Wars I Have Seen by Gertrude Stein

Author:Gertrude Stein [Stein, Gertrude]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: nepalifiction, TPB
ISBN: 978-0-307-83019-7
Publisher: Random House Publishing Group
Published: 2012-12-18T18:15:00+00:00

That was yesterday.

I was sitting with the wife of the mayor and in front of us was the main road from everywhere to Culoz. There were quite a few motor cycles rushing up and down with German soldiers and then there was a lull and then there came along hundreds of German soldiers walking, it was a terribly hot day and in the mountains heat is even hotter than below, and these soldiers were children none older than sixteen and some looking not more than fourteen, as they came and I have never seen anything like it since I saw the last lap of the walking marathon in Chicago. Our friend Elena Genin who lives near Belley and who is a Mexican, told us that she had seen the German troops going into Belley and she said I said to Joan, her daughter, this is not a German army this is a Mexican army when I was a little girl, and I did not quite understand but now I understand, these childish faces and the worn bodies and the tired feet and the shoulders of aged men and an occasional mule carrying a gun heavier than the boys could carry and then covered wagons like those that crossed the plains only in small and country wagons with a covering over them and later we were told in them were the sick and wounded, and they were being dragged by mules, it was unbelievable, and about a hundred of them more on women’s bicycles that they had evidently taken as they went along, it was unbelievable, the motorised army of Germany of 1940 being reduced to this, to an old fashioned Mexican army, it seemed to be more ancient than pictures of the moving army of the the American civil war. I suppose said Madame Ray the wife of the mayor that they choose them young like that, because children can set fire to homes and burn and destroy without knowing what they are doing, while grown men even the worst of them draw the line somewhere. It was a sorry sight in every way they had been in the mountains to fight the mountain boys who of course got away from them and killed and wounded quite a few of them and so they revenged themselves upon the civil population who were unarmed shooting them and burning their houses and driving away their cattle, they had cows and calves with them dangling along on a string, it was absolutely unbelievable that in July 1944 that the German army could look like that, it was unbelievable, one could not believe one’s eyes, and then I came home having put my dog on the leash and when I got home there were about a hundred of these Germans in the garden in the house all over the place, poor Basket the dog was so horrified that he could not even bark, I took him up to my bedroom and he just sat and shivered he did not believe it could be true.

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