Margaret Higonnet, Editor
In August 1918, a Massachusetts-born woman named Margaret Hall boarded a transport ship in New York City that would take her across the Atlantic to work with the American Red Cross in France, just then gripped in devastating and seemingly interminable conflict with Germany. The year she spent near the Western Front was eye opening; careful not to let her experience slip away like a strange dream, she captured it in rich detail in a series of letters, journals, and photographs that she would weave into a powerful narrative when she returned stateside. That narrative, a manuscript in the collections of the Massachusetts Historical Society, is now published for the first time. Modern readers will be transported by this first-person account of a woman’s life in the Great War. In the confident voice of an educated woman, conscious that she is doing significant work at a world historical moment, but also in the personal tone of someone trying to describe a world of loss and trauma to her family and friends, Hall’s memoir captures in real time how the war is changing France—and her.
