England's Effort: Letters to an American Friend

Mary Augusta Ward (1851–1920) was a British novelist who wrote under her married name as Mrs. Humphry Ward. She was a significant campaigner against women getting the vote, serving as the founding president of the Women's National Anti-Suffrage League. During World War I, Ward was asked by former United States President Theodore Roosevelt to write a series of articles to explain to Americans what was happening in Britain. Her work involved visiting the trenches on the Western Front, and resulted in three books, England's Effort: Letters to an American Friend (1916), Towards the Goal (1917), and Fields of Victory (1919). This first book of the series is a bird's-eye view of the first two years of the war, of the gathering of the new Armies, of the passing into law, and the results—up to the Battle of the Somme—of the Munitions Act of 1915.