Wars I Have Seen by Gertrude Stein

days in a train, everybody carrying something and some quite openly eating what they are not supposed to be having and others not eating anything at all at least it might just as well not be anything, and in a station having a long conversation with a very nice refugee she in one train and I in another one, and telling each other all about what we were and where we came from. It also is very amusing. The German army was a motorised army so everybody said and so everybody thought and so everybody knew and now their automobiles travel on the trains, there are none of them on the road. Here where we see the trains pass, continuously the German army moves with all its automobiles but all of them on the train. No automobile on the road. Not one, not one solitary one. All of them on flat baggage cars with soldiers sitting around them and this must be a pleasure to every one. To be sure in a way trains are more romantic than automobiles but even though Germans love the romantic, it cannot really be a comfort to them. I realised some years ago that trains were really more romantic than automobiles, and it was in this way. They were having their annual fair in Belley and they had as one of the attractions, a little tunnel and a train going in and coming out of it and going around and around. Almost everybody in Belley had been in automobiles some even in airplanes but quite a number had never been in a train, and it excited them going in and out of the little tunnel and around and around. There are two things that are exciting going around and around and around and going straight ahead on rails. Rails are in a way more romantic than a road. A road is picturesque and it can even be endless and straight, but even when it has white lines marked on it to separate one piece of it from the other piece of it which is done in modern highways,it has not the fascination of the converging lines of rails. Now we are in Culoz, and not any longer in Bilignin, in Bilignin there were roads but here there is a station and trains so naturally I know all there is to know about both of them. Now in September 1943, they are blowing up the trains as they come through the tunnel, just this afternoon, some heard a loud noise and it was the end of a train blowing up just as it came out of a tunnel and a little child was suffocated. Well nobody just knows why they do it, but they do and the young people including the young girls want to do it too. Not blow up trains but blow up bridges and tracks. I suppose it is that the German troops who have gone to Italy will not be able to get back to France. Simple human means have come to replace science. All the science is there if anybody can have anything with which to use it, but everybody is so busy having enough to eat, that science is not important, eating is important, and what can be more important than eating, nothing although everybody is getting pretty tired of growing everything themselves they are to eat or if not walking miles, or bicycling to bring it back, in order to eat it. Interesting if true, and it is true, very true.
    There is trouble in the Balkans, that is what made the first Balkan war, and to-day September 1943 the Serbs have captured a port in the Adriatic, and the English in the south of Italy are moving forward into the Adriatic to join them and to move into the Balkans.
    We have had the enemy in the house again and this is what they said.
    Unconditional surrender.
    There is trouble in the Balkans and what is the use of science if it goes on like that.
    As I said we have just had both the enemies staying in the house September 1943, and this is what they said.
    To-day, the eleventh of September 1943, after all Saint Odile was right, she said, that Germany would conquer the world would be drowned in blood and tears, and fire would be thrown from the sky upon the earth beneath and everybody would say that nothingcould defeat the power and the force of that army and everybody would say let us