Fighting France E-Book

Edith Wharton

• Herausgeber: Hesperus Press Ltd.
• Kategorie: Geisteswissenschaft
• Sprache: Englisch
• Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2024

Seitenzahl: 192

Beschreibung

Opening in August 1914, as the onset of the First World War is announced to a sunlit Paris, Edith Wharton's chronicle of her experience of the front lines powerfully evokes a country and a way of life under threat. As nuanced in her observations of human behaviour as she is in her vivid depictions of French landscape and architecture, Wharton fully exploits her unique position as consort to Walter Barry, President of the American Chamber of Commerce in Paris, which allows her unparalleled access to life in the trenches. Sensitive without sentimentality, Fighting France is nothing less than an inspirational testament to the strength of the human spirit at a time of the greatest adversity.

Leseprobe

Fighting France

From Dunkerque to Belfort

Edith Wharton

Foreword byColm Tóibín

Modern Voices

Part of Hesperus Press

Published by Hesperides Press Limited

167-169 Great Portland Street, W1W 5PF London

www.hesperus.press

First published in 1915

First published by Hesperus Press Limited, 2010

Foreword © Colm Tóibín, 2010

Ebook edition published by Hesperides Press Limited, 2024

Paperback ISBN: 978-1-84391-451-8

Ebook ISBN: 978-1-84391-345-0

All rights reserved. This book is sold subject to the condition that it shall not be resold, lent, hired out or otherwise circulated without the express prior consent of the publisher.

Contents

Foreword

Colm Tóibín

Fighting France:

The Look of Paris

In Argonne

In Lorraine and the Vosges

In the North

In Alsace

The Tone of France

Notes

Biographical note

Foreword

Colm Tóibín

By the time the First World War broke out, Edith Wharton, at fifty-two, had grown to love France and depend on it. She had known the country as part of her privileged childhood, having lived with her family in Paris between 1868 and 1870, and having learned to speak and read French at an early age. As a young woman in the United States, she was much cheered each year by the arrival of ‘our trunk from Paris’ with the dresses she had ordered; they came from the world capital of good fashion and good manners, two things which mattered to her enormously throughout her life. A number of important friendships – with the writer Paul Bourget in the 1890s, for example, or with Francophile Walter Berry, with whom she was in love, or John Winthrop, a family friend – helped her to discover a great deal about France, its traditions, most of which she deeply approved and many of which she relished, and its culture, which she also grew to love and appreciate.

She first lived in Paris as an expatriate in the winter of 1906, discovering to her glee that her career as a novelist, which rendered her alarming in certain elements of American society, made her a fashionable figure in Paris and interesting to the French. She rented an apartment from the George Vanderbilts in the city where she wintered in 1907 and 1908. Having stayed some time at the Hotel Crillon, she moved into her own apartment in Rue de Varenne in January 1910. Slowly, as her marriage was breaking up, she began to settle in Paris and give up her American life. The success of her novel The House of Mirth in its French translation added enormously to her happiness and social progress in these years.

It is not hard to imagine how much the destruction of France, or its defeat, or even a rupture in its way of life, would have horrified her. Her description of the country she loved at war is a testament to her abiding love for France and to her anguish at what began to happen there in August 1914.

In his book The Discovery of France Graham Robb writes about what those days meant in a France where many people had never travelled beyond a few villages:

Until 1st August 1914, no piece of news had ever reached the entire population on the same day… In places where newspapers were scarce and the main source of news was the weekly market, war came as a complete surprise. According to a survey conducted in 1915 by the rector of Grenoble University, people were ‘thunderstruck’ and ‘stupefied’… In some parts of the Alps, men were making hay in the high summer pastures when messengers brought the news. Some had to leave for the station in the next valley before saying farewell to their families… Soldiers from all over France found themselves in a land without landmarks, with nothing to guide them except flares and enemy gunfire… Horses that had walked the same farm tracks all their lives carried mutilated soldiers across a grassless field.

For Henry James, who had also found in France a haven of grace and civility, the arrival of the war was ‘a nightmare from which there is no waking except sleep’. He wrote from Rye in England to an old friend in the United States:

I write to you under the black cloud of portentous events on this side of the world, horrible, unspeakable, iniquitous things – I mean horrors of war criminally, infamously precipitated. These are monstrous miseries for us, of our generation and age, to live into… I try to think it will be interesting – but have only got so far as to feel it sickening.

On 6th August he wrote to his friend Edith Wharton in Paris of ‘this crash of our civilisation. The only gleam in the blackness, to me, is the action and the absolute unanimity of this country.’ The following year, James, who remained in a frenzy of patriotism until his death in 1916, became a British citizen. Once more he wrote to Edith Wharton of ‘the unspeakable adventure of being alive in these days’.

