Fighting France: From Dunkerque to Belfort 9781474406932

Citation preview

Fighting France

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Fighting France From Dunkerque to Belfort Edith Wharton

Edited by Alice Kelly

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© Editorial matter and organisation Alice Kelly, 2015 © Watkins/Loomis Agency Inc., New York, Literary Executors of The Estate of Edith Wharton, 2015 Edinburgh University Press Ltd The Tun – Holyrood Road, 12(2f) Jackson’s Entry, Edinburgh EH8 8PJ www.euppublishing.com Typeset in 11/13 Adobe Sabon by IDSUK (DataConnection) Ltd, and printed and bound in Great Britain by CPI Group (UK) Ltd, Croydon CR0 4YY A CIP record for this book is available from the British Library ISBN 978 1 4744 0692 5 (hardback) ISBN 978 1 4744 0693 2 (webready PDF) ISBN 978 1 4744 0694 9 (epub) The right of Alice Kelly to be identified as the editor of this work has been asserted in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988, and the Copyright and Related Rights Regulations 2003 (SI No. 2498).

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Contents

Note on the Text Acknowledgements Introduction: Wharton in Wartime

vi viii 1

Fighting France

75

Further Reading

197

Index

207

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Note on the Text

The text of Fighting France: From Dunkerque to Belfort has been set from the first American edition, first impression (New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, November 1915). The Canadian edition was published by McLeod and Allen in Toronto in November 1915 and the British edition was published by Macmillan in London in February 1916. Except for different publishing details on the title pages and a list of books by Wharton published by Scribner’s in the American edition, the American, Canadian and British first editions are identical, as the text was printed by Scribner and sent to McLeod and Allen in Toronto, and Macmillan in London, for their respective editions. Four of the articles originally appeared in Scribner’s Magazine: ‘The Look of Paris’ (Vol. 57, No. 5, May 1915), pp. 523–31; ‘In Argonne’ (Vol. 57, No. 6, June 1915), pp. 651–60; ‘In Lorraine and the Vosges’ (Vol. 58, No. 4, October 1915), pp. 430–42; and ‘In the North’ (Vol. 58, No. 5, November 1915), pp. 600–10. ‘‘In Alsace’ originally appeared in The Saturday Evening Post (Vol. 188, No. 21, 20 November 1915), pp. 9−10, 32–3. The first four chapters of the book were set from the Scribner’s Magazine articles, and textual variants between the magazine and the book publication are largely limited to minor word or phrasing changes and thus are not reproduced here. There is only one known extant typescript, of one of the chapters which did not originally appear in Scribner’s Magazine: ‘In Alsace’, held in the Department of Rare Book and Special Collections, Princeton University Library. Where Wharton expressed the desire to have a word changed for the second impression, this change has been implemented with the original word noted in the footnotes.

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Note on the Text

vii

Taking into account these multiple versions of the text, this edition seeks to produce an authoritative version. Otherwise, this edition reproduces the text as it was originally published. Double quotation marks have therefore been left in the text and the use of hyphenated words and italics for French words has not been standardised, as both are varied in the original text. Wharton’s predominant use of British spelling has been retained.

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Acknowledgements

For permissions to quote Wharton materials I would like to thank the Watkins/Loomis Agency, who represent Wharton’s Estate; Gabriel Swift and the librarians in the Department of Rare Books and Special Collections at Princeton University Library, for permissions to quote from the Edith Wharton Manuscripts and the Archives of Charles Scribner’s Sons, and for accommodating me during my research visits; Mark Gaipa at the Modernist Journals Project at Brown and Tulsa Universities for his help with images of Scribner’s Magazine; and Nancy Kuhl for permissions to quote from the Edith Wharton Manuscripts at the Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library at Yale University. The librarians and staff of the Beinecke Library, the Sterling Memorial Library and the Bass Library at Yale have all been brilliantly helpful and encouraging throughout the process of my research. At Edinburgh University Press, I would like to thank Jackie Jones for her early encouragement of this project, and Adela Rauchova and Rebecca Mackenzie for all their help. The community of Wharton scholars and enthusiasts has been very welcoming. Kelsey Mullen and the staff at The Mount, Edith Wharton’s former home in Lenox, Massachusetts, allowed me to present my work on Wharton’s wartime writings and shared their First World War resources. Alan and Irene Goldman-Price have been highly encouraging and given me a number of useful pointers. Kate McLoughlin, Anne Marsh Fields, Bruno Cabanes, William Blazek and Geneviève Brassard have all kindly shared their work with me. Pierre Purseigle gave useful help with translations. Most importantly, David Trotter has offered insightful comments on numerous

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Acknowledgements

ix

versions of my Wharton work, as well as unflagging encouragement and good humour throughout. Personally, I would like to thank Juan Pablo Fuentes, Joel Dodson and my family for all their help and encouragement.

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J[ A

NN

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Approx im ate Location of the Front Lin es

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First trip· Late February 1915

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Second trip- Early March 1915

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Wharton’s journeys to the war zones. The Mount, Lenox, Massachusetts.

Introduction: Wharton in Wartime

At the outbreak of the Great War in August 1914, the American novelist Edith Wharton was living in France. She quickly became a highly active participant in relief efforts and an advocate for American intervention in the war in her fiction and non-fiction. Wharton’s explicit war writings consist of a series of non-fiction impressions published as articles in Scribner’s Magazine and The Saturday Evening Post, and collected as Fighting France in 1915; three short stories ‘Coming Home’ (1915), ‘Writing a War Story’ (1919), and ‘The Refugees’ (1919); the 1916 fundraising anthology The Book of the Homeless; and the novels The Marne (1918) and A Son at the Front (1923), as well as a number of poems, newspaper articles and talks.1 In the Wharton Collection at Yale, there is also an unfinished and previously unknown story from this period entitled ‘The Field of Honour’.2 This body of work demonstrates that Wharton did not remain ‘pen-tied’ as she had been at the beginning of the war, but that she engaged with the war in a variety of genres and despite her extensive war work, she produced a considerable amount of writing.3 Wharton’s war writing has frequently been discussed – and largely dismissed – as propaganda. Stanley Cooperman considered Wharton to have ‘combined gentility with bloodthirst, the manners of the social novelist with the matter of the recruiting poster’, and even Wharton’s most steadfast advocates have been quick to dismiss her wartime writing.4 For such a major twentieth-century literary figure, this neglect is particularly surprising. Shari Benstock attributes it to ‘the larger problems of categorizing women’s contributions to war literature’.5 Re-evaluations of Wharton’s wartime writing have been prompted by the broader scholarly interest taken in women’s literary

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contributions to the First World War in recent years, which has uncovered the wartime writings of both unknown and more established female writers.6 Two book-length studies have focused exclusively on Wharton and the war. Alan Price’s largely biographical study The End of the Age of Innocence: Edith Wharton and the First World War offers a history of Wharton’s relief activities, with a final chapter considering her post-war fiction. Price asks, ‘How did a sophisticated social satirist turn so quickly into a partisan war propagandist?’ and notes the ‘shift in rhetorical registers’ in Wharton’s wartime writing, as she learned to ‘hit and hold “the tremolo note” when its effects served her ends’.7 For Price, Wharton’s ‘best writing during the war was reportage from various points on the front and from Paris’: in other words, Fighting France.8 Julie Olin-Ammentorp’s 2004 study Edith Wharton’s Writings from the Great War ‘examines the wartime and war-related writings as a coherent and crucial part of Wharton’s oeuvre’. Olin-Ammentorp argues that Wharton’s war writings, while scarcely ‘lost masterpieces’, ‘have not only intrinsic worth but biographical and historical value, and deserve far more study than they have received’.9 The strength of this continuing reassessment of Wharton’s wartime and post-war writing is further demonstrated by a number of recent readings of its feminism, links with genres such as travel literature, connections with modernist literature, and use of spatial tropes.10 The most recent biography, by Hermione Lee, provides an extensive and detailed account of the war years.11 Close attention to literary technique demonstrates just how complex and accomplished a propagandist Wharton was. In Fighting France, she at once justifies and elides war death through the skilful use of stock tropes: the suffering of innocent civilians and the ennobling and invigorating capacity of war experience. However, this text simultaneously incorporates moments of distinct anxiety or unease – particularly concerning the war dead – which undermine its straightforwardly propagandistic elements. Olin-Ammentorp argues that although ‘decidedly pro-French, it is not a doctrinaire work but a descriptive one’, and in this way, it is ‘very much a book without a thesis’.12 The moments of anxiety evident in this propaganda text, written during the first fifteen months of the war, indicate that Wharton was still working out how to write about the war and its casualties. Fighting France is therefore a far more complex text than has often been assumed.

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Introduction: Wharton in Wartime

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This centenary edition both restores the original photographs (omitted from earlier versions) and takes into account the book and magazine versions of the text. This Introduction considers the genesis of the text, its publication history in Scribner’s Magazine and The Saturday Evening Post, and its reception. It then provides a brief critical overview, placing the text within Wharton’s oeuvre.

The Genesis of Fighting France Wharton was fifty-two when the war broke out, and a celebrated author firmly established in the literary worlds of Paris, New York and London. From 1907, she and her husband, Edward ‘Teddy’ Wharton, were predominantly based in Paris, where Wharton would settle at an apartment at 53 rue de Varenne from 1910 until after the war. Like his father, Teddy suffered from bipolar disorder and had become increasingly ill since 1902. After twenty-eight years of marriage Wharton obtained a painful divorce in April 1913, choosing to carry out proceedings in France where the details could be kept private.13 She then spent much of 1913–14 travelling across Europe, to the United States and to North Africa. Wharton’s literary standing continued to be on the rise in this period: her most famous book, The House of Mirth (1905), had been a huge commercial success, and her later novel Ethan Frome (1911) received successful reviews in both Britain and America and further cemented her reputation, although it didn’t sell particularly well. Although The Reef (1912) sold poorly, her next novel The Custom of the Country was well received on its publication in October 1913. There is no doubt that the periods of the war and its aftermath were of intense personal importance to Wharton. The final chapters of her autobiography, devoted to ‘The War’ and ‘And After’, give a sense of how much the war punctuated her life. The outbreak of the war in August 1914 was to Wharton, as to much of the rest of the world, a complete shock. In her autobiography, she recalls learning of the assassination of Franz Ferdinand while at a garden party: It was a perfect summer day . . . An exceptionally gay season was drawing to its close, the air was full of new literary and artistic emotions, and that dust of ideas with which the atmosphere of Paris is always laden sparkled like motes in the sun.14

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Wharton, on the eve of travelling to Spain, paints her pre-war self as politically disengaged, largely ignoring the escalating international crisis: ‘We gave little thought to the poor murdered Archduke.’15 Returning to Paris as the newspapers began to be ‘disquieting’, Wharton and Walter Berry, her travel companion, did not believe the situation: ‘What nonsense! It can’t be war’, we said to each other the next morning; but we started early and rushed through to Paris, where the air was already thick with rumours. Everything seemed strange, ominous and unreal, like the yellow glare which precedes a storm. There were moments when I felt as if I had died, and waked up in an unknown world. And so I had. Two days later war was declared.16

The common belief in Paris – and in many other places – was that the war would be over quickly. Fulfilling a long-held ambition to spend a summer in England, Wharton had arranged to rent Stocks, the countryside home of the novelist Mrs Humphry Ward, during the summer of 1914. The outbreak of the war initially stalled this plan: Wharton could not leave Paris due to travel restrictions. Awaiting a permit to go to England, Wharton was approached by her friend the Comtesse d’Haussonville, president of one of the branches of the French Red Cross, to establish an ‘ouvroir’ (workroom) for unemployed women, specifically the seamstresses who were now out of work. Wharton immediately set to work finding an apartment for the ouvroir and establishing it, managing to raise $2,000 in the first fortnight.17 When her permit arrived to allow her to travel to England in late August, Wharton spent a number of lonely weeks at Stocks and then in London trying to return to Paris, but again trapped by travel restrictions. When she finally returned in late September 1914, she resumed management of the workroom, and set up a number of further charities. Much has been written on Wharton’s war work, but it is important to emphasise her immense success in managing a number of different relief efforts, despite her own admission that she was ‘totally inexperienced in every form of relief work, and not least in the management of anything like a work-room’.18 She records that by the end of the war in November 1918 ‘we had, in addition to five thousand refugees permanently cared for in Paris, and four big colonies for

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Introduction: Wharton in Wartime

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old people and children, four large and well-staffed sanatoria for tuberculous women and children’.19 Her work for her three main war charities – the American Hostels for Refugees, the Children of Flanders Rescue Committee, and Les Tuberculeux de la Guerre – resulted in her being awarded the French Legion of Honour in March 1916 and the Belgian Queen Elizabeth’s Medal, and she would still be raising money on their behalf until the late 1920s.20 Referring to Fighting France in her autobiography, Wharton writes: ‘I have related, in a little book written during the first two years of the war, the impressions produced by those dark and bewildering days of August 1914’.21 She introduces the story of Fighting France by recounting an anecdote of a dinner with the President of the Mozart Society and two musicians one summer evening sometime during the 1920s, where she was taken by surprise to learn that she had met one of them, Félix Raugel, before: Raugel was a stranger, except by reputation, and when he entered the room I had no sense of ever having seen him before. But he came straight up to me with beaming smile and hands outstretched. ‘Madame! What an age since we last met! Do you remember? It was in August 1915, when you rode up a mountain in the Vosges, astride on an army mule, and suddenly appeared in the camp of the Blue Devils [Chasseurs Alpins] on top of the Col de la Chapelotte!’ I stared at him in wonder; and as he spoke the peaceful room vanished, and the twilight shadows of my suburban garden, and I saw myself, an eager grotesque figure, bestriding a mule in the long tight skirts of 1915, and suddenly appearing, a prosaic Walkyrie laden with cigarettes, in the heart of the mountain fastness held by the famous Chasseurs Alpins, already among the legendary troops of the French army. Seeing Félix Raugel again brought back to me with startling vividness the scenes of my repeated journeys to the front; the scarred torn land behind the trenches, the faces of the men who held it, the terrible and interminable epic of France’s long defence.22

