BEFORE THE WAR WAS MORE than a few weeks old, Ferris Greenslet, commissioning editor at the Boston publishing house Houghton Mifflin, realized that it would be good for business. Without domestic radio, with only occasional access to moving images of the conflict, and with newspapers full of political positioning, the public would want books “telling not only what the war was about, but what it was like.” Producing “war books,” he decided in the fall of 1914, should be the firm’s top priority. A reasonable man, Greenslet was willing to publish a range of views, from what he termed “Allied propaganda” to arguments for the German point of view. Like Charles Scribner in New York, he was initially tolerant of Austrian and German perspectives, finding room on Houghton Mifflin’s 1915 list for Fritz Kreisler’s Four Weeks in the Trenches: The War Story of a Violinist and the anonymous Journal of a German Submarine Commander. Yet he grew increasingly hostile to Germany as a military and political power, especially as U-boat attacks continued intermittently on American merchant vessels on “Periscope Pond.” The sympathies of Houghton Mifflin’s readers were similarly shaped and reshaped by events. Greenslet, who ventured across the Atlantic several times during the war in search of new British and French literary talent, often with the help of Gilbert Parker or John Buchan at Wellington House, discovered early that “the best time to publish a war book is the day you accept it,” as its contents might be out of date by sundown.1
Nevertheless, the public appetite for war-related texts, both fiction and nonfiction, appeared insatiable, and Greenslet’s strategy paid off. Toward the end of 1915, Mildred Aldrich’s eyewitness account of the early days of the war, A Hilltop on the Marne, proved a runaway success, notching up seventeen printings in all, and two follow-up texts, On the Edge of the War Zone (1917) and The Peak of the Load (1918). Greenslet would also publish Leslie Buswell’s memoir of volunteer service, Ambulance Number Ten (1915), closely followed by Ian Hay Beith’s The First Hundred Thousand (1916), Charles W. Eliot’s The Road to Peace (1916), and James Norman Hall’s Kitchener’s Mob (1916). The manuscripts kept on coming, and the books kept on selling. Between 1914 and 1918, Houghton Mifflin would issue over a hundred war books with a total circulation of nearly 1.5 million copies—and this was only one of hundreds of publishing firms across America.2 Wartime industry was booming; and the book trade was no exception. However, Greenslet’s stake in the war was not merely economic: “The chief aim,” he admitted in 1943 as another war was waged, “was to try to help educate America to a full knowledge of the evil ambitions that were loose in the world, even if in the end it should lead us to join in fighting them.”3
This apparently bland remark is revealing, and not just for the moral confidence that underpins it, or the educative purpose of literature that it assumes. Here is another reminder that for the American reader, the First World War was a cultural and intellectual event long before it was a practical reality. Most European readers were thrust into conflict, or at least into a social environment focused obsessively on that conflict, with little cultural preparation—certainly with no sense of the kinds of images, both verbal and visual, that it would produce. On the other hand, American readers had almost three years to think and read about the war before it became their national business. It is probably no coincidence that The Great War and Modern Memory, the study which so decisively claimed the war as a cultural event, should have been by an American author. Paul Fussell has little to say about the American literature written during the war, or even after it. However, his premise that its events should be understood primarily through their impact on the collective cultural consciousness probably stems from this prevailing American perspective on the war as a site of intellectual and artistic conflict, rather than as a social and political fault line in the historical landscape—though it was that too for the United States. Greenslet clearly had no embarrassment, even in hindsight, that he deliberately put his readers in the mood for fighting. He was also good enough at his job to know that this was increasingly what the public wanted. As Charles Genthe points out in his survey of almost four hundred nonfiction American war narratives printed during the war, the overwhelming numbers of such books took for granted that military action was justified, and extolled the virtues of “sacrifice and inspiration.” Such texts, Genthe insists, should not be seen as proof of naivety or ignorance on behalf of their authors, but rather “as evidence of the romantic orientation of the American reading public.”4 Despite the present-day habit of equating the experience of the war with innovative literary practice and the expression of disillusionment, in reality, daring and cynical texts were slow to emerge, and were vastly outnumbered by those which took a more idealistic line. These enthusiastic texts clearly made their mark. The energy with which many Americans embraced the declaration of war in April 1917, shows how well the cultural ground had been prepared in the early phases of the conflict by Greenslet and others like him. Nevertheless, before condemning this alliance of publishing and politics, one should remember how informal, at times even antagonistic, this alliance was, especially in the early stages of the war, when much of what he published was directly in conflict with Wilson’s policy of neutrality. Greenslet clearly felt that the literature came first, and the politics had better catch up if it could. His effectiveness as an opinion maker, however, would be officially recognized later in the war. After April 1917, Greenslet worked closely with George Creel and provided a publishing outlet for the activities of the Vigilantes.5 He was also offered a post in the U.S. navy in communications in London. “It was a terrific temptation,” he wrote, “but after a conference in Washington, the consensus of wise men was that I would better keep on doing my bit where I was.”6