Both James and Wharton had had their imaginations nourished by France. Both of them had set some of their fiction there – James most notably The American (1877) and The Ambassadors (1903). Wharton had used Paris first in a story ‘The Lamp of Psyche’ in 1893; as close to the outbreak of war as 1913 she had used the city as a backdrop for her novel The Custom of the Country. Its heroine Undine Spragg had found there that:

Every moment of her days was packed with excitement and exhilaration. Everything amused her: the long hours of bargaining and debate with dress-makers and jewellers, the crowded lunches at fashionable restaurants… the afternoon motor-rush to some leafy suburb, where tea and music and sunset were hastily absorbed on a crowded terrace above the Seine…

Wharton had also set about explaining France and its glories to her compatriots in books such as A Motor-Flight Through France (1908). After the war she collected articles written during the conflict so that Americans could read about French Ways and Their Meaning (1919). In her memoir A Backward Glance (1934), she also wrote about her experience of France. She remembered, for example, where she was when she heard the news that the Archduke Ferdinand had been assassinated. ‘A momentary shiver ran through the company,’ she wrote, ‘but then the talk wandered away to the interests of the hour… the last play, the newest exhibition, the Louvre’s most recent acquisition…’

Immediately afterwards, she travelled in Spain. ‘We gave little thought to the poor murdered Archduke, and international politics seemed as remote as the moon. My servants had already closed my apartment in Paris, and gone to the house I had taken in England, and I was to follow early in August. Slowly, we began to loiter northwards.’

‘I have related,’ she wrote in A Backward Glance, ‘in a little book written during the first two years of the war, the impressions produced by those dark and bewildering days of August 1914.’ When she arrived in Paris, as she described in her memoir, she discovered that, because of the outbreak of war, she could not get any money, even to pay her servants in England. She did not, however, panic. There was something indefatigable about her, which was made clear in her industry as a writer, for example, or in the way she decorated houses and bossed servants about. She was often quite warlike even in peacetime. Now, she slowly came into her own. She began by realising that many French women had no source of income; and so set about raising money and finding a space where she could employ them to make fashionable lingerie. Having given ninety of them many instructions and a way of making a living, she set out for England, where she was met by Henry James.

The house she had rented was owned by the novelist Mrs Humphry Ward. ‘To the honour of the British race,’ she wrote, ‘let it be recorded that through all those agonising days Mrs Ward’s upper housemaid (whom I had taken on with the house) kept every room filled with bowls of flowers arranged with the most exquisite art.’ This was fine in its way, but it did not stop Edith Wharton wishing to return to France, where she could be of use. She implored the French and American embassies to help her. Once they did, she arrived in Paris and began to work for war charities.

‘Early in 1915,’ she wrote, ‘the French Red Cross asked me to report on the needs of some military hospitals near the front.’ What she saw when she set out made her realise that she should ‘recount my experiences in a series of magazine articles’ so that her compatriots would know what was happening to her beloved France.

‘Foreign correspondents were,’ she wrote, ‘still rigorously excluded from the war zone,’ but no one, no matter how stiff their rigour, had ever managed much to exclude Edith Wharton from anywhere, and so she ‘was given leave to visit the rear of the whole fighting line, all the way from Dunkerque to Belfort’. She ‘did so in the course of six expeditions, some of which actually took me into the front-line trenches.’ The articles appeared in Scribner’s Magazine in 1915 and then in a volume called Fighting France.

The opening section of the book, describing Paris at the outbreak of the war, has in its tone the powerful and brittle beauty and the clarity of observation to be found also some decades later in the writings of Elizabeth Bowen about the Blitz in London. Both women were helplessly watching the city of their dreams, a place which had rescued them, nourished them, treasured them, being torn asunder, and they rose to the occasion with considerable majesty and force. Paris in distress is described by Wharton in a heightened prose, her grim music full of beat and pace and melancholy variation.

Like James in England, who visited the troops, Wharton’s natural reticence, as she toured the front line, disappeared. Both of them wrote easily, almost as though doing so were a relief, about the beauty of the troops. ‘It is not too much to say,’ Wharton wrote, ‘that war has given beauty to faces that were interesting, humorous, acute, malicious, a hundred vivid and expressive things, but last and least of all beautiful.’ In November 1914, Henry James wrote to his friend Hugh Walpole, ‘I met a striking specimen the other day who was oddly enough in the Canadian contingent… and who was of a stature, complexion, expression, and above all of a shining candour, which made him a kind of army-corps in himself.’

Wharton’s novelist’s eye for the perfect detail was matched in these reports with a sense of moral grandeur and warlike fervour, which makes her book an important document not only about the state of the front but of the state of mind of a woman who passionately and idealistically supported the war. ‘And near each gun,’ she wrote, ‘hovered its attendant [French] gunner, proud, possessive, important as a bridegroom with his bride.’

