal, enough for the kitchen stove, and one grate fire that we more or less kept burning day and night, and there is always plenty of wood here as we are in wooded mountains, so gradually we stayed the winter. The only break was a forty-eight-hour run to Paris to get our winter clothing and arrange our affairs and then we were back for the winter.
Those few hours in Paris made us realize that the country is a better place in war than a city. They grow the things to eat right where you are, so there is no privation, as taking it away is difficult, particularly in the mountains, so there was plenty of meat and potatoes and bread and honey and we had some sugar and we even had all the oranges and lemons we needed and dates; a little short of gasoline for the car, but we learned to do what we wanted with that little, so we settled down to a comfortable and pleasantly exciting winter.
I had not spent a winter in the country, in the real country, since my childhood in California and I did enjoy it; there was snow, and moonlight, and I had to saw wood. There was plenty of wood to be had, but no men to saw it; and every day Basket II, our new poodle, and I took long walks. We took them by day and we took them in the evening, and as I used to wander around the country in the dark—because of course we had the blackout and there was no light anywhere, and the soldiers at the front were indulging in a kind of red Indian warfare all that winter—I used to wonder how anybody could get near without being seen, because I did get to be able to see every bit of the road and the fields beside them, no matter how dark it was.
There were a number of people all around spending the winter unexpectedly in the country, so we had plenty of society and we talked about the war, but not too much, and we had hired a radio wireless and we listened to it, but not too much, and the winter was all too soon over.
I had plenty of detective and adventure stories to read, Aix and Chambéry had them left over, and I bought a quantity every week, and there was an English family living near Yenne and they had books too, and we supplied each other.
One of the books they had I called the Bible; it was an astrological book called The Last Year of War, written by one Leonardo Blake. I burnt my copy the day of the signing of the armistice, but it certainly had been an enormous comfort to us all in between.
And so gradually spring came, a nice early spring, and all the men in the village had leave for agriculture and they all came home for a month, and nobody was very uneasy and nobody talked about the war, but nobody seemed to think that anything was going to happen. We all dug in our gardens and in the fields all day and every day, and March and April wore away.
There were slight political disturbances and a little wave of uneasiness, and Paul Reynaud, as the village said, began to say that there were not to be any more Sundays. The post-office clerks were the first to have their Sundays taken away. The village said it as a joke, ‘Paul Reynaud says that there are not to be any more Sundays.’ As country people work Sundays anyway when there is work, they said it as a joke to the children and the young boys, ‘Paul Reynaud says that there are not to be any Sundays any more.’ By that time all the men who had had an agricultural leave were gone again, and April was nearly over.
The book of astrological predictions had predicted all these things, so we were all very well satisfied.
Beside these astrological predictions there were others, and the ones they talked about most in the country were the predictions of the curé d’Ars. Ars is in this department of the Ain, and the curé, who died about eighty years ago, became a saint; and he had predicted that this year there would be a war and the women would have to sow the grain alone, but that the war would be over in time for the men to get in the harvest; and so when Alice Toklas sometimes worried about how hot it would be all summer with the shutters closed all the evening I said, ‘Do not worry, the war will be over before then; they cannot all be wrong.’
So the month of March and April went on. We dug in the garden, we had a lot of soldiers in Belley, the 13th Chasseurs and the Foreign Legion being fitted out for Norway; and then Sammy Stewart sent us an American Mixmaster at Easter and that helped make the cakes which were being made then for the soldiers and everybody, and so the time went on. Then it was more troublesome, the government changed—the book of prophecy said it would, so that was all right—and the soldiers left for Norway; and then our servant and friend Madame Roux had her only son, who was a soldier, of course, dying of meningitis at Annecy, and we forgot everything for two weeks in her trouble and then we woke up to there being a certain uneasiness.
The book of prophecy said that the month of May was the beginning of the end of the Nazis, and it gave the dates. They were all Tuesdays—well, anyway they were mostly Tuesdays—and they were going to be bad days for the Nazis, and I read
the book every night in bed and everybody telephoned to ask what the book said and what the dates were, and the month began.
The dates the book gave were absolutely the dates the tilings happened.
The first was the German attack on the new moon, the seventh, and that was a Tuesday.
