Wars I Have Seen

Wars I Have Seen by Gertrude Stein Read Free Book Online Page B

Book: Wars I Have Seen by Gertrude Stein Read Free Book Online
Authors: Gertrude Stein
anglo-saxonism had come in America to be a very conscious feeling, Dooley had made fun of it and we all felt it and it was disappointing it was not what Kipling and the describers of the Mutiny had made one feel wasAnglo-Saxon it was something different it was only we did not know it it was the beginning of the ending of the nineteenth century which now in 1943, is dying quite quickly, but we who were active then we felt it because we already had a beginning of the twentieth century and so although we did not know it we felt that the Boer war was the first shot fired at the nineteenth century, and although we thought we were of it we knew inside that we were not and we knew we should regret what the nineteenth century was but we knew we did not regret it we wanted something else and we were to have it.
    In Shakespeare’s Henry VI I just found that he said that Joan of Arc and she was not yet dead not in the play in fact she was just beginning and Shakespeare said that she would be the great French saint that she would replace Saint Denis, and she was only made a saint very late, very late indeed, just in time for the war of 1914 but she undoubtedly and Shakespeare was right she undoubtedly is the great French saint and has completely replaced Saint Denis. It is funny this business of being right. Everybody wants to be right, even the one who said he would rather be right than president. It is so natural to say and I was right was I not.
    I am wondering if Laval and the rest of them think they are right now in 1943, to be sure the Kiddie wrote to me in 1942 and said that at the end of 1942 there would be good news and in the spring of 1943 there would be more good news than bad news and as the summer came on the summer of 1943 the good news would be so good there would be no letters in the newspaper printing presses big enough to make headlines to celebrate them, and now the Italian islands are going one by one, one by one and there is only one more water to cross, and everybody who knows what an enemy was is now worried because and that is very strange, everybody knowing that everything is coming to an end every neighbor is denouncing every neighbor, for black traffic, for theft, for this and for that, and there are so many being put in prison, poor Madame Berard said it was so sad to see her husband going off between two policemen just as if he was a criminal and to knowthat some of their neighbors were pleased to see it. To be sure he had been killing meat and did he sell it or not or only serve it in quantity in his restaurant and her boy has to go to Germany because he is twenty-one even though he is a great mathematician and is to be a great man in the university of Lyon and the family were always gentle and kindly and obliging and never charged too much even when they might have and indeed it was all true they never did.
    It is hard to know about enemies at fifteen it all begins, knowing everything and never being happy again, excited yes but never happy again. And now Olympe has to go away and she knows what enemies are, they are Germans that is what enemies are and here there are none and she has to take a train and there she has to see them and the thought of it is making an old woman of her and she does not want to go, no no she does not want to go, but her mistress says the duty of a servant is to obey her mistress and not to follow her own changing fancy, but her fancy has never changed, she has always known what the enemy is what her enemies are, yes she has always known and more than ever since they have been in her home.
    And so the Boer war was disagreeable but not really serious not even for the Boers, like all defeated people they got the best of it, it is better to be defeated and win than win and be defeated. Now here in 1943 it seems so strange to see the enemy weakening just slowly weakening, quickly weakening, not being defeated or anything but just weakening, the French do better, they get defeated but

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