From Henry James: Collected Travel Writings: The Continent
In late 1914, as the war raged in Europe, Henry James spent much of his time providing support for relief efforts by raising money for Belgian refugees and by visiting the wounded soldiers flooding the hospitals in London. The death and destruction he witnessed in England away from the battlefields were shocking enough, he wrote, “but then I think of France and Russia and even Germany herself, and the vision simply overwhelms and breaks the heart.”
His friend Hugh Walpole, who was in Russia covering the war for the Daily Mail, sent him updates from the Eastern Front, and he returned the favor with news from England as well as personal experiences, such as this passage from a letter sent in November 1914:
I have been going to a great hospital [St. Bartholomew’s] at the request of a medical friend there, to help to give the solace of free talk to a lot of Belgian wounded & sick (so few people appear to be able to converse in the least intimately with them), & have thereby almost discovered my vocation in life to be the beguiling and drawing-out of the suffering soldier. The Belgians get worked off, convalesce, and are sent away etc.; but the British influx is steady, and I have lately been seeing more (always at Bart’s) of that prostrate warrior, with whom I seem to get even better into relation.
James’s easier companionship with wounded British soldiers over the Belgians was due, in no small part, to the fact that most of the soldiers knew neither French (which James spoke fluently) nor English. James volunteered at hospitals and refugee centers several times a week, but he did much more: He supported and publicized Edith Wharton’s relief efforts at the front in France, raised funds for refugees and recovering soldiers from American donors on both sides of the Atlantic, and in December became chairman of the American Volunteer Motor-Ambulance Corps, which was established only two months earlier by Richard Norton, a family friend.
For that effort, James issued an open letter to the American press, in which he described the work of the corps, solicited donations for its efforts, and encouraged young men, particularly American undergraduates or recent graduates, to volunteer. We have reprinted that letter, which James published as a pamphlet, at our Story of the Week website, where you can read it along with an introduction detailing James’s wartime volunteerism during the last two years of his life.
Read “The American Volunteer Motor-Ambulance Corps in France,” by Henry James
