Tuesday, April 16, 2013

The home front in France in the Great War

Home Fires in France, Dorothy Canfield Fisher

Katrina's review of this over on Pining for the West caught my eye the other day.  I've been looking around for more of Dorothy Canfield Fisher's work, after falling in love with The Home-Maker and Understood Betsy last year.  A book of stories about France in the Great War sounded very intriguing.  From reading about Fisher, I knew that she and her husband spent three years doing relief work in France, so I expected that her stories, while fictional, would be based on her own experiences.  Ever since reading Vera Brittain's Testament of Youth a few years ago (before I started blogging), I've wanted to learn more about the First World War.  It was a bit of shock to realize from that book just how little I do know.  I can't remember studying it in any great detail, even as a history major in college.  Only a random assortment of names and dates comes to mind - August 1914, Archduke Franz Ferdinand, the invasion of Belgium, Ypres and the Somme.  Thinking this might fill in some of the blanks, I requested a copy through interlibrary loan and was pleasantly surprised at how quickly it arrived.

Home Fires in France was published in America in 1918, presumably while the war was still going on.  According to the "Publisher's Note," Fisher wrote him that "What I write is about such very well-known conditions to us that it is hard to remember it may be fresh to you, but it is so far short of the actual conditions that it seems pretty pale, after all."  Her stories certainly aren't subtle.  They are clearly and strongly pro-French (one wouldn't know from them that the British are actually in the war). 

There are eleven stories in this book, and they are an interesting mix.  As the title suggests, they are not about the armies in the trenches but the home front.  They focus on both French soldiers and their families, and on Americans in France, many working for relief organizations.  Several of the stories are in the first person, with presumably Fisher herself narrating, others in the third person.  Some are set in Paris, flooded with refugees and invalided soldiers, others in the country-side, while two are harrowing accounts of events in northern France under German occupation. Fisher shows that while America was officially a neutral power, France was full of Americans like herself, collecting supplies and money from the U.S., organizing ambulances for the wounded, rehabilitation for the maimed and blind, food and clothing for the refugees.  Some of the Americans in her stories are there just to get their pictures in the paper, or to play at nursing handsome young men (as were some of the French involved in relief work as well). Others with a sincere desire to help are unprepared for the scope of the work and simply overwhelmed.  Several of the stories feature demobilized soldiers, maimed and blind, who must be provided for.  The narrator of one, "A Honeymoon . . . Vive l'Amérique," runs a Braille printing press producing books for veterans, which was one of Fisher's own projects.

The most affecting story, to me, was the one called "A Little Kansas Leaven," about a young woman named Ellen Boardman, twenty-seven, unmarried, an office manager, "plain, rather sallow, very serious."  Reading about the invasion of Belgium startles her into an awareness of world events, outside of her small Kansas town.  From the start, she cannot understand why America is standing by, unwilling to help France and Belgium (Britain apparently is on its own).  She ask questions of the fellow residents of her boarding house, and of her co-workers, many of whom see her as something of a crank, yet they find themselves reading the war news with more attention.  Eventually Ellen decides that she has to do something.  She takes leave from her job, over her boss's objections, takes out her life savings, and sails to France, to do what she can.  In Paris, she finds her way to a refugee bureau run by prominent Americans who desperately need her practical skills.  She spends four months there, organizing their work and their office.  In the evenings she goes to the Gare de l'Est, where soldiers returning to the front catch their trains.  There she timidly passes out chocolate and writing paper to those she finds alone, without family seeing them off.  When her savings run out, she sails back to America and her hometown, where she finds a hero's welcome.  I have to admit, this story brought tears to my eyes, a rare occurrence in reading.

I enjoyed these stories, though they weren't always comfortable reading.  However fictionalized, they opened up a new world to me, and they sparked my interest again in learning about the war itself.  I had no idea, for example, just what parts of France were occupied in the Great War.  Unlike Fisher and her readers in 1918, though, as I read I couldn't help thinking of the future, of what would happen in France just twenty years later.  It was especially poignant, reading the constant mention of fathers, husbands, sons lost, to know that her own son would die in the next war, in the Pacific.

12 comments:

  1. This combines two of my favourite things (I'd say "three" but perhaps having "war" as a favourite thing doesn't sound so good?!), France and Canfield Fisher, so this is going straight onto my wishlist. I don't know that I've read very much about WW1 from a US perspective, either.

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  2. This sounds fascinating. Most of the books I've read about the First World War have been from a British perspective - I don't think I've ever read anything from the French or American viewpoint. I'll add this to my list along with The Home-Maker, which I still haven't read yet!

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  3. I bought this knowing nothing about it, but having faith in the author. Lovely to know my faith was justified, and to be able to look forward to a perspective on France and WW1 that I haven't come across before.

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  4. vicki, maybe we could say that war is one of our great interests - that sounds better! I've read some fiction about America in that period, in old childhood favorites like Maud Hart Lovelace's Betsy & Joe, and Sydney Taylor's All of a Kind Family Uptown - and some newer discoveries, like Laurie King's Folly and Elizabeth von Arnim's Christopher & Columbus.

    Helen, I've read a little about the French homefront in World War II, but nothing about this war, which made it so interesting! and I think you'll love The Home-Maker.

    Jane, I was lucky enough to find a copy on-line. I'd have bought it just for Ellen Boardman's story, let alone the others.

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  5. As much as I love the British perspective on their experience of life on the home front it would be nice to read about things from another viewpoint. I have a copy of The Home-maker on my shelf and can't believe I haven't read it it yet. I must get to it soon and then to this volume, too!

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  6. Anbolyn, this book is so interesting and thought-provoking - from a very different viewpoint. And you have suhc a treat ahead of you with The Home-Maker!

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  7. Thanks for the mention, I'm glad you enjoyed it, if that's the right word to use. I did know a lot about the Great War but nothing from the French Home Front so it was an eye-opener. This is the only book by Canfield which I have read, I have some catching up to do!

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  8. I don't know much about WW1 in spite of having read several books set in that time period. Clearly I need to fix that! I also really want to find The Home-Maker -- I loved Understood Betsy and Hillsboro People (a short story collection).

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  9. I have never read anything about WWI from the French perspective, either. This goes on my wish list!

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  10. Katrina, thanks for the introduction to this book, I probably wouldn't have found it on my own!

    elizabeth, I'm adding Hillsboro People to my own list! I wish her books were easier to find. I'm going to resign myself to interlibrary loan.

    Debbie, thanks for stopping by (your blog is beautiful!). It's definitely a unique perspective - both American and French.

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  11. I too have not read a lot about WWI and find I have developed a strong interest in it. My grandfather (USA) was in WWI and stationed in France.Unfortunately he never spoke about it. However he did make a recording on cassette with my dad years ago as my dad interviewed him. Sadly my dad's 2nd wife threw the tape away once my dad died b/c my grandfather was my mother's father and she wouldn't have anything in the house to do with her. Will put these books on my list. Interesting review. Families!! huff

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  12. Huff, indeed! Pam, my heart dropped when I read that - as an archivist and a granddaughter.

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Thank you for taking the time to read, and to comment. I always enjoy hearing different points of view about the books I am reading, even if we disagree!