Explore "Coming Home" by Edith Wharton on Textopian. Read with annotations and highlights.
ON my first dash to the Northern fighting line -- Greer told me the other night -- I carried supplies to an ambulance where the surgeon asked me to have a talk with an officer who was badly wounded and fretting for news of his people in the east of France.
He was a young Frenchman, a cavalry lieutenant, trim and slim, with a pleasant smile and obstinate blue eyes that I liked. He looked as if he could hold on tight when it was worth his while. He had had a leg smashed, poor devil, in the first fighting in Flanders, and had been dragging on for weeks in the squalid camp-hospital where I found him. He didn't waste any words on himself, but began at once about his family. They were living, when the war broke out, at their country-place in the Vosges; his father and mother, his sister, just eighteen, and his brother Alain, two years younger. His father, the Comte de Rechamp, had married late in life, and was over seventy: his mother, a good deal younger, was crippled with rheumatism; and there was, besides -- to round off the group -- a helpless but intensely alive and domineering old grandmother about whom all the others revolved.