Wars I Have Seen Read Free

cavalry. Oh said I you were not then always in the Alpine troops, no he said after I escaped, I was a prisoner, I thought I would like a change. And said he now I am the personal guard of the Marechal and I am permanently attached to the government and if he dies whoever succeeds him, whether it is a dictator or something different I will be the personal guard of the government. He was only twenty-two and I wished him good luck and saidperhaps we would meet in Paris and said he if the government goes there I will but I hope it will be free and I said I have good hope and he said I always have had and he said he was would say goodbye to me before he left and I said surely, and I went on walking with my white dog in the moonlight.
    So as I say I know what it is to be any age now that there is a war and so remembering back is not only remembering but might be being.
    It is funny about wars, they ought to be different but they are not.
    In a way that is what makes it nice about France. In one war they upset the Germans by resisting unalterably steadily and patiently and valiantly for four years, in the next war they upset them just as much by not resisting at all and going under completely in six weeks. Well that is what makes them changeable enough to create styles.
    So I was five years old when we came back to America having known Austrians Germans and French French, and now American English, a nice world if there is enough of it, and more or less there always is.
    Back to America and Baltimore where my mother’s people came from, I do not know why but one is always proud of the places your people come from, you may never see them or perhaps never see them again as a matter of fact I did but nevertheless, that is where your mother came from and I suppose there is more meaning to that than where you were born particularly if you never saw it again there where you were born that is where I was born. In Allegheny Pennsylvania. Anything can be a dream, and in war it is more a dream than anywhere. Just now they have sent forty thousand people out of their homes in Marseilles, it is so real to me that it is a dream, not that I know any of them, if I did it would not be a dream but we were in Marseilles so much during the last war and that makes it a dream and in San Francisco when I was a child along the water front, the women of the town all of them came from Marseilles, and when I saw them in Avignon and Arles alongthe river front and at Marseilles they all seemed to be wearing the same wrappers, that is the kind of dressing gowns that they wore in San Francisco not far from Chinatown and that we used to see when we went to San Francisco with our parents, so that is what war is it is the inhabitants in geography.
    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,