The encounter vividly recalls her wartime meeting with Raugel during a visit to Alsace in August 1915. Her description of herself as ‘an eager grotesque figure’ suggests her retrospective embarrassment at her fervour to see the front, while her self-portrait as a ‘prosaic Walkyrie’ emphasises her awareness of her highly unusual position as a woman in the war zones. In this passage from 1934, Wharton

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returns to tropes from the text of Fighting France itself, revealing its lasting hold on her imagination: the description of the ‘scarred torn land’ repeating that text’s substitution of landscape for bodies and its focus on faces as markers of character. Fighting France was the result of five ‘expeditions’ to the front lines that Wharton made between February and August 1915, ‘some of which’ she wrote, ‘actually took me into the front-line trenches’.23 Wharton was initially approached by the French Red Cross to report on the conditions in military hospitals near the front and to take supplies, but she proposed a number of further trips in order to gather material to report back to those who had the money to help: ‘What I saw there made me feel the urgency of telling my rich and generous compatriots something of the desperate needs of the hospitals in the war-zone’.24 With her American friend, fellow Francophile, and later President of the American Chamber of Commerce in Paris, Walter Berry, and her trusty chauffeur Charles Cook driving ‘Her’ – as Wharton named her Mercedes – the party went east to the Argonne and Verdun in late February, and returned again to the same area a fortnight later in early March. They then went to the Vosges in May, north-east to Belgium in June, and to Alsace in August (see Figure 1). Each trip was about a week in length. These trips, which included travel by car, cart and mule, were not always easy: Eleanor Dwight notes that ‘getting to and from the frontline trenches demanded stamina, particularly from a woman of fifty-three’.25 Over the course of her trips, Wharton went into the French trenches, saw a German Taube aeroplane and German prisoners, and observed the pressures of curfew and blackout. As the war zones were off-limits to civilians, this degree of exposure constituted a unique opportunity, and Fighting France shows that she went to considerable lengths to exploit it to the full. Wharton wrote extensively about these trips in letters to friends, including Henry James, who was jealous of what she had been able to accomplish, and sometimes gave different versions of the same event to different correspondents.26 Wharton wrote the articles that became Fighting France for marked propagandistic purposes and with a distant American audience in mind, describing the physical conditions of the war zones to those far away in the States. It was her contacts who enabled her to gain access to war zones that were otherwise completely out of

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Introduction: Wharton in Wartime

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bounds to journalists and civilians, contacts such as the diplomat Jules Cambon, the politician Paul Boncour, the writer Jean-Louis Vaudoyer and the war correspondent Raymond Recouly. The main obstacle was whether or not Wharton could potentially betray military secrets: Foreign correspondents were still rigorously excluded from the warzone; but Monsieur Cambon, after talking the matter over with General Joffre’s chief-of-staff, General Pellé, succeeded in convincing him that, even if in my ignorance I should stumble on some important military secret, there would be little risk of its betrayal in articles which could not possibly be ready for publication until several months later; while the description of what I saw might bring home to American readers some of the dreadful realities of war.27

Her literary celebrity gave her a marked advantage: Monsieur Henry de Jouvenel (lately French Ambassador to Italy), receiving at Sainte Menehoulde my request to go on to Verdun, at first positively refused, and then, returning from a consultation with the General of the division, said with a smile: ‘Are you the author of “The House of Mirth”? If you are, the General says you shall have a pass: but for heaven’s sake drive as fast as you can, for we don’t want any civilians on the road today’.28

As Lee notes, Wharton’s ‘way was made smooth . . . partly because of her evident usefulness as a well-connected American writer’ who could write propaganda on behalf of France and partly because Berry was with her ‘expediting the necessary “laissez-passer” and making sure of access’ (see Figures 2 and 3).29 It is possible that Wharton was taken to particular places that the French government wanted to show off to the American people, such as the Hospice run by Soeur Julie Rigard in Gerbéviller, which seems to have been regularly used as an example of French fortitude during the war. Although Wharton ‘was not the only writer at the front’, her letter to James notes that Henri de Jouvenel, the husband of the writer Colette, told her she was the first woman: ‘He said: “Vous êtes la première femme qui soit venue à Verdun” – & at the Hospital [in Blercourt] they told me the same thing.’30

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Fighting France

By the time Wharton began the visits to the front described in her book, the war had settled down into relatively static trench warfare and she was able to visit various sections of the front line. In the early period of the war, she witnessed refugees pouring into Paris and nearly three million mobilised men moving out. Much of the damage suffered by the towns she describes visiting, such as Gerbéviller, occurred during that early period, in the ‘war of movement’, when the Germans advanced into Belgium and France under the Schlieffen Plan and the French counterattacked in Alsace-Lorraine and the southern Ardennes as part of their Plan XVII. The rapid advance of the Germans towards Paris caused enormous number of Parisians to flee and the French government was temporarily moved to Bordeaux. However, both plans proved flawed. The Allied victory at the Battle of the Marne (what became known as ‘the Miracle of the Marne’) in mid-September forced the Germans to retreat. The Germans then held their position at the Battle of the Aisne. After a number of inconclusive battles, both sides began to dig in and the extension of trenches north and south soon created a Western Front, extending from the North Sea to Switzerland, from Dunkirk to Belfort. The French experience of 1915 would be characterised predominantly by an enormous loss of life in battles including Ypres, Neuve Chapelle and Loos, and little movement: Lee notes that ‘over 50 per cent of the 1.3 million Frenchmen killed during the war died between August 1914 and December 1915’, or more concretely ‘two thousand young Frenchmen were killed in battle every day’.31 The loss of three people Wharton knew during 1915 gives an indication of the scale of the French casualties: her friend Jean du Breuil de Saint-Germain in February, her translator Robert d’Humières in June, and her former footman Henri in September. The photographs and souvenirs Wharton brought home from the front (or which were sent to her) show some of the scenes from the front that she describes in the text and give an indication of the reception she received on her journeys. In a series of fifteen photographs filed under ‘War Charities’ in the Beinecke Library, there is a blurred snapshot of Wharton and Berry standing among the ruins beside the Mercedes, presumably taken by Cook (see Figure 4), as well as strange, haunting images of devastated Nieuport, Belgium: men staring at the camera from a ruined street, the shell of the destroyed church, and the well-tended cemetery, with empty, gutted houses in the background (see Figures 5 to 8).32 However, there are some happy images: Wharton and

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Introduction: Wharton in Wartime

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Berry posing outside the Grand Hotel on the seafront and with a smiling group of Zouaves in Oostdunkerque (see Figures 9 and 10). Filed with these photos is a letter from Soeur Julie (who is mentioned in the text), and written on the envelope in Wharton’s hand: ‘Photos at the front / See “Fighting France”’. In the same folder there is the well-known drawing done for Wharton by one of the soldiers in the 41st Batallion: ‘Pour Mrs Edith Wharton en souvenir de sa visite au 41e Bataillon. (Croquis éxécuté sur le front)’ (see Figure 11). The artist was likely the man named on the envelope as Gaston Guillol of the 41st Cavalry Battalion, 3rd Company, Sector 56. This was the battalion that counted Félix Raugel as a member. The envelope also contains a copy of L’Echo du Ravin, the trench journal the figure throws out in the drawing (see Figures 12 and 13).33 The soldiers of the 41st Battalion had only started producing this journal in March 1915, so were probably very keen to show it off to their famous American visitor. These souvenirs demonstrate that Wharton was highly engaged with what she saw and the people she met in the war zones. As Olin-Ammentorp notes, ‘Wharton must have made an impression on the soldiers – and they upon her.’34

Publication History and Reception Wharton’s observations from the front were originally published as four individual articles in Scribner’s Magazine, appearing in the May, June, October and November issues.35 The fifth essay ‘In Alsace’ was published in The Saturday Evening Post in November.36 A further unpublished essay, ‘The Tone of France’, was added before publication. Fighting France: From Dunkerque to Belfort appeared on 24 November 1915 from Charles Scribner’s Sons, Wharton’s American publisher, and on 8 February 1916 from Macmillan, her British publisher. Scribner’s Magazine had been running since 1887 and was one of two magazines published by Scribner’s, based in New York.37 The owners of the publishing house were Arthur and Charles Scribner, and the editor of the Magazine from 1914 was Robert Bridges, who had succeeded Edward Burlingame.38 The monthly Magazine included articles by a range of literary and popular writers, including John Galsworthy, Rudyard Kipling, Robert Louis Stevenson, and later, F. Scott Fitzgerald, and covered topics of cultural and historical value for the educated, middle- to upper-class reader. There was so much advertising that each

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issue required an index of categories, such as ‘Automobiles’ and ‘Where Shall I Spend My Vacation?’ Throughout the war, Scribner’s had a regular set of war correspondents, including Wharton, Richard Harding Davis, E. Alexander Powell, Raymond Recouly (whom Wharton introduced to Scribner’s), and Mary King Waddington.39 As soon as the war began, Wharton knew that she was witnessing something worth recording. On 4 August 1914, she cabled Scribner’s in New York: ‘DETAINED IN PARIS EXTRAORDINARY SIGHTS DO YOU WANT IMPRESSIONS’.40 Charles Scribner immediately responded eagerly that they would use them in the October number of the magazine if sent promptly, but because of the chaos in Paris, the cable didn’t arrive.41 Wharton wrote on 20 September that she had not been able to write the article, blaming both the shock of the war and the lost cable: I thought I could surely do it when I last wrote to you, but the overwhelming horrors of the last weeks have so blotted out my impressions of those first quiet days, that all my attempts to recover them have been unsuccessful. I am very sorry, for if I had received your cable, which has never yet turned up, I should have noted down my sensations day by day, & I think they might have been interesting.42

Although she promised the article a number of times, the consequence of her return to Paris – war work, a focus on other writings, predominantly Bunner Sisters – was that she did not actually post ‘The Look of Paris’ to Scribner until 20 February 1915.43 We can, however, see its beginning in this letter of 24 October: Paris is magnificent in coolness, serenity & seriousness. One sees in every face in the street a sense of the greatestness of the issues, & the resolve that the great sacrifice shall not be vain. I hope America is beginning to understand this, & that there is no more talk there of ‘honourable peace’.44

Scribner expressed support for Wharton’s war work in a letter of 10 November, updated her on the situation in America, and continued trying to push her into writing her Paris article, telling her ‘the Magazine has some interesting articles’, including ‘an important one by E. Alexander Powell in the January number on the Fall of Antwerp’.45 On 29 December Wharton told him that ‘the war, as

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Introduction: Wharton in Wartime

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you know, has temporarily interrupted all my work, & for the present there is too much to do for the unfortunate creatures all about one to think much of literature’.46 However, she had contributed a poem to a fundraising anthology and an article to the New York Sun (prompting Scribner to send a personal contribution of five hundred francs for her relief work), and she was interested in her new story, a ‘gentle skit’ titled ‘Count Unterlinden’.47 At the end of January 1915, she wrote that she had finally overcome her writer’s block brought about by the war: I am beginning now to want to get back to work, & am kept back only by the steady drudgery of the charities in which, like everyone else here, I am involved. At first I could not write, & it was maddening to think I could have made a little money for the charities I wanted so much to help, & yet to be absolutely pen-tied.48

Once she did begin to write, she wrote with characteristic purpose and speed. In her autobiography, she notes: ‘wishing to lose no time in publishing my impressions, I managed to scribble the articles between my other tasks’, and Price estimates that each article took her about a week to write.49 Rapid composition and the requirements of magazine publication were most likely the reason for the variations in the format of the articles: some structured in parts (I, II, III), others as a diary with individual dated entries. Wharton sent ‘The Look of Paris’ to Scribner on 20 February, and he replied, ‘I know you will understand how much we appreciate the chance to use this article, which gives a phase of the war and its effects as no one else could do it’.50 Wharton’s sister-in-law Mary (Minnie) Cadwalader Jones checked the proofs, as there was not enough time for these to be sent to Wharton in Paris and returned before going to press.51 ‘The Look of Paris In War Time’ (see Figure 14) was published as the first cover story in the May issue of Scribner’s Magazine, which also featured John Galsworthy and other (now mostly forgotten) authors.52 The only other war text in this issue is ‘Sinews of War’ by Annie Eliot Trumbull, a melodramatic war story set in Austria which ends with the death of Hans and Gretel, the soldier protagonist’s beloved horses. However, the war is present in many of the adverts, such as a whole page of ‘Scribner War Books’, which includes Theodore Roosevelt’s recently published America and the World War,

