The Project Gutenberg EBook of Fighting France, by Edith Wharton

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Title: Fighting France
From Dunkerque to Belport

Author: Edith Wharton

Posting Date: August 8, 2009 [EBook #4550]
Release Date: October, 2003
First Posted: February 8, 2002

Language: English

Character set encoding: ASCII

*** START OF THIS PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK FIGHTING FRANCE ***

Produced by Charles Aldarondo. HTML version by Al Haines.

FIGHTING FRANCE

FROM DUNKERQUE TO BELPORT

BY EDITH WHARTON

NEW YORK: MCMXV

CONTENTS

THE LOOK OF PARIS
IN ARGONNE
IN LORRAINE AND THE VOSGES
IN THE NORTH
IN ALSACE
THE TONE OF FRANCE

THE LOOK OF PARIS

(AUGUST, 1914--FEBUARY, 1915)

I

AUGUST

On the 30th of 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 thunder-clouds, 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