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    Coming Home
    Coming Home
    Coming Home
    Ebook45 pages45 minutes

    Coming Home

    By Edith Wharton

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    About this ebook

    Edith Wharton's Coming Home is a short story of seven chapters that centers around the life of a French man named Jean de Réchamp during the war. The story is narrated in the first-personal pronoun and bases itself on reports about the atrocities committed by the German army.
    LanguageEnglish
    Publisheranamsaleem
    Release dateNov 28, 2018
    ISBN9788829572113
    Coming Home
    Author

    Edith Wharton

    Edith Wharton was born in 1862 to a prominent and wealthy New York family. In 1885 she married Boston socialite 'Teddy' Wharton but the marriage was unhappy and they divorced in 1913. The couple travelled frequently to Europe and settled in France, where Wharton stayed until her death in 1937. Her first major novel was The House of Mirth (1905); many short stories, travel books, memoirs and novels followed, including Ethan Frome (1911) and The Reef (1912). She was the first woman to win the Pulitzer Prize for Literature with The Age of Innocence (1920) and she was thrice nominated for the Nobel Prize in Literature. She was also decorated for her humanitarian work during the First World War.

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      Book preview

      Coming Home - Edith Wharton

      Coming Home

      Edith Wharton

      .

      I

      The young men of our American Relief Corps are beginning to come back from the front with stories.

      There was no time to pick them up during the first months--the whole business was too wild and grim. The horror has not decreased, but nerves and sight are beginning to be disciplined to it. In the earlier days, moreover, such fragments of experience as one got were torn from their setting like bits of flesh scattered by shrapnel. Now things that seemed disjointed are beginning to link themselves together, and the broken bones of history are rising from the battle-fields.

      I can't say that, in this respect, all the members of the Relief Corps have made the most of their opportunity. Some are unobservant, or perhaps simply inarticulate; others, when going beyond the bald statistics of their job, tend to drop into sentiment and cinema scenes; and none but H. Macy Greer has the gift of making the thing told seem as true as if one had seen it. So it is on H. Macy Greer that I depend, and when his motor dashes him back to Paris for supplies I never fail to hunt him down and coax him to my rooms for dinner and a long cigar.

      Greer is a small hard-muscled youth, with pleasant manners, a sallow face, straight hemp-coloured hair and grey eyes of unexpected inwardness. He has a voice like thick soup, and speaks with the slovenly drawl of the new generation of Americans, dragging his words along like reluctant dogs on a string, and depriving his narrative of every shade of expression that intelligent intonation gives. But his eyes see so much that they make one see even what his foggy voice obscures.

      Some of his tales are dark and dreadful, some are unutterably sad, and some end in a huge laugh of irony. I am not sure how I ought to classify the one I have written down here.

      II

      ON my first dash to the Northern fighting line--Greer told me the other night--I carried supplies to an ambulance where the surgeon asked me to have a talk with an officer who was badly wounded and fretting for news of his people in the east of France.

      He was a young Frenchman, a cavalry lieutenant, trim and slim, with a pleasant smile and obstinate blue eyes that I liked. He looked as if he could hold on tight when it was worth his while. He had had a leg smashed, poor devil, in the first fighting in Flanders, and had been dragging on for weeks in the squalid camp-hospital where I found him. He didn't waste any words on himself, but began at once about his family. They were living, when the war broke out, at their country-place in the Vosges; his father and mother, his sister, just eighteen, and his brother Alain, two years younger. His father, the Comte de Réchamp, had married late in life, and was over seventy: his mother, a good deal younger, was crippled with rheumatism; and there was, besides--to round off the group--a helpless but intensely alive and domineering old grandmother about whom all the others revolved. You know how French families hang together, and throw out branches that make new roots but keep hold of the central trunk, like that tree--what's it called?--that they give pictures of in books about the East.

      Jean de Réchamp--that was my lieutenant's name--told me his family was a typical case. "We're very province, he said. My people live at Réchamp all the year. We have a house at Nancy--rather a fine old hôtel--but my parents go there only once in two or three years, for

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