On the 30th of July, 1914, motoring north from Poitiers, we had lunched somewhere by the roadside under apple-trees on the edge of a field. Other fields stretched away on our right and left to a border of woodland and a village steeple. All around was noonday quiet, and the sober disciplined landscape which the traveller's memory is apt to evoke as distinctively French. Sometimes, even to accustomed eyes, these ruled-off fields and compact grey villages seem merely flat and tame; at other moments the sensitive imagination sees in every thrifty sod and even furrow the ceaseless vigilant attachment of generations faithful to the soil. The particular bit of landscape before us spoke in all its lines of that attachment. The air seemed full of the long murmur of human effort, the rhythm of oft-repeated tasks, the serenity of the scene smiled away the war rumours which had hung on us since morning. . . .
Edith Wharton is mostly known as a novelist -- but she was also a woman alive at the beginning of the First World War, when everyone in America was looking with concern to the chaos happening in Europe. She went to France, and wrote of the opening of WWI as she saw it. She was one of many Americans telling the story. . . . But in the end, she and folks like her were responsible for getting us into the First World War.