Fighting France, from Dunkerque to Belfort

In 1914, when war erupted across Europe, Edith Wharton was already living in Paris. What she witnessed over the following months would transform her from chronicler of Gilded Age society into something far more urgent: a witness to the first industrial war's horror, and a defender of the French spirit that refused to break. "Fighting France" records Wharton's journeys behind the lines in 1914 and 1915. She visited field hospitals where surgeons worked amid constant threat, walked through villages reduced to rubble, and descended into the crude early trenches where a new kind of warfare was being born. Yet this is not merely a document of destruction. Wharton insists on recording what she calls "the soul of France" - the villagers who returned to rebuild, the soldiers who joked in the face of death, the resilience that made resistance possible. Written with the precision and social acuity that defined her novels, this account offers a singular perspective: an American observer, already among Europe's most sophisticated literary voices, watching civilization confront its own annihilation.