5336. Great Writers on the Great War Fighting France, by Edith Wharton (read 21 Dec 2015) Edith Wharton in 1915 was living in France and wrote scintillating essays about Paris in 1914 and about her tour of the battle front in 1915. What struck me about her writing was how different it was from what one expects from a journalist. Every paragraph of this book tells us that we are reading the work of a master of prose. She tells of her visit to Verdun (before the great 1916 battle there), to Ypres, to Dunkerque, to the Argonne, to places resonating of the great names familiar to all students of the first World War--before the places became famous. She traveled by car, by mule, by foot, often hearing gunfire and at times seeing the German lines. This is as fine an account of the Western Front by a civilian as you will ever read. ( )

Very vivid and strongly pro-French descriptions of episodes of roughly the first year of World War I, including seeing Paris as an American civilian and visiting the French front lines as an accredited war writer. Strong emphasis on the barbarity of the Germans in destroying entire villages and slaughtering their inhabitants. Extremely high praise of the character of the French. Her description of their unity and firm purpose may have been true early in the war we she wrote, but did not continue to be so universal later. ( )

fightingfrance
Fighting France: from Dunkerque to Belport is a small collection of essays, written by American novelist and short story writer Edith Wharton at the beginning of the First World War while she was living in France.

“The signs over these hotel doors first disturbed the dreaming harmony of Paris. In a night, as it seemed, the whole city was hung with Red Crosses. Every other building showed the red and white band across its front, with “Ouvroir” or “Hopital” beneath; there was something sinister in these preparations for horrors in which one could not yet believe, in the making of bandages for limbs yet sound and whole, the spreading of pillows for heads yet carried high. But insist as they would on the woe to come, these warning signs did not deeply stir the trance of Paris. The first days of the war were full of a kind of unrealizing confidence, not boastful or fatuous, yet as different as possible from the clear-headed tenacity of purpose that the experience of the next few months was to develop. It is hard to evoke, without seeming to exaggerate it, that the mood of early August: the assurance, the balance, the kind of smiling fatalism with which Paris moved to her task. It is not impossible that the beauty of the season and the silence of the city may have helped to produce this mood. War, the shrieking fury, had announced herself by a great wave of stillness. Never was desert hush more complete: the silence of a street is always so much deeper than the silence of wood or field.”

As a consort to the president of the American chamber of commerce in France, Edith Wharton was given unique access to life at the front. In these essays Wharton meets with French soldiers, seeing for herself the impact upon everyday life, the devastation and desolation in once beautiful villages along the Western Front.

In many ways this book – though gloriously written, as one would expect from the pen of Edith Wharton – is rather out of step with the world we live in now. It reads rather like a piece of flowery propaganda at times, which in itself I think is fascinating, showing us as it does the spirit of patriotism that everyone it seems wanted to show the world. Edith Wharton was a fierce Francophile, and there’s no doubt where her sympathies lay here, the French are brave and stoical, the Germans evil, laying siege to the French countryside, destroying its villages. Written in 1915, it is hardly surprising that this is her view – it couldn’t be expected that it should be otherwise, it is probably only now with the distance of time that we are able to acknowledge, faults and heroisms on both sides.

They are grave, these young faces: one hears a great deal of the gaiety in the trenches, but the wounded are not gay. Neither are they sad, however. They are calm, meditative, strangely purified and matured. It is as though their great experience had purged them of pettiness, meanness and frivolity, burning them down to the bare bones of character, the fundamental substance of the soul, and shaping that substance into something so strong and finely tempered that for a long time to come Paris will not care to wear any look unworthy of the look on their faces.

During this year in France, Edith Wharton was able to tour various parts of the front, she appears fairly matter of fact about her presence in these places, but when we consider how close she was at times to the fighting this becomes a quite extraordinary chronicle. She focuses mainly on the deserted and war ravaged villages, and shows us temporary hospitals and soldiers’ messes and once poignantly encounters injured soldiers, suffering with no one to care for them. The soldiers set up little temporary villages right behind the lines, where they were able to live almost normally between engagements, and in the company of the her party and their guide Edith Wharton was able to meet these men. Wharton’s descriptions of landscape are just lovely, in her company the breeze rustles through the trees gently, while birds sing over head in trees alongside summer meadows.

