Book Description

Mademoiselle Henriette Cuvru-Magot, who, since the early months of the war, has been nursing the wounded at the Auxiliary Hospital of l'Union des Femmes de France, at Quincy, near Meaux, lives in the picturesque village of Voisins, a dependency of that commune. Daughter of a superior officer who played an active and brilliant part in the war of 1870, granddaughter of a Garde-du-Corps of Louis XVI, she heard from childhood in her home many tales of valiant deeds performed by the French Army. And now, in her turn, wishing to complete the story of the glorious past, witnessed by her father and grandfather, by the story of the heroic present, at which she herself is an onlooker, she is about to tell us what she saw from her modest cottage at the very beginning of the Great War, and trace to us a poignant picture of the events which took place under her eyes. Mademoiselle Cuvru-Magot began her journal August 2, 1914, thinking, of course, that she would never know the war itself except through the accounts given by our soldiers when at last they should return. Five weeks later she was in the midst of a battle, and that, of all others, the Battle of the Marne. The real merit of these notes—all too few, alas! since they leave off on the morrow of the Victory of the Marne—is not to be sought in the military incidents recorded by Mademoiselle Cuvru-Magot, though even these have their importance, but rather in the noble sentiments she expresses, which stand out above everything else, especially during the heart-rending hours of the invasion. In her village, cut off from the rest of the world, she finds herself almost alone with those who are most dear to her—too weak to protect them, powerless on the other hand to sacrifice herself, to give all her strength, all her sympathy to the soldiers wounded in the battle that is being waged there, a few steps from her door. Mademoiselle Cuvru-Magot was kind enough to let me see her manuscript, and at my earnest request has consented to publish it. It is with interest and emotion that we read these pages marked by ardent faith and by an unfaltering trust in the eternal destiny of our country. And they are pages written by a Frenchwoman who remembers with just pride that she is the daughter and granddaughter of soldiers.