A Soldier's Mother in France

In 1917, journalist and suffragist Rheta Childe Dorr boarded a ship for France, intent on covering the war as a correspondent. What she could not anticipate was how completely her professional detachment would shatter against the raw terror of motherhood. Her son had enlisted in the American Expeditionary Force, and across the battlefields of France, Dorr discovered that no correspondent's credentials could protect her from the same primal dread shared by every mother waiting for news of her boy. Traveling from training camps to forward positions, from Parisian hospitals to ruined French villages, she documents not merely the military machinery of war but its human face: the soldiers who write poetry in trenches, the French families sharing bread with American troops, the other mothers who corner her at railway stations desperate for any scrap of information about their sons. This is war writing stripped of heroics, rendered instead in the granular language of maternal anxiety and fierce, inconvenient love. Dorr's 1918 account remains staggering for its honesty about what it means to hope for your child while knowing that hope is also hope for every mother's child.