Fighting France, from Dunkerque to Belfort

Description

Fighting France, from Dunkerque to Belfort is a collection of articles by Edith Wharton written while she was a war correspondent in France in 1914-1915 and published in Scribner’s Magazine.

Though Wharton did spend more than a year on and around the Western Front during World War I, the articles are more travelogues than accounts of battles. Her journeys start in Paris, then she goes on to Argonne, to Lorraine and the Vosges, then to the North and to Alsace – as a long-time friend of the American Chamber of Commerce President in France, Wharton had special access to areas in the front zone where no other journalist could enter, so her accounts are all the more valuable.

Her reports, first of all, tell about her journeys along the front line and about the life of the soldiers in the trenches. She witnesses horrible living circumstances and difficulties that the soldiers endure heroically; she sees plots of land and homes devastated by bomb shells, ruined villages and fields that had no crops, only white crosses wherever the eye could see.

Wharton makes a successful attempt at conveying the suffering, the pain and the death she sees in the war zone – though the articles were fiercely criticized by Wharton’s contemporaries for not staying neutral and objective, it is exactly the sensitive and very personal character of the accounts that make them so touching and so credible. Wharton is a sharp observer, but she lets her emotions surface in her articles, involving her readers in a way that is informative and intimate at the same time.

Wharton was a Francophile, so she her collection of articles is about more than horrible events – it is also about the terrible effects of war on a country she loved.
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