Category: Historical Novels

Home Fires in France

This book is fiction written in France out of a life-long familiarity with the French and two years' intense experience in war work in France. It is a true setting-forth of personalities and experiences, French and American, under the influence of war. It tells what the war ha...

Chapters

4. Part 4

The man found his wife already there, bending over the sturdy, reddish, rounded sprouts pushing strongly through the loosened earth. She looked up at him with shining eyes. When...

3. Part 3

He walked heavily after this, lifting his feet with an effort. Several miles further, at the heap of debris which had been Falquieres, where his wife's family had lived, he made...

14. Part 14

In spite of this lack of appreciation of what was offered him, he was very frequently invited to the nightly feasts of his young confreres, and they hung about him eagerly becau...

8. Part 8

"But there were other, better things about those first months. For one thing, we had hope still. We hoped constantly for deliverance. Every morning I said to the girl who brough...

5. Part 5

He struck his hands together. "So few! When they last said they would allow some women and children to come to France, only a fifteenth part of those who asked for leave were al...

12. Part 12

Then, for half an hour, she was, by some extraordinary chance, left uninterrupted in her office, and dictated rapidly the answers to her morning mail. In order to accomplish as...

15. Part 15

I took my two Olympian guests for the usual idle, visiting-day couple. I went the rounds with them, pointing out with a weary satisfaction our various makeshifts. When I found t...

6. Part 6

Their restless upspringing life thrust my paralysis aside as an upspringing young tree cleaves the boulder which would hamper it. We pushed open the heavy leather door and stepp...

10. Part 10

But the wisdom of the simple was justified once more. There was a Y.W.C.A. in Paris, run by an energetic, well-informed American spinster. Ellen crawled into the rather hard bed...

19. Part 19

"Oh, everywhere, on the floor, up and down the hall, in the kitchen. But we haven't a thing except hot water to use for them; all the sheets were torn up two days ago, what they...

18. Part 18

Twenty minutes from that time they heard heavy, rapid footsteps enter the shop below and storm up the stairs. There was a loud knocking, and the sound of men's voices in a stran...

11. Part 11

Four months from the time she landed in Paris her money was almost gone and she was quitting the city with barely enough in her pocket to take her back to Marshallton. As simply...

17. Part 17

Jules Brismantier's father had been the principal pharmacist there all his life, and Jules stepped comfortably into his father's shoes, his business, and the lodgings over the p...

7. Part 7

The American's eyes came back from their inspection of all this and rested with a new expression on his rather snuffy, rather stout and undistinguished host. "Will you please te...

1. Part 1

This book is fiction written in France out of a life-long familiarity with the French and two years' intense experience in war work in France. It is a true setting-forth of pers...

2. Part 2

And, yes, the clothes are clean! I know it runs counter to all our fixed ideas and what we are taught in domestic-science classes. I don't pretend to explain it but the fact rem...

9. Part 9

Between 1620 and 1630 Giles Boardman, an honest, sober, well-to-do English master-builder found himself hindered in the exercise of his religion. He prayed a great deal and groa...

13. Part 13

Next after their always being there, he hated their efforts to cheer him up. That had been the phrase of the doctor at the hospital, when they went there to take him away: "Now...

16. Part 16

When I perceived the Halls corraled by this well-known personage, I shamelessly moved closer so that I could overhear what was being said. This was little enough on the part of...

20. Part 20

"Margaret Widdemer, who says she likes happy stories, proves it by writing them for other people to read.... The book is full of charm, amusing incident, and gay conversation; a...