I have a hard time liking a book when I don't like the protagonist or the author's voice. I read a lot about France, and I am also an expat living in my older age in an adopted country (although not in the middle of a war) so there was a lot I could potentially identify with in this book. But for the most part, there was little that resonated. For all that she loves the soldiers, she seems a snob to me. She dwells far more on the nobility of dying for a great idea than she does on the horror that was going on nearby in the battle of the Marne and then the Somme. Although it's true that she could hear it but not see it, she could hear the cannons day after day and had different units billeted at her house so she had some idea. The battles, and everything she talks about, much of it interesting, is done with a detachment, that for me, made the book much less engaging than it could have been.

When, (I believe it was) the Battle of the Marne was over and people were allowed to leave their villages, Aldrich went to see the remains of what had happened. Near the tiny hamlet of Barcy she found "first the graves were scattered, for the boys lie buried just where they fell -- cradled in the bosom of the mother country that nourished them and for whose safety they laid down their lives. As we advanced they became more numerous, until we reached a point where, as far as we could see, in every direction, floated the little tricolore flags, like fine flowers in the landscape. They made tiny spots against the far-off horizon line, and groups like beds of flowers in the foreground, and we knew that, behind the skyline, there were more."

It would have been better if she had stopped there. It was a moving description. But she went on, "It was a disturbing and a thrilling sight. I give you my word, as I stood there, I envied them. It seemed to me a fine thing to lie out there in the open, in the soil of the fields their simple death has made holy" ... Well, I don't think it's thrilling or holy. I think it's immensely, unspeakably sad. Those boys, many of them weren't even 20 years old. She goes on, "You may know a finer way to go. I do not. Surely, since Death is, it is better than dying of old age between clean sheets." I'll bet most of those men and boys, even though they had volunteered to fight, and did fight heart and soul for their country, would have loved to have seen their old age rather than die at the age of 18 or 20 in the mud. Aldrich managed to die at the age of 75 between clean sheets.

She talks about the boys (soldiers) playing football on the field below her house and suggests they have no idea how to play the game. It does seem that, in spite of having lived in France for over 40 years, she had no idea that in France football is soccer, not American football, and that is why they all run after the ball when it is kicked. "If they only knew the game -- active, and agile, and light as they are -- they would enjoy it, and play it well."

If only Aldrich was less concerned with pretty words (lots of pretty words, perhaps too many pretty words for my taste) and less of a snob, I would have liked her book more than I did. ( )

What happens when an American expatriate leaves Paris in 1914 for a quiet life in the French countryside only to discover a couple of months later that a war has begun and that her new home is in the path German invasion? A Hilltop on the Marne is a very interesting account of the last days of peace and the earliest days of the war from an American woman in France. The book is in the form of a series of letters she sent to the United States and tells of her interactions with violence, terror, British soldiers, French neighbors, etc. ( )