Life in the War Zone

Gertrude Atherton was nearly sixty years old when she insisted on seeing the war in France firsthand. As an American novelist of considerable reputation, she had connections that got her where other civilians could not go, but she also faced the suffocating bureaucracy that surrounded all access to the front. This collection of essays captures her determined, sometimes frustrated, always observant passage through war-ravaged France in 1915 and 1916. She writes of being turned away at train stations, bribing officials, waiting for permissions that never came, and finding ways through anyway. The landscapes she describes are indelible: towns reduced to rubble, roads choked with military traffic, hospitals where the wounded arrive in waves. But Atherton is equally attentive to the human details that no dispatches could capture, the particular courage of nurses, the dark humor of soldiers, the way ordinary life persists in the margins of catastrophe. This is war writing from an outsider's perspective, someone who came to witness and could not look away.