"A Son at the Front," by Edith Wharton - A Review

 Walking into our library to finish and send out this essay, I noticed on our Aura (a welcome gift from our youngest son) a photo of my wife when we were first married, and I thought of how much the world had changed. Then I paused: How much of that change is real, and how much is because I now view the world through eyes grown old?

 

 

Sydney M. Williams

 

Burrowing into Books

“A Son at the Front,” Edith Wharton

June 24, 2023

 

“Through all this alternating of tragedy and triumph ran the million

and million individual threads of hope, fear, fortitude, resolve,

with which the fortune of war was obscurely but fatally interwoven.”

                                                                                                                                A Son at the Front, 1923

                                                                                                                                Edith Wharton (1855-1897)

 

Ethan Frome may be Edith Wharton’s most famous novel, but she is best known for chronicling New York’s “Gilded Age,” with its wealth, political corruption, and corporate greed, through such novels as The Age of Innocence (winner of the 1921 Pulitzer) and House of Mirth. 

 

A Son at the Front was a departure. It tells of a young American, George Campton, who was born in France. Following a bout with Tuberculosis, he has just graduated from Harvard when the story opens in July 1914. His parents, divorced, live in Paris. His father (John) is an artist – a recent success – and his mother (Julia) is now married to a prominent American banker based in Paris, Anderson Brant.

 

The novel is suggestive of the period. The last major European war (the Franco-Prussian War) had ended in 1871. Industrialization and trade had made Europe wealthy. Wealth had brought culture and civility. The new Century appeared promising. Despite Germany’s re-arming, complex alliances, and the assassination of Austria’s Archduke Ferdinand, the prospect of war seemed incredulous to the leisure classes in Paris. When war came on August 3^rd, everybody “agreed that the war would be over in a few weeks.” No one foresaw the trench warfare that followed, nor could any have foreseen the cost to France: 1.4 million dead and 4.2 million wounded, out of a pre-war population of under 40 million. Realization of its horror sunk in gradually: “This war could no longer be compared to other wars: Germany was conducting it on methods that civilization had made men forget.”

 

It is with this background that we follow the young George Campton who saw himself and his generation as “internationalists.” “People are too healthy and well-fed now; they’re not going off to die in a ditch somewhere.” But when Germany invaded Belgium his tone changed: “The howling blackguards! The brigands! This isn’t war – it’s simply murder!” We watch George – the “son at the front” – through a telescope, but the microscope is trained on those at home, especially his father, an introvert who lacked social skills: “His misfortune had been that he could neither get on easily with people nor live without them…” With George’s induction, the war consumed his family: “What was war – any war – but an old European disease, an ancestral blood-madness seizing on the first pretext to slake its frenzy?” It is George’s experiences, shared vicariously by his parents, stepfather and others, that keeps the reader’s attention. 

 

The story’s outcome is not a surprise; what makes this book special is Wharton’s evocation of a place and time she knew well. As in all her books, she wrote of what she knew. Childless, she had divorced her husband of thirty years and moved to Paris in 1913, a place where she had spent part of her childhood. When war broke out, she stayed, helped refugees and visited the front as a journalist. Keep in mind, A Son at the Front was published less than five years after the Armistice – a story for anyone interested in the horrific consequences of war – particularly, a world war that set the table for the next thirty years.