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Original boards, with Bigelow’s name printed on front cover.  28pp.

An American “future war” fantasy, supposedly written by war correspondents in Fitzwilliam, New Hampshire, during a fictional German invasion of 1921.  Probably the only surviving copy of this literary excursion of a rich Boston and Chicago dilettante who died before his time.

Bigelow died in 1916 at age of 30, which dates this little booklet over a year before America’s entry into World War I. He was a Massachusetts socialite, grandson of John Bigelow, Mayor of Boston, a Harvard alumnus, married to the daughter of a Illinois railroad magnate. They lived on Chicago’s North Shore, but, in January 1916 bought a “farm” – euphemism for a summer getaway for rich Bostonians - near Fitzwilliam, New Hampshire, where his brother, Secretary of the Boston Real Estate Exchange, had long owned property.  But in February, he died there suddenly of cerebral meningitis; so this book must have been written in the interim month, posthumously published by his loyal widow before she went off to become a habitué of Palm Beach.

The less-than-dramatic story tells of a group of Yankee hostages who the invading Huns threatened to execute – but were ransomed by a shipment of gold paid by Boston bankers.