In September 1916, as World War I advanced into a third deadly year, an American woman named Ellen N. La Motte published a collection of stories about her experience as a war nurse. She titled the volume The Backwash of War: The Human Wreckage of the Battlefield as Witnessed by an American Hospital Nurse. Long forgotten, this astounding book by an extraordinary woman well merits a place among major works of World War I.
The Backwash of War presents an unflinching look at the destruction done by war to the human body and spirit. La Motte based the interrelated stories on what she witnessed while working in a French field hospital in Belgium, located jarringly near the firing line. In a story midway through the book, she explains, “Well, there are many people to write you of the noble side, the heroic side, the exalted side of war. I must write you of what I have seen, the other side, the backwash.”
The patients that La Motte presents are at once grotesque and pathetic. She writes of a patient slowly dying from gas gangrene, another suffering from syphilis, and a man who sobs and sobs because he does not want to die. She writes of a ten-year-old Belgian boy who has been shot through the abdomen by a fragment of German artillery shell. The French surgeon operates on him with all-too-evident irritation, and the boy’s own mother impatiently sits by his side, “listening to his ravings and bawlings” as he dies.
La Motte sketches these patients and others, whose lives intersect at the field hospital. She depicts the vain doctors, overworked nurses, and lazy orderlies, who jointly care for the war-torn patients. She describes the local women and teenage girls, who prostitute themselves to soldiers and surgeons. She presents the pompous, preening generals, who arrive and perfunctorily pin medals on the “bandaged heaps … that once were men.”
Throughout, La Motte masterfully highlights the senselessness of war and the suffering of those caught up in it. Boldly rejecting the staid conventions of wartime writing, she invents a new way of describing the human destruction she witnesses. Her tone is detached. Her sentences are clipped. Her descriptions are graphic and, at times, starkly horrific. She presents the operations—both literal and figurative—of the war hospital. And she does so with a distinctly mordant sense of humor. As one reader noted, “A strain of bitter irony running through the book eloquently testifies to the author’s abhorrence of war.”1
The Backwash of War was published simultaneously in New York and London, but it was eventually censored in both places. It was immediately suppressed in wartime England and France, but in America, the book freely circulated for nearly two years and was hailed as a stunning and unparalleled work of antiwar writing and went through multiple printings. Then in late summer 1918, it was also suppressed in the United States because it was deemed damaging to morale. Except for the book’s unsuccessful re-release in late 1919 and a new edition published in 1934, which received slight notice, The Backwash of War virtually vanished for nearly a century.2
The time has come to reclaim this lost classic and restore it to its proper place among seminal works of war writing. Apart from its literary merit, Backwash is remarkable in several ways. It is one of the earliest antiwar works of literature about World War I, published more than a dozen years before such classics as Erich Maria Remarque’s All Quiet on the Western Front (1929) and Ernest Hemingway’s A Farewell to Arms (1929). It was written by an American woman who actually had firsthand experience of the war. It was published before the United States had even entered the fray. And it is one of America’s few banned books of the World War I era.
This volume gathers, for the first time, all La Motte’s attributed published writing about World War I. In addition to the original stories from The Backwash of War, it includes the new introduction and final story that La Motte added to the 1934 edition of the book, as well as three war essays that La Motte published in 1915 and 1916. In these long-forgotten works, which are at once deeply unsettling and darkly humorous, La Motte speaks directly to the reader about her experiences as a wartime nurse. In “An American Nurse in Paris” (1915), she describes volunteering early in the war in an overstaffed, mismanaged military hospital in Paris, where she first witnessed the arrival of soldiers from the front. In “Under Shell-Fire at Dunkirk” (1915), she writes with unnerving immediacy of a fourteen-hour-long bombardment that she endured while she was en route to the field hospital in Belgium. And in “A Joy Ride” (1916), she retraces the route of a terrifying excursion she took from the field hospital that stranded her under artillery and aerial fire close to the frontline trenches. Collected here, these stories and essays present La Motte’s public reaction to the war.3 Additionally, this volume includes a chronology, which situates La Motte’s nursing experience and her war writing within the broader context of World War I.
This volume also features the first biography of Ellen N. La Motte, as well as the first comprehensive list of her many dozens of publications. The accomplishments of remarkable men have long been charted and celebrated, but often overlooked are the accomplishments of equally remarkable women. La Motte is one such woman. To date, little has been written about her.4 Drawing on a wide range of archival and other sources, including La Motte’s correspondence with her friends and family, the biography aims to illuminate important facets of her life and her extraordinary accomplishments, especially in the decades leading up to The Backwash of War.
Not only did La Motte boldly breach decorum in writing Backwash, but she also forcefully challenged societal norms in other equally daring ways. Born into the extended duPont family—whose namesake business, DuPont, would become America’s largest manufacturer of munitions during World War I—she utterly defied the scripted and restrained role of an American society lady. She was a trained nurse, public health advocate and administrator, lesbian, suffragist, journalist, writer, self-proclaimed anarchist, expatriate, intimate friend of the avant-garde writer Gertrude Stein, long-term partner of the American heiress Emily Crane Chadbourne, and indefatigable leader of an international anti-opium campaign. The biography shines a spotlight on the “lost” author of the “lost classic.”
The following pages of this introduction are intended to familiarize readers with La Motte’s war writing and its historical and literary context. The first section examines The Backwash of War’s publication, reception, censorship, and republication in 1934. The next section presents an overview and analysis of Backwash and La Motte’s war essays. And the final section situates her writing within the context of works by other nurse writers, including several women who served with her in France or Belgium.
Publication, Reception, and Censorship of The Backwash of War
In late September 1916, roughly half a year before America entered World War I, G. P. Putnam’s Sons published the first edition of The Backwash of War, which sold throughout the United States for $1.00 a copy.5 One of Putnam’s advertisements for the book read:
Miss La Motte here shows us war of to-day, not magnificent and glorious, but naked and loathsome, as seen in an evacuation hospital but a few miles behind the French lines. These sketches are not cheerful reading, but they are all faithfully true, first-hand reports from the front, written in the bitterness of the moment, not by an hysterical assistant but by a trained scientist of worldwide reputation.6
As the war raged abroad, La Motte’s work provided American readers an utterly unromantic look at the conflict. The first review appeared in Publisher’s Weekly, explaining, “Miss La Motte has seen horror with a big H, raw, gaunt, grisly Horror, a great human shambles working overtime.” The writer elaborated: “She doesn’t use pretty or conventional words to describe it, and after reading the book we comfortable stay-at-homes must realize, if we have not already, the fatuity of seeking pretty or nice terms to describe this stupendous mess, Modern War.”7
From coast to coast, the book was soon hailed as an exceptional work of war writing. The New York Times declared, “ ‘The Backwash of War’ literally breathes, or rather sobs, sincerity.”8 The St. Louis Post-Dispatch noted, “The book does not make pleasant reading; but who expects that when the horrors of war are truthfully stated?”9 And in January 1917, the Los Angeles Times stated, “If we were to compile an anthology of the ten best war stories about eight of them would be listed under the name of Ellen N. La Motte and credited to ‘The Backwash of War.’ ” The reviewer approvingly added, “Nothing like [it] has been written: it is the first realistic glimpse behind the battle lines that has been offered to a neutral public…. Miss La Motte has described war—not merely war in France—but war itself.”10
From the start, however, a large segment of La Motte’s intended audience was denied access to her bold truth telling. Although the book freely circulated in America, it was immediately censored in England, where it had been simultaneously published.11 At the start of the war, England had instituted the Defense of the Realm Act, which gave the government broad power to suppress all published criticism of the war effort. A Press Bureau had been established to fill the official role of censor, and the very month of Backwash’s publication, September 1916, proved to be the bureau’s busiest during the war.12 Among the works the Military Room suppressed was The Backwash of War. (Today, an original copy of the book from 1916 can be found in the British Library’s collection, but the library did not receive it until October 1919, nearly a year after the war’s conclusion.)13 At the time of its publication, Backwash was also suppressed in wartime France. As La Motte recorded in her introduction to the 1934 edition, “From its first appearance, this small book was kept out of England and France.”
In the United States the book continued to be sold, even after the country entered the war in April 1917. In fact, the book remained in circulation even after passage of the restrictive Espionage Act of June 1917 and the Sedition Act of May 1918. Together, these acts greatly limited free speech in the United States and allowed the postmaster general to censor published works that might cause “insubordination, disloyalty, mutiny, or refusal of duty” or otherwise “embarrass or hamper the Government in conducting the war.” As La Motte noted in the 1934 introduction, “By some oversight, [Backwash] continued to be sold, although suppression and censorship held full sway.”
