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The next thing that happened was that I was a very little older and we were
in Vienna, a nice place then. And now there was something I could remember as
well as some things I could be helped to remember by hearing them told again and
again, then and later.

Born that way there is no reason why I should have seen so many wars. I have
seen them. The Spanish-American was, the first world war and now the second world
war.

There were of course a number of others, that did not particularly concern
me. The Boer war I remembered that one, the Japanese-Chinese war, and the Russian-
Japanese war I remember that one very well too. Each one of these wars I remember
for another reason. I suppose it is not so unreasonable that I should have seen
so many wars having seen a good many countries when I was a baby and having a
feeling about countries which I suppose sooner or later since wars are make you
be one of those that see them.

And so we were in Vienna and I have never seen it again but it has always
remained for me something very real. It was there that I first came to be and so
of course it was real and then there were really things, there was a public gard-
en and in a kind of a way a formal garden pleases a child's fancy more than a
natural garden. It is more like a garden that you would make yourself. And there
was music and there was the old emperor who was a figure to have in a
formal garden and there was his national anthem and then there were the salt caves
and then also there were butterflies and insects in the woods and there was the
catching of them and there was good eating and on my third birthday a taste of
Vienna beer. And there were my mother and brothers on another there was a
tutor, one did not realise how important all these nationalities were going to be
to every one then and a Hungarian governess, and there was the first contact with
books, picture books but books all the same since pictures in picture books are
narrative. I have just bought twenty of them for the school children of Bilignin
and they are narrative.

5

certainly not one every day. Well say, two or three a year. Quite enough too to
remember because the rest of the time was just the rest of the time.

During these years there was no war and if there was it was not any way of
mine. But of course there was history, and there were novels historical novels and
so there was in a way war all the time. Why not when there is always war and
sometimes a nice war and sometimes an interesting war. And children do not take
war seriously as war. War is soldiers and soldiers have not to be war but they have
to be soldiers. Which is a nice thing. I remember that the only war that was not
soldiers to me but war was the Civil War. The other wars were soldiers emotion
and something to see. They said things that sounded like soldiers not like war,
but the Civil War, not the other wars in America, not the revolutionary war or
Indian wars they were soldiers not war. One of the first outside of English wars
that I remember and after all that was an English war was the defeat of Braddock
by the Indians because we had a story about that but this again was soldiers and
not war but the American Civil War was not soldiers it was war. And it is like
the wars now they are not soldiers they are war. Veterans always feel that it is
soldiers even though they know that it is war. Somehow General Grant was not a
soldier he was war and that is the reason I liked him.

Well all this time I went to school and school in California meant knowing
lots of nationalities. And if you went to school with them and knew about their
hair and their ways and all you were bound later not to be surprised that
Germans are as they are and French and Greeks and Chinamen and Japs. There is
nothing afterwards but confirmation confirmation of what you knew, because nobody
changes, they may develop but they do not change and so if you went to school
with them then why should you not know them. Some one was just telling me that in
German universities they had professors who studied the characteristics of
races. Quite unnecessary if you went to school with them but naturally the Germans
did not know that. General Grant did. He had been to school with all the generals
of the Civil War so he always knew what they would do.