The Note-Book of an Attaché: Seven Months in the War Zone

In the summer of 1914, the world of European diplomacy collapsed into chaos, and Eric Fisher Wood found himself standing at the center of the collapse. As an attaché at the American Embassy in Paris, Wood witnessed history in its most terrifying infancy: the mobilization, the refugee floods, the rumors, and the dawn of a war that would reshape civilization. His notebook captures those first seven months with an immediacy no later history can replicate. Here is the war not as it's understood in retrospect, but as it felt to those living through it hour by hour, unsure whether Paris would fall, whether America would be dragged in, whether any of it would end. Wood's prose carries the particular quality of someone writing while the ground still shakes beneath him. This is primary source material at its most visceral: a document of confusion, courage, and the peculiar blindness of people who could not yet see what they had stumbled into. For readers of war history, of first-person accounts, and of the Edwardian world as it genuinely existed, Wood's notebook offers something precious and unrepeatable.