Everything is dangerous and everybody casually meeting anybody talks to anybody and everybody tells everybody the history of their lives, they are always telling me and I am always telling them and so is everybody, that is the way it is when everything is dangerous.
Life and death and death and life.
I like to listen to the Germans talking English on the radio. There was a very funny one the other day.
He said he was very much in earnest, he said that the English were a terrible people and he gave two examples of their passion for unusual cruelty.
In the first place there was the horrible fact that they killed unborn children, they believe and they preach that most horrible of horrible doctrines, birth control, can, said he, such a nation remain in the ranks of nations called human, no he thought not, and then he went on there is something almost more frightful there is Malthus one of their great men who says people should be killed off by plagues, by famine, and by wars, can went on the radio speaker can a country whose acknowledged great men preach such a doctrine, can they be called human.
And so he goes on and so they go on, and all the radio stations interfere so that nobody can hear any one and in the midst of all the misery it is not childish but very small boyish. It is strange the world to-day is not adult it has the mental development of a seven year old boy just about that. Dear me.
And so the world is mediaeval just as mediaeval as it can be.
They look like men they look like men they look like men-of-war.
I had that over the radio in 1939 and now it is January 1944, and they still look like men, and they still look like men, but and they still look like men, of war.
They do and they do not.
I often think that the real beginning of this plunge back into mediaevalism was the abdication of Edward, it was it undoubtedly was just like a bit of mediaeval history, and since then it has become more and more mediaeval, The abdication of Edward, Jew baiting, and the plunging every individual into mediaeval misery, and perhaps it will all have to be done over again until a new nineteenth century and a new plunge into mediaevalism, who can know, history does repeat itself, I have often thought that that was the really soothing thing that history does. The one thing that is sure and certain is that history does not teach, that is to say, it always says let it be a lesson to you but is it. Not at all because circumstances always alter cases and so although history does repeat itself it is only because the repetition is soothing that any one believes it, nobody nobody wants to learn either by their own or anybody else’s experience, nobody does, no they say they do but no nobody does, nobody does. Yes nobody does.
It is very strange, for the last two years everybody was wearing shoes with wooden soles there were no others to be had and now there are no others to be had nobody wears shoes with wooden soles they all wear leather shoes like anybody did and there are none to be had but everybody wears them. It is a pleasure that it is like that, quite a pleasure, almost a contentment.
I was asking some people to-day how it happened and they said quite naturally, near Christmas ’43 everybody knows it is bound to be over some day, this war in spite of the fact that a number of people say that it is to be a hundred years’ war so why pay any attention to it, but nearly everybody thinks that now sometime there will be an end to it, as the peasant says everything that has a beginning must have an end so may not the war, and so everybody instead of keeping their leather shoes for later are wearing them now and besides that all the shopkeepers who have stocks of prewar shoes and in France there are always stocks big stocks of everything, why not, they are a saving and a secretive population why not, so now they are bringing out all these stocks to sell at big prices before prices become normal, so what between those who buy and those who wear what there is no longer any need of keeping, wooden shoes, which were really not very practical, have been given up and now suddenly everybody wears leather as if it were a fashion, now when there is supposed not to be any.
There are so many things that happened, we are burning peat, one used to read about that being done in Ireland, and here there are a great many marshes and there is peat and although it smells a little and smokes a good deal it is not bad to burn not at all, and as the windows in Grenoble and Annecy are all broken by explosions they all have paper windows, and as I say it really is like pioneering, we are all on the roads all the time going here and going there to find things to eat, in the country of course you do find plenty and at last there is so much that you can even refuse to buy more of it, of which we are all inordinately proud, up to date we all have bought anything anybody has brought us.
So many funny things one of our neighbors a very charming oldish lady who lives in a castle has three daughters and two sons, which is another matter. I am just now writing a novel about them Castles in Which We Live and the daughter Claude was in Chambery having her first baby, and she telephoned that the baby had come, the mother said she must go to her at once, but the husband said there is no train to-day, and she said but there is an autobus from Ruffieux, Ruffieux is ten kilometers away and she started off walking and she saw she would not get there in time so she stopped a man on a bicycle who was passing her and told him about her daughter and he said but the car will be gone before you get there and she said yes I know and he said I will take you on my bicycle and she said but there is no place behind for me to sit and he said no but I will take you on my handle bars and he did and she caught the car and she got to Chambery and she saw her grand-daughter.
