NEW YORK (AP) — When World War I broke out in 1914, Edith Wharton’s initial response was less as a storyteller in search of material than as a citizen and intrepid witness.The Pulitzer Prize-winning author of “The House of Mirth,” “The Custom of the Country” and other probing stories of New York society was living in Paris at the time and soon set out to help those imperiled by the clash between Allied and German forces. She set up a workroom for seamstresses and others who had lost their jobs, established hostels that aided thousands of refugees and even reported from the trenches for a series of dispatches that ran in the American periodical Scribner’s Magazine. But Wharton eventually — and inevitably — channeled her observations and experiences into fiction. She worked on a novel published after the war, “A Son at the Front,” and attempted a story about an affluent couple in the French countryside who decide that the war is going well enough that they can resume the social gatherings of the past. “The Men Who Saved the World” — unfinished and never before published — appears Friday in the new issue of The Strand Magazine, which has released rare works by Mark Twain, Ernest Hemingway and many others.