Tuesdays had begun.
Everybody was quiet; one of the farmers’ wives—the richest of the fanners and our town councilor—was the only one who said anything. She always said, ‘Ils avancent toujours, ces coquins-là.’ ‘The rascals are always coming on,’ she said.
There was nothing else to say and nobody said it, and then the Germans took Sedan.
That gave us all so bad a turn that nobody said anything; they just said how do you do, and talked about the weather, and that was all—there was nothing to say.
I had been in Paris as a child of five at school, and that was only ten years after the Franco-Prussian War and the debacle which began with Sedan, and when we children swung on the chains around the Arc de Triomphe we were told that the chains were there so that no one could pass under it because the Germans had, and so the name Sedan was as terrible to me as it was to all the people around us and nobody said anything. The French are very conversational and they are always polite, but when there is really nothing to say they do not say anything. And there was nothing to say.
The next tiling was that General Weygand was appointed the head of the army and he said if they could hold out a month it would be all right. Nobody said anything. Nobody mentioned Gamelin’s name—nobody.
I once said to a farmer that Gamelin’s nose was too short to make a good general, in France you have to have a real nose, and he laughed; there was no secrecy about anything, but there was nothing to say.
We had the habit of going to Chambéry to do our shopping once a week; we always went on Tuesdays because that suited best in every way, and so it was Tuesday, and nobody was very cheerful. We had a drink in a café, Vichy for me and pineapple juice for Alice Toklas, and we heard the radio going. ‘What’s the news?’ we asked mechanically. ‘Amiens has fallen,’ said the girl.
‘Let’s not believe it,’ I said; ‘you know they never hear it straight.’ So we went to the news bulletin, and there it was not written up, and we said to the girl in charge, ‘You know, they are putting out false news in the town; they told us Amiens was taken.’ ‘No,’ she said, ‘but I will go and ask.’ She came back; she said, ‘Yes, it is true.’
We did not continue shopping, we just hurried home.
And then began the series of Tuesdays in which Paul Reynaud in a tragic voice told that he had something grave to announce.
That was that Tuesday.
And the next Tuesday was the treason of the Belgian king.
And he always announced it the same way, and always in the same voice.
I have never listened to the radio since.
It was so awful that it became funny.
Well, not funny, but they did all want to know if next Tuesday Paul Reynaud would have something grave to announce.
And he did.
‘Oh dear, what a month of May!’ I can just hear Paul Reynaud’s voice saying that.
Madame Pierlot’s little granddaughter said not to worry, it was the month of the Virgin, and nothing begun in the month of Virgin could end badly; and the book of prophecy had predicted every date, but exactly. I used to read it every night; there was no mistake, but he said each one of these days was a step on in the destruction of the Third Reich, and here we were: I still believed, but here we were, one Tuesday after another; the dates were right, but oh dear!
Of course, as they were steadily advancing, the question of parachutists and bombing became more active. We had all gotten careless about lights, and wandering about, but now we were strict about lights, and we stayed at home.
II
I had begun the beginning of May to write a book for children, a book of alphabets with stories for each letter, and a book of birthdays—each story had to have a birthday in it— and I did get so that I could not think about the war but just about the stories I was making up for this book. I would walk in the daytime and make up stories, and I walked up and down on the terrace in the evening and made up stories, and I went to sleep making up stories, and I pretty well did succeed in keeping my mind off the war except for the three times a day when there was the French communiqué, and that always gave me a sinking feeling in my stomach, and though I slept well every morning I woke up with that funny feeling in my stomach.
The farmers who were left were formed into a guard to wander about at night with their shotguns to shoot parachutists if they came. Our local policeman, the policeman of Belley, lives in Bilignin, and he had an up-to-date anti-parachutist’s gun. He did not look very martial and I said to him, ‘What are you going to do with it?’ and he said, ‘I—I am not afraid.’ Well, Frenchmen are never afraid, but they do like peace and their regular daily life. So now nobody talked about the war; there was nothing to say about that. They talked about parachutists and Italy and that was natural enough—we are right here in a corner made by Italy and Switzerland.
The women did say, ‘They are advancing all the time, the rascals,’ but the men said nothing. They were not even sad; they just said nothing.
