Coming Home

By Edith Wharton

Having lived in France during the First World War, it's no surprise that Wharton documented the impact on her spiritual homeland, both in fiction and non-fiction. 'Coming Home' is told from the perspective of an American aid worker, who helps a wounded French soldier, Jen Réchamp. A bond between the two sees them travel to Jean's home to see that everything is as it should be. While Wharton might be better known for her high-society satires, 'Coming Home' reveals an author who can capture the horrors of war and the heroic spirits of those who choose to stand against it.A gripping insight into how the First World War was perceived in France, Wharton's ´Coming Home´ will delight fans of other WWI narratives such as Sam Mendes' Oscar-nominated movie ´1917´.-

• Language: English
• Publisher: SAGA Egmont
• Release date: Jul 14, 2022
• ISBN: 9788728127476

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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Edith Wharton

Coming Home

SAGA Egmont

Coming Home

Cover image: Shutterstock

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ISBN: 9788728127476

1st ebook edition

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This work is republished as a historical document. It contains contemporary use of language.

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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