There's an interesting literary footnote on Radio France Internationale. It's about how the American novelist Edith Wharton helped the French during WWI.
From the piece...
In 1914, though, she opened up several apartments in the area, transforming them into workshops for women.
“When war broke out an immense number of benevolent women in Paris felt a violent but vague impulse to ‘help’,” Wharton wrote in the New York Times. “This impulse found its chief expression in the traditional pursuits of making lint, hemming towels and crocheting baby jackets.
"Such activities are harmless and even commendable in days of peace, but in war time any unpaid industry encroaches on the rights of the unemployed, and this fact was so promptly understood in France that I can claim only by a few weeks’ priority the honor of having founded the first paying workroom in Paris.”
Soon her workshop in the rue de l’Université was overflowing and she was obliged to open up others around the arrondissement.
When refugees began pouring into Paris in September 1914 – “they all came at once in a terrible tidal wave” – Wharton took up their cause.
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