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a text Wharton admired.53 The Kodak advert in this issue used its implied veracity as its selling point: ‘Behind and in the trenches themselves, Kodaks by the thousand are “getting” the story of the war with relentless accuracy, absolute impartiality and pictorial charm’. We are reminded of Scribner’s comments to Wharton in November: ‘People over here want to know the truth’.54 At the beginning of March, Wharton cabled Bridges to let him know a further article was on the way: ‘JUST RETURNED FROM FIGHTING LINE IN ARGONNE MAILING ARTICLE NEXT WEEK’.55 She sent the manuscript of ‘In Argonne’ on 20 March, and an additional paragraph the next day.56 Wharton regretted dashing this article off at such speed, but acknowledged that ‘its value depends a good deal on its being brought out if possible in June’.57 She emphasised its novelty: ‘We seem to have had the extraordinary luck to see what no one else has seen – I only wish I had had time to give a better picture of it!’58 She sent a further letter a few days later suggesting that a map be added to her text. As she and her companions had been in particular areas only ‘by rather exceptional favour’, she included a map with crosses marking the places they had visited, with the aim of demonstrating how close they were to the lines without giving too much away.59 On receipt of ‘In Argonne’, Bridges replied that they were ‘delighted with it’ and offered her five hundred dollars per article.60 The cover of the June 1915 article announced ‘Mrs. Wharton sees the fighting in Argonne’ (see Figure 15), with the other cover stories being ‘The National Parks’ and ‘Baseball – The Ideal College Game’. This issue’s other war features were a melodramatic story called ‘Made in Germany’ by Temple Bailey about a German-American love affair, a propaganda story called ‘The Last Flash’ by Sarah Barnwell Elliott and a poem called ‘Missing’ by Edward Shillito. Following submission of ‘In Argonne’, Wharton wrote to ask whether she should continue work on ‘Coming Home’, a new story which had replaced ‘Count Unterlinden’, or whether she should write another war article: I have just heard that I shall probably get a laissez passer shortly for the Eastern army zone beyond Verdun – that is, toward Commercy, Nancy & the Vosges. There are many things to be seen there, including the savages at Gerbéviller, but though of course I am not likely to

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have anything to tell as thrilling as my glimpse of the battle of Vauquois – but if you want a second war article I should like to know as soon as possible.61

For timetabling reasons Scribner’s initially wanted her short story, but they later confirmed ‘Want Vosges after story’.62 Wharton mailed the story on 29 May, although it would not eventually be published until the Christmas 1915 issue.63 On 27 May, Wharton further emphasised the novel material that she would be able to include in her Vosges article: We were given opportunities no one else has had of seeing things at the front. I was in the first line trenches, in 2 bombarded towns, &c &c – Don’t proclaim it too soon, for I don’t want to be indiscreet; though of course I told the General in command that I wanted to write for you about what I saw, & had his consent & approval. Still, I think I was allowed by his staff officers to do even more than was in the programme, & though the tale may be told in yr. Sept. number it might be imprudent to specify too definitely now what I saw, especially as Norman Hapgood has just come back from the same quarter having failed to get into the first line trenches. – 64

In early June, Wharton offered Scribner a further article, ‘In the North’, which he accepted: I have just had my permit from Head Quarters allowing me to make, in the north, the same kind of trip I have just made, with in such exceptional conditions, in Lorraine & the Vosges. Of course one can never tell before hand first what one’s opportunities may be; but if I have anything like the good luck I had on my last expedition I can promise you an interesting article for October.65

She hoped to send the Vosges article shortly with some ‘good photos . . . taken directly in the trenches’, noting ‘there has been a delay in getting them (they were done for me by soldiers in the trenches)’.66 Scribner’s reply mentioned that he had seen Norman Hapgood the previous day ‘just back unexpectedly from the other side’, noting somewhat competitively: ‘I did not of course make any inquiries about the Vosges’.67

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At the end of June, Wharton proposed a volume of her articles: I am just [?] back after eight days of wonderful adventures, and hope to go off again next month to see the little corner of reconquered Alsace, which no one has been allowed to visit as yet. I have been given such unexpected opportunities for seeing things at the front that you might perhaps care to collect the articles (I suppose there will be five) in a small volume to be published in the autumn. I am in hopes of being able to give you some interesting photographs for the Lorraine article. Those taken by the soldier who was with us are too small to be satisfactory, but I have sent for the films and think I can have them successfully enlarged. I am sorry there has been a delay about getting them, but I jope [sic] they will go to you, with the article, in about ten days. [Added in ink: I shall have some good photos of the last trip also.]68

She yet again emphasised the exclusive nature of what she had been able to see: We were in Cassel last week when it was bombarded, and I was allowed to see Ypres, which no one now is allowed to go to, as the road between Poperinghe and Ypres is continually under fire. I was also in Dunkerque for a few hours after the last bombardment, and at Niewuport, the road to which is also under fire.69

Scribner replied: ‘We value very highly the articles on the War. You have evidently had exceptional opportunities and there is no one who could use them to more advantage. I have heard more comment on the first article ‘The Look of Paris’ than anything we have published in a long time’.70 He responded positively to Wharton’s book proposal, suggesting that they place the final article on Alsace directly in the volume: The prospect for a book appeals to us strongly. There should be a good sale for such a book now, in spite of the prevailing business depression, and the photographs of which you write would add greatly to its popularity; they are almost required. Would it do for us to put the last article on Alsace directly in the book? This would give us something unpublished and enable us to issue promptly. We have the article on the Vosges scheduled for October, the one on your visit

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to the northern line for November, and your story for Christmas. It would therefore be necessary to publish the fifth war articles together in the same number with the fourth or the story, in order to have the book out this Autumn. I think it would pay you to sacrifice the Magasine payment this time. What tremendous experiences you have been through[! added in ink] and I did not realize until your last letter that they were attended with real danger—that you had really actually [added in ink] been under fire.71

Wharton also suggested that instead of her abandoned novel Literature, she could provide ‘four or five short stories, not precisely war stories, but on subjects suggested by the war?’72 She had clearly begun to see the literary potential of the ongoing war: ‘So many extraordinary and dramatic situations are springing out of the huge [?] conflict [added in ink] that the temptation to use a few of them is irresistible’.73 Scribner unsurprisingly accepted.74 Wharton sent her Vosges article to Bridges in mid-July, apologising for the delay (‘The only apology I can make . . . is the usual one of an unexpected “rush” of refugee-work here’) and for the photographs she sent with her article: ‘Please use them as you see fit; I wish they were better’.75 She sent a further letter the same day, proposing her collection The Book of the Homeless, which Scribner agreed to publish.76 He wrote to Wharton at the end of July about Fighting France: Cannot we make some rapid progress on that war book? If you could furnish a title I think we could decide upon a form and price so that an announcement could be made and orders taken. In my last letter I spoke of illustrations as required but of course some of the articles are not illustrated and it might be difficult to find just the right photographs, though they undoubtedly exist. Unless we have some new ones perhaps it would be as well to [?] omit illustrations altogether; I will see what can be found.77

On receipt of her Vosges article, Bridges praised it and noted that they would use seven of the photographs: ‘they have a value as a part of the record of this unusual experience’.78 ‘In Lorraine and the Vosges’ was published in the October issue, with an extra photo that doesn’t appear in the book, ‘Mr. Liégeay at his cellar door’

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(see Figure 16). The sole cover story this time was Recouly’s article on ‘General Joffre: The Victor of the Marne’, under the pseudonym ‘Captain X, of the French Staff’, and the other war stories were ‘On the British Battle Line’ by E. Alexander Powell and ‘The Fortunes of America in War Time’ by Alexander Dana Noyes. At the beginning of August, Wharton told Scribner: ‘I have just had a splendid “laissez passer” for Alsace (“par exception”) & am off in a week or so.’79 She stressed the exclusive nature of her access again a week later: I am leaving for Alsace the day after tomorrow and the result of this trip ought to be of special literary value, as no one has been allowed to go to Alsace, and the letter accompanying my permit from the General Headquarters said: ‘An exception has been made in your favour, as no permits are given for Alsace.’ 80

She agreed that it would not be possible to put her Alsace article in Scribner’s Magazine, but asked Scribner if he would be able to place it ‘in some big-selling Weekly that would give me a big price and not compete with Scribner’s’ in order to raise money for her war charities.81 In the same letter she discussed the size of her warbook (‘five articles . . . from 6,000 to 7,000 words’) and noted that she hoped ‘to add a short one (3,000 or 4,000), called “The Tone of France” at the end of the book’. She suggested regarding the title ‘perhaps “Between the Lines” would do if it has not already been used and is not too ambitious’ with ‘From Dunkerque to Belfort’ as a subtitle.82 She cabled Scribner nine days later, having changed her mind: ‘NAME VOLUME OF ARTICLES FRANCE AT WAR’.83 After having apologised for the lateness of her war articles, Wharton sent ‘In the North’ at the beginning of September with seven photographs, of which Scribner’s used five in order to quickly place the article in the November issue.84 From Paris this time, Minnie Cadwalader Jones sent on a few minor corrections.85 Wharton’s next letter to Bridges noted: ‘I have been so desperately over-worked these last months, & have had so much illness in my household, that I was almost afraid that I could not finish the series’.86 She thanked them for revising the articles on her behalf and told them she would send a revised copy of the Argonne article for the book.87 Wharton later

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mentioned her ‘great fatigue’, but managed to send the article of ‘In Alsace’ at the end of the month, along with a new ghost story ‘Kerfol’.88 A few days later she wrote to Scribner after receiving word that Rudyard Kipling had intended to title his new volume ‘France at War’: By the way, I heard ten days ago that Mr. Kipling is bringing out shortly a volume of the same kind with the same title. I wrote at once to Sir Frederic Macmillan, to whom I have given the English edition, to ask him to notify Mr. Kipling that I had selected the title two months ago; but Mr. Kipling’s book comes out first and I have no hope that he will yield his title. The only alternative I can suggest is: ‘Dunkerque to Belfort’, which is not nearly as good. Perhaps it might be necessary to add as a sub-title, ‘Along the French Lines’, or something of that kind.89

She changed her mind in early October, cabling Scribner: ‘Please name my book Fighting France’.90 A letter to Frederick Macmillan in London two days later reveals this wasn’t her idea: ‘I was in despair over the title of my book but Mr. James has renamed it for me’.91 She sent the final article ‘The Tone of France’ in mid-October.92 Scribner, meanwhile, was busy trying to place Wharton’s Alsace article on her behalf, telling her that after unsuccessful attempts elsewhere, they had managed to sell the article to the Saturday Evening Post for $600, although they had tried for $750.93 It was printed with added subheadings and alternative illustrations, indicating the different readership of the two magazines (see Figures 17 and 18). Scribner also told her that the new title was ‘excellent’.94 ‘In the North’ was published in the November issue, once more on the cover as ‘On the North Front’. It included illustrations from photographs by Count Étienne de Beaumont, a pre-war socialite who had organised an ambulance service for the French army. Other war articles in this issue were by E. Alexander Powell and Frederic C. Howe. ‘In the North’ would be the most revised of the four articles for book publication, although these were minor edits to delete repetition or improve style, and it is not entirely clear who completed these revisions. There is no official contract for the book publication of Fighting France, meaning that the details of print runs and royalties must be obtained from the correspondence.95 Wharton received 35 per cent royalty for the text in the States, where it was sold for $1.00, and

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20 per cent royalty in Britain, where it was sold for 5s.96 On the back of the letter detailing these terms from Macmillan, Wharton wrote: ‘Fighting France / English Contract–’.97 She outlined the wartime publication conditions at the bottom of a letter from Macmillan in October 1916 regarding her 1916 collection, Xingu and Other Stories: War terms – 20% instead of 25% – no advance royalty – first payment 3 mts after publication.98

Wharton knew from experience that good marketing would boost sales of Fighting France and wrote to Macmillan in mid-November to ask him to change the current advert to highlight the uniqueness of her war experience: the little announcement of the book in the Times Literary Supplement, saying I had been along the front ‘behind the lines’, was an understatement. I have been several times on the first trenches & a few yards from the Germans – to the extent of being fired at by a sniper! – & all along the front have been repeatedly to places no other woman has visited. My trips were made by special permission of Genl Joffre for the purpose of writing the articles.99

The initial reviews of Fighting France were very positive on its American publication in late November 1915 (see Figure 19). Scribner wrote to Wharton in December: ‘ “Fighting France” has been exceptionally well received by the press and promises to have a good sale. . . . I enclose a clipping from the [New York] Sun. This editorial seems to be inspired by your book, to which it makes such cordial acknowledgement’.100 Scribner noted that they were just ordering another edition, after the first edition of 3,400 copies, of which one thousand went to Macmillan.101 Wharton wrote at the end of December that she was ‘glad that “Fighting France” has gone so quickly into a second edition’, but hopes they had time to correct the misprints, adding ‘They made me so unhappy that I asked Sir Frederick Macmillan to insert an “errata” slip & he has done so, to my great relief’.102 She was pleased with the ‘unusually good’ reviews.103 Bridges had written to Wharton a few days earlier with regards to the preparation and

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timing of Xingu and Other Stories, noting that Fighting France was ‘still in full tide so to speak’.104 A French translation was already under way. Wharton told Macmillan in February 1916 that ‘The reviews are so good that I hope the sale may continue and increase’ and that a translation would be coming out in Paris shortly, ‘partly in the “Revue de Paris” and partly in the “Revue des Deux Mondes” ’.105 ‘The Look of Paris’ had already appeared in the Revue des Deux Mondes in June 1915, and the other three articles were condensed into two longer articles published in March and April 1916.106 The text was published in France in 1916 as Voyages au front de Dunkerque à Belfort (Paris: Plon, 1916). The Scribner’s text went through a series of impressions, before a new edition was published as Volume III of Scribner’s ‘War on All Fronts’ series in 1917 and reissued in 1918 and 1919, with endpaper, ‘Chevalier of the Legion of Honor’ added on the title page beneath Wharton’s name, and nine photographs, as opposed to thirteen in the original. The title was unfortunately misspelt as Fighting France: From Dunkerque to Belport. Despite this, Wharton’s letters suggest that in general she was pleased with the text, asking Macmillan in September 1918 to ‘kindly send a copy of “Fighting France”, with the author’s compliments, to: “Interpreter E.Saillens, H.Q. 4th Army, S.P. 2 British Expeditionary Force” ’ and adding ‘will you kindly have six copies sent to me here, the whole order to be charged to my account?’107 She asked for further copies to be sent to her in 1921 and 1922.108

