[modest shelfwear book, vintage bookseller's label (The White House, San Francisco) on rear pastedown; the jacket is moderately worn and lightly soiled, with a few tiny edge-nicks, some minimal paper loss at a few corners, some fading to the spine, and a 2.5-inch split at the bottom rear hinge]. (8 B&W film stills; see Notes) Hughes's novel of "an American girl's heroism for the sake of those she loved," set against the backdrop of the early days of the First World War as experienced in Belgium, where the German Army (the "Huns") purportedly commited all sort of atrocities, particularly against women. (The heroine's heroics were to save her mother and sister, who had traveled there in order for the young girl to be placed in a convent.) First serialized in The Red Book Magazine, the book appeared in hardcover (from Harper & Brothers) in June 1918. The film version, for which this edition was a tie-in and in which star Blanche Sweet portrayed both sisters, was already in the can by the end of November, but didn't premiere until early March 1919 (in Detroit, of all places), with general release following in May. A note about the stills that illustrate this edition: although the title page promises "Eight Illustrations from the Photoplay," that's a little understated; there are, in fact, a frontispiece photo plus seven photographic pages inserted in the text -- but each of the seven actually contains *two* stills from the film, so the total number of images present is fifteen. Another note: the original edition was illustrated by James Montgomery Flagg, and the publishers of this reprint sort-of retained Flagg's front-panel jacket illustration -- but almost completely obscured it with a reproduction of an endorsement letter (for the book) by Theodore Roosevelt. How about one more note? The book is also unusual (perhaps unique) among photoplay editions in bearing no reference whatsoever to the company that produced and distributed the film -- which, for the record, was Lewis J. Selznick's World Film Company.