In fact, the book not only continued to be sold after America was at war but also continued to receive high praise. In December 1917, Pearson’s Magazine declared, “ ‘The Backwash of War’ is surely worth reading: should in fact be read by everyone who wishes to get at the truth.”14 The following month, the journal Issues and Events claimed that La Motte had “rendered an invaluable service to mankind.” Its writer explained, “An act of the world tragedy now being staged in Europe which has been sadly neglected by the critics writing in our daily press receives careful and intelligent treatment in Ellen La Motte’s ‘The Backwash of War.’ ”15
Among wartime readers, the book had detractors as well as advocates. What most reviewers saw as welcome truth telling struck others as an unwelcome and unrelenting focus on the unseemly aspects of war. A reviewer for the Wilmington, Delaware, Morning News objected to the “sordid” and “harrowing” pictures La Motte “painted in words,” primly noting:
There can be no question as to the extreme unpleasantness of the subjects discussed…. There are certain phases of life upon which it is best not to dwell and it is assumed that as she grows in experience Miss La Motte will learn that the reading public does not crave an exploitation of nastiness, but more of what is kindly and wholesome.
Clearly, some readers would have preferred a more conventional war work. Nonetheless, as even La Motte’s prim critic at the Morning News conceded, the book “attracted considerable attention” and was, on the whole, “favorably received.”16
On the nation’s elite college campuses, Backwash also sparked divergent reactions. A student journalist at Vassar complained, “It presents the ugliest and most unpleasant side of war, with no apparent purpose except that of refreshing in the minds of its readers the fact that such a side exists.” The student cautioned that, for some readers, the book would be “upsetting to an unwholesome degree,” and she concluded, “It seems that in no case will the book do any good, and in such days as these it has no place.”17 A Harvard student adamantly disagreed. “These thirteen bitter and harrowing little sketches,” he argued, “should be read by everyone desirous of seeing the war as it is.” He predicted, “Miss La Motte’s book will do a great deal to increase the sentiment for peace.”18
Wartime readers generally considered the book a pacifist or antiwar work, but La Motte did not believe war could be ended, at least not in the near future. She wrote in the book’s introduction, “We are witnessing a phase in the evolution of humanity, a phase called War—and the slow, onward progress stirs up the slime in the shallows, and this is the Backwash of War. It is very ugly.” La Motte loathed war, but she considered it unavoidable. As she further explained, “After this war, there will be many other wars, and in the intervals there will be peace. So it will alternate for many generations.” She thought that humanity would progress until, eventually, a final war would be followed by an enduring peace. Then war would cease to exist. “But not till then.”
La Motte further elucidated her thoughts on the subject in a newspaper interview in May 1918:
I have been so close to war. To me it is horrible; it is not beautiful, it is not necessarily ennobling. But I know that it has to be … I am not a pacifist…. I am not even one of those people you find everywhere who are saying that this is to be the last war, the war which will end war. I don’t believe that. I think we shall have wars and more wars until humanity evolves into something it is not at present. But I do not see why we should not tell the truth about war, just as we would tell it when describing the action of an earthquake or a typhoon.19
La Motte thought war was inescapable, at least for the present. Even so, readers insisted that her “stories that curdle the blood” presented a forceful antiwar argument.20 As the New York Times book critic wrote, “Revolting—even sickening at times—Miss La Motte’s book … is, unconsciously, a stern, strong preachment against war.”21
Readers also consistently grouped Backwash with antiwar works. In July 1918, a writer for the New World explained, “There is a corner of my book-shelves which I call my ‘T N T’ library. Here are all the literary high explosives I can lay my hands on. So far there are only five of them.” Backwash was America’s sole contribution to his collection and the only work written by a woman.22
La Motte’s book was most frequently compared to Henri Barbusse’s internationally famous Le Feu (published in English as Under Fire), which was generally considered the first antiwar novel of World War I. Many readers detected a similarity between the two books. “Miss La Motte like Barbusse can touch the heart of horror when she wishes to,” one critic commented.23 Another noted that La Motte “pictures the war she sees—the physical, mental, moral slime of it—with the same frank, crusading ruthlessness Barbusse shows in his epic of war, ‘Under Fire.’ ”24 Even after the war, the two books remained coupled in readers’ minds. In 1934 a literary scholar recalled, “ ‘The Backwash of War’ appeared in 1916 and, like ‘Le Feu’ of Barbusse, marked the reaction against the treatment of war in fiction as a mixture of glory, patriotism, adventure, love affairs and practical jokes, which had prevailed … in favor of stark realism.”25
Backwash seemed to wartime readers to be a groundbreaking work of war writing, and its early advocates anticipated that it would be of enduring interest and importance. In January 1917 a writer for the Masses called the book “immortal” and explained, “It is a bitter, angry laugh at Churches, at discipline, nationalism, patriotism, at the whole military system, at the crime and madness of War.”26 In the same issue of the Masses, the literary editor, Floyd Dell, named Backwash “The Book of the Month” and stated, “It tells unsparingly all that there is to tell—all that has never been told before.” Proclaiming the work “a tremendous artistic achievement,” Dell urged readers, “If you don’t want to miss one of the best books written in the last ten years in the English language, you must read this book.” In his estimate, the book was “more likely than any other so far produced by the war, to last beyond the war.”27
Instead, the book did not even “last” until the end of the war. In fact, its censorship was closely linked to that of the Masses. In late 1917, the radical journal was forced to cease publication, and Floyd Dell, as well as several others associated with the Masses, were charged, under the Espionage Act, with conspiring to obstruct military conscription. A new journal, the Liberator, was soon launched to take the place of the Masses, and La Motte was one of its thirteen original contributing editors. Initially, the Liberator, which called itself a “journal of revolutionary progress,” circulated freely. But in late summer 1918, it ran into trouble precisely because of its endorsement of The Backwash of War.
Beginning with its first issue, the Liberator had promoted the book. Indeed, in each of its first four issues—March through June 1918—the Liberator had touted Backwash without incident, by listing it as a recommended title or including it among works for sale on the “Book Shop” page. In the April issue, for example, Backwash appeared at the bottom of the “Book Shop” page, where it was described with just two words: “A masterpiece.” Several months later, however, a similar advertisement caused the Liberator serious trouble. In her 1934 introduction, La Motte recalled what happened:
An issue of The Liberator was held up—it could not be released until a certain objectionable passage was stamped out in black ink. This passage, it appears, was a reference to The Backwash of War. The Liberator carried a column in each issue of books specially recommended by the editor. In each issue, month after month, appeared a short paragraph of three or four lines, recommending The Backwash of War. So—when The Liberator was held up till this passage could be inked out, one suspected that something had happened to the Backwash itself.
No official notice was ever sent to me. After several weeks I ventured to inquire of the publishers what had happened. The Government, it appeared, did not care for the book.
The problem was with the September 1918 issue. The book had received no mention in July or August, but in the September issue, which began circulating in August, Backwash appeared again on the “Book Shop” page. Squeezed into just two lines in the final column, the advertisement for it read in full: “ ‘The Backwash of War,’ by Ellen N. La Motte. What a nurse saw. $1 net.”28 (In some archived copies, though, those lines are blacked out.)
An explanation that ran in the December 1918 issue of the Liberator further illuminates what happened. “In August we contracted with the biggest magazine distributors in the country to put us on the newsstands,” the journal’s business manager states. “In September one of their Directors saw his first copy of The Liberator and found something in it that he did not like,” and he refused to distribute the publication.29 Soon thereafter the book was censored.
Up until autumn 1918, though, The Backwash of War had remained in free circulation and sold well. Demand for the book had been so strong that in less than two years, there were four printings. Then Backwash attracted the attention of the government censors—specifically the powerful postmaster general—and was suppressed. Its publisher stopped selling the book, and when La Motte protested that the stories were true, she was told, “That is exactly the trouble.” As she recalled in the 1934 introduction, “The pictures presented—back of the scenes, so to speak—were considered damaging to the morale. In the flood of war propaganda pouring over the country, these dozen short sketches were considered undesirable.”
Backwash was not the only wartime work to be censored, but it was one of the few books. As the Nation—which had an issue barred from the mails in mid-September—reported in December 1918, “During the war unaccustomed restraints have been placed on the press, on private correspondence, and on public and private speech. The public is more fully aware of the censorship exercised over newspapers and letters than of that over books; yet the latter has great interest.” Elaborating on this point, the Nation explained, “The postal censor also was busy. One of his victims was Ellen La Motte’s ‘The Backwash of War.’ ”30
That “victim” never really recovered. Backwash was re-released by its publisher, in both the United States and England, roughly a year after the war’s conclusion. In December 1919, it appeared on a list of new books in London’s Athenaeum, with a short review noting that the stories are “as painful to read as they are enthralling.”31 That same month, the book was promoted in an advertisement in the Nation, with a brief but informative description: “The government has just released this out-of-the-ordinary book. It gives you the experiences of a nurse on the battlefields.”32 But the book failed to regain momentum. During an eighteen-month period from July 1921 to January 1923, only twenty-one copies were sold, earning La Motte a mere $4.13 in royalties.33
In radical circles, though, the book retained a small but loyal fan base. In 1920 a writer for Cleveland’s Toiler reminded readers, “Miss La Motte will be remembered as the author of ‘The Backwash of War’ which contained the most remarkable picture of war horrors ever penned. This book was suppressed ‘thru fear of the effect it would have upon civilian morale.’ In other words it was suppressed because it would never do for the people to learn the truth about war.”34 The same year, the Liberator described the book as “America’s sole contribution to the real … honest literature of the war.”35 But as new war books appeared, attracting the literary limelight, Backwash slid ever further into obscurity.