Avoiding the Wooden Crosses: Wharton as War Reporter and Propagandist This afternoon, on the road to Gérbeviller, we were again in the track of the September invasion. Over all the slopes now cool with spring foliage the battle rocked backward and forward during those burning autumn days; and every mile of the struggle has left its ghastly traces. The fields are full of wooden crosses which the ploughshare makes a circuit to avoid; many of the villages have been partly wrecked, and here and there an isolated ruin marks the nucleus of a fiercer struggle. But the landscape, in its first sweet leafiness, is so alive with ploughing and sowing and all the natural tasks of spring, that the war scars seem like traces of a long-past woe; and it was not till a bend of the road brought us in sight of Gérbeviller that we breathed again the choking air of present horror. (130–1)

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Beyond its conditions of publication, Fighting France provides us with a unique glimpse of Wharton as both war reporter and propagandist. During the First World War, governments, groups and individuals of every fighting nation produced a greater volume of propaganda than in any previous war, initially to support the war and to provoke men to enlist, and, as the war dragged on, to maintain morale at the front and at home. Not only was propaganda production ‘rationalized and modernized’, but simultaneously its distribution changed, supplying the popular mass daily newspapers with ‘a more simplified and more sensational presentation of news’.109 At this stage of the war, American propaganda differed from European propaganda, because its predominant aim was to provoke intervention into what was seen as a European war. The sense of the geographical and metaphorical distance of the World War was captured in a popular song by George M. Cohan, ‘Over There’ (1917), and this figuring of the relationship in spatial terms has since been appropriated as a structural metaphor in discussing America and the war.110 John T. Matthews has noted that prior to America’s entrance into the war in April 1917, ‘America’s distinctive relation to the Great War originated in its remoteness from the event itself’: The American side of the Great War necessarily relied on institutions of representation – journalism, print propaganda, fiction, sermons – to make the war real in the place where it was not occurring. In important respects, American writing of the war was the war.111

The links between literature and propaganda were manifested in the public appetite for war stories and the recruitment of writers as propagandists. Peter Buitenhuis argues that the absence of hard news from the front created demand for both war reportage and fantasy from writers: ‘The public appetite for stories about the war was very strong; people had a craving to know about the fighting and to see their faith in the moral and physical strength of the Allies reflected in an accessible form’.112 He notes that expatriate authors such as James and Wharton were ‘influential catalysts of American opinion’.113 Although Wharton wasn’t officially recruited as a propagandist as many writers were, she used her literary skills to present her reportage in a particular way, and later thematised the public need for war stories in her short story ‘Coming Home’.114 Lee argues

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that ‘all Wharton’s war writings up to 1917 were designed to rouse up America’.115 As with Wharton’s other war writings, readings of Fighting France frequently dismiss the text as naïve propaganda, criticising her evasive presentation of the war dead through oblique modes or by not mentioning them at all. Claire Tylee argues that ‘like other members of the older generation, Wharton amply fulfilled the task of turning out pro-French propaganda designed to encourage American intervention in the war’, somewhat disparagingly referring to her as ‘one of the literary tourists who produced a foreigners’ guide to the Western Front’.116 Matthews dismisses Wharton’s obliquity as a type of wilful blindness to the war’s horrors: ‘in her fiction, as well as, even more oddly, in her journalism describing the front line itself, Wharton omits almost all mention of the actual wounding of people’. Her war scenes ‘seem to have no casualties’ and hardly ‘any soldiers’, and any accounts of casualties are ‘strangely unrelated to human bodies’.117 Contemporary reviews were more charitable: a December 1915 Bookman review notes that although ‘these chapters, except for their occasional graphic descriptions of the havoc wrought in French fields and villages and cities, pay slight attention to the horrors of the conflict’; that instead ‘Mrs. Wharton is more interested in the man behind the gun and the spirit that moves him than in the gun’s achievement’.118 Despite being received as ‘merely a simply told, realistic narrative’, Wharton’s indirect mode constitutes an intensely literary sort of propaganda, such as her metaphoric substitution of shattered buildings for shattered bodies and her manipulation of point of view.119 A large part of what makes her propaganda effective is her use of obliquity to downplay the deaths of allied soldiers and provoke anger at the destruction perpetrated by German soldiers. We can therefore read the passage quoted above as an implicit demonstration of Wharton’s own method, where she circuitously avoids the wooden crosses – or the war dead – relating the war scars through imagery of the landscape and physical environs. Another contemporary review was therefore correct to note that ‘Mrs Wharton’s impressions of France in war time are imparted with her unfailing touch of literary distinction’.120 There can be no doubt of Wharton’s Francophilia by the end of the opening section. The account begins right before the outbreak of war – on 30 July 1914 – when Wharton and Berry were travelling to

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Chartres to visit the celebrated medieval cathedral. They had lunched near Poitiers, in a pastoral scene with apple trees, fields, woodland, and a village church, a timeless and ‘distinctively French’ scene which ‘smiled away the war rumours which had hung on us since morning’ (85). Wharton’s novelist’s sensibility can be seen throughout this opening article, such as her use of pathetic fallacy to illustrate the war rumours through the ‘thunder-clouds’ overhead (86). Entering the cathedral at Chartres, Wharton devotes attention to the famous stained-glass windows, and subsequently extends her praise for French culture as they return to Paris, entering the city from the west. She describes St Cloud and Suresnes, the Bois de Boulogne, the lawns of the Parc de Bagatelle, the Arc de Triomphe, the Champs Elysées, and compares the scene around the Seine to ‘the blue-pink lustre of an early Monet’ (87). She completes her whistle-stop tour of French culture with a statement about the majesty of personified Paris: ‘The great city, so made for peace and art and all humanest graces, seemed to lie by her river-side like a princess guarded by the watchful giant of the Eiffel Tower’ (87). Later in the chapter she describes Paris using classical analogies, comparing the sunsets of the Trocadéro to Dido’s Carthage (95). Why did Wharton choose to begin her account with the French countryside and Paris, rather than with her first trips into the war zones in February 1915? Aware that she was writing for the educated, predominantly middle-class, often well-travelled American readership of Scribner’s Magazine who might well have been familiar with France, Wharton provided her readers with an affirmation of their knowledge of French geography and culture. For those readers who hadn’t been to France, this was a chance for her to describe the country she loved to them. Wharton’s position as both resident and observer allowed her to act simultaneously as expert guide for her American audience and as fellow tourist. In one scene, Wharton looks down on the city ‘from the terrace of the Hôtel de Crillon’, a luxury hotel that her readership would have known through regular adverts in the Magazine (91). (She was staying at the hotel because her apartment had been closed up for the summer.) Recording the ‘gradual paralysis’ of Paris during August 1914 as the first conscripts were mobilised, Wharton emphasises absence from a leisured perspective: ‘the resounding emptiness of porterless halls, waiterless restaurants, motionless lifts’ (91). Wharton, playing at being a tourist,

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extends this tourism to the war, noting ‘the nearest approach to “militarism” which Paris offers to the casual sight-seer is the occasional drilling of a handful of piou-pious’ (101). Wharton’s later reference to what she sees at the front as ‘our sight-seeing’ (177) is therefore likely tongue-in-cheek, perhaps in light of the cartoon featured on the cover of the satirical French magazine Le Rire Rouge in late May 1915 (see Figure 20).121 Entitled ‘Dans les Ruines’, it depicts an unimpressed Wharton standing up next to Berry in the back of the Mercedes driven by Cook through a ruined town, with the caption ‘Ce n’est que ça!’ (‘Is that all?’), drawn by Jules Abel Faivre who accompanied the group on their trip into Lorraine and the Vosges. Wharton’s response – ‘such a good sketch of us at Gerbéviller!’ – suggests she was aware of this potentially negative view of her as a disinterested tourist, enough to poke fun at it.122 She had told Mary Berenson in a letter in January 1915 that ‘I don’t know anything ghastlier & more idiotic than “doing” hospitals en touriste, like museums!’123 The opening essay ‘The Look of Paris’ takes Wharton’s role as observer and the motif of sight and appearance literally. Focusing on the way things look or appear allowed her a certain artistic licence, and she repeatedly referred to these articles as her ‘impressions’, making no claim to veracity.124 On the morning that the first captured German flag was hung out on the balcony of the Ministry of War (news brought, in a strangely symbolic gesture, by ‘our butcher’s boy’), Wharton hurries to the Ministry of War, wanting to see the Latin Quarter ‘boil over’:

It is safe to say that there was hardly a man or woman of that crowd who had not a soldier at the front; and there before them hung the enemy’s first flag . . . It symbolized all they most abhorred in the whole abhorrent job that lay ahead of them; it symbolized also their finest ardour and their noblest hate, and the reason why, if every other reason failed, France could never lay down arms till the last of such flags was low. And there they stood and looked at it, not dully or uncomprehendingly, but consciously, advisedly, and in silence; as if already foreseeing all it would cost to keep that flag and add to it others like it; foreseeing the cost and accepting it. There seemed to be men’s hearts even in the children of that crowd, and in the mothers whose weak arms held them up. (99)

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Like many other places in the text, Wharton effectively employs stock patriotic rhetoric and sentiment to present the French people as united in purpose and thought, an effect she creates both through claims to certainty (‘It is safe to say’) and modifying conditional fragments (‘as if’, ‘There seemed to be’). In a further crowd scene, Wharton records the look of Parisians streaming to the Invalides where German trophies were on display, again using the motif of appearance to make a more general claim about the character of the French people in wartime. She argues that ‘the Parisian face, after six months of trial, has acquired a new character’: the women’s faces look like ‘memorial medals’, moulded out of ‘some dense commemorative substance’, while the men’s are like the classical bronzes of the Naples Museum, ‘burnt and twisted from their baptism of fire’ (103–4). By describing the French people through their appearance, Wharton was able to emphasise their suffering in order to provoke sympathy from the American people. Wharton’s depiction of the Belgian refugees in Paris offers perhaps her most explicit adoption of conventional propaganda tropes. Extending her motif of sight, Wharton argues, ‘No one who has ever caught that stare of dumb bewilderment – or that other look of concentrated horror, full of the reflection of flames and ruins – can shake off the obsession of the Refugees’ (101). The refugees, who ‘belong mostly to a class whose knowledge of the world’s affairs is measured by the shadow of their village steeple’, are described in pseudo-biblical terms: They were ploughing and sowing, spinning and weaving and minding their business, when suddenly a great darkness full of fire and blood came down on them. And now they are here, in a strange country, among unfamiliar faces and new ways, with nothing left to them in the world but the memory of burning homes and massacred children and young men dragged to slavery, of infants torn from their mothers, old men trampled by drunken heels and priests slain while they prayed beside the dying. (101–2)

Wharton’s description of the wounded in the streets of Paris is written in a similar visual rhetoric. She focuses again on ‘the expression of their faces which I should like to picture and interpret as being the very essence of what I have called the look of Paris’, to suggest that the men have been improved by their war experience:

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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. (105)

Here, Wharton adopts the rather odious discourse of war as morally cleansing, which was a common trope of propaganda in all of its manifestations. Later in the text she writes of the war in similarly regenerative terms: ‘War is the greatest of paradoxes: the most senseless and disheartening of human retrogressions, and yet the stimulant of qualities of soul which, in every race, can seemingly find no other means of renewal’ (111). Wharton’s primary purpose in going to the war zones at the end of February 1915 was to ‘visit a few ambulances and evacuation hospitals behind the lines’, which gave her her ‘first sight of War’ (107). Wharton was well aware that her privileged visits also carried an obligation to report what she saw. She attempted to relate to her readers the sights and sounds of war, fulfilling the civilian desire to know what being in the war zones was really like: The square before the principal hotel – the incomparably named ‘Haute Mere-Dieu’ – is as vivid a sight as any scene of modern war can be . . . The continual coming and going of alert and busy messengers, the riding up of officers (for some still ride!), the arrival of much-decorated military personages in luxurious motors, the hurrying to and fro of orderlies, the perpetual depleting and refilling of the long rows of grey vans across the square, the movements of Red Cross ambulances and the passing of detachments for the front, all these are sights that the pacific stranger could forever gape at. (109–10)

Wharton describes what she hears as the ‘Voice of the Front’, such as the strange ‘trio’ of ‘the gnat, the cuckoo and the cannon’ they hear when they stop for lunch in the forest of Commercy (130). The siege-gun she hears in Dixmude makes ‘a noise that may be compared – if the human imagination can stand the strain – to the simultaneous closing of all the iron shop-shutters in the world’, and she even describes the ‘four distinct phases’ of the sound of shelling for her reader (161, 181).

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Being in the war zones was both exciting and fearful because of Wharton’s civilian status. The text is punctuated with visits to headquarters to gain permits and permissions, and inspections by military authorities.125 The sense of the nearness of the war gave her a voyeuristic thrill, and she seized every opportunity to see and experience as much as possible. At the hospice they visit in Clermonten-Argonne, one of the sisters tells them that there is fighting going on across the valley which they can watch from a nearby garden. Wharton’s response – ‘It did not take us long to reach that garden!’ – demonstrates her eagerness (116). The language is once again of sight, what she refers to elsewhere as the ‘war-vision’: ‘we stood there dumbfounded at the accident of having stumbled on this visible episode of the great subterranean struggle’ (124, 117). Because it was always a case of ‘how much we were to be allowed to see’, any other war adventures were considered a bonus: she notes elsewhere the ‘happy accident’ of having ‘caught one more war-picture’ when they take the wrong route (142, 125). However, these experiences are not always positive: their journey from Cassel to Poperinghe only affords them ‘heat, dust, crowds, confusion, all the sordid shabby rear-view of war’ (156). In a letter to James in March, Wharton mentioned the ‘Horror-of-War’ picture she had found in a hospital, ‘not a hospital but a human stable’.126 The sentiment that often comes across in the text is the strangeness of war, particularly the bizarre and unsettling juxtaposition of the war zones and normal life. Leaving Verdun, Wharton is shocked to discover how close they were to the German lines: As we left Verdun behind us the sound of the cannon grew fainter and died out . . . but suddenly, at a cross-road, a sign-post snatched us back to war: St. Mihiel, 18 Kilometres. St. Mihiel, the danger-spot of the region, the weak joint in the armour! There it lay, up that harmless-looking bye-road, not much more than ten miles away – a ten minutes’ dash would have brought us into the thick of the grey coats and spiked helmets! The shadow of that sign-post followed us for miles, darkening the landscape like the shadow from a racing storm-cloud. (123–4)

There are numerous points where Wharton is unaware of where the war zones start and end, leading to a frequent sense of disorientation.

