Baron de la Grange Marriage During World War I

Baron Amaury de la Grange was the nephew of Baron Louis de la Grange and his wife, the former Anita Carroll, daughter of John Lee Carroll.

Source: The Washington Post, December 17, 1916, p. MT5.

Headline: The Romances of Rich American War Nurses: Proof that Pity Is, Akin to Love and That Cupid Finds an Easy Way Into Hearts Softend by Sympahty In These Recent Weddings of Ministering Heiresses and the War Heroes They Have Helped Back to Life and Health.

"Cupid, with the wireless of love, has linked the trenches of Champagne, the Somme and the Dardanelles to the mansions of Fifth avenue and Wahsington. Thanks to him, the romance of the great war has become international. Through him the United States is paying back some of the millions of profits ahta have come to it because of Europe's travail.. . .
In these alliances there is none of the sordid barter and sale, on the one hand, for money to replenish empty coffers, and on the other for a title, which have marred so many marriages between wealthy American women and fortune-hunting counts and dukes.
Take, for example, the romance of Emily Sloane, whose marriage a little mroe than a year agao was food for wonder in the social worlds of New York and Paris. The daughter of Henry T. Sloane, of New York, and the sister of Mrs. William Earl Dodge, who has just obtained a divorce, had been thought to have renounced all ideas of wedlock. With her sister she is heir to an estate whose value is estimated at $20,000,000. Fortune hunters and sincere admirers on two continents, in New York and Paris, had laid siege to her heart prior to 1914, but she evinced no more than ordinary interest, no matter how eligible they were.
Her early life had been saddened and embittered by the marital unhappiness of her father and mother, who were divorced, the latter becoming the wife of Perry Belmont, and among the families with which she had been intimate there was more than one which had a skeleton in the closet in the form of an unhappy international marriage which had been built on the quicksands of ambition for social presitge and need of wealth. She devoted her time chiefy to philanthropic and charitable work, although not by any means foregoing social diversions.
She was as well known in the solons of the American colony in Paris as in the villas of Lenox and the town houses of New York, and it was not unnatural that when the war broke out her sympathies should turn to France. She was foremost in the work of organizing the Lafayette fund, through which the society women of New York raised money for the manufacture of comfort kits to be sent to French soldiers.
As secretary of the organization Miss Sloane not only raised money, but herself packed kit bags, and following the rule of the organization, inclosed in them a slip bearing her name as the sender.
One of the Lafayette kit bags sent from New York fell into the hands of Baron Amaury de la Grange, lieutenant in the French army in the trenches of Champagne. He opened it and found therein a slip of paper bearing the name "Emily Sloane." The name was familiar to him. He remembered Emily Sloane as one of the talented, charming American women with whom he had danced and exchanged repartee in various social functions in the salons of Paris. Their acquaintance had been merely a pleasant one. He wrote to her thanking her for the kit, telling her what comfort her gift and the sentiment that called it into being gave him, and recalling their meetings in Paris.
She answered his letter and the desultory correspondence of the front, which feeds alike love, hope and fear began. His missives, written on scraps of paper, blurred by mud and water, told little of himself or his life in the trenches.
One day she read that he had been decorated with the Cross of War for carrying a wounded comrade out of a trench in the face of a murderous fire.
He won more than the Cross of War by that act. He won the heart of Emily Sloane, already at the point of capitulation! They met at last in a hospital where Miss Sloane was visiting and seminursing. And so she became the Baroness de la Grange."

Another article on the marriage said that Miss Sloane arrived Tuesday, September 15, 1915 and they married the following day. The Baron returned to the front on Sunday "to take up his service as a lieutenant aviator."