Trying to gain a new readership for the work, La Motte arranged for Backwash to be republished in the United States in 1934. She contributed a new story to the volume as well as an updated introduction, in which she explained, “Now that we are again going through a period of peace, it seems an opportune moment for a new edition of this book.” Clearly, she intended her stories to serve as a reminder to peacetime readers, lest they become too complacent and forget the horrors of war. “There can be no war,” La Motte warned, “without this backwash.”
When the new edition of Backwash appeared in August 1934, it attracted limited attention. A few book critics simply borrowed from La Motte’s new introduction and recounted the facts of the work’s unusual history. The New York Times, for example, briefly explained, “It was forbidden to bring this book into England and France during the World War, and after four printings in this country it was suppressed at the request of the United States Government.”36
In a longer and far more enthusiastic review, the nationally syndicated columnist of the Literary Guidepost described a few of the stories, then commented, “The pieces should be read by those who talk of the glory of war.”37 In another version of the review, he added, “It is a book which tells the truth about war, not with the help of statistics and facts about national movements, but with the help of art.” Then he concluded with three short and powerful sentences. “The stories are beautifully written. They are terrible. But they will do good.”38
Other readers also thought the book contained an important message for contemporary readers. An editor at the New Republic wrote, “[Backwash] was suppressed by a complacent publisher at the behest of the government, on the ground that it would weaken the will to war. Its reappearance should do just that.”39 A couple of years later, another journalist commented, “[This] is not a book for pacifists, but for pro-war people…. Anyone who, after reading this book, now republished, can still stand for war, is a degenerated heathen though he may profess with great ardor to be a Christian.”40
Overall, though, the new edition of the book attracted few readers and gained little traction in the literary marketplace. By the mid-1930s Americans seem to have grown tired of the subject of World War I and, perhaps, resented La Motte’s implicit warning about future conflicts.
The Stories
On the pages of The Backwash of War, La Motte essentially reinvents the rules for war writing. Her stories, which she gradually completed between December 1915 and June 1916, defy wartime conventions and explore topics typically hidden from public view. She leads her reader into the hospital wards and even into the operating room, where sweat pours from the brows of the surgeons, and patients lose their limbs and even their lives. As the literary scholar Charles V. Genthe aptly observed, “By any standard, [Backwash] is the most bitterly disillusioned of all of the 1914–1918 narratives.”41
With a couple of exceptions, the stories in Backwash are written from the perspective of an unnamed nurse, stationed in a French field hospital in Belgium, which is located ten kilometers behind the battlefront. Each story focuses on a particular patient, incident, or staff member, but the stories are also closely interlinked. The patients come and go—either sent home disabled, sent back to the front patched up, or sent to the local cemetery—but the director, doctors, nurses, and orderlies remain and reappear. All the while, all too audibly and dangerously nearby, the war continues to be waged.
“Heroes,” the first story, concerns a failed suicide. It bluntly begins, “When he could stand it no longer, he fired a revolver up through the roof of his mouth, but he made a mess of it. The ball tore out his left eye, and then lodged somewhere under his skull, so they bundled him into an ambulance and carried him, cursing and screaming, to the nearest field hospital.” At the hospital, the soldier is skillfully operated on. But he is considered a deserter for attempting to kill himself, and his life will be saved only so that he can later be court martialed and executed by a firing squad. As La Motte explains, he will be “nursed back to health, until he [is] well enough to be stood up against a wall and shot.”
War, in La Motte’s words and in her wards, is bloody and appalling. Conventional war writers highlighted heroism, both in the theater of war and in the operating theater. They presented model soldiers and model patients. From the very first lines of “Heroes,” La Motte boldly challenges these norms. The soldier who has attempted suicide behaves “abominably” at the field hospital. It requires “a dozen leather straps and four or five orderlies to hold him in position.” And he spits “great clots of stagnant blood.” One lands on the immaculate uniform of the hospital director, staining her “from breast to shoes.”
In “Heroes,” La Motte thus quickly disabuses her reader of any romantic notions of war. She intersperses the first paragraphs of the story with a series of short declarative sentences. “This is War.” “It was disgusting.” “Truly it was disgusting.”
“Heroes” also highlights the paradoxical role of the war nurse, who must attempt to preserve life amid an inferno of destruction. Given the ways of war, where does her true duty to her patients lie? Should she help mend men so that they can be returned to the trenches? Will doing so make her complicit in war’s destructive process? And what about the man who attempted suicide? In a passage full of sharp sarcasm, La Motte explains the contradictions inherent to her role:
By expert surgery, by expert nursing, some of these [wounded men] were to be returned to their homes again, réformés, mutilated for life, a burden to themselves and to society; others were to be nursed back to health, to a point at which they could again shoulder eighty pounds of marching kit, and be torn to pieces again on the firing line. It was a pleasure to nurse such as these. It called forth all one’s skill, all one’s humanity. But to nurse back to health a man who was to be court-martialled and shot, truly that seemed a dead-end occupation.
Returning to the same subject a few paragraphs later, she asks, “Wherein lay the difference? Was it not all a dead-end occupation, nursing back to health men to be patched up and returned to the trenches, or a man to be patched up, court-martialled and shot?” To these dangerous questions, La Motte provides a lofty answer. Parroting the war rhetoric of the day, she writes, “The difference lay in the Ideal.” After all, the war is being waged for “cherished ideals,” for “courageous dreams of freedom and patriotism.” But La Motte is obviously not convinced. Nursing in wartime, as her pointed pun suggests, is fundamentally a “dead-end occupation.” Even more heretically, she suggests that waging war itself is a dead-end occupation.
La Motte’s nurse narrator refuses to see the war through rose-colored glasses. Instead, she sees the war as a vast tragedy and takes note of the foibles of those around her. The general bestows medals in a perfunctory fashion. The orderlies drink wine together at the far end of a ward, as an unattended patient dies. And the hospital’s director left behind her own young children in faraway England, yet she finds a Belgian mother insufficiently maternal.
Whereas other war writers laud the bravery of the wounded and highlight their selflessness and stoicism, La Motte paints a very different picture of these men. In the ironically titled “Heroes,” she describes the “pitiful” and “irritating” soldiers who share a hospital ward with the man who attempted suicide. For example, there is selfish Alexandre, who smokes, even though it violently nauseates the patient in the next bed, and there is “poor, querulous, feeble-minded Félix,” who has a foul-smelling fistula and spends his time trimming, combing, and twirling his moustache. These men who fill the hospital ward demonstrate no heroic or noble qualities. Instead, they seem “so ignoble, so petty, so commonplace.”
“Heroes,” which first appeared in Atlantic Monthly in August 1916, is in keeping with the volume’s other tales of futile hospital operations, foul bodies, and filthy deaths. From first to last, La Motte’s stories have no heroes in the conventional sense of the word. In fact, the most heroic soldier in Backwash is a thief from Paris, who appears in “A Citation.” He belongs to the despised Bataillon d’Afrique, a regiment of convicts impressed into war service. Mortally wounded, he patiently tolerates the medical experimentation of his fame-seeking surgeon, as his life is needlessly prolonged, and his pain needlessly “enhanced a hundredfold,” during what La Motte calls “months of torture.”
In the romantic works of legions of war writers, men willingly fight and die for their nation. Not so in La Motte’s work. In her story “Pour la Patrie,” a priest forces a dying soldier to say, “God, I give you my life freely for my country.” But the soldier has the last word. The story ends with his declaration, “I was mobilized against my inclination. Now I have won the Médaille Militaire. My Captain won it for me. He made me brave. He had a revolver in his hand.” Indeed, each of La Motte’s stories ends with a twist that points to the inanity of the war, the egotism of those in power, or the powerlessness of those whose lives have been irreversibly destroyed.
La Motte was a socialist and an avowed anarchist, and repeatedly in her stories, common men—turned into common soldiers—unwillingly suffer and die for a cause in which they have no vested interest. These men are forced into the trenches and forced to remain there. They show no eagerness to fight and no readiness to die, but they are powerless to resist the juggernaut of war. This is true for the French soldiers who fill the wards of the field hospital, and it is equally true for the German soldiers, who fight against them. Notably, the story “Heroes” ends with one French soldier asking another, “Dost thou know, mon ami, that when we captured that German battery a few days ago, we found the gunners chained to their guns?”