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At one point the party find themselves lost after all the milestones and signposts have been effaced or removed either by the French or by the invading Germans: ‘It was the strangest of sensations to find ourselves in a chartless wilderness within sixty or seventy miles of Paris’ (125). Similarly, Wharton struggles throughout the text with the civilian problem of knowing or comprehending exactly what the war is, or where to find it. Looking down on the valley of the Moselle, she writes: The longer one looked, the more oppressive and menacing the invisibility of the foe became. ‘There they are – and there – and there.’ We strained our eyes obediently, but saw only calm hillsides, dozing farms . . . Suddenly an officer, pointing to the west of the trenched hill said: ‘Do you see that farm?’ It lay just below, near the river, and so close that good eyes could easily have discerned people or animals in the farm-yard, if there had been any; but the whole place seemed to be sleeping the sleep of bucolic peace. ‘They are there,’ the officer said; and the innocent vignette framed by my field-glass suddenly glared back at me like a human mask of hate. The loudest cannonade had not made ‘them’ seem as real as that! . . . (137)

There is, therefore, a certain triumph in tying down what war might be: At every bridge and railway-crossing a sentinel, standing in the middle of the road with lifted rifle, stopped the motor and examined our papers. In this negative sphere there was hardly any other tangible proof of military rule; but with the descent of the first hill beyond Montmirail there came the positive feeling: This is war! (108)

In the Vosges in a village held partly by German and partly by French forces, Wharton makes this explicit: ‘It was one of those strange and contradictory scenes of war that bring home to the bewildered looker-on the utter impossibility of picturing how the thing really happens’ (184). What makes Wharton’s propaganda writing effective? As well as her use of the motif of appearance as representative of character, Wharton structures part of her text through a series of atrocity stories: particularly vulnerable, yet resilient French figures telling

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individual tales of German barbarism (a format she would recycle in the short story ‘Coming Home’ the same year, including some of the figures). One key example is Sister Gabrielle Rosnet in her Hospice in Clermont, whose story is recounted by Wharton in a mixture of sentimental language and reported speech; the story of the German officers ‘bursting in with revolvers’, and finding her ‘alone with my old men and my Sisters’ (116). This story of vulnerability – women and old men against the German officers ‘so tall that I couldn’t see up to his shoulder-straps’ as Sister Rosnet recalls – is a perfect vehicle for Wharton to present the brutality of the German soldiers and the goodness and suffering of the ordinary French people. Wharton accordingly emphasises Sister Rosnet’s innate goodness, her generosity and her strength of spirit. Wharton includes a chain of similar atrocity stories in her account of the town of Gerbéviller on 13 May 1915, less than a week after the sinking of the ocean liner RMS Lusitania.127 The recent act of German aggression likely explains Wharton’s particularly harsh satire in this section, although the event itself is only indirectly registered in the text.128 The individual stories that Wharton tells are generally of vulnerable figures such as the old woman who, ‘hearing her son’s deathcry’, opens her door and is shot herself (131). Mr Liégeay, a former mayor of Gerbéviller, tells Wharton of hiding in his cellar for three days with his family while the Germans set fire to the house. Wharton uses his story of the destruction of his family home to represent the wider destruction of history and culture – of civilisation – brought about by the war. The inclusion of a photo of ‘Mr. Liégeay in his dining room’ provides visual evidence of this destruction, and the original magazine article included a further photo of ‘Mr. Liégeay at his cellar door’. Elsewhere in Gerbéviller, ‘all the town had been red with horror – flame and shot and tortures unnameable’ (133). In not naming the particular atrocities committed, Wharton leaves it to the reader to imagine what happened: a formulation she reused in ‘Coming Home’ to prompt the reader to construct their own atrocity story from a summary of its typical generic characteristics.129 The subsequent atrocity story in Gerbéviller is from Soeur Julie, another ‘Sister of Charity’ who ‘had held her own . . . gathering her flock of old men and children about her and interposing her short stout figure between them and the fury of the Germans’ (133). Soeur Julie is esteemed as taking practical action to alleviate the sufferings of

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others, and we can see how this might have appealed to Wharton with her numerous war charities. The two photographs of Soeur Julie at Yale University (see Figure 21) fit Wharton’s description of her as ‘a ruddy, indomitable woman’ (133). Further atrocity stories follow this same pattern. Sister Theresia at Pont-á-Mousson has gathered ‘all the human wreckage of this stormbeaten point of the front’ and is praised for her calm and collected manner, ‘in no wise disconcerted by the fact that the shells continually play over her roof’ (138). The story of the singling out of General Lyautey, ‘one of France’s best soldiers, and Germany’s worst enemy in Africa’, forms a final atrocity story: ‘the officer in command asked for General Lyautey’s house, went straight to it, had all the papers, portraits, furniture and family relics piled in a bonfire in the court, and then burnt down the house’ (139–40). Wharton tells the reader that this story, which they hear from the gardener outside the ruin of the house, is ‘corroborated by the fact that not another house in Crévic was destroyed’ (140). Her use of ‘corroborated’ and her inclusion of photographs of some of these figures demonstrates her attempts to make these stories believable, in an era where entirely fabricated or grossly exaggerated atrocity stories and rumours were rife.130 The most persistent example of Wharton’s effective propaganda is the extended motif of death and violence in relation to land and buildings, which works as a substitute for human corpses. Wharton repeatedly depicts land and buildings as having suffered the brunt of enemy aggression, rather than people. She writes that, ‘the country between Marne and Meuse is one of the regions on which German fury spent itself most bestially’ (113). Towns and villages are ‘victims’ and leaving Sainte Menehould, ‘every road branching away to our left was a finger touching a red wound’ (129, 119). Wharton writes that, ‘we have passed through streets and streets of such murdered houses, through town after town spread out in its last writhings’ (129). Ypres is ‘the dead city . . . bombarded to death’, explicitly compared to ‘a disembowelled corpse’ (158–9). In Dunkerque, ‘a death-hush lay on the town . . . even more oppressive than the death-silence of Ypres’ (168–9). Rheims has a ‘look of deathlike desolation’ (173). Passing through an unnamed town, Wharton writes: Oh, that poor town – when we reached it, along a road ploughed with fresh obus-holes, I didn’t want to stop the motor; I wanted to

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Fighting France hurry on and blot the picture from my memory! It was doubly sad to look at because of the fact that it wasn’t quite dead; faint spasms of life still quivered through it. (143)

The metaphor of damage to buildings rather than bodies is most evident when Wharton obliquely describes the mutilation of a girl’s body: ‘Between the clipped limes and formal borders the German shells had scooped out three or four “dreadful hollows,” in one of which, only last week, a little girl found her death; and the façade of the building is pock-marked by shot and disfigured by gaping holes’ (138). Occasionally Wharton brings her personification of houses and buildings full-circle by likening them to human victims: the village of Heiltz-le-Maurupt is ‘so stripped and wounded and dishonoured that it lies there by the roadside like a human victim’ (124). Passing through a frequently shelled woodland area, Wharton suggests that ‘there was something humanly pitiful in the frail trunks of the Bois Triangulaire, lying there like slaughtered rows of immature troops’ (164). These examples suggest the extent of Wharton’s development of her metaphor of land and buildings as a means to mediate the violence and destruction of the war to civilians and soldiers, and thereby her conscious manipulation of her material for propagandistic purposes. Occasionally, the images of the personified houses that have been ‘murdered’ and the violent deaths of dying towns are tempered by the idea of cultivation and regrowth. Wharton paradoxically notes of towns in the Argonne that ‘even in the most mortally stricken there were signs of returning life’ (129). Her use of buildings and towns as metaphors for the human dead prevents the distressing direct presentation of the war dead, and simultaneously allows for the hopeful possibility of renewal and regeneration, which would have been impossible if she had depicted corpses directly.

Uncomfortable Propaganda: Death and the War Despite Wharton’s effective use of stock propaganda tropes throughout her text, there are a number of moments which undermine and disrupt her propagandistic intent. Among these are moments of proleptic horror, where Wharton includes an imagined version of the horrors to come. Similarly, there are instances where the ostensible

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military victory is qualified – even disqualified – by the acknowledgement of the cost in human lives: ‘But what it cost!’ Soeur Gabrielle exclaims after the French have regained the small village of Vauquois (118). These moments predominantly involve strange and unsettling encounters with the dead. As striking as any is Wharton’s visit to a makeshift hospital in a church in the village of Blercourt (118–19): The church was without aisles, and down the nave stood four rows of wooden cots with brown blankets. In almost every one lay a soldier – the doctor’s ‘worse cases’ – few of them wounded, the greater number stricken with fever, bronchitis, frost-bite, pleurisy, or some other form of trench-sickness too severe to permit of their being carried farther from the front. One or two heads turned on the pillows as we entered, but for the most part the men did not move.

The wooden cots, like pews, hold soldiers who are close to death. Wharton notes the strange effect of a vespers service held in the church in the ‘sunless afternoon’ with ‘the sick under their earthcoloured blankets’, as though they were already dead and buried. Their ‘livid faces’ furthers this impression of their corpse-like nature, and proleptic mourning is enacted by the women present: Wharton observes ‘the black dresses of the women (they seemed all to be in mourning)’. The figurative language adds to the sense of endings: the candle-gleams and their reflection ‘were like a faint streak of sunset on the winter dusk’. The description of the service explicitly suggests a funeral ritual: presently the curé took up in French the Canticle of the Sacred Heart, composed during the war of 1870, and the little congregation joined their trembling voices in the refrain: ‘Sauvez, sauvez la France, Ne l’abandonnez pas!’ The reiterated appeal rose in a sob above the rows of bodies in the nave: “Sauvez, sauvez la France,” the women wailed it near the altar, the soldiers took it up from the door in stronger tones; but the bodies in the cots never stirred, and more and more, as the day faded, the church looked like a quiet grave-yard in a battle-field.

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The juxtaposition of the patriotic hymn, a remnant of the earlier Franco-Prussian War (1870–1), with the dying men of the present war makes for an odd scene. The refrain is sung ‘in a sob’ by the wailing women over the silent corpse-like bodies: a manipulation of point of view which further encourages us to see them as already dead. The simile with which Wharton concludes acknowledges the death toll of the war to ‘sauvez la France’, making the human costs explicit. As the only depiction of dying allied soldiers within the text, the bleakness of this scene makes it stand out. A further scene of uncomfortable propaganda depicts the dead enemy – the corpse of a German soldier seen from a peep-hole in the French trenches (147–9). The Captain giving Wharton’s party a tour of a second-line trench offers to show her a first-line trench, and her excitement is evident: ‘Here we were, then, actually and literally in the first lines! The knowledge made one’s heart tick a little.’ Taking ‘a cautious peep round its corner’, she finds the presence of the enemy difficult to comprehend: ‘for a minute, I had the sense of an all-pervading, invisible power of evil, a saturation of the whole landscape with some hidden vitriol of hate. Then the reaction of unbelief set in.’ Returning up the trench, Wharton is offered a further privileged viewpoint: we came again to the watcher at his peep-hole. He heard us, let the officer pass, and turned his head with a little sign of understanding. ‘Do you want to look down?’ He moved a step away from his window. The look-out projected over the ravine, raking its depths; and here, with one’s eye to the leaflashed hole, one saw at last . . . saw, at the bottom of the harmless glen, half way between cliff and cliff, a grey uniform huddled in a dead heap. ‘He’s been there for days: they can’t fetch him away,’ said the watcher, regluing his eye to the hole; and it was almost a relief to find it was after all a tangible enemy hidden over there across the meadow . . .

The civilian temporarily gains a combatant’s viewpoint: a perspective which reveals the war dead. The illicitness of the scene, conducted behind the captain’s back and negotiated in confidence between the watcher and Wharton, introduces an element of voyeurism: the civilian’s momentary sharing of the combatant’s viewpoint suggests a temporary bridging of the gap between the two, and the transgres-

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sion of the female viewer into an ideologically male sphere. It is important that the corpse that Wharton views metonymically is a German soldier, because the matter of fact description and the treatment of his body would most likely have been too distressing for an American readership, had he been an ally. Wharton’s relief at finding this ‘tangible enemy’ is in contrast to prescribed and concrete characteristics of the German ‘Hun’ in stock Allied propaganda as primitive, savage, murderous and uncivilised barbarians, and seems almost sympathetic in acknowledging that they, too, want to collect their dead for proper burial. Perhaps the most disturbing scene describes an individual’s unhealthy and fetishistic relationship with the war dead, in sharp contrast to two earlier scenes depicting more comforting, if idealised, relationships. In the first of these earlier scenes, Wharton describes the care for the dead shown by a reservist troop in the hills in Lorraine and the Vosges, in order to demonstrate the bonds forged between men in wartime and the dedication of the soldiers to their dead comrades: ‘The care of this woodland cemetery is left entirely to the soldiers, and they have spent treasures of piety on the inscriptions and decorations of the graves’ (146). The resilience of traditional commemoration of the dead is revealed in the accompanying photograph of an individual grave with a large wreath and flowers, marked and fenced off in an open wooded area. Wharton presents another similarly idealised portrayal in her description of Nieuport. The terrible destruction of the town has left a thirty-foot crater beside the cathedral graveyard, yet the soldiers’ graves in the graveyard remain well-maintained: The dead are laid in rows under the flank of the cathedral, and on their carefully set grave-stones have been placed collections of pious images gathered from the ruined houses. Some of the most privileged are guarded by colonies of plaster saints and Virgins that cover the whole slab; and over the handsomest Virgins and the most gaily coloured saints the soldiers have placed the glass bells that once protected the parlour clocks and wedding-wreaths in the same houses. (164–5)

Amidst the surrounding apocalyptic scenes, this commemoration of the dead is intended to offer consolation through traditional modes of marking and remembering the dead.

