Writers from North America who travelled to Europe to gather material for newspaper articles, magazine articles, and books about the European War were always on a journey of understanding.
When The Saturday Evening Post sent Canadian and United States novelist Maude Radford Warren (1875–1934) to Europe in 1916, the articles that she wrote for the Post in 1917 later formed the content of the 1918 book The White Flame of France. The book takes the reader from Warren's trans-Atlantic voyage to the trenches of northeastern France.
Warren used her descriptive skills as a novelist to convey the waves of revelation that met her expectations and background knowledge. She spent some time in England, absorbing the war-time culture. Then she was off to to France, where she gradually made her way from the worlds of civilians and refugees to the war zone.
Like many other eyewitness accounts of war-time France, The White Flame of France has a reverential tone towards the French people. Warren describes the hardships and sacrifices made in many sectors of society. Her descriptions of refugees, including children, are particularly poignant. She also understood the large significance of the Battle of Verdun in French culture and history.
The book ends with what at first looks like a light-hearted view of life during wartime, but that impression soon changes. This last chapter, "Barnstorming for the Poilus," concerns a group of entertainers who travelled among the military camps, trying to distract soldiers from their tragic burden. In the process, the entertainers made human connections with "poilus" that Warren sensitively records in The White Flame of France.
Warren was one of many writers featured in the 2020 book An Unladylike Profession: American Women War Correspondents in World War I, by Chris Dubbs.
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