Fighting France, from Dunkerque to Belfort

The novelist got a pass to the front, and she used it. Edith Wharton drove the length of the French line in 1915, from Dunkerque to Belfort, and wrote down what she saw with a novelist's precision: the emptied villages, the shelled cathedrals, the trenches near enough to look into, and a country holding itself together by will. War reporting of an unusually high order.