Wars I Have Seen

THIS IS A RANDOM HOUSE WARTIME BOOK

Copyright, 1945, by Random House, Inc.

Published simultaneously in Canada by Random House of Canada Limited

Designer: Ernst Reichl

eISBN: 978-0-307-83019-7

v3.1

Contents

Cover

Title Page

Copyright

First Page

Epilogue

I do not know whether to put in the things I do not remember as well as the things I do remember. To begin with I was born, that I do not remember but I was told about it quite often, I was not born during the night but about eight o’clock in the morning and my father whenever I had anything the matter with me always reproached me by telling me that I had been born a perfect baby. I do not know whether the four living and the two dead older children had not been born equally perfect babies at any rate my father never reproached them with it when there was anything the matter with them. Anyway though I could not remember it from the beginning there was no doubt that I was the youngest of the children and as such naturally I had privileges the privilege of petting the privilege of being the youngest one. If that does happen it is not lost all the rest of one’s life, there you are you are privileged, nobody can do anything but take care of you, that is the way I was and that is the way I still am, and any one who is like that necessarily liked it. I did and do.

The next thing I heard about myself was that I was eight months old. Of course I had been born in America, of course we were all of us born in America but all the same when I was eight months old we were not there. My uncle used to tell me about that. He was an art student in Germany, at that time, my mother’s family who were not rich although all born in America and were not people who liked business, even if their father was a tanner, but tanning is not really a business at least it was not in those days, it was a trade and so my uncle after my mother married my father was helped by my father to go to Germany to study sculpture. In those far away days, Americans went to Germany to study art particularly sculpture and then after that they finished in Rome. That was the way it was and we were all in Europe and I was eight months old and they left me in the arms of my uncle, why was never explained, but anyway I cried and ladies he knew came along and he did not like it. He was young then but I was so much younger that he did not like it. He often told me about that many years after.

The next thing that happened was that I was a very little older and we were in Vienna, a nice place then. And now there was something I could remember as well as some things I could be helped to remember by hearing them told again and again, then and later.

Born that way there is no reason why I should have seen so many wars. I have seen three. The Spanish-American war, the first world war and now the second world war.

There were of course a number of others that did not particularly concern me. The Boer war I remembered that one, the Japanese-Chinese war, and the Russian-Japanese war I remember that one very well too. Each one of these wars I remember for another reason. I suppose it is not so remarkable that I should have seen so many wars having seen a good many countries when I was a baby and having a feeling about countries which I suppose sooner or later since wars are make you be one of those that see them.

And so we were in Vienna and I have never seen it again but it has always remained for me something very real. It was there that I first came to be and so of course it was real and then there were really things, there was a public garden, a formal garden and in a kind of a way a formal garden pleases a child’s fancy more than a natural garden. It is more like a garden that you would make yourself. And there was music and there was the old emperor who was a natural figure to have in a formal garden and there was his national anthem and then there were the salt caves and then there were birds and butterflies and insects in the woods and there was the catching of them and there was good eating and on my third birthday a taste of Vienna beer. And there were my mother and my brothers on horseback and there was a Czech tutor, one did not realise how important all these nationalities were going to be to every one then and a Hungarian governess, and there was the first contact with books, picture books but books all the same since pictures in picture books are narrative. I have just bought twenty of them for the school children of Bilignin and they are narrative.

My mother so I heard them say at a later day did not like being in Vienna all alone with five children. She had had a sister from Baltimore with her, but she had gone away, my father had gone back to America on business and my mother said she wanted to be nearer America so she packed up and left the tutor and governess behind her and with the five children she went to Paris. I continued to be the youngest one. I was about four years old then and I do not know whether I really remembered more about Paris but I think I did. It always does make war because one of the things that seemed to me in 1914 was that Paris was then the way I remembered it when I was four only then there was no war. But war makes things go backward as well as forward and so 1914 was the same as 1878 in a way.

Of course there are a good many times when there is no war just as there are a good many times when there is a war. To be sure when there is a war the years are longer that is to say the days are longer the months are longer the years are much longer but the weeks are shorter that is what makes a war.