Wars I Have Seen Read Online

When I was fifteen I did not care for goats I like a wall and I had read about fruit trees growing on the sunny side of a wall and I always said when I was fifteen that when I was older and could have it I would have a wall and have fruit trees growing on the sunny side of a wall. I remember the first time I ever saw fruit trees arranged to grow on a wall. It was just after the Spanish American war and we were in Paris for the exposition and McKinley had just been shot and I saw fruit trees trained to grow on the sunny side of walls and it reminded me of when I was fifteen and I wanted to grow fruit trees on sunny sides of the wall and my brother said that he would keep a goat on the wall to eat the fruit trees. And now it is 1943 and there is no milk and we keep a goat and I walk the goat and I like the goat, goats are very willful and I have found out why we like flowers. Because goats pick flowers to eat, and children pick flowers because animals pick flowers to eat and children pick flowers like that.

At fifteen flowers commence to have other meanings, beauty is beauty and flowers are flowers and flowers are no longer flowers as the goat picks them.

Beauty is its own excuse for being, that begins at fifteen that and that enemies are not what they seem, that all belongs at fifteen. At fifteen overbearing that is the need to be the one that has to dominate the other one by not studying, by studying, by fighting, by not fighting, by war, red war, white war, green war and black war. Black war is fighting, red war is war, white war is exciting and green war is disappointing. And at fifteen war has begun, and every one knows that with the sun or without the sun war has begun.

What happened. She Lucy Lilly Lamont, wanted what she wanted and she was not stupid she was overbearing and crazy and not nervous but obstinate and she felt superior. That can make enemies even if nobody is your enemy. It is just like this but not in a way. In a war anybody can forget about Lucy Lilly Lamont. Why not when she is of no importance in a war. And this is what made us feel as we did about the Boer war, it was the first war that made us feel that wars were wars but that they were not important because nothing changed. We only know now that we felt that way then now in 1943, but we did we most certainly did begin to feel that way then.

Lucy Lilly Lamont was fifteen all her life, they have a way of saying it here, they say she never left the primary grades, it is that that makes her the other side of fifteen all her life, and it is very interesting, war is and is not like that, a good deal of war is like that and then when everybody is tired of war then it is not at all like that.

Fifteen.

Every time I watch them I ask them how old they are. They are usually younger than fifteen or older, it is not very often that they are just fifteen and when they are it is very special. Being fifteen is very special, being eleven or thirteen is not so special, being seventeen or nineteen is not so special. Being fifteen is very special.

And now it is June 1943 and two of the young men who are twenty-one have come to say good-bye, they hope they are not going to die right away but all who are twenty-one have to go to Germany as hostages to be put in a pen, they say to work in factories but there is no work, and if they go into hiding well it would be all right if it were not for the winter but will it be over before the winter, they ask me to tell them but can any one tell them, do I know, well anyway I can say that they might amuse themselves by learning and reading German and they might amuse themselves by saying that they are going traveling as students, and say they, if we do not consider them as enemies will the Americans like it, will they, might it not displease them, but said I you can learn their language and read their literature and contemplate them as if you were travelers and still know them to be enemies. Why not. Well said they why not. Anyway they said you have cheered us, and I kissed them each one of them and wished them well, and one of them came back to shake hands again and I kissed him again and said be prudent and he said I will and they went away up the hill. Oh dear me one cannot sleep very well.

But from fifteen on you can think about enemies, quite certainly think about enemies.

The idea of enemies is awful it makes one stop remembering eternity and the fear of death. That is what enemies are. Possessions are the same as enemies only less so, they too make one forget eternity and the fear of death.

So many things begin around fifteen. Money, possessions eternity, enemies, the fear of death, disappointments begin a long time before and sorrow, but around fifteen you can begin to write them down, which makes the depth and consolation of disappointment and sorrow. All this can and does begin around fifteen and then a little later came the Boer war, and war as no longer something that belonged to others and to history and to stories but something that was going on now and was a disillusion and disappointing. I did not know anybody who was fighting or any of their relations, but it was the time when anglo-saxonism had come in America to be a very conscious feeling, Dooley had made fun of it and we all felt it and it was disappointing it was not what Kipling and the describers of the Mutiny had made one feel was Anglo-Saxon it was something different it was only we did not know it it was the beginning of the ending of the nineteenth century which now in 1943, is dying quite quickly, but we who were active then we felt it because we already had a beginning of the twentieth century and so although we did not know it we felt that the Boer war was the first shot fired at the nineteenth century, and although we thought we were of it we knew inside that we were not and we knew we should regret what the nineteenth century was but we knew we did not regret it we wanted something else and we were to have it.

In Shakespeare’s Henry VI I just found that he said that Joan of Arc and she was not yet dead not in the play in fact she was just beginning and Shakespeare said that she would be the great French saint that she would replace Saint Denis, and she was only made a saint very late, very late indeed, just in time for the war of 1914 but she undoubtedly and Shakespeare was right she undoubtedly is the great French saint and has completely replaced Saint Denis. It is funny this business of being right. Everybody wants to be right, even the one who said he would rather be right than president. It is so natural to say and I was right was I not.

I am wondering if Laval and the rest of them think they are right now in 1943, to be sure the Kiddie wrote to me in 1942 and said that at the end of 1942 there would be good news and in the spring of 1943 there would be more good news than bad news and as the summer came on the summer of 1943 the good news would be so good there would be no letters in the newspaper printing presses big enough to make headlines to celebrate them, and now the Italian islands are going one by one, one by one and there is only one more water to cross, and everybody who knows what an enemy was is now worried because and that is very strange, everybody knowing that everything is coming to an end every neighbor is denouncing every neighbor, for black traffic, for theft, for this and for that, and there are so many being put in prison, poor Madame Berard said it was so sad to see her husband going off between two policemen just as if he was a criminal and to know that some of their neighbors were pleased to see it.