Outbreak of World War I

The outbreak of World War I began in the book as distant news with an unexpectedly local measure of significance: German troops crossed into Belgium, and the fighting soon advanced into France, while Harry S. Truman’s letters remained focused on his immediate life. The contrast between the war’s expanding scale and his silence about it frames the event not only as a military crisis, but as something his correspondence largely kept at the edge of view.

The Advance into Belgium and France

In the first week of August, sixty thousand German troops crossed into Belgium at Liège. By September, German armies had swept through Belgium and reached the Marne River in France, where French forces were making a stand. The sequence—from the crossing at Liège to the fighting at the Marne—establishes the outbreak as a rapidly widening European conflict, its progress reported through the newspapers.

The war also disrupted the assumptions of people far from the front. The account describes the siege guns before Liège as a menace even to quiet wheat-growing people—not to their safety or their goods, but to their settled way of thinking. The guns signaled the arrival of a force that could overturn familiar expectations, a disturbance that would recur throughout the war in the form of unforeseeable disaster.

A War Absent from Truman’s Letters

The advance should, the narrative observes, have held particular interest for Truman. He had a strong sense of history, was fascinated by military heroes, and had previously served in the National Guard. Yet his letters to Bess Wallace said nothing about the war. Even after his worries and grief over his father had passed, he did not turn in his correspondence to events in the wider world.

The only stated exception to this inward focus was the 1912 presidential contest, which elected Woodrow Wilson, the first Democrat to win the presidency since Grover Cleveland. Truman regarded Wilson as a great man. The contrast is telling: national politics could draw his attention, but the reports from Belgium and France left no clear trace in what he wrote to Bess.

The Conflict Enters as a Dream

Two years after the outbreak, Truman gave Bess one indirect sign that the war had entered his imagination. He told her of a dream in which he fell from a plane over France and ended up in a hospital, crying because he could not see her. The dream joins the distant war’s geography to his most immediate personal attachment, but it does not change the pattern of his letters: the conflict appears as a setting for separation from Bess rather than as a subject of sustained reflection.

The event’s narrative significance lies partly in that uneven attention. The war advances across Belgium and into France in the public record, while Truman’s written world remains largely private. Only in the later dream do the two briefly meet, with France as the place where imagined danger threatens the relationship that dominates his correspondence.