On July 30, 1914, as war was beginning to be declared throughout Europe, Edith Wharton stood in the glow of Chartres Cathedral. Wharton’s collected writings about her travels to the front in World War I, originally published in 1915, begin with her visit to the medieval cathedral. She describes Chartres’s famous windows:
The light at Chartres was doubtless matched by the luster of the 1914 summer itself. Nevertheless, “that perfect hour” Wharton references would be shattered by the outbreak of the Great War. By that time, Edith Wharton had been living in France since 1907 and her reputation as a writer was established. Deeply attached to France’s history and traditions, as well as its artistic life, she was shocked at the prospect of war and disturbed by the threat she believed it posed to France’s ancient, civilized culture.
When asked by the French Red Cross to help with the war effort, and report about the needs of military hospitals, she readily agreed. As she noted in her autobiography, A Backward Glance: “What I saw there made me feel the urgency of telling . . . of the desperate needs of the hospitals in the war-zone, and I proposed to Monsieur Jules Cambon [a French diplomat] to make other trips to the front, and recount my experiences in a series of magazine articles.”
While traveling near (or at) the front lines in France from February to August 1915, Wharton published four essays in Scribner’s magazine about her observations, notably the devastating effect of the war on French troops and civilians, as well as on the towns and cities themselves. In late 1915, these essays, and two additional ones, were compiled into Fighting France and published in book form by Charles Scribner’s Sons.
An advocate of American intervention, Wharton hoped through her writing to galvanize American public opinion on behalf of France and her allies. Fighting France has often been characterized as propaganda and not accorded the same respect or status as Wharton’s other writing; in an attempt to bring renewed attention to Wharton’s wartime writing, and to offer a critical reappraisal of it, Alice Kelly has edited this admirable new edition on the centennial of its publication.
In a thoroughly researched and thoughtful introduction, Kelly argues for a “closer look” at Fighting France and locates it among a variety of literary genres, including war correspondence. She makes an effective case that Fighting France is not merely skillful propaganda but a work worthy of deeper study. And to assist the reader, she includes detailed annotations that explain Wharton’s many (and sometimes oblique) historical, biblical, and literary references. Kelly avoids the false choice of characterizing Wharton as either propagandist or artist and suggests that her use of various literary devices not only demonstrates her innate skill but, ultimately, creates more effective propaganda.
In one example, she cites Wharton’s repeated imagery of a scarred physical and architectural landscape as a useful metaphor for the human devastation caused by the war: “The most persistent example of Wharton’s effective propaganda,” she writes, “is the extended motif of death and violence in relation to land and buildings, which work as a substitute for human corpses.” Kelly also notes Wharton’s evocation of the abiding “nearness of the war” through her juxtaposition of scenes from the front lines with normal French life, reflecting the disorientation experienced by a civilian witness to war and the often indeterminate location of the combat itself. A reader could infer that such literary devices—damaged landscapes, unlikely juxtapositions—suggest the very fragility of the civilized and cultivated world Wharton cherished and believed to be under threat.
Such incongruous juxtapositions are woven throughout Wharton’s essays. In one town she sees the white light of flares exploding at night and compares the flash to white flowers: “Below us the roofs of Cassel slept their provincial sleep, the moonlight picking out every leaf in the gardens; while beyond, those infernal flowers continued to open and shut along the curve of death.” And with death always near, Wharton gives us an especially poignant image of destruction and fragility in her description of a chapel serving simultaneously as a hospital in a small French village:
It is the inverse image of Chartres. The church is a “graveyard” drained of light, strength, and beauty. The “perfect hour” is gone. And it is the artist who tells us.
Sydney Leach is a lawyer who writes from Virginia.
