Free Wars I Have Seen by Gertrude Stein Page A

anti-semitism.
    Anybody can ask a question and anybody can answer a question, and during war-time they ask questions more than ever particularly in war-time like this one of 1943. Who said Christine aged six of her mother who is the Italians, Italians being in occupation it was a natural question, why the Germans said her mother, and who are friends of the Germans, why the Italians said her mother, and who are friends of the English said Christine, why the Americans said her mother, and is Stalin friends with Germans said Christine, no with the English said her mother, and who are the French friends of, said Christine, why no one said the mother.
    So if you ask questions and there is an answer it is not nevertheless any less illuminating, but anybody can ask questions in the year 1943, in July.
    Nevertheless there are more public servants than ever, more police, more regulations, more avoidance of the law, more prisoners, more coming and going and everybody sooner or later has to know a great many public servants a very great many, and certainly very certainly they do not ask or answer questions, and if they do they do not mean to they ask them because that is what they are told to do. We have an acquaintance, she was taken by the Germans because well there was a reason, there usually is a reason one might say there always is a reason. And they asked questions and she kept answering saying she did not know the answer to the questions. Nobody does know whether she does know the answer to the questions they asked her. And all the time all around her, there was opening and closing of revolvers and police dogs coming and going and lying down and getting up and suddenly she laughed, quite pleasantly and the man asking her questions said do not laugh at me and she said I am laughing pleasantly that is to say I am laughing at the absurdity of my being here not able to answer the questions you are asking and so she was in prison for two months and then once more they called her to ask questions and as she did not know the answers any more than she had before the man asking said now you can go, and she said where and he said wherever you like and she said you mean I am free and he said yes you are free, and she said but I have no money left, it all went in prison and I have none left for car-fare, and my friends live quite a way off, could you give me twenty soux for car-fare, and he said yes he could and she said do, and he gave it to her and she went away and she was free.
    The thing that is most interesting about government servants is that they believe what they are supposed to believe, they really do believe what they are supposed to believe, which has a great deal to do with wars and wars being what they are. It really has.
    I once asked some one who should know why public servants in the army in every branch of government service did not seem to have the kind of judgment that the man in the street any man or any woman has about what is happening. Oh he answered thereason is simple, they are specialists, and to a specialist his specialty is the whole of everything and if his specialty is in good order and it generally is then everything must be succeeding. In the German army they call these specialists the bees, because in their cells they are supposed to make honey, not money honey. And so this is what makes war, and then makes the failure of war. I have said so often between 1939 and 1943, I cannot understand why men have so little common sense why they cannot understand when there is no possibility of their winning that they will win, why they cannot remember that two and two makes four and no more. And now everybody knows except the public servants they are still believing what they are supposed to believe nobody else believes it, not even all their families believe it but believe it or not, they do still believe it, believe what they are supposed to believe. And so naturally they believing what they are supposed to believe