Fighting France

Determined to support her adopted country and its people during WWI, Edith Wharton worked with the French Red Cross to deliver supplies to the French front lines of battle. The horrors she saw there compelled her to record and report her observations. Not only did she wish to apprise US citizens of wartime events, but she wished to garner support for France as well as draw attention to the conditions of the soldiers. With her novelist’s sense of style and in great detail, Wharton relates the terror and toll of trench warfare, the desolation of the damaged and deserted countryside and Red Crosses in occupied Paris. She describes the “scream of the battery” in the trenches and the "battered, shattered, frostbitten, deafened and half-paralysed" soldiers she visits in military hospitals. Such experiences inspired Wharton’s involvement in charities that tried to address the conditions on which she reports in Fighting France: From Dunkerque to Belfort.