If they say they believe it do they and if they say they will do it will they. That is what happens any day. Pretty soon there will not be any war and what will that be like.
Pretty soon.
I wonder sometimes why the English royal family lets any one who might come to the throne lets him be called George how can they, to be sure Shakespeare said a rose will smell as sweet call it by any name but will it. No it will not. Consider the name of George. Every time there was a George on the throne there was trouble bad trouble. The first two Georges gradually reduced England from the glory that Anne and Marlborough following William and Mary had given them, and then came George III and all misfortune, did he not lose colonies and go mad and then George the fourth and the first world war, with Napoleon and then no more Georges for a bit, and then after Victoria and Edward and Edward would not have a world war come George V a nice man but with all the misfortunes of a world war and then an Edward, would the world war have come had Edward stayed on but he did not, not, and a George came and bang a world war once again and plenty of misfortune and so will they again will the royal family again have the temerity to call a son who might come to the throne George. Better not, really better not. There is something in a name all the same.
To-day I was walking my usual twelve kilometers to buy some bread which is not dark and some cake which is very good, very very good and on the way I met a woman who was dragging a push-cart sometimes pushing it and in between she stopped to pick up sticks and I said to her well you will have a bit of a fire. Yes she said in the one sack I have some coal, I have picked it up near the railroad and in the other I have pieces of paper to light the fire and now I am picking up twigs to make it go. I do not belong here, she said, she was a good looking upstanding woman, I do not belong here she said, I come from the north, when I think of my lovely country up north where roses grow, but I and my son were put out without an hour’s notice, put out by the Germans, they have my house and they have my furniture and I have nothing, and here, it is a wretched country and miserable people they would not give you anything even if you paid them and all I hope is that some day soon bombs will fall on them, bombs, she said and I laughed and she said my good lady, yes that is what I say, and we each of us went on our way, each getting provisions which we needed that day.
And the young are strange. It is all strange. I was talking to the head of our local bank and his daughter is studying social science in Grenoble and they are naturally bankers are
very quiet and conservative, and I said now that Grenoble is so full of explosions and killings and reprisals I suppose you are keeping your daughter at home. Oh no he said, the young are not like that, they say, this is their war, that we do not understand, their professors can be shot as hostages, their comrades mixed up in aggressions, their windows blown out and all the rest, but after all it is their war let us alone it is our war, and said the father there is nothing to do but to let them alone, I guess it is their war.
One day is the same as another day and yet every day is different. And the girls tend to be tall, taller than they used to be but not the boys not taller than they used to be, I suppose there is a physical reason for this, I do suppose so.
What worries a great many is that when the young come back out of Germany they will all be old, quite old, that does worry a great many.
And any evening one can go on listening to any one propagandizing over the radio and one thing is very certain nobody seems to be loving any one. Do you love one another, is not at all true now. Nobody can, it is extraordinary really extraordinary how difficult it is just now for anybody to love their neighbor any neighbor, here there and everywhere it is very certain that it is not at all a natural thing for any one to love one another. This Christmas and New Year of 1943–’44 has made it very natural indeed, that they do not do not at all not any one hardly any one that no one does love any one, that is their neighbor, hardly any one. It is like that now, this last winter was just one winter too long, anybody knows that, last winter it was all right they could still make the joke that the war was going to be over and when asked why what reason had he, he said I have a very certain one, it is that my wife has had enough more than enough. But now it is another winter and nobody can make it a joke any more, it is just one winter too much.
I was out walking this afternoon the first week of January ’44 on the banks of the Rhone and there was a cold wind and I had two layers of wool one very good and one not so good and a layer of heavy linen very good and the wind came right through to my arms and it was not a degree below centigrade zero in fact it was one above and what are the German soldiers feeling over there, there are a few around here young ones guarding the railroad line and over in Belley they are that is they have been training young ones, they are all gone now presumably to Russia, and they were cold there in Belley where it is not so very cold and they were very young and a great many of them were not Germans and they were being trained to run tanks made of wood and that they worked with their feet as the German army has no automobiles any more none at all except those that are on freight cars, and yet it goes on, well I suppose as the peasants say anything that has a beginning must have an ending, and as Madame Gallais says it is she who here gives us the little luxuries we need, she finds them and she is very gay about it which is pleasant of her, she lived most of her life in Paris and she likes to be Parisian which she is and you have to learn to do everything even to die, and the young feel like that about it too, they feel that the old ones cannot learn how to die in this war, but they know.
