That is what I say.

From the Russian-Japanese war on I became for purposes of daily living a European and so not only were wars different but also the century was different the twentieth century had begun. Science was over, because believe it or not the twentieth century is not interested in science it really is not.

In these days we have to have animals around us because we have to have milk and eggs and there is no way to buy them so we have chickens and a goat, and I take care of them August 1943. And I have been struck by the fact that do what you like that is what they like and what they are but they always must have five toes, chickens and goats, and dogs and everything. Now there is no reason for it it is just what you might say a mystic number, a number that pleases but having been made it is there, five is there everywhere when there are toes. And this has a great deal to do with that, that the nineteenth century believed in science but the twentieth century does not. Not.

Saint Odile, oh yes Saint Odile.

I said once that the farmers of Bilignin just before this war said that if they had to thrash the wheat with flails the way it used to be done none of them would grow wheat, they would only grow wheat if the thrashing machine came around to thrash it, and now 1943, they are all thrashing their wheat with flails, and they fish eels so that they can take the skin, there is no leather left, and the eel skin replaces the leather in the flail, and they do it, not because there are no machines, there are indeed electric ones which they never had before, but if their wheat is thrashed by machine the government can control it, and if it is thrashed by flail, each man when and where he likes, instead of all together with a machine why of course some of it can get kept, can get hidden can get eaten, oh dear, of course beating wheat with a flail is as much science as doing it with an electric machine, but it does not make people feel the triumph of science, not at all it just makes it middle ages and secret, and that is why the twentieth century is not interested in science, so called, not at all, while the nineteenth century had nothing if not that nothing at all.

And now about Saint Odile.

Our young servant when she came this morning and I asked her was there any news said I can tell you very little, it is always the same some one is winning and some one is losing. It is always the same.

And that is what made the prophecies of Saint Odile seem different, the final winning was so tremendous. This is the story.

In 1940 when we were all filled with sorrow and despair and a little hope and a complete certainty that after all, the Germans were not going to win. To my great surprise a prisoner a young musician who said the worst of being a prisoner was that you were all day and all night always together with seventy other men, men alone always together, just like Cummings described it in The Enormous Room. Well anyway he said in spite of everything every morning all of the roomful took it simply and completely for granted that the Germans were not going to win. They all greeted each other good-morning and how long before the Germans are going to be defeated. But said I how did you keep that faith. We do not keep it he said we had it, we just naturally did not have any other feeling. Well we the civilian population did not have it so simply, we had to have the prophecies of Saint Odile but they did help a lot.

To-day August 1943 I saw another returned prisoner, he was pale and his eyes glowed and as I came into the grocery store I heard some one say the pigs the rascals. And the grocer said to me do not be startled he is only talking about the Boches. Yes said the man I do not understand how anybody cannot realise that we are still at war with the Germans. An armistice is a pause but it is not an end, and as long as there is no peace we are at war, and as long as we are at war any one helping the enemy is a traitor to his country, that is the way I see it he said and his eyes glowed and he said they say that the Americans are slow but I dont know, Roosevelt said that in 1943 they would be here, and now it is 1943 and here they are. I dont know what anybody wants that satisfies me, they said they would be here and here they are. And I said I as an American I want to thank you and we shook hands and he said thank you and I said thank you.

This is what a prediction is. Just that, but of course that was near, it was said in ’42, and then there is the unconditional surrender, which they are demanding from the enemy. When I was a child and later and always I admired General Grant, and I knew that they used his initials Ulysses Simpson to mean Unconditional Surrender Grant. It was reasonable very reasonable very logical I thought so then and I said it just today, if the winner wins, then the vanquished should give in, and why ask for terms beforehand, if the winner is going to be generous he is going to be generous and if he is not going to be generous he is not going to be generous so what is the use of making terms. Unconditional surrender and then let them be generous or not. That is reasonable, because any way the ones beaten are beaten. That is the difference between European logic and American logic just that. So in a way my always quoting Unconditional Surrender Grant was a prediction. In a way yes it was. It is strange just as strange as it can be. Since yesterday or day before yesterday it seems but it was only yesterday, we have a German officer a major and his orderly stationed in the house and now August 1943, they are very meek, just as meek as that. The cook said to him that it was the Germans who had stolen the gardener’s radio, and that the gardener was a prisoner.