unpleasant as one of the women said of course it was unpleasant but not unpleasant as if we had been conquered.
And she was right, the Germans not being conquerors any more nobody feels conquered.
It is full of excitement to know that Shakespeare and everybody is right about how people are. By this I mean, anybody can mean, that when you are in a country that is being occupied by an enemy, by two enemies in a manner of speaking, everybody is funny, that is they feel and they act in such different ways at any time. You think they think one thing and they act another. One country priest who outrages his congregation by preaching against the Americans, is delighted to meet me and makes a special effort to love my dog and love me. Others who are said to be one thing say other things and under conditions distinctly unfavorable for them, oh it is all so complicated and every day and in every way I like the complications being so complicated. The 1914–1918 war was a simple war with simple feelings and all the veterans of that war are confused with this war, they do not understand, and they cannot find themselves, everything is so opposed to anything that is straightforward, I must say I like it, I like things that look as if they were there when they are elsewhere. I do like it. I do not like to fish in troubled waters but I do like to see the troubled water and the fish and the fishermen. I suppose I do not like to fish in troubled waters because I do not care about fishing at all, but that is another matter.
After the Germans left we had Italians in the house. They were rather attaching, foolish and could not keep away from the young servant, they went in one door and came out another and then they were still there, but otherwise they were sad, and they hated the Germans and they liked everybody else, and they were sad, they said if this went on they would have no country, they hoped some of them would still have a family but would they, oh said they holding their heads. Milan, and Turin, and Genoa and Cremona, oh dear. And we were sorry for them and they said they hoped they would stay here until the end of the war and the next day they had to go away, and they went around saying good-bye to the village where they had only been for eight days as if they were saying good-bye to the village in which they had been born.
The Balkans, first came to be something for me, from Tolstoi,and our Slav brothers and then freeing them, it is extraordinary how Bulgaria, which is the most Slav of all the Balkan peoples is the one that has most passionately been ungrateful to the Russians who freed them, but that makes it all like Shakespeare too which is very exciting, and so from that time through the two Balkan wars, and hearing lots of Serbs in 1914–1918 war, and visiting the sick Serb men in France and the children to now when we have a Servian dentist and his son is in prison for having ammunition stored in his room to give to the young men who have escaped into the mountains to avoid going to Germany as forced labor, and they were so frightened that he was going to be shot, but fortunately he was in the hands of the Italians and they do not shoot any one if they can avoid it and they can always avoid it. We have a young maid working for us and she is Italian, that is French-Italian and I tease her because she spends her Sundays visiting her relations in prison. There is an uncle who was a restaurant keeper and he is in prison for having given and sold food, which is known as black traffic, and yesterday she went to Chambery to see a cousin who was in the Italian army and now September ’43, the Italians have been put in prison by the Germans but this cousin seems to have escaped in a truck, which he was driving but where to nobody knows. It is a strange confusion nobody knows. Some one was just telling of trying to find somebody who was in prison, and so they took a bundle of clothes, and they went to all the prisons in Lyon and in
And she was right, the Germans not being conquerors any more nobody feels conquered.
It is full of excitement to know that Shakespeare and everybody is right about how people are. By this I mean, anybody can mean, that when you are in a country that is being occupied by an enemy, by two enemies in a manner of speaking, everybody is funny, that is they feel and they act in such different ways at any time. You think they think one thing and they act another. One country priest who outrages his congregation by preaching against the Americans, is delighted to meet me and makes a special effort to love my dog and love me. Others who are said to be one thing say other things and under conditions distinctly unfavorable for them, oh it is all so complicated and every day and in every way I like the complications being so complicated. The 1914–1918 war was a simple war with simple feelings and all the veterans of that war are confused with this war, they do not understand, and they cannot find themselves, everything is so opposed to anything that is straightforward, I must say I like it, I like things that look as if they were there when they are elsewhere. I do like it. I do not like to fish in troubled waters but I do like to see the troubled water and the fish and the fishermen. I suppose I do not like to fish in troubled waters because I do not care about fishing at all, but that is another matter.
After the Germans left we had Italians in the house. They were rather attaching, foolish and could not keep away from the young servant, they went in one door and came out another and then they were still there, but otherwise they were sad, and they hated the Germans and they liked everybody else, and they were sad, they said if this went on they would have no country, they hoped some of them would still have a family but would they, oh said they holding their heads. Milan, and Turin, and Genoa and Cremona, oh dear. And we were sorry for them and they said they hoped they would stay here until the end of the war and the next day they had to go away, and they went around saying good-bye to the village where they had only been for eight days as if they were saying good-bye to the village in which they had been born.
The Balkans, first came to be something for me, from Tolstoi,and our Slav brothers and then freeing them, it is extraordinary how Bulgaria, which is the most Slav of all the Balkan peoples is the one that has most passionately been ungrateful to the Russians who freed them, but that makes it all like Shakespeare too which is very exciting, and so from that time through the two Balkan wars, and hearing lots of Serbs in 1914–1918 war, and visiting the sick Serb men in France and the children to now when we have a Servian dentist and his son is in prison for having ammunition stored in his room to give to the young men who have escaped into the mountains to avoid going to Germany as forced labor, and they were so frightened that he was going to be shot, but fortunately he was in the hands of the Italians and they do not shoot any one if they can avoid it and they can always avoid it. We have a young maid working for us and she is Italian, that is French-Italian and I tease her because she spends her Sundays visiting her relations in prison. There is an uncle who was a restaurant keeper and he is in prison for having given and sold food, which is known as black traffic, and yesterday she went to Chambery to see a cousin who was in the Italian army and now September ’43, the Italians have been put in prison by the Germans but this cousin seems to have escaped in a truck, which he was driving but where to nobody knows. It is a strange confusion nobody knows. Some one was just telling of trying to find somebody who was in prison, and so they took a bundle of clothes, and they went to all the prisons in Lyon and in
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