With savage irony, La Motte exposes the fundamental lack of egalitarianism in French military service. In “Women and Wives,” she writes, “Ah yes, France is democratic. It is the Nation’s war, and all the men of the Nation, regardless of rank, are serving. But some serve in better places than others. The trenches are mostly reserved for men of the working class, which is reasonable, as there are more of them.” France’s national motto, which La Motte quotes in the story, is “Liberty, Equality, and Fraternity.” Yet these very values, she notes, are conspicuously absent in France’s military. She shows that men with influential connections can pull strings to receive safe posts, like a hospital orderly named Fouquet, who is introduced in “The Hole in the Hedge.” He is six feet tall, twenty-five years old, ruddy, and strong. Yet for him there is “no danger, no front line trenches.” Meanwhile, the wounded and ill soldiers, whom he sullenly cares for with “intentional clumsiness,” are “old men of forty and forty-five” and look “very much older.” They deeply resent Fouquet and call him a shirker.
The weight of the war, as La Motte makes unmistakably clear, falls disproportionately on the sagging shoulders of disempowered working-class men. They are the ones wounded in the trenches. They are the ones who become sick from extended exposure to the cold winter rain. They are the ones who arrive at the hospital in the backs of ambulances.
Through focusing on these common men whose lives are devastated by the war, La Motte reveals the cataclysm at a human level. The drafted soldiers at the center of her stories may have foul mouths and foul bodies, but they are also all victims. In “La Patrie Reconnaissante,” a Parisian taxi driver lies slowly dying a “filthy death,” after being struck in the belly by a German shell. In “Alone,” a thirty-nine-year-old gardener, a widow with one child, lies dying, with an inch of shell lodged in his fractured skull and “his torn-out thigh” infected with gas gangrene. And in “The Interval,” a half-paralyzed man, dying of meningitis, sobbingly protests that he does not want to die. The war, La Motte shows, is built on the ugly suffering of these and other distinctly unexceptional men.
Even more disturbing, La Motte shows that the war is also built on the ugly suffering of noncombatants, including children. In “A Belgian Civilian,” a ten-year-old boy, fatally wounded by a German shell, is brought to the field hospital, where he is considered an “imposition.” A French doctor resentfully performs a futile operation. Afterward, the wounded French soldiers in the boy’s ward indignantly listen to him bawl, until he dies in the middle of the night. La Motte ironically comments, “In war, civilians are cheap things at best, and an immature civilian, Belgian at that, is very cheap.” But her true message is clear. An innocent life is lost, and apart from a sentimental nurse and the concerned director of the hospital, the war seems indifferent to the child’s death.
Similarly, in “An Incident,” a teenage boy is grievously injured in a traffic accident in Paris, when his overloaded delivery wagon collides with a horse-drawn cab. As a crowd quickly gathers, the distinguished military officer riding in the cab, who is on his way to the War Ministry, leans back and twirls his moustache, completely unmoved by the boy’s screaming and sobbing. Although the incident takes place far from the battlefront, La Motte’s message is clear. Those who run the war are disturbingly unmoved by suffering.
In “A Surgical Triumph,” La Motte focuses on civilian loss from another perspective. The story centers on a Parisian hairdresser, who has built a good life for himself, his wife, and his teenage son. The boy is learning the art of washing, curling, and drying hair and has “a good future before him.” But then the chubby youth is drafted, “forced to fight for his glorious country,” and gravely wounded. After multiple months in the hospital and multiple operations, he is proclaimed “a surgical triumph” and at last sent home. There, the hairdresser is anguished to discover that the “surgical triumph” is actually a blind, mangled, and miserable quadruple amputee.
Decades later, the American author Dalton Trumbo would write a haunting novel, Johnny Got His Gun (1939), narrated from the perspective of a terribly wounded World War I soldier, who is a quadruple amputee and also blind, deaf, and mute. “If the book is any good at all it is good as an argument against war,” Trumbo explained.42 But La Motte was the first World War I writer to imagine the suffering of a quadruple amputee, and her depiction of the wrenching scene in which the father and sobbing son are reunited presents its own powerful condemnation of war.
In “A Surgical Triumph” and elsewhere, La Motte forcefully reminds her readers that the victims of war are not only the men wounded and killed on the battlefield but also their loved ones. In the shortest story in the collection, “At the Telephone,” a man, whose body is “stone cold and ashen grey,” lies on an operating table with a “ten-thousandth chance” of survival. He is given spinal anesthesia, and as a surgeon vainly struggles to save his life, the patient reminisces about his home and his wife. La Motte writes, “He talked about her incessantly, and with affection.” As La Motte here makes clear, war destroys not just men but also marriages, creating legions of war widows.
War affects marriages in other ways, too, as La Motte reveals in “Women and Wives.” The French military bans wives from the war zone, she explains, because they bring with them the worries of home and are “bad for the morale of the Army.” Yet, the French military permits other women, who “cheer and refresh the troops.” La Motte wryly notes, “Of course the professional prostitutes from Paris aren’t admitted to the War Zone, but the Belgian girls made such fools of themselves, the others weren’t needed.” Military policy thus essentially fosters infidelity.
Prim wartime writers studiously avoided making any mention of sex, but La Motte exposes the uncomfortable truth that local women, and even teenage girls, prostituted themselves to military men. The hospital’s “little fat” purveyor commandeers an ambulance nightly to sleep with a woman twelve miles away. Likewise, an old doctor, who is sixty-four years old and has grandchildren, regularly visits “a little girl of fourteen” in the local village. Even a priest who works at the hospital regularly slips “down to the village to spend the night with a girl.”
La Motte wanted her readers to understand that the social disruptions and displacements of wartime have ugly consequences that are often directly at odds with war rhetoric about protecting women and children. As she so effectively shows, war is corrosive to the institution of marriage and leads to the “ruin” of countless unmarried women and girls. She writes, “After the war, it is hoped that all unmarried soldiers will marry, but doubtless they will not marry these women who have served and cheered them in the War Zone.”
The candor with which La Motte addressed the topic of soldiers and sex was radically daring during the war years. By contrast, most wartime writers insisted that the soldiers’ experience was morally ennobling. For example, in Fighting France (1915), the eminent American novelist Edith Wharton writes of the French soldiers, “It is as though all ‘nervosity,’ fussiness, little personal oddities, meanness and vulgarities, had been burnt away in a great flame of self-dedication.” In the far trenches, Wharton states, are the Germans, “the men who had made the war.” In the near trenches are the French soldiers, “the men who had been made by it.”43 But in La Motte’s telling, the war was far from redemptive.
Time and again in her stories, La Motte focuses on subjects that are unsavory and unmentioned in typical wartime works. Her story “Locomotor Ataxia” is another excellent example. It presents a soldier who has gradually lost his ability to walk. As he demonstrates his disability, “moving with uncertain, running, halting steps,” his fellow patients titter and snigger. They all know his diagnosis. The inability to control one’s bodily movements—locomotor ataxia—is a signature symptom of late-stage syphilis.
In her stories La Motte reveals what other authors concealed, and she even manages to make the horror and suffering at the frontline hospital seem repetitive and disturbingly routine. In “The Interval,” she writes, “This is the day of an attack. Yesterday was the day of an attack. The day before was the day of an attack.” She explains that the ward is filled with “men, grey and bearded, dying in our clean beds, wetting our clean sheets with the blood that oozes from their dressings.” Then she adds, “When they die, we will pull off the bloody sheets, and replace them with fresh, clean ones, and turn them back neatly, waiting for the next agonizing man.” The war, in La Motte’s rendition, is tedious and absurdly repetitious. The ambulance drivers deliver their bloody loads. The patients die quickly or slowly. A dapper general appears periodically to affix medals to the hospital gowns of those who will survive and return home missing limbs, so that they can pass as war heroes on the streets of Paris and inspire the masses. Brutally cynical and utterly unsentimental, La Motte’s writing little resembles that of conventional wartime authors, especially women writers. As the Detroit Journal noted in early 1917, “The women who have penetrated the war zone and have written alone have used the bleeding pen. It remained for a woman, Ellen LaMotte, … to draw the real portrait of the ravaging beast.”44 Whereas other women composed works brimming with sentimentality and sympathy, La Motte recounted matters of life and death from a seemingly dispassionate remove. Of the boy in “A Belgian Civilian,” she explains, “It was a hopeless case…. The child would die without an operation, or he would die during the operation, or he would die after the operation.” Of the wounded man in “Pour la Patrie,” she writes, “So the third day dawned, and he was alive, and dying, and knew that he was dying. Which is unusual and disconcerting.” And of a trio of patients in “The Interval,” she comments, “It will be better when they die. The German shells have made them ludicrous, repulsive.”
