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    Fighting France, from Dunkerque to Belfort
    Fighting France, from Dunkerque to Belfort
    Fighting France, from Dunkerque to Belfort
    Ebook159 pages2 hours

    Fighting France, from Dunkerque to Belfort

    By Edith Wharton

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    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherArchive Classics
    Release dateJan 1, 1975
    Author

    Edith Wharton

    Edith Wharton (1862–1937) was an American novelist—the first woman to win a Pulitzer Prize for her novel The Age of Innocence in 1921—as well as a short story writer, playwright, designer, reporter, and poet. Her other works include Ethan Frome, The House of Mirth, and Roman Fever and Other Stories. Born into one of New York’s elite families, she drew upon her knowledge of upper-class aristocracy to realistically portray the lives and morals of the Gilded Age.

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    Reviews for Fighting France, from Dunkerque to Belfort

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    • 3/5
      Edith Wharton was living in France when World War One broke out and Frighting France is her account of the first year of that war written as a series of articles for Scribner's Magazine. She is an unabashed Francophile so, in her eyes, the Germans are the enemy who wantonly destroy picturesque villages, wreck havoc on the people, and have no respect for the great architectural gems like Rheims Cathedral, The French, on the other hand, have grown more noble and courageous as they defend their homeland. Indeed, even the French trenches in that first year of the war, exhibit that Gallic style and spirit. Annual flowers are planted in front of the half buried temporary structures which serve as officer's quarters, soldiers' mess halls, little chapels, and aid stations. Life in the nearby villages which serve the soldiers when they have breaks from the fighting is almost normal with the young men flirting with the local girls, cranking out little newspapers, joking together and even staging tournaments. The weather in that first year is lovely and the sound of birds rivals the sound of the big guns being fired by both sides.Because of her connections Wharton is given guided tours of the various French positions. She sees the positive most of the time and is affected mainly by the deserted villages and towns, abandoned by their inhabitants as the Germans invaded. A flapping curtain or a child's toy is a poignant reminder of the disrupted lives. I can remember only once when she really comments on the awful casualties of this war. She enters a barn full of wounded soldiers who are dying on dirty straw. Nothing more can be done and she laments that there are no women to nurse these severely injured men. This is a very powerful moment in the narrative.These articles were written to convince the American reader to support the French who are fighting on their own soil against the aggressive Germans. Wharton does not repeat the popular atrocity propaganda. She rather concentrates on the determination of France to defeat the enemy while retaining the moral high ground. I suspect she succeeded in reinforcing the beliefs of readers who agreed with her.Note: I read the public domain edition of this book as available on Project Gutenberg.
    • 3/5
      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.
    • 4/5
      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.
    • 4/5
      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.
    • 4/5
      Edith Wharton was fortunate as a civilian to be escorted around France during WWI documenting the effects of war on the people and countryside, although it is unclear who her escorts were and why she had so much access to the front line. She writes without sensationalism but clearly conveys feelings of loss when encountering deserted towns and destroyed lives. The book contains many descriptions of French villages, although the inclusion of a map would have been useful.Thank you to Hesperus press for the perfect purse size copy.
    • 4/5
      A modern journalist would have been tempted to use sensationalism to create reports with high impact. Instead, in 1915 Edith Wharton wrote eloquent, detailed descriptions of her first hand observations. These brilliantly talented pieces describe not only the lamentable conditions in the trenches but also provide many details about the atmosphere of the time as well as of the French landscape. Her empirical narrative reveals a personal involvement that is more striking than provocative headlines would have been. The exclusion of political background gave a different perspective to her account, bringing it home to the modern reader that these were ordinary individuals in a treacherous, life-changing situation. Wharton wrote subjectively yet compassionately in beautiful, elegant prose. Too often we remember only the outcome and have a tendency to generalize events of the Great War without considering the horrific conditions that individuals endured and that are so skillfully described in these essays.Colm Tóibin has written an informative foreword about Edith Wharton and the circumstances that brought her to write these essays that were submitted to Scribner's Magazine and later published in a single volume.Kudos to Hesperus Press for producing a beautiful, fine quality softcover edition of Wharton's classic.
    • 5/5
      In his ‘Foreward’ to this book Colm Toibin notes that at the beginning of WWI Edith Wharton. who had finally settled in Paris in 1906, had come to love France so its 'not hard to imagine how much the destruction of France, or its defeat, or even a rupture in its way of life, would have horrified her.' Some of that horror comes across in these beautifully observed essays detailing her trips through France in 1915. The names of some of the towns Wharton visited still resonate today, of Ypres, which she visited after the Second Battle, but before the slaughter of the Third Battle, she wrote 'Ypres has been bombarded to death, and the outer walls of its houses are still standing ... Every window pane is smashed, nearly every building unroofed, and some house-fronts are sliced clean off, with the different stories exposed, as if for the stage-setting of a farce. In these exposed interiors the poor little household gods shiver and blink like owls surprised in a hollow tree.' The essays are presented in chronological order and this allows the modern day reader to really sense the slow descent into the chaos of the trench warfare that so dominated this war.
    • 5/5
