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Coming Home

Edith Wharton

70 ratings
Coming Home | Edith Wharton

Coming Home

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I don't believe he was talkative before the war, but his long weeks in hospital, starving for news, had unstrung him. And then he was mad with excitement at getting back to his own place. In the interval he'd heard how other people caught in their country-houses had fared—you know the stories we all refused to believe at first, and that we now prefer not to think about.... Well, he'd been thinking about those stories pretty steadily for some months; and he kept repeating: "My people say they're all right—but they give no details."

"You see," he explained, "there never were such helpless beings. Even if there had been time to leave, they couldn't have done it. My mother had been having one of her worst attacks of rheumatism—she was in bed, helpless, when I left. And my grandmother, who is a demon of activity in the house, won't stir out of it. We haven't been able to coax her into the garden for years. She says it's draughty; and you know how we all feel about draughts! As for my father, he hasn't had to decide anything since the Comte de Chambord refused to adopt the tricolour. My father decided that he was right, and since then there has been nothing particular for him to take a stand about. But I know how he behaved just as well as if I'd been there—he kept saying: 'One must act—one must act!' and sitting in his chair and doing nothing. Oh, I'm not disrespectful: they were like that in his generation! Besides—it's better to laugh at things, isn't it?" And suddenly his face would darken....

On the whole, however, his spirits were good till we began to traverse the line of ruined towns between Sainte Menehould and Bar-le-Duc. "This is the way the devils came," he kept saying to me; and I saw he was hard at work picturing the work they must have done in his own neighbourhood.

"But since your sister writes that your people are safe!"

"They may have made

Aaron 12/13/2018
A short story about WWI by the author of Ethan Frome; an unnecessarily morbid love story I remember from English class senior year of high school. Not sure what the moral of the story was supposed to be.
Catarina 05/13/2017
3.5, really. Damn you, rating system!
Jenny 02/26/2017
A different track for Wharton. She can write about war with as much skill as she shows writing about high society. This one was not so much a satire as a showing of the horror of war.
It was also interesting to see the different reactions of the two men when they found out who it was who occupied the
Jan C 02/24/2014
Very moving at times. Originally published in a magazine. One of a series of books republished because they were deemed too important to lose.

The story is about what happened to the village and villa of Rechamp. A nasty commander who destroyed the properties of many, apparently just because he could

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