La Motte’s writing is graphic and irreverent and experimental all at once, and it was likely influenced by the highly innovative work of the author Gertrude Stein, who was an intimate friend of La Motte’s during the war. Describing a soldier in “The Interval,” La Motte writes, “Meningitis has set in and it won’t be long now, before we’ll have another empty bed. Yellow foam flows down his nose, thick yellow foam, bubbles of it, bursting, bubbling yellow foam. It humps up under his nose, up and up, in bubbles, and the bubbles burst and run in turgid streams down upon his shaggy beard.” The wordplay and repetition is reminiscent of Stein’s work, but in Backwash, La Motte uses it to shape a new type of war writing with a distinctly cynical sensibility.
It was a sensibility that gained tremendous traction after the war, in the disillusioned writing of what Stein dubbed the “lost generation.” Indeed, La Motte’s stories are written in the detached, jaded style that would come to define World War I literature in the postwar period. As Hazel Hutchison incisively notes in The War That Used Up Words, “Nothing quite like The Backwash of War had been written in English before. It was the text that first caught the distinctive note of the conflict, and demonstrated how its brutality and pathos could be handled in prose.”45 In short, La Motte modeled for postwar writers a new way of writing war.
On the pages of Backwash she frequently strings together declarative sentences, drained of emotion and neutral in tone, in which the underlying horror goes unacknowledged, just as Ernest Hemingway would later do in his own war writing. She writes in the story “Alone,”
They could not operate on Rochard and amputate his leg, as they wanted to do. The infection was so high, into the hip, it could not be done. Moreover, Rochard had a fractured skull as well. Another piece of shell had pierced his ear, and broken into his brain, and lodged there. Either wound would have been fatal, but it was the gas gangrene in his torn-out thigh that would kill him first. The wound stank. It was foul.
Hemingway, famous for his blunt and clipped sentences, clearly had a forerunner. Indeed, La Motte’s prose style might well have influenced Hemingway’s. In the early 1920s Gertrude Stein’s literary salon attracted many of the emerging postwar writers. Among those who sought Stein’s advice was Hemingway, whose style she significantly influenced.46 Perhaps Stein showed Hemingway her copy of Backwash as an example of admirable war writing. Or perhaps she simply passed along what she had learned from reading La Motte’s work.47
La Motte even anticipated the sensibility of much later war writers, including the World War II novelist Joseph Heller. In Backwash she uses biting humor to expose the illogic and perverse absurdity of war and military regulations, just as Heller does in Catch-22 (1961), a work that also begins in a military hospital. In fact, the literary scholar Eric Solomon argues that La Motte’s story “La Patrie Reconnaissante” contains “all the elements of Catch-22’s hospital scenes.”48
Similarly, Backwash, with its prevailing tone of detached resignation, anticipates Kurt Vonnegut’s Slaughterhouse-Five (1969). In “Women and Wives,” La Motte writes, “You speak of the young aviator who was decorated for destroying a Zeppelin single-handed, and in the next breath you add, and he killed himself, a few days later, by attempting to fly when he was drunk. So it goes.” More than half a century later, Vonnegut pointed out similar absurdities and incongruities when writing about World War II. And the simple catchphrase he used throughout his book, each time he mentioned a death, was “So it goes.”
In many ways, La Motte was a writer ahead of her time, and her stories little resemble the works other authors published during World War I. She wrote about suicidal soldiers, syphilis, and the sex lives of sexagenarians. She wrote, in the words of her book’s subtitle, about the “human wreckage of the battlefield” that she had witnessed.
La Motte certainly was not inclined to humor readers who preferred war works awash with sympathy and kindness, but she did eventually make a small concession to those who wished for lighter fare. Or so she claimed. When Backwash was republished in 1934, she added a story titled “Esmeralda.” It begins,
People often say to me, you are quite morbid about the war, about your experiences in the War Zone. Surely, surely, in all those long months, you must have seen something that was not grim and horrible—something that was noble, or inspiring, or amusing, something that was human…. So now I will tell you about Esmeralda, so that you won’t think I have a quite morbid mind, unable to see anything but tragedy, unable to recognize nice things when I see them.
As for Esmeralda, suffice it to say that she is a beloved pet goat that ends up served for dinner. Even at her cheeriest, La Motte clearly had a gallows sense of humor.
War, according to La Motte, was repugnant and repulsive, and it was especially so when seen from the vantage point of a war nurse. At end of the 1934 introduction, she writes, “Much ugliness is churned up in the wake of mighty, moving forces, and this is the backwash of war. Many little lives foam up in this backwash, loosened by the sweeping current, and detached from their environment. One catches a glimpse of them—often weak, hideous or repellent.” Then La Motte concludes with an equally disquieting assertion: “There can be no war without this backwash.”
The War Essays
The three essays La Motte published under her name in 1915 and 1916 help illuminate her wartime experience as well as her broad outlook on the conflict. She appears in them at three distinct junctures in her work as a war nurse: first, while she was living in Paris and volunteering in a large military hospital in late 1914; second, while she was en route to the field hospital in Belgium and experienced a traumatic bombardment in June 1915; and third, while she was working at the field hospital and took a terrifying “joy ride” in May 1916. In the essays La Motte writes in the first person, speaking directly to the reader. At times she is self-mocking. At times she mocks others. But underlying every word is a bitter recognition of the tragedy of war.
In “An American Nurse in Paris,” La Motte sketches her initial exposure to the war. The conflict was just a couple of months old when she traveled from New York to France to volunteer at an American-supported military hospital in Paris. In the essay, La Motte gives a candid account of her impressions of that hospital, where she began working on November 7, 1914.
She found the hospital well funded and well equipped but scandalously mismanaged and underutilized. “The waste is manifest on all sides, waste of time, energy, service, effort, money,” she wrote. “There is an abundance, a superfluity, of everything.” This waste of resources particularly galled La Motte because she knew that elsewhere wounded and sick men were suffering, even dying, for want of supplies and adequate surgical and nursing care. She recorded, “English nurses come in from the front from time to time and tell us of the conditions in the field hospitals, where the patients are brought in by the hundreds, day after day…. They tell us tales of the wounded outnumbering the nurses two hundred to one.” By contrast, at the hospital, the attendants outnumbered the patients by nearly two to one.
At the hospital, La Motte saw wounded soldiers arriving from the front, and her initial shock registers clearly on the page. She describes several “grievously wounded” soldiers she encountered her first day. In a striking phrase, she refers to them as “dirty, muddy, bloody little heaps of humanity.” Treating men such as these was a new and disturbing experience for La Motte, who had trained and worked in urban hospitals, and whose area of expertise was tuberculosis care. She saw the men’s faces “contorted with pain and suffering.” She saw their dreadful wounds and smelled their putrid bodies. One new arrival had a “shattered leg, swollen and gangrenous.” Another had a “hand with the palm torn off, and horribly infected.” A third, who had been “struck in the back by a piece of bursting shrapnel,” had spent a month lying in a field hospital with a fecal fistula and was emaciated and “filthy beyond words to describe.” La Motte hauntingly records, “I saw the awful mutilation wrought by bullet and shrapnel.”
War is wasteful, La Motte shows. It wastes time, energy, money, and material resources, but more profoundly and painfully, it wastes men. She admires the fortitude of the patients, who entered the war “young, strong, able-bodied and in the prime of life.” But she grimly notes that few of them will return to the army or easily return to their peacetime occupations. Of those who survive, most will have a “prolonged and tedious” convalescence, and a “great proportion [will be] crippled or mutilated for life.”
War is also darkly humorous, at least in La Motte’s account, where tragedy and comedy often converge. In “An American Nurse in Paris,” the humor is largely at the expense of the auxiliaries—society girls and other women who volunteer at the hospital. These untrained helpers are of little assistance and sometimes are “a positive menace” to the patients. The volunteer orderlies, the male counterparts of the auxiliaries, are no better. One rich American orderly outright refuses to assist La Motte in irrigating a patient’s wound. “I’d do anything I could for the dear fellow,” he insists, “but I really can’t do that, it’s too disagreeable.” La Motte tries to reason with him, but he demurs. “It’s very disagreeable,” he repeats, “I really must refuse.”
“An American Nurse in Paris” appeared in a July 1916 issue of Survey: A Journal of Constructive Philanthropy, published in New York, and it soon drew a rebuttal. In a letter to the editor, the hospital’s chairman refuted La Motte’s accusations of mismanagement and noted that La Motte had only served at the hospital “for a period of about three weeks in November, 1914.” He then quoted an official report by an American surgeon, who gave a positive review of the hospital’s operations—both surgical and organizational.49 However, the surgeon had assessed the hospital long after La Motte’s departure.
Mysteriously, another essay about the hospital in Paris, “Experiences in the American Ambulance Hospital, Neuilly, France,” was quite clearly written by La Motte, yet she is not identified as its author in the American Journal of Nursing, where the essay was published in April 1915. Instead, the supposed authors of the essay are listed rather cryptically as K. K. and M. E. H.50 Even so, the essay overlaps with “An American Nurse in Paris” to such an extent, and so unmistakably reflects La Motte’s unique style and sensibility, that she is undoubtedly its actual author. The essay is not included in this volume, because of space constraints and lack of attribution to La Motte, but it merits brief discussion here.