While I was walking along the banks of the Rhone and the wind was cold I saw a tremendous quantity of crows and of wild ducks, there are so many kinds these days, to be sure for three years now there has been no hunting but then on the other hand there is no food, people gather in their crops more carefully than they used to, they do their own gleaning and so what is there to eat for all these birds and there are so many thousands more than there used to be and they are much fatter than they used to be there must be a reason for it but is there.
One dreams funny dreams these days. I dreamed one about Nathalie Barney. I dreamed that she always left the plants of her Paris apartment at a florist’s to have them watered over the summer and returned in the winter and now would she have them back again, would she, would the florist would there be a florist, would there be an apartment, would there be she. I do not know whether she did do this ordinarily with her plants or whether she had plants but all the same I did dream it.
She is in Florence and it is January 1944 and everybody here well not everybody but a great many think that since the war did not end in ’43, it never will end, never end at all and perhaps they are right, anyway that is the way a great many here to-day feel about it.
Everybody almost anybody these days is either dragging shoving or carrying something everybody along the road and I carry, it comes easier to me to carry than pull or push, although sometimes I do put what I carry on what they push and we push together but mostly I carry, not a great deal three or four or five kilos, and that is quite enough to carry quite enough for twelve kilometers more or less.
The other day I was talking to the baker, he does bake us cakes, yes he does, we like cake, and he does bake me white bread and he does give us jam yes he does, a good many do these days and he does. And we were talking. He said he had just been reading about Hungarian cooking. He said he was comparatively a young man he is forty-five or there about, and he said a man like himself had begun life being apprenticed to a very good cake shop in Lyon, from there he had gone to Paris, he had worked at all the best houses, all the most important cake and tea places, and then he had worked on the Riviera and he had a great deal of experience and now he had bought this little bakery in this little hamlet and perhaps he would stay there even after the war, after all he said a man like myself having had so much experience should remember a great deal of what he has learned from others but he should also keep just a little of what is only himself and then he has a small place and yet people will come because it is that. Now he said I can only do a few things for about fifteen clients of which you are one, but wait he said wait until the war is over then you will see what you will see and it will be very good.
And then we went on to talk about climate and the things each nation drinks and the food it eats. Yes he said I do understand that here in France we make normally a wine that is rarely more than nine degrees of alcohol, and we can drink that with our meals and indeed we can even put water into our wine as many do, and we drink a nice wine while eating, but the Hungarians who drink a heavy wine, they drink water with the meal and they drink their heavy wine after. As do the Spaniard and the Portuguese too, I said, it is all a question of climate. Now I said the Americans and the Russians who had more or less the same climate, they drink a heavy alcohol before the meal vodka or a cocktail, and during the meal they drink hot drinks like tea, coffee or cocoa, yes he said I understand the stomach has to have a shock and then has to be kept warm, but said he the only thing I do not understand is the German food and the German drinks, that is beer, ah I said the English and the Germans both suffer from the sea fogs of the North Sea and perhaps beer and their diet is the only thing that meets that sea fog, perhaps he said, all the others he said I find sympathetic but not that, he said, and then he sighed, he said they talk about the United States of Europe but he said that can never come about the food and the drink of each country in Europe is too radically different, they could never have a United States, oh no, he said. I sometimes think though, there could be all the Slavs together and all the Latins together, and then if we were fairly decently governed it might be all right, but he said even then very likely not, no he said I see that as long as each country wants to eat its own food and drink its own drink and they do there can never be a United States of Europe. It is strange, he went on, very strange that in such a small continent as is Europe, there should be so many kinds of climate, so many kinds of food and drink. It is strange, he said, and I took my two delicious cakes and my two loaves of bread and slung it on my back and Basket and I went home as we always do in the winter evening.
It is January 1944 all the same.
All one’s friends are going up to Paris for a change. There are no trains but anyway all the time they all keep taking them. We live the life of trains, so much more now that there are none. In the old days of automobiles I never thought I would clink the little gate and go through or put through the passage over
the railroads, the way I used to see people do while we waited in the automobile but now I do do it just like that all the time, with a basket on my back and I like it, why not.