The Front of What?

We are often inclined to think about “the front” as being a place of preference. The front of the line is good if one is seeking to get tickets to an event. Front seating is better than seating on the wings. Front is good for in-person voting rather than at the tail end of the line. Front of the class implies success academically. But a weather front means usually that foul conditions are on the way.

Just so, the front of battle in time of war is a very dangerous place to be. A brutal place it can be, and was during World War I. A place of muddy trenches and agonizing deaths. That frames the central thread that runs through Edith Wharton’s “A Son at the Front” (1922). Its time is World War I. Its place is mostly in Paris behind the front lines of trench warfare brought on by Germany’s attack on France and its northern neighbors. Paris is where parents and other relatives worry about sons and await letters from them, or, more ominously perhaps, about them.

The central characters are four. John Campton is father to George. The father has by this time earned the reverence of others as an artist, a portrait painter. He has an unexplained limp. He can be surly and not very respectful of societal manners and norms. Not very respectful about people. He cares deeply about George and that he not be at the front, that he be safely placed in a support position behind the lines.

John Campton is divorced from Julia Brant, George’s mother, who has remarried to a very different kind of man than John. Not another artist, not a man with a creative artist’s disposition, but a financier, a man of wealth, with all the resources and connections that that brings, a man of influence, including in respect to George’s circumstances. John Campton and Mr. Brant do not have an easy relationship with one another.

But that relationship and other relationships and attitudes evolve under the heavy weight of war and of George’s own wartime path. The evolving attitudes and how they are expressed, while “the front” always looms over all, is what gives this novel by Edith Wharton its expression in classic truths.

She makes it difficult to again think of bloody war in any detached way. She forces the reader to reflect on all the wars of men, perhaps no less brutal than that of World War I at “the front.” It is to make one wonder at the warrior’s blind reenactments generation to generation over thousands of years, right up to present time.

It is to cause one to take pause, to reflect on the issues among men, to reflect on the lust for power among men. The impact on families. The story of John Campton, his son George, Julia Brant, and Mr. Brant will bring tears to your eyes, figuratively if not literally. Tears came to their eyes.

More than that, Edith Wharton reminds of us of why it is so important to read books such as “A Son at the Front.” It is to try to understand consequences before having to actually know them personally.