Many of the same individuals and incidents appear in both essays about the Paris hospital. For example, the orderly assigned to La Motte’s ward who refuses to assist her in “An American Nurse in Paris” with a “certain difficult dressing” also appears in “Experiences in the American Ambulance Hospital,” where he refuses to help with a “a particularly loathsome dressing.” He says in one essay, “I’d do anything I could for the dear fellow.” He says in the other, “I’d do anything for the dear boys.” And in both essays, he shows patients photographs of his château in northern France, declaring, “This is where your orderly lives.” Even the italics are the same. These and numerous other overlaps unmistakably point to the essays’ shared authorship.51
“Experiences in the American Ambulance Hospital” also clearly displays La Motte’s dark humor as well as her utter antipathy for war. At one point, the essay’s narrator even declares, “But I find, as we run through these humorous episodes, that there is not one of them without its undercurrent of horror.” Of course, this undercurrent—or backwash—of horror is the true focus in all of La Motte’s war writing. And in the passage of the essay that most directly condemns the war, La Motte’s distinctive voice rings clearly:
The trains of wounded [soldiers] are often delayed by being sidetracked to let the fresh troops go through to the front. That seems barbaric, you say? Certainly, it is barbaric. War never was better than the uttermost horror of barbarism, and this war today is more brutal than any that has gone before it. We are sadly perfected in machinery to mutilate our men en masse. En masse, we bring them back and heal them with our expert knowledge, born of civilization, only to hurl them forward again to the firing line that they may go through their agony once more; this time facing pain every detail of whose infinite torture is vividly familiar to them through the touch of their own personal anguish.
The writing style, word choice, and sentiments here, and throughout the essay, are rather unmistakably La Motte’s. Why, then, was the piece published without her name affixed to it?
The answer seems fairly clear. When the essay was published in April 1915, La Motte was desperately trying to find a nursing position at the front, and she likely worried that being known as the author of “Experiences in the American Ambulance Hospital” would hurt her chances. After all, the essay is bluntly critical of not only the hospital in Paris but also the war as a whole. Significantly, La Motte published “An American Nurse in Paris” under her own name, in July 1915, only after she had finally found a place at the front. And that essay’s publication did, indeed, ruffle feathers. “Miss La Motte’s article in the Survey has upset the whole American colony at Neuilly,” an observer in Paris reported.52
The next of La Motte’s war essays included in this volume, “Under Shell-Fire at Dunkirk,” focuses on a terrifying bombardment La Motte experienced in June 1915, when she was en route to the field hospital in Belgium. Along with several other nurses, she traveled from Paris to Dunkirk, a port city in northern France, where they were supposed to stay for a few days, in a hotel outside town. Unfortunately, their stay proved unexpectedly harrowing. During the second night, German forces launched a long-range artillery bombardment of Dunkirk. La Motte watched from the hotel’s balcony as shells plunged into the town. It was her first experience of shellfire, and several hours later, believing the attack was over, she ventured into Dunkirk, filled “with an overwhelming curiosity to see the town, to know what damage had been caused by [the] tremendous shells.” But she had made a serious mistake. She writes, “Suddenly I realized, in a flash, that we were entering the town … between intervals of bombardment! A sickening sense of fear, of nervous dread, passed over me.”
On the pages of “Under Shell-Fire at Dunkirk,” La Motte presents an unusually candid description of the “cold terror” felt by a noncombatant during a bombardment. She admits that she was nearly paralyzed with fear when she found herself stranded on the streets of Dunkirk as shells began to fall. She eventually took shelter in the cellar of a “crumpled” house destroyed months earlier, where a man, his wife, and their “two ragged children” now lived. But she was not yet out of danger.
The essay thus charts La Motte’s initiation into the war zone. She writes, “For the first time I saw war in the concrete, saw the havoc wrought by those awful guns.” The sentence seems to echo one in “An American Nurse in Paris,” where she describes her initiation into war nursing: “Here for the first time, I saw wounded soldiers brought in from the front.” So, too, it seems to echo her statement in that essay: “I saw the awful mutilation wrought by bullet and shrapnel.” Before the first year of World War I was over, La Motte had seen the damage war wrought to humans and to homes. She had seen the crumpled bodies and crumpled buildings—and in her war essays, she did not prettify or romanticize what she observed.
On its final page, “Under Shell-Fire at Dunkirk” achieves an unexpected and unnerving immediacy. Up to this point, La Motte describes the events of the day using the past tense. For example, she writes, “We were in the direct line of fire,” and “Shells began falling again during lunch.” The bombardment seems to have been a traumatic experience, from which La Motte safely emerged. But four paragraphs from the essay’s end, she suddenly shifts from the past to the present tense. “So here we are,” she states. “We are in the direct line of fire.” La Motte has returned to the “flimsy little hotel” and now sits with the other nurses on the balcony. It is late afternoon, and the shells “are falling nearer and nearer.” There is no cellar in which to hide, and the act of writing becomes La Motte’s distraction from the “terrible tension.” She admits, “I am writing this to kill time; yet as each shell strikes I spring to the window, and my chair falls backwards, while the others laugh.”
The essay, the reader suddenly realizes, is not a description of past events but a description of present events. La Motte is writing to “kill time” as she experiences an attack that could kill her. The bombardment is ongoing, at least on the pages of the essay, and the reader is left in a state of limbo. The final sentence reads, “And so we sit on the balcony and watch the bursting shells—and wait.”
“Under Shell-Fire at Dunkirk” was published in the Atlantic Monthly in November 1915. An abridged version also appeared in War Readings, an anthology of poetry and prose published in 1918. Interestingly, the preface to that book explains, “Horrors and details of suffering have been omitted as out of place in a volume intended for use in schools.”53 The children of America, it seems, were to be shown only a sanitized version of the war. Nevertheless, La Motte’s intention was always to show her readers those very horrors and details of suffering. With what one admirer described as her “terse, vivid style,” La Motte bravely revealed—in her essays, as in her stories—the many dimensions of the “havoc wrought” by war.54
Her final war essay, “A Joy Ride,” also printed in the Atlantic Monthly, appeared in October 1916, soon after the release of The Backwash of War. In it La Motte details a terrifying experience she had in late May 1916, when she arranged to accompany a fellow nurse at the field hospital on a “joy ride.” They were to be driven to the town of Poperinghe, five kilometers away, where the other nurse hoped to visit a nephew serving in the Canadian forces. They arrived safely in Poperinghe—a place “splintered, gashed, and bitten, from end to end”—but learned that the nephew was actually posted near Ypres. The very name of that Belgian town, where two major battles had already been fought, petrified La Motte. Nonetheless, they set off to find the nephew, but as they approached Ypres, they came under shellfire attack. Then a German bomber appeared overhead, and La Motte took shelter with some soldiers in a wooden hut, as antiaircraft guns burst into action. Her “joy ride” had turned out to be anything but joyful. She survived physically unharmed but thoroughly shaken.
Although her tone throughout the essay is gently self-mocking, La Motte clearly conveys in its pages her horror of war. She explains, “I am not naturally what one would call brave, and since last summer, after our fourteen-hour bombardment in Dunkirk, the sight of a shelled town makes me feel quite sick.” But despite her best efforts, and in fulfillment of her worst fears, La Motte again found herself under attack. She remained outwardly calm and “acted just the same” as the soldiers around her. Yet, when she wrote about the events, La Motte refused to put on a similarly brave face. Instead, she publicly declared, “I hate shells and am desperately afraid of them. It is so refreshing to admit the truth.”
Through her refreshing truth telling, La Motte proved herself a daring war writer, and nowhere is she bolder than in a passage in “A Joy Ride,” in which she compares soldiers to animals led to slaughter. As she rode toward Ypres, La Motte passed a huge encampment of “many thousands of soldiers en repos, released for two weeks from the trenches, to rest.” She explains that their bare and dirty huts looked “just like animal pens, in which animals wait to be slaughtered.” Then she pushes the analogy further and writes, “Only the lounging soldiers did not seem like animals awaiting slaughter, or perhaps they were unconscious of their fate, just like animals.” It was not a new analogy. Other authors in the past, including Herman Melville and Walt Whitman, had compared the carnage of combat to butchery and likened war to a vast slaughterhouse. Other authors would do so in the future. In the late 1920s Ernest Hemingway would famously write of World War I, “I had seen nothing sacred, and the things that were glorious had no glory and the sacrifices were like the stockyards at Chicago if nothing was done with the meat except to bury it.”55 Decades later, Kurt Vonnegut would title his seminal World War II novel Slaughterhouse-Five (1969). But to liken soldiers to animals awaiting slaughter was a radically daring comparison for La Motte to make during World War I.