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In contrast to these idealised scenes, a third scene depicts a form of obsessive commemoration (138–9). Wharton initially introduces this scene in positive terms: ‘I have seen the happiest being on earth: a man who has found his job.’ The town where he lives, Ménil-sur-Belvitte on the edge of the Vosges, is personified as ‘badly battered’, where ‘a real above-ground battle of the old obsolete kind took place’: the Col de la Chipotte Battle from late August to mid-September 1914. Wharton’s description of the makeshift chapel that the local curé has created in a room in the parsonage to commemorate the French deaths is increasingly disturbing: The chapel is also a war museum, and everything in it has something to do with the battle that took place among the wheat-fields. The candelabra on the altar are made of ‘Seventy-five’ shells, the Virgin’s halo is composed of radiating bayonets, the walls are intricately adorned with German trophies and French relics, and on the ceiling the curé has had painted a kind of zodiacal chart of the whole region, in which Ménil-sur-Belvitte’s handful of houses figures as the central orb of the system, and Verdun, Nancy, Metz, and Belfort as its humble satellites. But the chapel-museum is only a surplus expression of the curé’s impassioned dedication to the dead. His real work has been done on the battle-field, where row after row of graves, marked and listed as soon as the struggle was over, have been fenced about, symmetrically disposed, planted with flowers and young firs, and marked by the name and death-dates of the fallen.

In this ersatz war museum religious iconography has been fastidiously reworked in weaponry. Like Soeur Julie, the curé, Father Alphonse Colle, did exist: he was the pastor of Ménil-sur-Belvitte from 1908 until his death in 1943 and dedicated himself to commemorating the dead in the way Wharton describes. Images taken a few months later show the curé standing in the ruins of the church of Ménil, the altar and the interior of the war museum (part of the zodiacal chart on the ceiling is visible), and the war cemetery he created on the battlefield, where Wharton describes his meticulousness in ordering, marking and naming the graves of fallen soldiers (see Figures 22 to 25). The curé’s collection and fetishisation of both bodies and military paraphernalia initially suggests a fantasy of participation, seen in the zodiacal chart positing Ménil-sur-Belvitte as the centre of the war. Rather than an urge to participate, however, the war has brought out

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in the curé the maniacal zeal of the collector: a transformation that Olin-Ammentorp suggests is ‘more eerie than noble’.131 Although this treatment of the dead could be lauded as admirable, Wharton emphasises its problematic nature: As he led us from one of these enclosures to another his face was lit with the flame of a gratified vocation. This particular man was made to do this particular thing: he is a born collector, classifier, and heroworshipper. In the hall of the ‘presbytère’ hangs a case of carefullymounted butterflies, the result, no doubt, of an earlier passion for collecting. His ‘specimens’ have changed, that is all: he has passed from butterflies to men, from the actual to the visionary Psyche.

The fanatacism of the collector is demonstrated in the illumination of the man in his obsession, and the very troubling analogy between collecting butterflies and collecting men suggests that there is little difference between these activities. Despite being related in realist terms, Wharton’s description of the curé through the figure of the collector and the motif of fetishism is markedly literary, and demonstrates her manipulation of her material. Her mode of representation demonstrates both the literariness of her propaganda and her evident unease at the more uncomfortable aspects of the war, such as the curé’s unhealthy response to death. In this case, the authorities noticed it too, and the curé, repeatedly accused of stripping corpses after exhumation, was finally banned from exhuming and identifying the bodies of soldiers in December 1916. What, then, do we make of these moments in a text aimed at encouraging American intervention in the war? Despite Wharton’s appropriation of stock propaganda rhetoric and imagery, these strange moments suggest that she was still working out how to respond to and represent some more unpalatable aspects of the war – particularly the enormous numbers of war dead – arising from the extraordinary and unprecedented conditions of its first fifteen months.

Fighting France in Context Unlike some of Wharton’s later war writing, Fighting France includes a range of genres, styles and formats. This mixing of genres, where, for example, she moves seamlessly between discussing the horrors of the experiences of the Belgian refugees and the shopping habits of

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Parisian women, makes the text difficult to classify. This is in part due to the text’s origins in magazine publication, written during the busyness of relief work and to a tight deadline for publication. However, this is more likely because she was still working out how to respond to and write about the war. Her later war stories and novels are far more definitive and unambiguous in terms of purpose and structure. Drawing directly on her recent experiences in the war zones, Wharton’s 1915 short story ‘Coming Home’ is an exercise in using – and frequently undermining – the genres of the atrocity story and revenge narrative, resulting in a clever, frequently metatextual war story. Likewise, her post-war story ‘Writing a War Story’ (1919) is a further playful take on the genre of war literature, and an examination of the role of women in wartime. Drawing on Wharton’s own experiences of wartime relief work, the unfinished ‘The Field of Honour’ (likely 1919) and the story ‘The Refugees’ (1919) both satirise female volunteers and relief organisations in darkly comic modes. The satire and irony of Wharton’s short stories is entirely absent from Wharton’s most straightforwardly propagandistic and sentimental text, her novella The Marne (1918), which was written on a wave of patriotic and Francophile sentiment prompted by America’s entry into the war in April 1917. Her non-fiction piece French Ways and Their Meaning (1919) developed in part from a talk given to American soldiers at the Soldiers and Sailors Club in spring 1918, which had early roots in the final essay of Fighting France, ‘The Tone of France’. This book was ‘ordered to be placed in all ships’ libraries by the US Department of the Navy’.132 Again heavily drawing on her experience of wartime relief work, her more nuanced and unusual war novel A Son at the Front (1923) focuses entirely on the civilian parent’s war experience, and was influenced by the death of Newbold Rhinelander in 1918, the son of her cousin Thomas N. Rhinelander. Wharton was highly involved in attempting to find Newbold (who was reporting missing before being confirmed dead) and mediating the news to her cousin and his wife, and eventually attended his funeral in their absence.133 This lengthy experience of the arbitration of civilian grief was contemporaneous with Wharton’s drafting of the novel. Fighting France, as the earliest and most generically unstable of all her war-related prose, therefore offers us an important insight into Wharton’s early experimentation with genre, form and tone.

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Wharton’s assessment of her wartime production in her autobiography is unduly harsh, given the range of writing she produced in this period alongside her voluntary work: Many women with whom I was in contact during the war had obviously found their vocation in nursing the wounded, or in other philanthropic activities. . . . I cannot honestly say that I was of the number. I was already in the clutches of an inexorable calling, and through individual cases of distress appeal to me strongly I am conscious of luke-warmness in regard to organised beneficence. Everything I did during the war in the way of charitable work was forced on me by the necessities of the hour, but always with the sense that others would have done it far better; and my first respite came when I felt free to return to my own work. Such freedom was seldom to be achieved during those terrible years, and between 1914 and 1918 I had time only for ‘Fighting France’, ‘Summer’, a short tale called ‘The Marne’, and a series of articles, ‘French Ways and Their Meaning’, which I was asked to write after our entry into the war, with the idea of making France and things French more intelligible to the American soldier.134

Reading Fighting France as part of Wharton’s oeuvre, we can see how this wartime text – written in the new (for Wharton) genre of war reportage and with different purposes – demonstrates some of the larger preoccupations of her writing: predominantly Francophilia, travel writing, and architecture. Wharton’s well established love of France manifested itself almost continuously throughout her fiction, most explicitly in her 1908 text A Motor-Flight Through France, a travelogue of impressions, and French Ways and Their Meaning (1919). Fighting France’s similarity to a travel narrative links it to A Motor-Flight Through France and In Morocco (1920). Wharton’s long-standing interest in houses and architecture, demonstrated in The Decoration of Houses (1897), co-written with Ogden Codman, Italian Villas and Their Gardens (1904), and Italian Backgrounds (1905), is seen in this text through the insistent motif of the destroyed buildings and ruins she encounters and describes. However, Fighting France remains an unusual propaganda text. Wharton effectively employed key propaganda tropes to glorify warfare, but simultaneously acknowledged its inevitable outcomes, ‘the saddening suggestions of what, on the distant periphery, that energy is daily and hourly resulting in’ (109). The moments of uncomfortable

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propaganda demonstrate that Wharton was still working out her literary response to the war, at a time when she found the war simultaneously ‘exhilarating’ and ‘oppressive’ (108, 127). Fighting France, as an important record of the war produced by one of America’s great authors, demonstrates that Wharton’s war writing is never as simplistic as has been assumed, and demands a closer look.

Notes 1. Fighting France: From Dunkerque to Belfort (New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1915; London: Macmillan, 1916); ‘Coming Home’ [1915] and ‘Writing a War Story’ [1919], in Maureen Howard (ed.), Edith Wharton: Collected Stories, 1911−1937 (New York: Library of America, 2001), pp. 26−58, 247−60; ‘The Refugees’ [1919], in Trudi Tate (ed.), Women, Men and the Great War: An Anthology of Stories (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1995), pp. 174−98; The Book of the Homeless (Le livre des sans-foyer): Original Articles in Verse and Prose, ed. Wharton (London: Macmillan, 1916); The Marne: A Tale of the War (London: Macmillan, 1918); A Son at the Front, ed. Shari Benstock (London: Macmillan, 1923; repr. DeKalb: Northern Illinois University Press, 1995). Some of Wharton’s war poems and her newspaper articles ‘My Work Among the Women Workers of Paris’ (28 November 1915, The New York Times Magazine) and ‘Edith Wharton Tells of German Trail of Ruin’ (6 April 1917, The New York Sun) and her talk ‘Talk to American Soldiers’ (Lecture at the Soldiers and Sailors Club) (Spring 1918, Yale Collection of American Literature, Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library, YCAL MSS 42, Series I, Box 19, Folder 612) are reprinted in the Appendices in Julie Olin-Ammentorp, Edith Wharton’s Writings from the Great War (Gainesville: University Press of Florida, 2004). Some critics also include the novel Summer (1917) and the non-fiction French Ways and Their Meaning (1919) in this group. Further war writings are still being discovered, such as articles and poems in the Hyères Weekly News and Hyères and There Weekly News, published by the American Red Cross in France (Harriet B. Sanders World War I Scrapbook, Yale Collection of American Literature, Beinecke, YCAL MSS 995, Box 1, Folder 2, 1919). 2. Wharton, ‘The Field of Honour’, Yale Collection of American Literature, Beinecke (YCAL MSS 42, Series I, Box 16, Folder 484). I discovered this text during archival work in the Beinecke Library in November 2011.

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3. Letter from Wharton to Charles Scribner, 30 January 1915. Correspondence between Wharton and Scribner’s, 1914−15. Archives of Charles Scribner’s Sons (C0101); 1786–2004 (mostly 1880s−1970s), Boxes 193−4, Folders 5 and 6. Manuscripts Division, Department of Rare Books and Special Collections, Princeton University Library, Princeton. 4. Stanley Cooperman, World War I and the American Novel (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins Press, 1967), p. 41. 5. Shari Benstock, ‘Introduction’, in A Son at the Front, pp. vii−xvi (p. x). For an example of this omission, see Millicent Bell (ed.), The Cambridge Companion to Edith Wharton (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995). 6. See Nicola Beauman, A Very Great Profession: The Woman’s Novel 1914−39 (London: Virago, 1983); Sandra M. Gilbert and Susan Gubar, No Man’s Land: The Place of the Woman Writer in the Twentieth Century, 3 vols (New Haven; London: Yale University Press, 1989–94); Claire Tylee, The Great War and Women’s Consciousness: Images of Militarism and Womanhood in Women’s Writing, 1914−64 (Iowa City: University of Iowa Press, 1990); Sharon Ouditt, Fighting Forces, Writing Women: Identity and Ideology in the First World War (London: Routledge, 1994); Dorothy Goldman, with Jane Gledhill and Judith Hattaway, Women Writers and the Great War (New York; Twayne; London: Prentice Hall International, 1995); Angela K. Smith, The Second Battlefield: Women, Modernism and the First World War (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2000); Debra Rae Cohen, Remapping the Home Front: Locating Citizenship in British Women’s Great War Fiction (Boston, MA: Northeastern University Press, 2002); Jane Potter, Boys in Khaki, Girls in Print: Women’s Literary Responses to the Great War, 1914−1918 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2005; repr. 2008). Collections of essays include: Margaret Higonnet, Jane Jenson and Margaret Collins Weitz (eds), Behind the Lines: Gender and the Two World Wars (New Haven; London: Yale University Press, 1986); Helen M. Cooper, Adrienne Auslander Munich and Susan Merrill Squier (eds), Arms and the Woman: War, Gender, and Literary Representation (Chapel Hill; London: University of North Carolina Press, 1989); Dorothy Goldman (ed.), Women and World War I: The Written Response (London: Macmillan, 1993); Miriam Cooke and Angela Woollacott (eds), Gendering War Talk (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1993); Suzanne Raitt and Trudi Tate (eds), Women’s Fiction and the Great War (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1997).

