A few weeks before the Great War started in August 1914, Mildred Aldrich, a US-born journalist, and resident of Paris since 1898, retired to a house in a village on the River Marne, directly in the path taken a few months later by the invading German army. Her house still stands near the Euro-Disney theme park close to Paris.

She provided hospitality, food and washing facilities to British and French troops trying to stop the Germans’ advance and and struck up abiding friendships with some of them. Most other villagers had left by the end of August, but she remained with the help of a local housekeeper.

The book, Mildred on the Marne: Mildred Aldrich, Front-Line Witness 1914-1918, is an eye-opener about the life of rural Frenchwomen in wartime, who, having lost their men, were forced to carry on alone in the fields. She describes the destruction of farms and homes after the failed invasion. Her meetings with women who had lost husbands, sons and brothers are particularly poignant.

The Oxford-born author. David Slattery-Christy, interweaves Aldrich's often harrowing experiences with official communications between political and military figures of Britain, France and Germany.

Mildred, who was 61 in 1914, was intelligent and literate, courageous and empathetic. In Paris, she had been a foreign correspondent for the Boston Herald under a male nom de plume, until her ruse was discovered. She had then made a living of sorts by translating French plays for the London and New York theatre.

From her hilltop hideaway, she kept up a copious correspondence with friends like Gertrude Stein and Alice B Toklas. Some valued her friendship so highly that they anonymously funded her retirement.

Incensed by the failure of the US to declare war on Germany after the sinking of the Lusitania in 1915, she published her letters in the US, aimed at influencing public opinion. These described the privations of French civilians and France’s and her own antipathy towards Germany. The US finally declared war in 1917. Other books followed after the war, and she donated her royalties to war victims.

In 1922, she was made a Chevalier of the Legion d’Honneur.

* David Slattery-Christy is a former resident of Old Botley. His play Forever Nineteen, about Mildred Aldrich, was performed at the Burton-Taylor Rooms, Oxford, as part of a 1993 tour.

Review by Grant Nightingale