The Day of Glory
By . New York: Henry Holt & Co. 1919. 12mo, iv+259 pp, $1.00.
HERE is a book for those who wish to quicken their understanding of France. He who reads its few pages to their end will have come to the exquisite joy of November eleventh at Paris. He will have walked in Paris that day; have been swept in the current of its crowd; have marked the young French soldier, oblivious of the concourse, lay his humble flowers on the statue of Strasburg; have heard the singing; have seen, not heard, the fine band playing in the Tuileries Garden, its music drowned in the roar of rejoicing. Yet this book presents itself not at all as an ode of victory.
Nor is it, like so many books of this war, an expression of hasty opinions. The author, with restraint and skill, makes us believe that we have seen what she more directly has seen. There is the story of Jeanne, the wife, the mother, suffering in body and spirit for her family, for France, yet not succumbing. Her husband returns from the front on leave, then is gone once more. The story is as simple as that happening was common in France. Yet the story becomes in this book as individual as any instance of that recurring story, which in flesh and blood any one of us might have encountered.
Then there is the chronicle of the work during the war of a French woman-doctor, Dr. Nicole Girard Mangin. In these pages we see the beginning of the battle of Verdun as it appeared to a hospital immediately behind the lines. Possibly, if the reader had never read elsewhere of those days, he might accept from this report, as from any other single report, an impression incomplete and misleading. He might picture only the despair, the confusion. Let him remember that a hospital sees things the most dire.
Of the other four chapters, ’Some Confused Impressions’ and ‘The Day of Glory particularly help the reader to feel that he has been in France. The former tells of a day near ChâteauThierry, July 18, 1918, of what the author saw there, and, more particularly, of what she heard from American soldiers. The other departs from the custom of the earlier chapters, in that the emotions of the author are more intimately recorded. But the departure is only apparent: the emotions of an individual after the salvo from Les Invalides were not private: they were general to a nation. They were Paris. D. S.