Free Wars I Have Seen by Gertrude Stein

white goat called Genevieve, and there we first found out that you could have goat’s milk that did not taste of goat, had been interned first at Lourdes and then taken to Germany and now I went to Belley to say good-bye as we were moving. My lawyer said that everything was nicely arranged and we thanked each other and said what a pleasure it had all been, and then he said and now I have something ratherserious to tell you. I was in Vichy yesterday, and I saw Maurice Sivain, Sivain had been sous-prefet at Belley and had been most kind and helpful in extending our privileges and our occupation of our house, and Maurice Sivain said to me, tell these ladies that they must leave at once for Switzerland, to-morrow if possible otherwise they will be put into a concentration camp. But I said we are just moving. I know he said. I felt very funny, quite completely funny. But how can we go, as the frontier is closed, I said. That he said could be arranged, I think that could be arranged. You mean pass by fraud I said, Yes he said, it could be arranged. I felt very funny. I said I think I will go home and will you telephone Madame d’Aiguy to meet me. He said shall I walk home with you, I did feel very funny, and I said no I will go home and Madame d’Aiguy will come down to see you and arrange and I went home. I came in, I felt a little less funny but I still did feel funny, and Alice Toklas and Madame d’Aiguy were there, and I said we are not moving to-morrow we are going to Switzerland. They did not understand that and I explained and then they did understand, and Madame d’Aiguy left to go and see the lawyer and arrange and Alice Toklas and I sat down to supper. We both felt funny and then I said. No, I am not going we are not going, it is better to go regularly wherever we are sent than to go irregularly where nobody can help us if we are in trouble, no I said, they are always trying to get us to leave France but here we are and here we stay. What do you think, I said, and we thought and I said we will walk down to Belley and see the lawyer and tell him no. We walked down to Belley it was night it was dark but I am always out walking at night, I like it, and I took Alice Toklas by the arm because she has not the habit of walking at night and we got to Belley, and climbed up the funny steps to the lawyer, and I said I have decided not to go. Madame d’Aiguy was still there and she said perhaps it was better so, and the lawyer said perhaps we had better go and then he said he had a house way up in the mountains and there nobody would know, and I said well perhaps later but now I said to-morrow we are going to move to Culoz, with ourlarge comfortable new house with two good servants and a nice big park with trees, and we all went home, and we did move the next day. It took us some weeks to get over it but we finally did.
    But what was so curious in the whole affair was its unreality, like things are unreal when you are a child and before you know about realism as we did in the Spanish-American war and the Russo-Japanese war just that.
    And also the strange quality of government employees, I know a great deal now that and Russian literature about that same time of the Russo-Japanese war taught us about that.
    It was around those days that three things happened that made me know about those kind of things. There was my eldest brother coming home from the East as a member of the G. A. R., he had to grow a beard to look old enough, of course he did not belong but there were privileges in traveling and other things so he came along with them. It was then I first knew about officialdom and what one did by bribing. Of course that has to do with war, because the ordinary person that is one leading a peaceful life particularly men comes in contact with officials but in war-time, sooner or later everybody does. The second thing was the famous Oscar Wilde trial and the question of public opinion and the third thing was the Dreyfus case and