In A Backward Glance, she wrote, ‘When the book was published it was not permissible to give too precise details about places of people.’ This helps explain the vagueness of the section from 24th June when she wrote about visiting La Panne:

In one of those villas for nearly a year, two hearts at the highest pitch of human constancy have held up a light to the world. It is impossible to pass that house without a sense of awe. Because of the light that comes from it, dead faiths have come to life, weak convictions have grown strong, fiery impulses have turned to long endurance, and long endurance has kept the fire of impulse.

This was a veiled reference to ‘the moment when I was received at La Panne, in a little wind-rocked, sand girt villa, by the Queen of the Belgians, who had summoned me to talk of the Belgian child-refugees committed to our care.’ She could describe this in A Backward Glance, but not, for security reasons, in her wartime reports.

Edith Wharton was decorated by the French and the Belgians for her war-work. Since the French had, Wharton told her American publisher, decided not to decorate any civilians or foreigners during the war, her French honour especially pleased her. They had made an exception of her. With her exceptionable bravery, energy, talent and wit, she must have understood, as we do, that it was quite reasonable of them. As well as her work during the war for the country she loved, her book Fighting France is a testament to why this was so.

Fighting France:

From Dunkerque to Belfort

The Look of Paris

August 1914 - February 1915

1

August

On 30th July, 1914, motoring north from Poitiers, we had lunched somewhere by the roadside under apple trees on the edge of a field. Other fields stretched away on our right and left to a border of woodland and a village steeple. All around was noonday quiet, and the sober disciplined landscape which the traveller’s memory is apt to evoke as distinctively French. Sometimes, even to accustomed eyes, these ruled-off fields and compact grey villages seem merely flat and tame; at other moments the sensitive imagination sees in every thrifty sod and even furrow the ceaseless vigilant attachment of generations faithful to the soil. The particular bit of landscape before us spoke in all its lines of that attachment. The air seemed full of the long murmur of human effort, the rhythm of oft-repeated tasks, the serenity of the scene smiled away the war rumours which had hung on us since morning.

All day the sky had been banked with thunderclouds, but by the time we reached Chartres, toward four o’clock, they had rolled away under the horizon, and the town was so saturated with sunlight that to pass into the Cathedral was like entering the dense obscurity of a church in Spain. At first all detail was imperceptible; we were in a hollow night. Then, as the shadows gradually thinned and gathered themselves up into pier and vault and ribbing, there burst out of them great sheets and showers of colour. Framed by such depths of darkness, and steeped in a blaze of midsummer sun, the familiar windows seemed singularly remote and yet overpoweringly vivid. Now they widened into dark-shored pools splashed with sunset, now glittered and menaced like the shields of fighting angels. Some were cataracts of sapphires, others roses dropped from a saint’s tunic, others great carven platters strewn with heavenly regalia, others the sails of galleons bound for the Purple Islands; and in the western wall the scattered fires of the rose-window hung like a constellation in an African night. When one dropped one’s eyes form these ethereal harmonies, the dark masses of masonry below them, all veiled and muffled in a mist pricked by a few altar lights, seemed to symbolise the life on earth, with its shadows, its heavy distances and its little islands of illusion. All that a great cathedral can be, all the meanings it can express, all the tranquilising power it can breathe upon the soul, all the richness of detail it can fuse into a large utterance of strength and beauty, the Cathedral of Chartres gave us in that perfect hour.

It was sunset when we reached the gates of Paris. Under the heights of St Cloud and Suresnes the reaches of the Seine trembled with the blue-pink lustre of an early Monet. The Bois lay about us in the stillness of a holiday evening, and the lawns of Bagatelle were as fresh as June. Below the Arc de Triomphe, the Champs Elysées sloped downward in a sun-powdered haze to the mist of fountains and the ethereal obelisk; and the currents of summer life ebbed and flowed with a normal beat under the trees of the radiating avenues. The great city, so made for peace and art and all humanest graces, seemed to lie by her riverside like a princess guarded by the watchful giant of the Eiffel Tower.

The next day the air was thundery with rumours. Nobody believed them, everybody repeated them. War? Of course there couldn’t be war! The Cabinets, like naughty children, were again dangling their feet over the edge; but the whole incalculable weight of things-as-they-were, of the daily necessary business of living, continued calmly and convincingly to assert itself against the bandying of diplomatic words. Paris went on steadily about her midsummer business of feeding, dressing, and amusing the great army of tourists who were the only invaders she had seen for nearly half a century.

All the while, everyone knew that other work was going on also. The whole fabric of the country’s seemingly undisturbed routine was threaded with noiseless invisible currents of preparation, the sense of them was in the calm air as the sense of changing weather is in the balminess of a perfect afternoon. Paris counted the minutes till the evening papers came.