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7. Alan Price, The End of the Age of Innocence: Edith Wharton and the First World War (London: Robert Hale, 1996), pp. xii, xiii. Price notes that the origin of this phrase ‘tremolo note’ is a letter from Wharton to Elisina Tyler, with whom she co-managed her war charities, from 12 April 1916: ‘In the letter Wharton describes her struggle to overcome her long-standing reluctance to showcase pathetic individual cases of need to raise funds. “The Report [an annual report on the charities] is exactly the contrary of what I approve in that line, but I always get money by the ‘tremolo’ note, so I try to dwell on it as much as possible” ’, pp. xiv−xv. 8. Price, The End of the Age of Innocence, p. 181. 9. Olin-Ammentorp, Edith Wharton’s Writings from the Great War, pp. 1, 5. 10. See criticism in the Further Reading by William Blazek, Geneviève Brassard, Peter Buitenhuis, Mary Carney, Mary Condé, Teresa Gómez Reus and Peter Lauber, Hazel Hutchison, Annette Larson Benert, Kate McLoughlin, Yolanda Morató Agrafojo, Alan Price, Sara Prieto, Mary R. Ryder, Mary Suzanne Schriber, Judith L. Sensibar and Claire Tylee. 11. Hermione Lee, Edith Wharton (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2007), pp. 444−519. 12. Olin-Ammentorp, Edith Wharton’s Writings from the Great War, pp. 29, 40. 13. Noted by Shari Benstock, No Gifts from Chance: A Biography of Edith Wharton (New York: C. Scribner’s Sons, 1994), p. 279. 14. Wharton, A Backward Glance (New York: D. Appleton-Century, 1934), p. 336. 15. Wharton, A Backward Glance, p. 338. 16. Wharton, A Backward Glance, p. 338. 17. Lee, Edith Wharton, p. 464. 18. Wharton, A Backward Glance, p. 341. 19. Wharton, A Backward Glance, p. 349. 20. For a thorough and detailed account of Wharton’s wartime relief efforts, see Price, The End of the Age of Innocence. 21. Wharton, A Backward Glance, p. 339. 22. Wharton, A Backward Glance, pp. 351−2. 23. Wharton, A Backward Glance, p. 352. 24. Wharton, A Backward Glance, p. 352. 25. Eleanor Dwight, Edith Wharton: An Extraordinary Life (New York: Abrams, 1994), p. 193. 26. A selection of these letters can be read in the section ‘The Writer in Wartime: 1914−1918’ in R. W. B. Lewis and Nancy Lewis (eds), The

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27.

28. 29.

30. 31. 32.

33.

34. 35.

36. 37.

38. 39. 40.

41

Letters of Edith Wharton (New York: Scribner’s, 1988), pp. 329−413. See Wharton’s letters to Henry James of 28 February, 11 March and 14 May 1915 for descriptions which were then rewritten for her Fighting France articles, pp. 348−56. Wharton, A Backward Glance, p. 352. Jules-Martin Cambon (1845−1935) was a French diplomat and the head of the political section of the French foreign ministry during the war. Maurice César Joseph Pellé (1863−1924) was a French Division General who was later the first Chief of the General Staff of the Czechoslovak Defence Force. Wharton, A Backward Glance, p. 353. Lee, Edith Wharton, p. 483. Lee notes that ‘wartime “sightseers” – journalists or well-connected civilians – were frequent during the long, static war of the trenches’, p. 484. Letter to Henry James, 28 February 1915, in Lewis and Lewis, The Letters of Edith Wharton, pp. 348−50 (p. 350). Lee, Edith Wharton, p. 454. These photographs are filed under ‘War Charities’ in the Beinecke Library. Yale Collection of American Literature, Beinecke (YCAL MSS 42, Series, Box 56, Folder 1659). Stéphane Audoin-Rouzeau notes that L’Echo du Ravin was ‘the roneoed paper of the 41st Battalion of Chasseurs, with a circulation of a few hundred copies, which appeared between March 1915 and June 1916’, in Men at War, 1914−1918: National Sentiment and Trench Journalism in France during the First World War, trans. Helen McPhail (Providence; Oxford: Berg, 1992), p. 5. Olin-Ammentorp, Edith Wharton’s Writings from the Great War, p. 232. ‘The Look of Paris’ (Vol. 57, No. 5, May 1915), pp. 523−31; ‘In Argonne’ (Vol. 57, No. 6, June 1915), pp. 651–60; ‘In Lorraine and the Vosges’ (Vol. 58, No. 4, October 1915), pp. 430−42; ‘In the North’ (Vol. 58, No. 5, November 1915), pp. 600−10. ‘In Alsace’, The Saturday Evening Post (Vol. 188, No. 21, 20 November 1915), pp. 9−10, 32–3. The other magazine was Scribner’s Monthly (1870−81), which became The Century Magazine, published by the Century Company (1881−1930). James E. Sait, ‘Charles Scribner’s Sons and the Great War’, Princeton University Library Chronicle, 47 (1987), pp. 152−80 (pp. 153, 164). See Sait, ‘Charles Scribner’s Sons and the Great War’ for more information about Scribner’s during the war. Cable from Wharton to Scribner, 5 August 1914 [‘Dated 4th’ written at bottom], Princeton.

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41. Cable from Scribner to Wharton, 6 August 1914, Princeton. 42. Letter from Wharton to Scribner, 20 September 1914, Princeton. Wharton was still lamenting not having kept a diary in a letter to John Charpentier of 13 March 1919, when she asked him if he could get hold of some morning newspapers from the first few weeks of the war, because she was writing a book about a young American engaged in the French Army [The Marne]. She writes, ‘Pourquoi n’ai-je pas gardé les journaux de ces premières semaines?’ (‘Why didn’t I keep diaries of these first weeks?’) (Yale Collection of American Literature, Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library, YCAL MSS 42, Series III, Box 37, Folder 1117). 43. Cable from Wharton to Scribner, 20 February 1915, Princeton. 44. Letter from Scribner to Wharton, 24 October 1914, Princeton. 45. Letter from Scribner to Wharton, 10 November 1914, Princeton. Scribner told Wharton ‘we have a small book in hand for him on the fighting in Flanders. He seems to have been the correspondent who saw most of it’. 46. Letter from Wharton to Scribner, 29 December 1914, Princeton. 47. Sir Hall Caine, King Albert’s Book: A Tribute to the Belgian King and People from Representative Men and Women throughout the World (London: The Daily Telegraph, 1914). Wharton, ‘Mrs Wharton Asks for Funds to Aid Refugees’ (18 January 1915, New York Sun). Donation mentioned in letter from Scribner to Wharton, 19 January 1915, Princeton. Letter from Wharton to Scribner, 14 November 1914, Princeton. However, Price notes that Wharton’s ‘literary production had fallen off so sharply that for 1914 she filed taxes on an income of only $900’, The End of the Age of Innocence, p. 39. 48. Letter from Wharton to Charles Scribner, 30 January 1915, Princeton. 49. Wharton, A Backward Glance, p. 352–3. Price, The End of the Age of Innocence, p. 45. 50. Letter from Scribner to Wharton, 11 March 1915, Princeton. 51. Letter from Scribner to Wharton, 11 March 1915, Princeton. Minnie later checked the proofs of ‘In Argonne’ and Scribner’s checked the proofs of ‘In Lorraine and the Vosges’ (Letter from Scribner to Wharton, 9 April 1915, Princeton; Letter from Scribner to Wharton, 26 July 1915, Princeton). Before book publication, Wharton was able to send a revised copy of ‘In Argonne’ and send galley proofs from pages 1−31 (which arrived too late to be inserted), but Minnie checked the page proofs (Letter from Wharton to Bridges, 22 September 1915, Princeton; Letter from Anna Bahlmann to Scribner’s, 14 October 1915, Princeton). 52. ‘The Look of Paris’ (Vol. 57, No. 5, May 1915), pp. 523−31. The other contributors to this issue were Willis Boyd Allen, Armistead C. Gordon, Emma A. Opper, Duncan MacPherson, Charles H. Sherrill,

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53.

54. 55. 56.

57. 58.

59.

60.

61. 62. 63. 64. 65. 66.

43

Edwin Arlington Robinson, Annie Eliot Trumbull, Alice Duer Miller and Samuel McCoy. Theodore Roosevelt, America and the World War (New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1915). Lee notes that the copy Roosevelt gave to Wharton bore the dedication: ‘From an American – American!’, quoted by Lee, Edith Wharton, p. 459. Letter from Scribner to Wharton, 10 November 1914, Princeton. Cable from Wharton to Scribner’s, 3 March 1915, Princeton. Cable from Wharton to Scribners, ‘WAR ARTICLE [LETTER STRUCK THROUGH] MAILED TWENTIETH HOPE PUBLISHED JUNE’, 27 March 1915, Princeton. Letter from Wharton to Bridges, 21 March 1915, Princeton. Letter from Wharton to Bridges, 24 March 1915, Princeton. Letter from Wharton to Bridges, 21 March 1915, Princeton. Letter from Wharton to Bridges, 21 March 1915, Princeton. Wharton also told Bridges in this letter that she could not write ‘Count Underlinden’ as present, writing ‘The war has become too vast & terrible for such things’. Letter from Wharton (per A. Bahlmann) to Bridges, 24 March 1915, Princeton. On receiving this map, Scribner replied: ‘It arrived at the latest minute possible, as your article was made up ready to cast. Fortunately, there was a space at the end of it, and we have had a rapid sketch map made which includes all the points enumerated in your original copy. If it seems rather meagre, it is because it was made overnight! Of course we should have put it near the beginning of the article if the pages had not already been completed’. Letter from Scribner to Wharton, 16 April 1915, Princeton. Letter from Bridges to Wharton, April 9 1915, Princeton. Price notes that Scribner’s paid Wharton ‘$1000 in 1915 for each of her two stories, “Coming Home” and “Kerfol”, but only $500 for each of the war articles’, in ‘Edith Wharton’s War Story’, Tulsa Studies in Women’s Literature, 8 (1989), 95−100 (p. 97). Letter from Wharton to Bridges, 3 April 1915, Princeton. Wharton evidently counted ‘In Argonne’ as her first war article. Cable from Scribner’s to Wharton, 30 April 1915, Princeton. Letter from Wharton to Bridges, 21 May 1915, Princeton. Cable from Wharton to Scribner, 29 May 1915, Princeton. Letter from Wharton to Bridges, 27 May 1915, Princeton. Letter from Wharton to Scribner, 9 June 1915, Princeton. Cable from Scribner to Wharton, 25 June 1915, Princeton. Letter from Wharton to Scribner, 9 June 1915, Princeton. The next day, Wharton also offered Scribner a piece on General Joffre by her

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67. 68. 69. 70. 71. 72. 73. 74. 75. 76.

77. 78. 79. 80. 81. 82. 83. 84.

85. 86. 87.

Fighting France friend Raymond Recouly, which was published in the October issue. Cable from Wharton to Scribner, 10 June 1915, Princeton. Unlike her own articles, there was time for Wharton to revise the proofs for this article and return them to Scribner’s, 11 August 1915, Princeton. Recouly (1876−1950) was a journalist and war correspondent before the war, as well as Foreign Policy Editor of Le Figaro. He was drafted during the war and served on the French and Russian fronts. In the 1920s and 1930s he wrote a number of books devoted to the war and Marshal Foch, the Commander in Chief of the Allied Armies in 1918 who was later named a Marshal of France. Letter from Scribner to Wharton, 18 June 1915, Princeton. Letter from Wharton to Scribner, 28 June 1915, Princeton. Letter from Wharton to Scribner, 28 June 1915, Princeton. Letter from Scribner to Wharton, 13 July 1915, Princeton. Letter from Scribner to Wharton, 13 July 1915, Princeton. Letter from Wharton to Scribner, 28 June 1915, Princeton. Letter from Scribner to Wharton, 13 July 1915, Princeton. Letter from Scribner to Wharton, 13 July 1915, Princeton. Letter from Wharton (per A. Bahlmann) to Bridges, 19 July 1915, Princeton. Letter from Wharton to Scribner, 19 July 1915, Princeton. Many letters between the pair for the next six months related to this collection. Letter from Scribner to Wharton, 27 July 1915, Princeton. Letter from Bridges to Wharton, 3 August 1915, Princeton. Letter from Scribner to Wharton, 4 August 1915, Princeton. Letter from Wharton to Scribner, 11 August 1915, Princeton. Letter from Wharton to Scribner, 11 August 1915, Princeton. Scribner agreed to do this for her in his letter of 3 September 1915, Princeton. Letter from Wharton to Scribner, 11 August 1915, Princeton. Cable from Wharton to Scribner, 20 August 1915, Princeton. ‘I want to tell you again how sorry I am that my war articles are always so late in arriving. The pressure of work here is so great that I am often too tired to detach my mind from it and do any decent writing’. Letter from Wharton to Scribner, 30 August 1915, Princeton. Cable from Wharton to Scribner, 4 September 1915, Princeton. Letter from Bridges to Wharton, 22 September 1915, Princeton. Letter from Mary Cadwalader Jones to Scribner, 17 September 1915, Princeton. Letter from Wharton to Bridges, 22 September 1915, Princeton. Letter from Wharton to Bridges, 22 September 1915, Princeton. The annotated typescript of ‘In Alsace’ is now at Princeton: ‘In Alsace’.

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88. 89.

90. 91.

92. 93. 94. 95.

96. 97.

98. 99.

