The peak of the load; the waiting months on the hilltop from the entrance of the Stars and stripes to the second victory on the Marne. By: Mildred Aldrich

by Mildred Aldrich

Mildred Aldrich (November 16, 1853 – February 19, 1928) was an American journalist and writer. She was born in 1853 in Providence, Rhode Island. She grew up in Boston, taught at elementary school there and went on into journalism. She wrote for the Boston Home Journal, the Boston Journal and the Boston Herald. She started the short-lived The Mahogany Tree in 1892 In 1898, she moved to France, and, while there, became a friend of Gertrude Stein and Alice B. Toklas.She worked as a foreign correspondent and translator. Aldrich moved to Huiry, near Paris, in 1914, only months before the outbreak of the First World War.[2] Her house there overlooked the Marne river valley, and her experiences during the First Battle of the Marne, as detailed in her letters to friends in the U.S., constitute her first book, A Hilltop on the Marne (1915). Following the success of that work, Aldrich produced three more collections of her wartime letters. On the Edge of the War Zone (1917) contains letters dating from the aftermath of the Marne battle until the entry of the U.S. into the war, The Peak of the Load (1918) details most of the final year of the war, and When Johnny Comes Marching Home (1919) describes her experiences in the months immediately following the war's end. Aldrich also produced one novel, Told in a French Garden, August 1914 (1916), and in 1926 completed an autobiography entitled Confessions of a Breadwinner, which resides in the collections of the Schlesinger Library at Harvard University, but has never been published (although digital images of the typed manuscripts are displayed on the Harvard University

206 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 1918

Reviews

[Michael · Rating 5 out of 5]

This set of letters follows on from the author's previous set (June 1914 - April 1917) in her book "A Hilltop on the Marne". "The Peak of the Load" covers the period April 1917 through to the beginning of the retreat of the German forces in the summer of 1918, from near her adopted French home town of Huiry, about 40 kilometres east of Paris. Once again I marvelled at her writing skills, her descriptions, and also the pluckiness of her attitude in the face of the German assault. She still managed to get to Paris on occasion and this despite all the troop and supply movements of Allied forces moving up to the front. I was surprised to learn that the Germans were firing a huge cannon called Grosse Bertha at Paris from a very long distance and the shells arrived throughout this period causing some damage in the city. The Parisians basically ignored the onslaught, but were more concerned about the aerial bombing that was also occurring. Mildred continued to visit Paris despite the shelling and bombing. Her home in Huiry had shells fired near her and at one stage the small settlement come very close to accepting the fact that they would have to evacuate. A very brave and able woman who I am sure would have been a pleasure to meet.

The e-book (free) can be found here

https://archive.org/details/peakofloa...

and is available to download in a range of e-Reader formats. Note: because the book was published many years ago, the optical readers used to digitize the publication have sometimes screwed up some words and numbers which can be entertaining or frustrating and as an example the date 1918 at the beginning of one of her letters sometimes comes out as igi8