They said little or nothing except what everyone was already declaring all over the country. ‘We don’t want war – mais il faut que cela finisse!’ ‘This kind of thing has got to stop’: that was the only phrase one heard. If diplomacy could still arrest the war, so much the better: no one in France wanted it. All who spent the first days of August in Paris will testify to the agreement of feeling on that point. But if war had to come, the country, and every heart in it, was ready.

At the dressmaker’s, the next morning, the tired fitters were preparing to leave for their usual holiday. They looked pale and anxious – decidedly, there was a new weight of apprehension in the air. And in the rue Royale, at the corner of the Place de la Concorde, a few people had stopped to look at a little strip of white paper against the wall of the Ministère de la Marine. ‘General mobilisation’ they read – and an armed nation knows what that means. But the group about the paper was small and quiet. Passers-by read the notice and went on. There were no cheers, no gesticulations: the dramatic sense of the race had already told them that the event was too great to be dramatised. Like a monstrous landslide it had fallen across the path of an orderly laborious nation, disrupting its routine, annihilating its industries, rending families apart, and burying under a heap of senseless ruin the patiently and painfully wrought machinery of civilisation…

That evening, in a restaurant on the rue Royale, we sat at a table in one of the open windows, abreast with the street, and saw the strange new crowds stream by. In an instant we were being shown what mobilisation was – a huge break in the normal flow of traffic, like the sudden rupture of a dyke. The street was flooded by the torrent of people sweeping past us to the various railway stations. All were on foot, and carrying their luggage; for since dawn every cab and taxi and motor-omnibus had disappeared. The War Office had thrown out its drag-net and caught them all in. The crowd that passed our window was chiefly composed of conscripts, the mobilisables of the first day, who were on the way to the station accompanied by their families and friends; but among them were little clusters of bewildered tourists, labouring along with bags and bundles, and watching their luggage pushed before them on handcarts – puzzled inarticulate waifs caught in the cross-tides racing to a maelstrom.

In the restaurant, the befrogged and red-coated band poured out patriotic music, and the intervals between the courses that so few waiters were left to serve were broken by the ever-recurring obligation to stand up for the Marseillaise, to stand up for God Save the King, to stand up for the Russian National Anthem, to stand up again for the Marseillaise. ‘Et dire que ce sont des Hongrois qui jouent tout cela!’⁠1 a humorist remarked from the pavement.

As the evening wore on and the crowd about our window thickened, the loiterers outside began to join in the war-songs. ‘Allons, debout!’⁠2 And the loyal round begins again. ‘La chanson du départ’ is a frequent demand; and the chorus of spectators chimes in roundly. A sort of quiet humour was the note of the street. Down the rue Royale, toward the Madeleine, the bands of other restaurants were attracting other throngs, and martial refrains were strung along the Boulevard like its garlands of arc-lights. It was a night of singing and acclamations, not boisterous, but gallant and determined. It was Paris badauderie⁠3 at its best.

Meanwhile, beyond the fringe of idlers the steady stream of conscripts still poured along. Wives and families trudged beside them, carrying all kinds of odd improvised bags and bundles. The impression disengaging itself from all this superficial confusion was that of a cheerful steadiness of spirit. The faces ceaselessly streaming by were serious but not sad; nor was there any air of bewilderment – the stare of driven cattle. All these lads and young men seemed to know what they were about and why they were about it. The youngest of them looked suddenly grown up and responsible; they understood their stake in the job, and accepted it.

The next day the army of midsummer travel was immobilised to let the other army move. No more wild rushes to the station, no more bribing of concierges, vain quests for invisible cabs, haggard hours of waiting in the queue at Cook’s. No train stirred except to carry soldiers, and the civilians who had not bribed and jammed their way into a cranny of the thronged carriages leaving the first night could only creep back through the hot streets to their hotel and wait. Back they went, disappointed yet half-relieved, to the resounding emptiness of porterless halls, waiterless restaurants, motionless lifts: to the queer disjointed life of fashionable hotels suddenly reduced to the intimacies and make-shift of a Latin Quarter pension. Meanwhile it was strange to watch the gradual paralysis of the city. As the motors, taxis, cabs and vans had vanished from the streets, so the lively little steamers had left the Seine. The canal-boats too were gone, or lay motionless: loading and unloading had ceased. Every great architectural opening framed an emptiness; all the endless avenues stretched away to desert distances. In the parks and gardens no one raked the paths or trimmed the borders. The fountains slept in their basins, the worried sparrows fluttered unfed, and vague dogs, shaken out of their daily habits, roamed unquietly, looking for familiar eyes. Paris, so intensely conscious yet so strangely entranced, seemed to have had curare injected into all her veins.