Coming Home 1916

An American relief worker becomes the witness to H. Macy Greer's unsentimental war stories, and through them the front lines come alive in all their fear, rumor, and ruin. At the center is Jean de Réchamp, a wounded French cavalry officer whose private anguish over his family's fate becomes inseparable from the wider devastation of wartime France. Jean's story begins before the fighting, with his love for Mlle. Yvonne Malo, a spirited musician and artist whose independence unsettles his old provincial family. Their engagement exposes the suffocating force of convention, gossip, and class prejudice, yet Jean's wit and persistence eventually win his relatives over. When war comes, however, the family is cut off at their château near the fighting, and Jean is left to imagine the worst after reading a delayed notice that their estate has been "retaken" by the enemy. As he and the narrator travel through frozen, shattered villages toward Réchamp, the landscape itself becomes a record of occupation, atrocity, and endurance. In the end, the ruined world gives way to an astonishing reunion: the house has survived, the family is alive, and Yvonne has helped turn the estate into an ambulance station, nursing the wounded while preserving the household's dignity and grace. This edition has been fully restored with modern typesetting, custom cover design.