The Cultural And Intellectual Rebuilding Of France After The Second World War Book

This is an interesting bit of war propaganda and valentine to the French nation. Wharton was living in Paris when war broke out in 1914 and she describes its effects on the civilian population, their shopping habits, cafe life, the availability of taxis and such. She then takes a driving tour of some of the decimated, burned, bombed out villages and cities of the Western Front - Nancy, Rheims, the Argonne, Lorraine, the North coast, Alsace. On several occasions in her memoir she actually goes to the front, visits the trenches, and sees war (usually with field glasses). What she sees are flares, puffs of smoke, bombers flying overhead, the sound of a German sniper firing occasionally from a tree. There's not all that much horror of war here.

I have no doubt that Wharton was being truthful here to her own vision and experience of the war, but it's a very romanticized vision.

It is not too much to say 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. Almost all the faces about these crowded tables - young or old, plain or handsome, distinguished or average - have the same look of quiet authority...

In Lorraine she descends into a trench with her military guides and peeps out onto "a strip of intensely green meadow" where "all about us was silence, and the peace of the forest. Again, for a minute, I had the sense of an all-pervading, invisible power of evil, a saturation of the whole landscape with some hidden vitriol of hate. Then the reaction of unbelief set in, and I felt myself in a harmless ordinary glen, like a million others on an untroubled earth." "It is one of the most detestable things about war," she writes blithely, "that everything connected with it, except the death and ruin that result, is such a heightening of life, so visually stimulating and absorbing." She finishes the memoir with a hagiographic chapter titled "The Tone of France" in which the French have become not only the most intelligent people in the world, but also the most sublime.