Mary Roberts Rinehart

I was off to the war. I might be turned back at Folkstone. There was more than a chance that I might not get beyond Calais, which was under military law. But at least I had made a start.

This is a narrative of personal experience. It makes no pretensions, except to truth. It is pure reporting, a series of pictures, many of them disconnected, but all authentic. It will take a hundred years to paint this war on one canvas. A thousand observers, ten thousand, must record what they have seen. To the reports of trained men must be added a bit here and there from these untrained observers, who without military knowledge, ignorant of the real meaning of much that they saw, have been able to grasp only a part of the human significance of the great tragedy of Europe.

I was such an observer.

Kings, Queens and Pawns: An American Woman at the Front by Mary Roberts Rinehart

 

Rinehart was one of the first woman to cover trench warfare during WWI. The story of this portion of her life is available free at Project Gutenberg and LibriVox.