Fields of Victory

In the winter of 1918-1919, Mrs. Humphry Ward crossed the Channel to witness what the Great War had made of France. What she found was a landscape of rubble and ruin, towns erased from the map, and a people hollowed by four years of slaughter. Written as a series of letters, Fields of Victory is not a novel but an urgent, eyewitness account of the armistice's immediate aftermath. Ward walks the former battlefields, speaks with French civilians and British military leaders, and grapples with the scale of destruction that propaganda could never capture. She is especially concerned with correcting the historical record: ensuring that Britain's role in the final campaigns is properly understood and honored. The result is a document of considerable historical weight, written by one of the most celebrated novelists of the Victorian and Edwardian eras, whose literary connections included her uncle Matthew Arnold. For readers seeking primary testimony from the war's first historians, those who stood in the ruins while the smoke still rose, this remains an indispensable witness.