“As we sat there in the grass, swept by a great mountain breeze full of the scent of thyme and myrtle, while the flutter of birds, the hum of insects, the still and busy life of the hills went on all about us in the sunshine, the pressure of the encircling line of death grew more intolerably real. It is not in the mud and jokes and everyday activities of the trenches that one most feels the damnable insanity of war; it is where it lurks like a mythical monsters in scenes to which the mind has always turned for rest.”

As an early twentieth century travelogue by a great American writer, Fighting France is a beautifully rendered little piece, locations exquisitely described with obvious affection. As a first-hand account of France during the first few months of The Great War, however, it is rather over blown and very one sided. The final section – entitled The Tone of France is particularly objectionable – as Wharton appears to speak for the whole of France, allowing her admiration of the French spirit and patriotism to descend into terrible generalisations. However I can’t help but also see something rather interesting in Fighting France as a social document, and I wonder what it might have been like had Edith Wharton written these essays with some greater distance to the war.

This was my eleventh read for the Librarything Virago Group’s Great War theme read (I have rather neglected it of late) links to my other Great War reads are on my reading challenges page ( )

In this short collection of essays, Edith Wharton captures observations on the impact of World War I on her beloved adopted country. She traveled over hill and dale, visiting army camps and villages left as ghost towns after inhabitants fled. Through her military guides, she gained access to areas inaccessible to typical civilians, including getting close enough to the front that she would be waved off to get out of danger.

Wharton's non-fiction prose is just as descriptive as in her novels; you can picture the scenery and hear the birds chirping in the meadow. The essays were originally published in Scribner's Magazine, and I'm sure made for interesting reading as a companion to broadsheet journalism. ( )

American novelist, Edith Wharton, settled permanently in Paris in 1907. She loved France, and had great admiration for its people. When war was threatening to break out at any minute, she and her good friend Walter Berry were traveling in Spain. They hurried back hardly able to believe that the stories were true, and through Berry's influence, they were able to begin their adventure that would take them to the front bringing supplies to the soldiers. They traveled in Wharton's car, which she had shipped from New York. During this time, Wharton wrote a series of essays that were published by Scribner's.

In Hermione Lee's biography "Edith Wharton", she says that Wharton sent a telegram to:

"the Scribner office: "JUST RETURNED FROM FIGHTING LINE IN ARGONNE MAILING ARTICLE NEXT WEEK." She was very keen to let her publishers and friends know that she was being given special, unrivaled access. (Scribner was not entirely convinced: in reply to her asking whether he would not prefer her war articles to the fiction she had promised them, he cabled back: "PREFER SHORT STORY.")...............Her passion for cultured tourism was being translated into the the ambitious curiosity of that dauntless and idiosyncratic twentieth-century breed, the woman "special correspondent" at war. And her publishers were, in the end, duly impressed. Scribner wrote to Wharton in July 1915: "What tremendous experiences you have been through! And I did not realize until your last letter that you were attended with real danger --- that you had actually been under fire." Wharton made five journeys with Walter Berry into the war zone between February and August 1915, which were condensed into four articles published in Scribner's Magazine, and then in "Fighting France" in November."

In this little book of around 100 pages, Wharton's experiences are told with Wharton's typical beautiful descriptions. Throughout she describes the courage of the people. Her hope was that her words would spur the Americans back home to give up their isolationist attitude and come to the aid of this country that she loved. It is interesting to note that she really did get right up to the front line, and even writes of going through one of the trenches.

Her efforts during the war did get many of her very rich friends back home to send money to help with the relief efforts she was very involved in. In 1916, she was awarded the French Legion d'honneur for her work.

I enjoyed this interesting book, and would recommend it to anyone interested in Wharton's travels during the first year of the war, and her view of the people she met and the countryside she traveled through.. ( )