To be sure he had been killing meat and did he sell it or not or only serve it in quantity in his restaurant and her boy has to go to Germany because he is twenty-one even though he is a great mathematician and is to be a great man in the university of Lyon and the family were always gentle and kindly and obliging and never charged too much even when they might have and indeed it was all true they never did.

It is hard to know about enemies at fifteen it all begins, knowing everything and never being happy again, excited yes but never happy again. And now Olympe has to go away and she knows what enemies are, they are Germans that is what enemies are and here there are none and she has to take a train and there she has to see them and the thought of it is making an old woman of her and she does not want to go, no no she does not want to go, but her mistress says the duty of a servant is to obey her mistress and not to follow her own changing fancy, but her fancy has never changed, she has always known what the enemy is what her enemies are, yes she has always known and more than ever since they have been in her home.

And so the Boer war was disagreeable but not really serious not even for the Boers, like all defeated people they got the best of it, it is better to be defeated and win than win and be defeated. Now here in 1943 it seems so strange to see the enemy weakening just slowly weakening, quickly weakening, not being defeated or anything but just weakening, the French do better, they get defeated but they do not weaken, while the Germans do not get defeated they weaken, and when they weaken enough to go out like a lamp with no oil, or with no wire, out, it does not die it just weakens to nothing. Until they weaken everybody says about them but they are still strong, and then they weaken. There you are, that is to say here we are 1943.

After the Spanish-American war there was the Boer war, and that was no longer fifteen that was older, I was in the medical school then the first year and I went out to San Francisco to see my brother Mike who had just been married.

The Spanish-American war was the first to me modern war. Modern is like realism, modern is always modern to some one as realism is always real to some one, not to some one but to a great many at one time. Modern, how nicely it is modern now then and when.

What was modern then was seeing all the middle western men, young men, boys too many, going out to San Francisco, and catching everything and then going off in boats to the Philippines. I was just reading Shakespeare’s Henry the Fifth and I found it astonishing how easily they talked of transporting ten thousand, fifteen thousand even twenty thousand soldiers across the water from England to France. How when they had such comparatively little tonnage, did they get so many of them across, how did they, well anyway so they say they did. Call it modern if you like but soldiers any quantity of them at any time can be carried across the ocean, any quantity of them at any time and now here in June 1943, we are waiting for them, waiting for them, to bring us shoes and stockings and dental floss, here in the country we have plenty to eat although we would like more cake and sugar and butter but still here in the country having a goat and chickens we do have plenty to eat and fish, we do have plenty to eat. But one does get so tired of seeing everybody planting and growing vegetables you think how nice it will be to have those happy days come back when vegetables grew not in the ground but in tins. A vegetable garden in the beginning looks so promising and then after all little by little it grows nothing but vegetables, nothing, nothing but vegetables.

Well anyway the Spanish-American war was modern but it was completely nineteenth century, there was nothing but the question of sea power and whose sea power was it, we all read a book that told us it, but then we had known it anyway, because of Nelson, and now we were doing it again, and it was very exciting, we were all finding out about the difficulty of having to have two fleets a Pacific one and an Atlantic one, and we were all getting to feel that we were to be, well there it was still nineteenth century completely nineteenth century and we were not thinking about a twentieth century, and we were so excited that we were not realising that the nineteenth century was beginning to be over, not the least bit in the world. I was young then but I can still see those young men in San Francisco, those middle-western young men of twenty and twenty-one, with their undeveloped necks, their rather doughy faces, I see why they call them dough-boys, they are like that between twenty and twenty-one, they go to sleep anywhere sitting or standing, their heads and their mouths and their eyes can go to sleep anywhere, and open or not open, that is what it is to be twenty or twenty-one, and now here and now, it is just the same, the young of twenty-one, the young Frenchmen of twenty-one are all being deported to Germany, two came to see me to say good-bye to ask how I could encourage them and all I could say was try to study them and learn their language and get to know their literature, think of yourselves as a tourist and not as a prisoner, and they were worried and nervous and they said will the Americans like it if we think of them like that, sure I said all the Americans want is to make you free, and they said yes we know that. It makes me feel very very much like that, I used to say to any Frenchman or Frenchwoman who complained of anything, I said but every time I go out in the village of Bilignin there I see all your young men whatever is happening they are still there and that is everything that they are not gone. But now they are gone and going. Some of them betake themselves to the mountains others are conspiring, the son of our dentist a boy of eighteen has just been taken because he was helping and will he be shot or not. Oh dear. We all cry. But there is nothing to do but wait for us to come nothing to do. And they look so, I saw a train full of them, everybody was handing them up wine and bread, although nobody has much of it for themselves or to give them, and there they were with the gendarmes, going away. And they were awake then and pretty soon they will be tired out and go to sleep any way that it is possible to be sleeping, in a chair or standing or in any way.

It is funny but my memory of those middle-western boys going out to the Philippines was that they were just like these French boys twenty and twenty-one going off to Germany, as deported and held away from every one. Dear me.

So that was realism. Anything is realism but that certainly was realism.

And it all made me remember the impression I have when I read Wyandotte or The Hutted Knoll which was about then, the shock I had in reading that book because for the first time I realised what it meant not to know whether any one was loyal to you or not, did they or did they not believe in you, were they interested in your interests and how can you tell. I had read laments of great men and many novels but in some strange way Wyandotte or The Hutted Knoll made me understand that you could think that some one was devoted to you and loyal to you and really not at all they were opposed to you and would if such a thing were necessary denounce you. And now and again in June 1943 it is happening all around one.

Well in the first place Olympe who knows who her enemies are, and are they, could they become another thing or rather could those to whom she was loyal could she stop being loyal to them, could she want so much not to leave you and when she really did have it to leave you did she at the last hour turn against you so as to prepare her mind to be attuned to the other to whom she was going. Could she and did she. She did. Might she and would she denounce the first one the second one or any one or would she only prepare herself in case she had to do something and it might be that something and would any one she was leaving realise that she had not been very serviceable in fact that she had been rather useless although everything made any one think that she was perfection and almost saintly as a character. Dear me. It is like a detective story particularly as her sister Clothilde used a cheap enemy perfume to drown out the smell of onions and cooking on her and does it came to be known that she slept in her mistress’ room.