Coming Home 1916

In the early months of the Great War, a small American relief corps stitches together fragments of the battlefield, trying to make sense of scattered horrors. The narrator, a quiet observer, relies on the unpolished yet sharply perceptive storyteller H. Macy Greer, whose plain‑spoken voice carries the raw truth of soldiers’ experiences. Through dinner conversations and long cigars, the reader is introduced to a mosaic of lives—young officers, wounded cavalrymen, and the families left behind—painted with a mixture of dread, melancholy and a wry, almost cinematic irony.

One vivid account centers on a French cavalry lieutenant whose shattered leg confines him to a straw pallet while the war rages beyond his tent. As he recounts the fate of his aristocratic family’s estate, the narrative reveals the disorienting distance between home and front, the absurdity of “retaken” towns, and the lingering hope that even a modest tally of daily supplies can offer a strange comfort. The story captures the delicate balance between personal loss and the collective endurance that defines the early days of the conflict.