      Reading this intelligent and informative book at a time when France is simmering and often revelling in its governmental ineptitude and the déconfiture of its national football team is at once surreal and sobering. Surreal, because the courageous and unsentimentally patriotic nature of the people so acutely observed by Edith Wharton seems light years away from that of the irascible and excitable French nation today. Sobering, when I realised that almost 100 years have passed since World War I, and even though my parents were not born until 1917, it stills feels like part of my own history.In 1914 Wharton, living in Paris, was in a position to make a motor tour as far as the Front in Northern France and Belgium, in order to inspect the conditions of the hospitals and assess the needs of the medical services. Visiting the trenches, she saw first-hand the wounded and the dying, the deserted or destroyed villages and towns. Her descriptions (apart from the more analytical first and last chapters, The Look of Paris and The Tone of France, respectively) are written in the form of a travel journal, and are so precise and detailed that they could be used today as settings for films. But what I found most moving were her compassionate encounters with the troops; it is as if she can see into their souls.To quote: "It is not too much to say that war has given beauty to faces that were interesting, humorous, acute, malicious, a hundred vivid and expressive things, but last and least of all beautiful. Almost all the faces about these crowded tables - young or old, plain or handsome, distinguished or average - have the same look of quiet authority; it is as though all the nervosity, fussiness, little personal oddities, meannesses and vulgarities, had been burnt away in a great flame of self-dedication. It is a wonderful example of the rapidity with which purpose models the human countenance."As often happens: a coincidence. Yesterday I was researching a botanical garden in the south of France for a guide book; the text mentioned that the house had been built by the man who discovered the Venus de Milo. Looking up his name, I discovered that the same house had been bought by Edith Wharton in 1927, and it was she who planted the exotic garden. I am glad she spent her last years in a country she so appreciated, surrounded by peace and beauty.This is the first work I have read by Edith Wharton; thanks to Hesperus Press for letting me review it - I shall certainly look for more of her books. This edition is small and light, easy to read, well produced with cover flaps that I always find useful to mark my page. I would have liked a map to follow her journeys; it would be interesting to travel the same routes today. And oops, a little typo, p.4 line 17, form instead of from.
    • 4/5
      In addition to being a Pulitzer Prize winning novelist, essayist, and author of short stories, Edith Wharton was one of those Americans who fell in love with France at an early age. She would in fact make it her principal place of residence from 1911 up to her death in 1937. When the First World War broke out in 1914, she was – not unexpectedly given her social connections (a book jacket note describes her as “consort” to Walter Berry, then Chairman of the U.S. Chamber of Commerce in France) – one of the few neutral foreigners allowed to remain in early wartime France. At the age of 52, she returned to France from England and began to work for war charities, showing a special interest in the widows of French soldiers killed in the war by finding them work, even hiring 90 of them herself to make fashionable lingerie for sale.Much of her relief work involved traveling by car across the length and breadth of the war front in France, from Switzerland to the English Channel, even visiting the war front. In addition to reports of her observations for the Red Cross, among others, six of her car trips became the subject of magazine articles and this book in 1915. The phrase “From Dunkerque to Belfort” in the title referred to the two fortified cities located at the two ends of the trench lines that had quickly stretched the length of what came to be called the Western Front. The author clearly hoped that, after nearly a year of war, her collected observations on wartime France and how it affected both the French and her would persuade Americans to support France and even enter the war as a French ally.From the vantage point of the 21st Century with its ongoing conflicts in Iraq and Afghanistan, there is an almost touching degree of innocence in Edith Wharton’s writings about the war and about France at war. I was repeatedly reminded of the things that the author did not yet know about France, the French, their experience of the impact of the First World War, and how that experience would affect them as a nation and a people. Writing in 1915, she knew nothing about the mutinies that would wrack the French Army in 1917 – just two years into the future. Reportedly up to 30,000 French troops would leave the trenches and go to the rear, involving as many as half of the divisions then in the French Army. The authorities would respond with mass arrests and military trials which would pass death sentences on more than 600 soldiers, more than 40 of which would be carried out by firing squads. But these worn, desperate, tired French soldiers are not the ones seen and written about by Ms. Wharton in 1914-1915.In another passage, Ms. Wharton describes visiting the fortress of Verdun, in the face of German attacks and artillery barrages. And yet, as dramatic as her visit to that citadel may have been, the true sausage grinder of the famous Battle of Verdun is still a year in the future – 21 February to 18 December, 1916. The German High Command would deliberately attack the fortress for the sole purpose of drawing in and killing as many French troops as possible. The final French casualties would amount to 371,000, including 60,000 killed; 210,000 wounded; and 101,000 missing. Nor does our author know that the French commander responsible for its defense, General Pêtain, would rise to become a living symbol of French defiance – only to fall to ignominy and be convicted of treason twenty years later for his collaboration with Nazi Germany. But no one in 1915 knew these things.“Fighting France” is well written and easy to read little volume that might help the modern reader to understand how the war was perceived and experienced by at least some of those actually present. A map or even an historical atlas of the First World War might help some readers better follow Mrs. Wharton’s peregrinations around France and recognize the militarily significant locations and dates she mentions. The book would also be of interest to those devotees and fans of Mrs. Wharton’s novels and short stories who would like to know and understand more about the woman who drew so often upon her own experiences in writing her fiction. It seems clear that whether or not any of her own novels could be considered autobiographical, many elements of her life and experiences might lend themselves well to the novel, the stage, or cinema including the experiences described in this slim work.
    • 3/5
      Originally published in 1915, these are essays by the Francophile novelist which give a picture of Paris at the outbreak of the first World War followed by her experiences close to the front line with a description of the privations and early losses of the French army. Mrs Wharton was fortunate in having high-level contacts, which allowed her more latitude than would have been accorded to an ordinary war correspondent . She also understood French attitudes and was taken seriously there as a literary figure. Her descriptive powers are considerable and she was writing at a time before the war had deteriorated into the hopelessness of stagnating trench warfare, poison gas and huge slaughter on both sides. The book is interesting historically for in it one can see some of the reasons for the disastrous insistence on the humiliation of the Germans in the peace settlement which followed the Armistice of 1918 and which is considered by some historians to have led directly to the rise of the Nazis and the second World War.

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    Fighting France, from Dunkerque to Belfort - Edith Wharton

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