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    Coming Home 1916
    Coming Home 1916
    Coming Home 1916
    Ebook77 pages55 minutes

    Coming Home 1916

    By Edith Wharton

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    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherArchive Classics
    Release dateJun 1, 2004
    Coming Home 1916
    Author

    Edith Wharton

    EDITH WHARTON (1862 - 1937) was a unique and prolific voice in the American literary canon. With her distinct sense of humor and knowledge of New York’s upper-class society, Wharton was best known for novels that detailed the lives of the elite including: The House of Mirth, The Custom of Country, and The Age of Innocence. She was the first woman to be awarded the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction and one of four women whose election to the Academy of Arts and Letters broke the barrier for the next generation of women writers.

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      Book preview

      Coming Home 1916 - Edith Wharton

      The Project Gutenberg EBook of Coming Home, by Edith Wharton

      This eBook is for the use of anyone anywhere at no cost and with

      almost no restrictions whatsoever.  You may copy it, give it away or

      re-use it under the terms of the Project Gutenberg License included

      with this eBook or online at www.gutenberg.org

      Title: Coming Home

             1916

      Author: Edith Wharton

      Release Date: January 17, 2008 [EBook #24349]

      Last Updated: January 8, 2013

      Language: English

      *** START OF THIS PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK COMING HOME ***

      Produced by David Widger

      COMING HOME

      By Edith Wharton

      Copyright, 1916, By Charles Scribner's Sons

      Contents

      I

      The young men of our American Relief Corps are beginning to come back from the front with stories.

      There was no time to pick them up during the first months—the whole business was too wild and grim. The horror has not decreased, but nerves and sight are beginning to be disciplined to it. In the earlier days, moreover, such fragments of experience as one got were torn from their setting like bits of flesh scattered by shrapnel. Now things that seemed disjointed are beginning to link themselves together, and the broken bones of history are rising from the battle-fields.

      I can't say that, in this respect, all the members of the Relief Corps have made the most of their opportunity. Some are unobservant, or perhaps simply inarticulate; others, when going beyond the bald statistics of their job, tend to drop into sentiment and cinema scenes; and none but H. Macy Greer has the gift of making the thing told seem as true as if one had seen it. So it is on H. Macy Greer that I depend, and when his motor dashes him back to Paris for supplies I never fail to hunt him down and coax him to my rooms for dinner and a long cigar.

      Greer is a small hard-muscled youth, with pleasant manners, a sallow face, straight hemp-coloured hair and grey eyes of unexpected inwardness. He has a voice like thick soup, and speaks with the slovenly drawl of the new generation of Americans, dragging his words along like reluctant dogs on a string, and depriving his narrative of every shade of expression that intelligent intonation gives. But his eyes see so much that they make one see even what his foggy voice obscures.

      Some of his tales are dark and dreadful, some are unutterably sad, and some end in a huge laugh of irony. I am not sure how I ought to classify the one I have written down here.

      II

      ON my first dash to the Northern fighting line—Greer told me the other night—I carried supplies to an ambulance where the surgeon asked me to have a talk with an officer who was badly wounded and fretting for news of his people in the east of France.

      He was a young Frenchman, a cavalry lieutenant, trim and slim, with a pleasant smile and obstinate blue eyes that I liked. He looked as if he could hold on tight when it was worth his while. He had had a leg smashed, poor devil, in the first fighting in Flanders, and had been dragging on for weeks in the squalid camp-hospital where I found him. He didn't waste any words on himself, but began at once about his family. They were living, when the war broke out, at their country-place in the Vosges; his father and mother, his sister, just eighteen, and his brother Alain, two years younger. His father, the Comte de Réchamp, had married late in life, and was over seventy: his mother, a good deal younger, was crippled with rheumatism; and there was, besides—to round off the group—a helpless but intensely alive and domineering old grandmother about whom all the others revolved. You know how French families hang together, and throw out branches that make new roots but keep hold of the central trunk, like that tree—what's it called?—that they give pictures of in books about the East.

      Jean de Réchamp—that was my lieutenant's name—told me his family was a typical case. "We're very province, he said. My people live at Réchamp all the year. We have a house at Nancy—rather a fine old hôtel—but my parents go there only once in two or three years, for a few weeks. That's our 'season.'...Imagine the point of view! Or rather don't, because you couldn't...." (He had been about the world a good deal, and known something of other angles of vision.)

      Well, of this helpless exposed little knot of people he had had no word—simply nothing—since the first of August. He was at home, staying with them at Réchamp, when war broke out. He was

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