A Traveller in War-Time
1918
This is not the Churchill you think you know. In 1917, American novelist Winston Churchill crossed the Atlantic into a world at war, and what he found haunted him enough to commit to paper. A Traveller in War-Time captures something rare: an American novelist's unfiltered encounter with Europe while it bled. Churchill approached wartime Britain and France without the buffer of history or politics, recording instead the immediate sensory shock of passage and arrival. He fills these pages with the people he meets aboard the crowded ship, in Paris streets, on London omnibuses, near the Western Front. What emerges is a portrait of societies reorganized around a single purpose, where individuals discover new meanings of sacrifice and duty. The accompanying essay on the American contribution and the democratic ideal articulates why an entire generation crossed an ocean to fight in someone else's war. For readers who want to feel what it was like to be an American in wartime Europe before the convenient distance of history.