In short, in the essays in this volume, La Motte publicly speaks in her own voice, as she encounters the impact of war in the military hospital in Paris, in bomb-shattered Dunkirk, and behind the frontlines near Ypres. Her essays are at once harrowing and humorous. She is as ready to laugh at herself as to laugh at others, as she masterfully teases mirth out of grim circumstances. But she never lets her readers forget that the war is fundamentally a tragedy. Describing how she felt when she emerged from the cellar in Dunkirk, during a brief break in the bombardment, she writes, “It was like walking in a nightmare, dragging leaden legs, with the terror that comes with dreams.” War, according to La Motte, was like a long nightmare from which the world had yet to awaken.
Ellen N. La Motte and Other Nurse Writers
Ellen N. La Motte was far from a typical World War I writer. She was a woman from what was still a neutral country, who had firsthand experience of the war zone. She focused on war’s horrors rather than its heroes. She wrote during the war and was censored during the war. No one else was quite like her, just as no other book was quite like The Backwash of War. Even so, it is helpful to consider her war stories and essays in the context of other works about World War I, especially those by other nurse writers. Remarkably, several nurses who worked alongside La Motte, at the hospital in Paris or at the field hospital in Belgium, also published books about the war. Their works in particular provide valuable information about La Motte’s wartime experience and the patients she tended.
The nurses who volunteered in World War I collectively crafted a considerable body of war writing. They ranged from Vera Brittain, whose well-known memoir, Testament of Youth (1933), was recently made into a feature film, to a great many lesser-known writers. Indeed, works by World War I nurses, especially war diaries, continue to be found and published, including Dorothea’s War: The Diaries of a First World War Nurse (2013), A Nurse at the Front: The First World War Diaries of Sister Edith Appleton (2012), and The War Diary of Clare Gass, 1915–1918 (2000). In these and countless works of prose, and occasionally poetry, Word War I nurses recorded their thoughts about their patients and about the conflict.56
It is especially interesting to see how other nurses, who published during the war years, described the sick and shattered men in their care because their patients seem so markedly different from those La Motte presents in Backwash. For example, a British elementary school teacher, who volunteered as a nurse, wrote of her patients, “The men come practically straight from the trenches, and are deeply grateful for, and appreciative of, the cosy beds, the nicely-cooked food, the absence of vermin, the cleanliness and brightness of the wards, and our attempt to make them comfortable and happy.”57 Similarly, the anonymous author of Diary of a Nursing Sister on the Western Front, 1914–1915 (1915) had nothing but praise for the wounded men in her care. She worked on an ambulance train that transported soldiers from a clearing hospital, located right behind the frontline, to base hospitals. Describing a trainload of 368 men evacuated from the front in late October 1914, during the First Battle of Ypres, she noted, “a good 200 were dangerously and seriously wounded, perhaps more.” But she emphasized their fortitude and good spirits: “The outstanding shining thing that hit you in the eye all through was the universal silent pluck of the men; they stuck it all without a whine or complaint or even a comment.” The wounded men, she insisted, had “an entire lack of resentment about their own injuries.”58 By contrast, their counterparts in Backwash loudly rant and rail against their fate. Or they bawl and sob like children.
The radicalness of La Motte’s depiction of wounded soldiers—as fearful of death and fretful in life—comes into stark relief when her work is compared with those of her nursing peers. Indeed, a remarkably upbeat article about the very field hospital where La Motte worked appeared in the British Journal of Nursing in September 1916 (the same month Backwash was published and banned in England). The article insists, “All English nurses who have had the privilege to nurse among the French soldiers know what wonderful patience and endurance the French [soldiers] have always shown—there never were such patients. Never a murmur—always plucky and wonderfully cheerful.”59 These perpetually “plucky” patients seem to belong to an entirely different war—or entirely different wards—than La Motte depicts in Backwash.
While the war was still under way, the literary conventions for works by nurses remained highly uniform, and these conventions were already solidly in place before La Motte had even arrived at the hospital in Belgium. On the published page, patients received their care with profuse gratitude and never a word of complaint. Violetta Thurstan’s Field Hospital and Flying Column, which was published in April 1915, provides a good example. Thurstan was an English nurse who served early in the war as matron of a hospital in German-occupied Belgium. Of that experience, she writes, “I am sure that no hospital ever had nicer patients than ours were. The French patients, though all severely wounded and prisoners in the hands of the Germans, bore their troubles cheerfully, even gaily.”60
Interestingly, in 1917 Thurstan published a second work, A Text Book of War Nursing, which was quickly recognized as the authoritative text on the subject. In it, she states that nurses “must be able to bear the gigantic waste and pity of it all, the endless killing and maiming and still keep cheerful and well-balanced and always seeing the best side of things.”61 The same rosy rules applied equally to wartime nurse writers. But whereas other nurses were sentimental and sympathetic, La Motte was scathing and satirical.
Among nurse writers’ works, those by La Motte’s actual wartime colleagues provide an especially useful perspective. One fellow nurse even mentioned La Motte in her book, War Letters of an American Woman (1916). The author, Marie Van Vorst, was an expatriate writer living in France, who volunteered at the American-supported military hospital in Paris. In late 1914, Van Vorst noted in a letter that La Motte was among the nurses “anxious to go to the front.” In another letter, the following summer, Van Vorst described La Motte’s experience in the Dunkirk bombardment: “She said she was frightened to death, and it was perfectly horrible.”62
Von Vorst also presents in her book some powerfully evocative descriptions of the military hospital in Paris and its patients. She records, for example, her shock on first entering the ward for men with wounds infected with gas gangrene: “The odour seemed a conglomeration of every foul and evil thing—penetrating, dank; and from then on that terrible odour seemed to penetrate to my very bones.” Elsewhere, in lines hauntingly reminiscent of Walt Whitman’s description of wounded Civil War soldiers, she describes the arrival of new patients:
Direct from the trenches the men are carried in … a long line of stretchers with their pitiful burdens, the men with their wounds dressed on the field, men who have not had their boots off, or their clothes, for three weeks, some of them with grey, strange faces—such anxious looks, such pallor! And those dreadful dressings that have been on for days.63
In her published letters, Van Vorst thus evocatively describes some of the sickening smells and unsettling sights that she and La Motte both encountered in the Paris hospital. Yet, unlike La Motte, Van Vorst remained wholly supportive of the war and eager for America to join the fight.
Three of La Motte’s colleagues at the field hospital in Belgium also wrote about their wartime experiences, in works published over a span of nearly thirty years. My Beloved Poilus, a volume of wartime letters by Agnes Warner, a trained American nurse, appeared in early 1917. A Green Tent in Flanders, the war diary of Maud Mortimer, a volunteer American nurse, was published later that same year. A dozen years later, The Forbidden Zone, a modernist war memoir by Mary Borden, the American director and benefactor of the field hospital, was released in 1929.64 And Journey Down a Blind Alley, another memoir by Borden, covering both world wars, was published in 1946. These books provide valuable information about the history, structure, and success of the field hospital, where the three women worked alongside La Motte.
Borden, an American heiress and writer who had no formal nursing training, was the founder of the hospital. As she explains in Journey Down a Blind Alley, she volunteered early in the war, through the French Red Cross, to care for typhoid patients at an improvised hospital in Dunkirk. There she encountered sick men lying in long rows on dingy beds, but there were no nursing supplies with which to assist them. She describes the scene as “a dim purgatory of gaunt heads, imploring eyes and clutching hands.” The experience made her acutely aware of the dire need for properly equipped hospitals, and she soon arranged with the French army to underwrite the cost of equipping a new field hospital, for which she would be in charge of day-to-day management. Her agreement also allowed her to select the hospital’s nurses.65
Hôpital Chirurgical Mobile No. 1 opened in July 1915, and as its name suggests, it was the French army’s first mobile surgical hospital. It had roughly 140 patient beds, a dozen nurses, and a single operating room with three tables. The hospital was situated by the Belgian village of Roesbrugge, midway between Dunkirk and Ypres. There the “mobile” hospital remained throughout La Motte’s time as a volunteer because, as La Motte explained in the introduction to Backwash, the opposing armies “remained dead-locked, in one position.”
