Kings, Queens, and Pawns: An American Woman at the Front

Mary Roberts Rinehart, known for her bestselling mystery novels such as The Circular Staircase published in 1907, earned a reputation as “the American Agatha Christie” through the success of her novels. Yet Rinehart was also a WWI correspondent.

After convincing her editor at The Saturday Evening Post to send her to the Belgian front, and armed with letters of introduction, her status as a well-known writer and member of the American Red Cross, as well as plenty of fearless initiative, she became the first American to report from the front. In Kings, Queens and Pawns (1915) Rinehart records scenes of life at, and far from, the front: a baby whose legs were blown off, a young soldier rendered blind in battle sitting quietly as he listens to a recording of Madama Butterfly, the entire noncombatant population of a Belgian town homeless after relentless German-lead bombings, a queen overseeing her Needlework Guild.

Anticipating the ultimately widely held view of the bloody and often futile conflict, Rinehart argues that the greatest treasures of the warring countries, the young soldiers fighting so valiantly in the prime of their lives, are mere pawns wasted and lost on the desolate battlefields.