WORLD WAR I
"Mine is no more than a pin-point of sharp experience in the vast catastrophe. Voluntarily, for the sake of my profession I ran a risk -- slight it seemed -- and luck was against me."
In fact famous journalist Elizabeth Shepley Sergeant's injuries from an explosion were much more than a pin-point. As she lay in a French hospital at the end of the war, she reflected on the immediate world and the larger world around her. She brings you into that world with her fresh and keen observer's eye and with painful prose that fear and loss have engendered.
Those she knew and loved faced constant danger and spoke in ways that all soldiers understand:
"Both great lovers of life and of France. Both fully expecting to die some fine morning, "doing a definite thing for no very concrete reason," as the American put it. Both taking a simple and immense pride in their dead comrades, a pride devoid of heroics. In the war they are fighting there is no place for either oratory or vindictiveness. " I have never wasted ten minutes hating the Germans," says Rick. The British lieutenant hasn't either. But he has lost, as the American has not, all zest for war in itself. He envies his American cousins their faith and enthusiasm, goes back to the front with a rather wistful serenity. While the Californian is passionately longing to achieve his aviator's destiny."
Her work in France was for The New Republic magazine. After her recovery, she moved to New Mexico and wrote about that state and the Native Americans who lived there.
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