My Lorraine journal — Reading Companion

Women in the War's 'Lining'

O'Shaughnessy devotes notable attention to the women she encounters, particularly those she calls 'the unchosen and unmated.' In one passage, she describes two Englishwomen emerging from a hospital—one nearing sixty with 'banked fires' in her eyes, the other in the grip of 'l'âge dangereux.' She reflects that the war has brought such women, for the first time, into sustained contact with men outside their families, making them 'part of the strange lining of the war, part of the vast patchwork.' Her language is precise: she sees them as 'pale, thin bits, sewn into something riotous, reckless, multicolored, heroic.' This is not a general tribute to women's war work but a specific, almost anthropological observation of a social transformation.

Objects and Their Histories

Throughout the journal, O'Shaughnessy pauses on material artifacts that carry layered meanings. In one scene, she examines fire-backs—iron plaques placed behind hearths—noting their origins: 'l'amour désarmé' from the eighteenth century, a Louis XVI piece depicting a housewife, and a Crimean War scene that could be 'any one of a hundred thousand scenes of to-day.' She traces their provenance to the King of Spain and Maria Theresa, remarking that their origins were 'as diverse as the history of Lorraine itself.' These objects anchor her observations in tangible history, contrasting the permanence of metal with the transience of war.

The Gardener and the White Dust

A particularly striking episode involves a soldier-gardener sent to tidy her garden. O'Shaughnessy notices 'such a passion of tenderness in the way he handled his rake' that she speaks with him. He is from Cette, a territorial assigned to the 'État-Civil des Champs de Bataille'—civilian workers on battlefields. For eighteen months, a man who 'all his life has planted flowers' has been 'digging up dead bodies, hunting in a literal “body of death” to find the plaques.' The contrast between his former life and his current duty is stark. Meanwhile, she notes the heat: 'Out there in the Champagne Pouilleuse men are marching in the white dust, resting in the white dust, giving up their lives in the white dust.' The repetition of 'white dust' becomes a refrain for the war's erasure.

O'Shaughnessy's journal resists easy categorization. It is neither a frontline report nor a home-front memoir, but a hybrid that moves between the Ducal Palace in Nancy and the gardens of Vitrimont. Readers should attend to her eye for detail—the fire-backs, the gardener's rake, the 'white dust'—as clues to her method. She writes as a diplomat's wife, an outsider with access, and her observations are filtered through a sensibility attuned to the 'eternal reasons in transient things.'

I often think of Edith O'Shaughnessy’s Lorraine journal, her careful hand noting the quiet courage of women amid the rubble. It shares a hushed kinship with With our army in Flanders — A Closer Reading, as both hold the same patient sorrow—war’s landscape remembered not in headlines, but in the steady, unbroken witness of those who remained.