And so that month was almost over; and then one day, it was a Sunday, I was out walking with Basket just before lunch, and as I came up the hill Emil Rosset and the very lively servant they had, who had been with them for twenty-five years and had had a decoration and reward by the government for faithful service on a farm, and who in spite of all that is very young and lively, were sta ding pointing and said, ‘Mademoiselle! Mademoiselle! Did you see them?’ ‘What?’ I said. ‘The airplanes—the enemy airplanes! There they go, just behind the cloud!’
Well, I just did not see them; they had gone behind the clouds.
There were eight, they told me, and were flying very feebly.
We have a range of hills right in front of the terrace; on the other side of these hills is the Rhone, and that is where they had come from.
Of course we were all really excited; enemy airplanes in a city are depressing, but in the open country, with wooded hills all around, they are exciting.
We have several very religious families in Bilignin and one with four girls and a boy, and they all go into Belley to Mass, and Madame Tavel said to me, ‘I knew it’—it was her day to stay home with the animals—‘I knew it: they always come on Sunday and burn the church.’ She had been a young girl in French Lorraine in the last war and met her husband there, who had been a prisoner.
‘But,’ she said, ‘of course we have to go to Mass just the same.’
It was she who later on said to her little girl, who was to go out into the fields with the cows and who was crying, Madame Tavel said, ‘Yes, my little one, you are right to cry. Weep. But, little one, the cows have to go, and you with them all the same. Tu as raison, pleures, ma petite.’
We went over to Culoz, which is about twelve kilometres away, to see our friends and to hear the news. Culoz is the big railroad station in this part of the world where trains are made up for various directions, and there they had dropped bombs. All the veterans of Culoz turned out to see the bombs drop and they were disappointed in them; they found them to be bombs of decidedly deuxième catégorie, very second-rate indeed.
It was the only time we had bombs really anywhere near us, and one of the German airplanes was brought down near a friend’s house not far away and a country boy seventeen years old brought in the aviators, and it was a pleasant interlude, and we could all talk again and we had something to talk about and the veterans all were very pleased for the first time in this war; one of our friends remarked that it really was a fête pour les anciens combattants.
The war was coming nearer. The mayor of Belley came to Bilignin to tell the mothers that two of their sons were killed.
It was sad; they were each one the only sons of widows who had lost t
heir husbands in the last war, and they were the only ones, now the war is over we know, who were killed anywhere in this countryside.
They were both hard-working quiet fellows twenty-six years old, and had gone to school together and worked together and one of them had just changed his company so as to be near the other, and now one bomb at the front bad killed them both.
That month was over and June was commencing.
I had finished the child’s book and had settled down to cutting the box hedges. We have what they call a jardin de curé, with lots of box hedges and little paths and one tall box pillar, and I found that cutting box hedges was almost as soothing as sawing wood. I walked a great deal and I cut box hedges, and every night I read the book of prophecy and went promptly to sleep.
And none of us talked about the war because there was nothing to say.
The book of prophecy once more gave the significant days for June and they were absolutely the days that the crucial events happened, only they were not the defeat of Germany but the downfall of France.
It made me feel very Shakespearean—the witches’ prophecy in Macbeth about the woods marching and Julius Cæsar and the Ides of March; the twentieth century was just like that and like nothing else.
And then Italy came into the war and then I was scared, completely scared, and my stomach felt very weak, because—well, here we were right in everybody’s path; any enemy that wanted to go anywhere might easily come here. I was frightened; I woke up completely upset. And I said to Alice Toklas, ‘Let’s go away.’ We went into Belley first and there were quantities of cars passing, people getting away from Besançon, both of us and all the Belleysiens standing and looking on; and I went to the garage to have my car put in order and there were quantities of cars getting ready to leave, and we had our papers prepared to go to Bordeaux and we telephoned to the American consul in Lyon and he said, I’ll fix up your passports. Do not hesitate—leave.’
And then we began to tell Madame Roux that we could not take Basket with us and she would have to take care of him, but not to sacrifice herself to him; and she was all upset and she said she wished we were away in safety but that we would not leave, and she said the village was upset and so were we, and we went to bed intending to leave the next morning.