Free Wars I Have Seen by Gertrude Stein Page B

make it possible for the country to think they can win a war that they cannot possibly win, and so they go to war, and all because the public servants really believe what they are supposed to believe they really do. Of course most people in peace time do not realise this because the public servants who are like that practically never come in contact with them, and as nobody believes what they are supposed to believe, really one might say nobody believes that is nobody in ordinary life believes what they are supposed to believe because they are too busy making a living to have time to believe what they are supposed to believe, but public servants not having the necessity of making a living because their present past and future are secure, and practically unchangeable, they have all the time and strength to put into believing what they are supposed to believe and the result of this is war, the wars, that they are sure to lose, I suppose even the wars they are sure to win, well anyhow. It was Lee in the civil war, who was such a typical public servant, and who believes what he was supposed to believe, and at that time when my brother who did not belong came out to California with them all he had to do was to wear a beard to look old enough I vaguely began to know that public servants have nothing to dowith the business of living because they do believe what they are supposed to believe, it makes a certain kind of clergyman, and school teacher as well as army, and government employees. Oh dear me, and will we have more to eat to-morrow, we always worry but as yet we always have had, in spite of the government servants believing what they are supposed to believe.
    The next thing that impressed me at that time, was the Oscar Wilde story, and that largely because of the poem he wrote about his imprisonment, up to that time I had never conceived the possibility of anybody being in prison, anybody whose business it was not naturally because of natural or accidental crime to be in prison, and in California in those days of course even natural or accidental crime did not mean prison. And now in 1943 the large part of the men of a whole nation are in prison. Prisoners, prison, of course we did know about Andersonville and Libby prison, but that was romantic, but now there are too many for romance, many many too many. Anybody can be a prisoner now, even those who are only in a training camp feel themselves to be prisoners. We have just had a letter from Victor the baker’s son twenty years old who has been our gardener. He is the only son with four sisters and is much loved by his family. He says,
    Life has completely changed since I have been here, I never stop thinking of my former life, in those days when I wanted to go out, I went out, I remained out as long as I wanted to stay out, I came in when I wanted to, but alas that life is over, for the eight months that I am to stay in this isolated camp where we never see any civilian, the whole round of the week. Sunday we go out but in a group and with our chief, so we are not free. And then to-day too a letter from a real prisoner in Germany, and he says, I always liked you and your country and I have not changed my mind, far from it.
    Well he is free to say what he will but that is very difficult to stop, very very difficult, even in prison.
    Another friend a political prisoner told us, that they never have as much information real information about everything as inprison. And a hotel keeper whom we liked, well there is black traffic, and there is this and there is that, and they all are in prison, and now the Germans and the Italians in July 1943 as the pressure is commencing all around them, they feel imprisoned. There is no doubt that every one really wants to be free, at least to feel free, they may like to give orders or even to take them, but they like to feel free, oh yes they do they do like to feel free, and so Oscar Wilde and the Ballad of Reading Gaol was the first thing that