It was 17 October when they got home. Paris was ‘beautiful and unviolated’, Gertrude said. But there were blackouts, fuel and food shortages, Zeppelin alarms and fears of invasion. Friends scattered. Derain and Braque had been conscripted. Picasso said, ‘On August 2 1914 I took Braque and Derain to the Gare d’Avignon. I never saw them again.’ Braque suffered a head injury in the Second Battle of Artois in June 1915, and had to be trepanned to save his eyesight. Matisse moved to Nice with his family. Apollinaire served as a brigadier with an artillery regiment; he died aged thirty-eight in the flu pandemic of 1918. Marie Laurencin had married a German and was living in Spain. Leo went back to New York and had intensive psychoanalysis. Carl Van Vechten told Gertrude he met him occasionally, ‘scowling in galleries at manifestations of modern artists and talking but never to me. He seems to be quite certain that he doesn’t like me.’ Michael and Sarah Stein moved to the French Riviera; they loaned nineteen paintings by Matisse to an art exhibition in Berlin and never got them back. Claribel Cone was stuck in the Regina Palace Hotel in Munich for the duration of the war.
Paris was too dangerous and deserted for Gertrude and Alice to stay. They rented a villa in Majorca and to finance the additional expenditure Gertrude sold Matisse’s Woman with a Hat for $4,000 dollars to Sarah and Michael Stein.3
On Majorca, Gertrude and Alice kept to their roles of writer and acolyte, husband and wife, but were cut off from home and friends. Gertrude wrote plays and poems. One play, Turkey and Bones and Eating and We Liked It, was twelve pages long, had seventeen scenes and such lines as ‘I do not like cotton drawers. I prefer wool or linen. I admit that linen is damp. Wool is warm. I think I prefer wool.’ Scene VI was ‘A water faucet’. She also wrote more poems about her love for Alice. One called ‘Lifting Belly’, which was fifty pages long, Virgil Thomson described as ‘concerning the domestic affections’:
I say lifting belly and then I say lifting belly and Caesars. I say lifting belly gently and Caesars gently. I say lifting belly again and Caesars again. I say lifting belly and I say Caesars and I say lifting belly Caesars and cow come out. I say lifting belly and cow come out… Lifting belly high
That is what I adore always more and more.
Come out cow.
They stayed on the island until December 1916. After the death of about a million fighting men, French victory at the Battle of Verdun stopped Germany’s advance towards Paris. Gertrude and Alice felt safe to return to rue de Fleurus.
war work
In Paris, out of a wish to contribute to the war effort, Gertrude and Alice, under the auspices of the American Fund for French Wounded, volunteered to distribute hospital supplies. Gertrude ordered a model-T Ford from America and had it converted into a supply truck. They called the Ford Auntie. It had wooden wheels and bicycle-thin tyres and required a great deal of cranking. For their first assignment, in March 1917, they drove to Perpignan to organize a distribution depot there.
Gertrude drove. Alice map-read. They set off armed with a Michelin Guide to hotels and restaurants. Alice planned the route according to the Guide’s gastronomic promise. The car’s maximum speed was thirty miles an hour. It kept breaking down and Gertrude dragooned passing men to help. She had ‘a scary habit of talking and forgetting about driving’ and was not good at following directions. When Alice told her they were on the wrong road, Gertrude responded, ‘wrong or right, this is the road and we are on it’.
They distributed medicines, blankets and food parcels to hospitals in the South of France. It was like a continuous Christmas, Alice said. She did the stocktaking and paperwork and sent weekly reports to the Fund. They also used Auntie to ferry wounded soldiers to hospitals. Gertrude, with her own money, bought X-ray equipment, thermometers, bandages and cigarettes. If inspired, in the car or a field, she wrote poems:
The wind blows
And the automobile goes
Can you guess boards.
Wood.
Can you guess hoops.
Barrels.
Can you guess girls.
Servants.
Can you guess messages.
In deed.
Then there are meats to buy.
We like asparagus so.
This is an interview.
Soldiers like a fuss.
Give them their way.
Yes indeed we will.
We are not mighty
Nor merry.
We are happy.
Very.
In the morning.
We believe in the morning
Do we.
A second assignment was to distribute supplies from a depot at Nîmes to military hospitals in southern France in the Bouches-du-Rhône and the Vaucluse. Braque encountered them at Avignon. Gertrude was wearing a greatcoat and Cossack hat and Alice a pith helmet and officer’s jacket with lots of pockets:
Their funny get-up so excited the curiosity of the passers-by that a large crowd gathered around us and the comments were quite humorous. The police arrived and insisted on examining our papers. They were in order, but for myself, I felt very uncomfortable.
At Christmas 1917, Gertrude and Alice hosted a dinner and dance at their Nîmes hotel for convalescing British soldiers. They danced with the wounded men. ‘It was as gay as we could make it’, Alice said. ‘But the British army was not cheerful.’
On the day of the victory procession, the Armistice, the défilé, on 11 November 1918, they got up at sunrise to join the celebrations:
‘It was a wonderful day’, Gertrude wrote:
Everybody was on the streets, men, women, children, soldiers, priests, nuns, we saw two nuns being helped into a tree from which they would be able to see.
They all marched past through the Arc de Triomphe…
Everybody except the germans were passing through. All the nations marched differently, some slowly, some quickly, the french carrying their flags the best of all…
However it all finally came to an end. We wandered up and we wandered
