Woman's Experiences in the Great War

In October 1914, Antwerp is about to fall. A forty-something Australian woman in sable furs and a French-speaking accent refuses to leave. Louise Mack was no ordinary war correspondent. Armed with audacity and a journalist's notebook, she positioned herself at the most dangerous crossroads of the siege, witnessing the bombardment, the exodus, thecollapse of a city. Her account crackles with the raw immediacy of someone who breathed the smoke and heard the shells. It is also deeply, sometimes painfully, personal: fiercely pro-Belgian, often viciously anti-German, occasionally drowning in sentiment. These are not the considered reflections of history but the raw pulses of a woman in a war zone, writing as the world burned around her. Mack's book endures not because she was impartial, but because she was there, terrified and unbowed, offering us the chaos of witness rather than the calm of hindsight.