Although Edith Wharton may be best known for her novels analyzing New York's upper crust, the author lived in France from 1907 until her death in 1937. There, she witnessed the ravages of World War I, especially the hardships endured by refugees. She helped by establishing The Children of Flanders Relief Committee and The American Hostels for Refugees. To raise money for her charities, she edited this work of poems, essays, and pictures.

Contributors include some of the brightest names of the time -- Joseph Conrad, Jean Cocteau, Paul Claudel, Thomas Hardy, Henry James, Maurice Maeterlinck, George Santayana, Igor Stravinsky, and W.B. Yeats. Theodore Roosevelt provided the introduction, in which he wrote: "We owe to Mrs. Wharton all the assistance we can give. We owe this assistance to the good name of America, and above all for the cause of humanity we owe it to the children, the women and the old men who have suffered such dreadful wrong for absolutely no fault of theirs."