45

Edith Wharton Manuscripts (C0118); 1903–25, Box 1, Folder 10. Manuscripts Division, Department of Rare Books and Special Collections, Princeton University Library. It shows Wharton made a number of minor, largely stylistic corrections, which were then reproduced in the final printed text. Letter from Wharton to Bridges, 25 September 1915, Princeton. Cable from Wharton to Scribner’s, 28 September 1915, Princeton. Letter from Wharton to Scribner, 30 September 1915, Princeton. She sent a cable with this proposed title to Scribner, 3 October 1915, Princeton. Burlingame at Scribner’s had also written her a letter on 17 September notifying her of the problem over the title, which she had not yet received. Letter from Burlingame to Wharton, 17 September 1915, Princeton. Cable from Wharton to Scribner, received 9 October 1915, Princeton. Wharton to Macmillan, 11 October 1915, in Shafquat Towheed (ed.), Correspondence of Edith Wharton and Macmillan, 1901–30 (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2007), p. 164. Letter from Anna Bahlmann to Scribner, 14 October 1915, Princeton. Letter from Scribner to Wharton, 15 October 1915, Princeton. Letter from Scribner to Wharton, 22 October 1915, Princeton. Letter from Scribner to Wharton, 15 October 1915, Princeton. Wharton’s literary estate, under the ownership of Mrs Elisina Tyler, wrote to Scribner’s in May 1946 to enquire about their plans for reprinting some of Wharton’s books. The response from Scribner’s to Miss Diana M. Tree from 2 July 1946 includes photostatic copies of a number of Edith Wharton contracts, and a ‘Charles Scribner’s Sons Office Memorandum’ with a list of texts which are missing contracts. Fighting France is included in this list. Archives of Charles Scribner’s Sons (C0101); 1786−2004 (mostly 1880s−1970s), Box 108, Folder 6, Manuscripts Division, Department of Rare Books and Special Collections, Princeton University Library. See the Appendix to Towheed, Correspondence of Edith Wharton and Macmillan, 1901−30, p. 267 Letter from Wharton to Frederick Macmillan, 4 November 1915. Edith Wharton Collection. Yale Collection of American Literature. Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library (YCAL MSS 42, Series III, Box 38, Folder 1144: Correspondence with Macmillan and Co. 1905−18). Wharton’s handwriting at the bottom of a letter from Macmillan to Wharton, 16 October 1916, Beinecke. Letter from Wharton to Frederick Macmillan, 17 November 1915, in Towheed, Correspondence of Edith Wharton and Macmillan, 1901–30, pp. 167−8.

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46 100. 101. 102. 103. 104. 105.

106.

107. 108.

109. 110.

111.

112.

113. 114.

Fighting France Letter from Scribner to Wharton, 10 December 1915, Princeton. Letter from Scribner to Wharton, 10 December 1915, Princeton. Letter from Wharton to Scribner, 26 December 1915, Princeton. Letter from Wharton to Scribner, 26 December 1915, Princeton. Letter from Bridges to Wharton, 24 December 1915, Princeton. Letter from Wharton to Frederick Macmillan, 14 February 1916, in Towheed, Correspondence of Edith Wharton and Macmillan, 1901−30, p. 172. ‘Le visage de Paris’, Revue des Deux Mondes, Juin 1915 (Troisième quinzaine). ‘I. En Argonne – en Lorraine et dans les Vosges’, Revue des Deux Mondes, Mars 1916 (Deuxième quinzaine). ‘II – Dans le Nord et en Alsace’, Revue des Deux Mondes, Avril 1916 (Quatrième quinzaine), which appeared in the same issue as an article by Wharton’s friend Paul Bourget and a review by T. de Wyzewa of Fear God and Take Your Own Part (1916), Roosevelt’s next book after America and the World War. Letter from Wharton to Frederick Macmillan, 21 September 1918. Beinecke. Letter from Wharton to Frederick Macmillan, 7 February 1921, Beinecke. Letter from Wharton’s Secretary to Frederick Macmillan, 26 October 1922, Beinecke. Cate Haste, Keep the Home Fires Burning: Propaganda in the First World War (London: Allen Lane, 1977), pp. 1−3. See David M. Kennedy, Over Here: The First World War and American Society (New York; Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1980; repr. 2004). John T. Matthews, ‘American Writing of the Great War’, in Vincent Sherry (ed.), The Cambridge Companion to the Literature of the First World War (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005), pp. 217−42 (p. 217). Peter Buitenhuis, The Great War of Words: Literature as Propaganda 1914−1918 and After (London: Batsford, 1987; repr. 1989), p. 102. Buitenhuis, The Great War of Words, p. xvii. Price also includes this quotation in The End of the Age of Innocence, p. xiii. Price notes that ‘the phenomenon of American authors turning from fiction to propaganda to sway a neutral American reading public and to aid war charities was not uncommon between 1914 and 1917’, citing Dorothy Canfield Fisher, Mary Roberts Rhinehart, Gertrude Atherton, Alice B. Toklas and Gertrude Stein, and Henry James as examples (The End of the Age of Innocence, p. xii). He later notes that ‘Occasionally [Wharton’s] propaganda work extended into

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115. 116.

117. 118.

119. 120.

121. 122.

123. 124. 125.

126. 127.

128.

47

official government circles, as when she asked John Garrett at the American embassy to advise a French inspector of propaganda about which American journalists could be used in support of the Allied cause’ (The End of the Age of Innocence, p. 46). Lee, Edith Wharton, p. 457. Claire Tylee, ‘Imagining Women at War: Feminist Strategies in Edith Wharton’s War Writing’, Tulsa Studies in Women’s Literature, 16 (1997), pp. 327−43 (pp. 327−8). Matthews, ‘American Writing of the Great War’, pp. 226–30. Florence Finch Kelly, ‘Eye Witnesses of the War: Fighting France’, Bookman, 42 (December 1915), pp. 462–3, in James W. Tuttleton, Kristin O. Lauer and Margaret P. Murray (eds), Edith Wharton: The Contemporary Reviews (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1992), pp. 222−3. Kelly, ‘Eye Witnesses of the War’, p. 222. Anon., ‘Mrs. Wharton and Kipling on the War: Famous Writers Tell of Their Experiences at the Front – Recent Books on the European Conflict’, New York Times Book Review, 5 December 1915, p. 490, in Tuttleton et al., Edith Wharton: The Contemporary Reviews, pp. 221−2 (p. 221). Jules Abel Faivre, ‘Dans les Ruines’, front cover illustration from Le Rire Rouge, No. 27, 22 May 1915. Quoted by Lee, Edith Wharton, p. 485. Lee is quoting a letter quoted by Eleanor Dwight from Wharton to Alice Garrett (n.d.), Edith Wharton: An Extraordinary Life, p. 195. Letter to Mary Berenson, 12 January 1915, in Lewis and Lewis (eds), The Letters of Edith Wharton, pp. 345−7 (p. 346). Wharton, A Backward Glance, pp. 339, 353, 355. There are eight automobile permits for 1915 held in the Beinecke. Edith Wharton Collection. Yale Collection of American Literature, Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library (YCAL MSS 42, Series V, Box 51, Folder 1538: Permits, automobile (World War I) / 1915–18). Letter to Henry James, 11 March 1915, quoted in Lewis and Lewis, The Letters of Edith Wharton, pp. 351−3 (p. 352). The British ocean liner RMS Lusitania was torpedoed and sunk by a German U-Boat on 7 May 1915, resulting in the loss of 1,198 lives, including 128 Americans. This event helped shift public opinion in the United States towards joining the war, and contributed to America’s later declaration of war in April 1917. Wharton writes of Gerbéviller: ‘when the Germans entered, a fire was built in every house, and at the nicely-timed right moment one of

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129.

130.

131. 132. 133.

134.

Fighting France the explosive tabloids which the fearless Teuton carries about for his land-Lusitanias was tossed on each hearth. It was all so well done that one wonders − almost apologetically for German thoroughness − that any of the human rats escaped from their holes; but some did, and were neatly spitted on lurking bayonets’ (131). ‘It was one of the most damnable stories I’ve heard yet. Put together the worst of the typical horrors and you’ll have a fair idea of it. Murder, outrage, torture. . .’, ‘Coming Home’, pp. 40−1. Rather than uncritically reproducing the genre of the atrocity story as she was doing in Fighting France, in ‘Coming Home’ Wharton was drawing attention instead to its constructed nature, as part of her larger narrative preoccupation with storytelling, particularly storytelling in wartime. Earlier in the war, on 2 September 1914, Wharton had written to Sara (‘Sally’) Norton: ‘The “atrocities” one hears of are true. I know of many, alas, too well authenticated. Spread it abroad as much as you can. It should be known that it is to America’s interest to help stem this hideous flood of savagery by opinion if not by action. No civilized race can remain neutral in feeling now’, in Lewis and Lewis, The Letters of Edith Wharton, pp. 335−6 (p. 335). She wrote again to Sally Norton on 27 September 1914: ‘As to the horrors & outrages, I’m afraid they are too often true. – Lady Gladstone, head of the Belgian refugee committee in London, told a friend of mine she had seen a Belgian woman with her ears cut off. And of course the deliberate slaughter of “hostages” in defenceless towns is proved over & over again’, in Lewis and Lewis, The Letters of Edith Wharton, pp. 338−40 (p. 340). Olin-Ammentorp, Edith Wharton’s Writings from the Great War, p. 40. Lee, Edith Wharton, p. 462. The letters between Wharton and Thomas N. Rhinelander are held in the Edith Wharton Collection, Yale Collection of American Literature, Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library (YCAL MSS 42, Series XI: Louis Auchincloss Material, Oversize Box 64, Folder 1791). Wharton, A Backward Glance, pp. 356−7.

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Figure 1. Wharton and Berry in the war zones. Edith Wharton Collection. Yale Collection of American Literature, Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library, Yale University.

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Fighting France

Figure 2. Motor vehicle permit for Edith Wharton (front), May 1915. Edith Wharton Collection. Yale Collection of American Literature, Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library, Yale University.

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Figure 3. Motor vehicle permit for Edith Wharton (back), May 1915. Edith Wharton Collection. Yale Collection of American Literature, Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library, Yale University.

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Fighting France

Figure 4. Wharton and Berry among the ruins. Edith Wharton Collection. Yale Collection of American Literature, Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library, Yale University.

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Figure 5. Une rue à Nieuport. Edith Wharton Collection. Yale Collection of American Literature, Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library, Yale University.

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Fighting France

Figure 6. L’eglise de Nieuport. Edith Wharton Collection. Yale Collection of American Literature, Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library, Yale University.

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Figure 7. Bascote de l’eglise de Nieuport. Edith Wharton Collection. Yale Collection of American Literature, Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library, Yale University.

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Fighting France

Figure 8. Cimetière de Nieuport. Edith Wharton Collection. Yale Collection of American Literature, Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library, Yale University.

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Figure 9. Grand Hotel sur la plage à Oostdunkerque. Edith Wharton Collection. Yale Collection of American Literature, Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library, Yale University.

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Fighting France

Figure 10. Groupe à la musique du Zouaves à Oostdunkerque. Edith Wharton Collection. Yale Collection of American Literature, Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library, Yale University.

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Figure 11. Pour Mrs Edith Wharton. Edith Wharton Collection. Yale Collection of American Literature, Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library, Yale University.

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Fighting France

Figure 12. Envelope of letter from Soeur Julie to Edith Wharton. Edith Wharton Collection. Yale Collection of American Literature, Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library, Yale University.

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Figure 13. Front page of L’Echo du Ravin (May 1915). Edith Wharton Collection. Yale Collection of American Literature, Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library, Yale University.

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Fighting France

·VOL. LVII NO. 5

MAY 1915

PRICE 25 CENTS·

~-({+})})))))})))If««ingor writing home, the !1()\dier's lettertmd proi)J»e~:l on a patched blue knee, a scarred fist laboriously driving the foun· tain pen received in the hospital. Some ttre leaning over the shoulder of a pal who has just reeeived a Paris paper, others chuckling together at the, joke~~ or their own ~'ri!.nch journal-the Echodu Ra\·in, the J ournal des Poilus or the Diuble Bleu; little papers ground out in pur· pliah script on foolscap and adorned with comic s ketches and u wealth of local humor. Higher up, under a fir belt, at the edge of a meadow, the officer who rode ahead signed to us to dismount and scramble after him. We plunged under the tree!!, into wbat seemed a de1111er thicket, and found it to be a 'thatch of branches woven to screen the muzzles of a bat. tery. The hi&: lfUllS were ail about WI, crouched in these sylvan lairs like wild beasts waiting to spring; and near each gu n hovered its attendant gunner, proud, possessive, important as a bridegroom with hill bride. We climbed and climbed again, reaching at last a sun· and.wind·burnt common which forms the top of one of the highest mountains in t.he regio n. The forest was left below us. and only a belt of dwarf firs ran along the edge of the great: grsssy shoulder. We dismounted, the mules

We had been rather too conspicuously facing the German batteries on the opposite slope, and our p~nce might have drawn their fire on an artillsry observation post installed near by. We retreated h urriedly and unpacked our luncheon basket on the more sheltered side of the ridge. As we sat there in the grass, swept by a great mountain breeze full of the scent of thyme and myrtle, white t he flutter of birds, t he hum of insects, the still and busy life of the hills went on all about us in the 11unshiue, the pressure of the encircling line of death grew more intolerably rea l. I t is not in the mud of t he trenches that one most feela the damnable insanity of war; it is where it lurks, like a mythical monster, in scenes to which the mind has always turned for rest.

No ve mb er 20, 19/S

We had not yet made the whole tour of the mounlaio top; and after luncheon we rode over to a point where a tong. narrow yoke connects it with a spur projectioi directly above the German lines. We left our mules io hiding and walked along the yoke, a mere knife edge of rock rimmed with dwarf vegetation. Suddenly we heard an explosion behind us- one of the batteries we bad passed on the wny up waa giving tongue. The German lines roorosite one, a minute later, u brown geyser or dust.

French Rule in Alsa ce RESENTLY a deluge of min descended on us, driving us P back to our mules and down the near