FIGHTING FRANCE: From Dunkerque to Belfort

American novelist Edith Wharton (1862-1937) is best known for the Age of Innocence. Opening in August 1914 as the onset of the First World War is announced to sunlit Paris, Wharton's chronicle of her experience on the front lines powerfully evokes a country and a way of life under threat. As nuanced in her observations of human behaviour as in her vivid depictions of French landscape and architecture, she fully exploits her unique position as consort to Walter Barry, President of the American Chamber of Commerce in Paris, which allows her unparalleled access to life in the trenches. Sensitive without sentimentality, the book is nothing less than an inspirational testament to the strength of the human spirit at a time of the greatest adversity. Colm Toibin in his foreword says 'Wharton's novelist's eye for the perfect detail is matched in these reports with a sense of moral grandeur and warlike fervour.' Names of the towns still resonate today like Ypres which she visited after the second battle but before the slaughter of the third battle: 'Ypres has been bombarded to death, and the outer walls of its houses are still standing... Every windowpane is smashed, nearly every building unroofed, and some house-fronts are sliced clean off, with different stories exposed, as if for the stage-setting of a farce. In these exposed interiors the poor little household goods shiver and blink like owls surprised in a hollow tree.' The essays are presented in chronological order which shows the modern day reader the slow descent into the chaos of the trench warfare that so dominated this war. 120 page paperback.