La Motte’s nursing colleagues provide useful descriptions of the hospital and nearby Roesbrugge. Warner records, “It is a regular field hospital and is composed of a great many portable huts or sheds; some are fitted up as wards, another the operating room, another the pharmacy, another supply room, laundry, nurses’ quarters, doctors’ quarters, etc. It is a little colony set down in the fields and the streets are wooden sidewalks.” She also offers a glimpse inside the nurses’ quarters. “I share a small room with two other nurses and there is not much room to spare,” she writes. “We have boxes put up on end for tables and wash-stands, and there is only one chair. Some of the nurses have tents, two in each.”66 Regarding the hospital’s setting, Mortimer explains, “From the windows [of the linen room], we have a bird’s-eye view of the nearest village, with the spotted reptile of continually moving troops crawling through its single, straggling street.” Windows in the operating room, Mortimer notes, offer a view looking out “across to the mud flats of Flanders, here and there dotted with windmills.”67 Borden adds that the hospital was a “pleasant affair of neat huts standing firmly in a green field.”68
La Motte also described the hospital. At the start of “The Hole in the Hedge,” she explains, “The field hospital stood in a field outside the village, surrounded by a thick, high hedge of prickly material. Within, the enclosure was filled by a dozen little wooden huts, painted green, connected with each other by plank walks.” In a newspaper interview, La Motte later added, “The hospital was arranged with many separate buildings, so that in going from one ward to another the nurses had to go outdoors: day or night, and in all sorts of weather. The weather mostly was vile, and, despite our stoves, we had difficulty in keeping warm.”69
The hospital stood roughly ten kilometers behind the firing line, which meant the fighting was highly audible and unnerving. As Warner wrote home,
The first night I arrived I did not sleep, for the guns roared all night long, and we could see the flashes from the shells quite plainly; the whole sky was aglow. The French and English guns sounded like a continuous roar of thunder; but when the shells from the German guns landed on this side we could feel a distinct shock, and everything in our little shanty rattled.
She also noted that, at the time of her arrival in September 1915, “four English, three American and three French nurses” were working at the hospital; one of whom was surely La Motte. In her next letter, she added, “Some of the nurses were in Dunkirk when it was bombarded, and they said the noise was the most terrifying part of it all.”70 Clearly, for the nurses, not to mention the patients, being so close to the fighting could be quite frightening, and it could also trigger memories of past trauma.
Located so near to the firing line, the hospital served the highest risk patients, and it did so quite impressively. As Mortimer explains, “Only such of the wounded are brought to us as may not without danger be carried farther.”71 Even so, the doctors and nurses at the field hospital were able to save many lives. Warner reports that from July 23, 1915, when the hospital opened, through January 1, 1916, a total of 750 patients were cared for at the hospital, of which only 66 died.72 It was a notably low mortality rate for a field hospital at the time, and the rate dropped even lower in the following months. After the statistics for the hospital’s entire first year were calculated, Mortimer was gratified to record in her diary, “We have only lost one man in every thirteen and—since, for the most part, only the worst cases are brought to us—the hospital may be proud of its record.”73
La Motte’s work at the hospital were entirely encompassed within that first year, and dozens of patients from the period appear on the pages of The Backwash of War. Fascinatingly, some of these same patients also appear in the works of her colleagues. For example, the patient in La Motte’s “Heroes,” who shot himself through the roof of his mouth in a failed suicide attempt, reappears in Borden’s The Forbidden Zone. But there is a surprising twist in Borden’s narration of his case.
In many ways, the accounts by La Motte and Borden about this patient align. Both women recognize the absurdity of saving the man’s life, if he is ultimately going to be court martialed and placed before a firing squad. Likewise, both writers describe how the patient repeatedly tries to pull the postoperative bandages off his head, in an attempt to kill himself. In Backwash he is prevented from doing so. In The Forbidden Zone, however, he is allowed to succeed. Borden explains that she told the night nurse, “When [he] pulls off his bandage tonight, leave it off.” And then Borden records that the night nurse “looked at me a minute hesitating. She was highly trained. Her traditions, her professional conscience, the honor of her calling loomed for a moment before her, then her eyes lighted. ‘All right.’ ”74
At the end of La Motte’s story, the man is alive, but at the end of Borden’s, he is dead. This key difference in the tandem tales invites a weighty question. La Motte’s version of the story is clearly told from the perspective of the night nurse, and Borden insists in the preface to The Forbidden Zone, “I have not invented anything in this book.”75 Does this mean that La Motte was the highly trained nurse in Borden’s account, who helped the doomed man die?
Other patients in Backwash also appear in works by La Motte’s colleagues. Amazingly, one patient even appears in the works of Warner, Mortimer, Borden, and La Motte. He is the Parisian petty criminal from the much-despised Bataillon d’Afrique. In “A Citation,” La Motte describes how a vainglorious surgeon pointlessly and painfully prolongs this man’s life. She writes, “He lay in hospital for several months, suffering greatly, but greatly patient.” Similarly, Mortimer notes that the man was “one of the pets of the hospital and the pride of the doctors—not because of any show of health he made … but because he was still alive after all they had been allowed to do to him.” She further records that after spending four months at the hospital, the man eventually died in January 1916, folded in the arms of a tearful nurse.76
Mortimer, Warner, and La Motte describe the events following the patient’s death in a strikingly similar way. Mortimer records, “Twenty minutes later the General [arrived with] a Croix de Guerre and a Médaille Militaire in his hand.”77 Warner notes, “Half an hour after he died the General came to decorate him.”78 And La Motte writes, “So he died finally, after a long pull, just twenty minutes before the General arrived with his medals.” All three writers capture the tragic irony of the general arriving just a little too late. But Borden’s account in The Forbidden Zone is radically different, and the general and medals play no part. Instead, Borden shapes a dramatic story of religious salvation. She describes the man as a “vile savage rat from the sewers of Paris” and calls his bed in the hospital ward “a centre of obscenity,” where “foul odours, foul words, foul matter [swirl] round him.”79 Yet at the end of her story, a priest succeeds in saving the man’s soul, and the patient dies smiling at dawn.
When La Motte’s book is compared with those by Warner, Mortimer, and Borden, new angles and complexities appear. Not only did the women help care for the same patients, but they also shared important bonds, forged by the experience. In fact, La Motte dedicated The Backwash of War to Borden, “The Little Boss.” La Motte had spent half a year trying to obtain a position at the front, and as she writes in the dedication, Borden finally made possible her “experience in the zone of the armies.” Likewise, Borden was deeply fond of La Motte. In early September 1915, another American recorded, “Mrs. Borden Turner (the lady she is with) says [Miss La Motte] is the joy of her life.”80
La Motte and her colleagues even wrote about one another. Borden, for example, frequently appears in Backwash as the “Directrice.” Even more fascinating, La Motte herself repeatedly appears in Mortimer’s A Green Tent in Flanders. In a diary entry from January 1916, Mortimer first describes an American who is a “fully trained and excellent nurse,” a “pacifist and neutral to the backbone,” and an expert in hospital efficiency. She nicknames the nurse Organization. (La Motte had previously been superintendent of the Tuberculosis Division at the Baltimore Health Department.) Mortimer records that the nurse is “big and breezy.” (La Motte was five foot eight.) She adds that the nurse had just returned from “her happy home.” (La Motte had been on an extended break at her home in Paris.) Then taking note of Organization’s literary pursuit, Mortimer writes, “She is not here now to probe physical weakness but to cut deeper—for the purification of art and sentiment—down to the unquestionable depravity of the human heart.” And Mortimer perceptively comments, “Logically given form what a hit the real truth will make.”81
The following month, Mortimer again wrote about the truth-seeking American nurse:
It almost looks as though Organization has a grouch; she certainly has a cold. For some days she has lain in her cot with her face to the wall, like Hezekiah, and figs cannot heal her hurt. “How wrong-headed and untrustworthy every one is. Life is so untidy; if only some one would fairly face cleaning it up, might it not easily be done.” Baffled she returns to her happy home. Yet perhaps after all she has got what she came for. Her attaché case bulges with documentary evidence of the obliquity of human nature especially as observed under torture in a field hospital.82
Organization is rather unmistakably La Motte, as seen through the eyes of a fellow nurse. She is depressed. She is disillusioned. And she is returning to Paris, for another extended break, with an attaché case full of story drafts and notes that she will transform into The Backwash of War.
Countless men and women crafted works about World War I, including soldiers, journalists, doctors, nurses, and civilians. They published volumes of poetry, memoirs, novels, story collections, journals, and more. Each of these works, whether written during or after the conflict, reflects a specific perspective, style, and sensibility that can be profitably compared with La Motte’s own. Works by other nurses, in particular, complement and contradict La Motte’s works in illuminating ways.
Nurse writers present the war from a uniquely female perspective. Nursing was the province of women, and the nurse writers of World War I occupied a special no man’s land. Putting their own lives at risk, they tended to the sick, wounded, and dying, and they chronicled war as witnessed from the ambulance trains and hospital wards.
Ellen N. La Motte was not simply the author of an extraordinary book, who bore brave witness to World War I. She was also an extraordinary woman. At the time she volunteered as a war nurse, she was already in her early forties and extremely accomplished. She was a trained nurse, who had risen to the heights of her profession, authored a nursing textbook, and published over twenty essays in the field of public health. She also was a suffragist, journalist, socialist, lesbian, expatriate, and much more. To understand The Backwash of War and her war essays more fully, it is helpful to read them within the context of La Motte’s bold life, as sketched in the following biography.