Not everyone saw it that way. Later in the war, Randolph Bourne would survey this entire process with characteristic disgust: “If our intellectuals were going to lead the administration, they might conceivably have tried to find some way of securing peace by making neutrality effective. They might have turned their intellectual energy not to the problem of jockeying the nation into war, but to the problem of using our vast neutral power to attain democratic ends for the rest of the world and ourselves without the use of the malevolent technique of war. They might have failed. The point is that they scarcely tried.”7 But even Bourne had to admit that the writing and publishing classes were largely responding to public taste, though this taste for dramatic foreign crises over less exotic troubles closer to home struck him as bitterly complacent: “Numbers of intelligent people who had never been stirred by the horrors of capitalistic peace at home were shaken out of their slumber by the horrors of war in Belgium. Never having felt responsibility for labor wars and oppressed masses and excluded races at home, they had a large fund of idle emotional capital to invest in the oppressed nationalities and ravaged villages of Europe. Hearts that had felt only ugly contempt for democratic strivings at home beat in tune with the struggle for freedom abroad.”8 Despite their different political sympathies, both Greenslet and Bourne make it all sound straightforward—which it wasn’t. Had the reading public responded wholeheartedly to the arguments for war, there would have been no need for George Creel’s inventive and expensive Committee on Public Information (Greenslet’s “wise men” in Washington) to market the conflict to America in 1917. Alternatively, had the cultural elite, of which Bourne was himself a prominent member, uniformly supported military intervention, there would have been no cause for the restrictions on freedom of political expression put in place once America mobilized. Clearly, the publishing environment of the midwar period was a complex one, and generalizations about readers and writers were, and remain, treacherous. To engage with the First World War in print was to take on a set of inconsistencies and contradictions which at times defied expression.
The rest of this chapter looks at three texts which dared to engage with the war in this turbulent publishing context. Wharton’s edited collection The Book of the Homeless, which was sold in aid of her refugee charities, came out early in 1916, featuring a stunning international cast of writers, artists, and composers from Thomas Hardy to Igor Stravinsky. Here was a clear piece of evidence, were any needed, of Wharton’s elite cultural status and her enviable personal connections in both America and Europe. It was also evidence of the willingness of the intellectual and creative classes on both sides of the Atlantic to direct their abilities toward the “war effort.” Likewise, Norton’s pamphlet of patriotic poems What Is Your Legion? (1916), deftly handled by Greenslet at Houghton Mifflin, appears at first glance to be exactly the kind of text which Bourne blamed for heedlessly “jockeying the nation into war.” On closer inspection, however, this text reveals an agenda deeply concerned with social reform and left-wing international politics. But the most remarkable text of 1916, perhaps the most remarkable text in English published during the war, was Ellen La Motte’s memoir of her months spent nursing at the Western Front, The Backwash of War. This slight, dark book finds little to say about the political scenery of the moment, and offers nothing to the debate about American neutrality or intervention—unless pointing out the grim consequences of conflict can be seen as taking a stance. Its steely exposé of the moral ironies of war struck a new note among the war books of 1916, a note which the establishment would later be keen to silence, but which would sound again and again in later texts. None of these three books was a runaway success, either commercially or critically, although the reasons for their obscurity are in themselves interesting. Nevertheless, these works offer glimpses into the complexities and inconsistencies of the midwar book world, and show the difficulties of persuading readers to think about the war in any but the simplest terms.
Henry James described it as an “inspiring appeal.”9 In July 1915, Edith Wharton wrote to a number of her friends and contacts, outlining her plans for a collaborative book to be sold in aid of her wartime charities. She was by no means the first to take on such a project. In 1914, Wharton had contributed a poem to King Albert’s Book, edited by Rudyard Kipling and sold in aid of the Belgian Fund of the Daily Telegraph.10 Samuel Honey and James Muirhead’s Sixty American Opinions on the War appeared in 1915 “to show how many friends we have in America.”11 Winifred Stephens’s anthology The Book of France, to which James had contributed the opening essay, came out in July 1915. James sent Wharton a copy, presumably so that she could survey the competition, though he insisted that the “B. of F. doesn’t amount to much (such things, con rispetto parlando, never do!)”12 Wharton, however, was determined that her book would amount to something, and with characteristic energy and ambition, she set about amassing a dazzling list of almost sixty contributors, and arranging with her publisher Charles Scribner to produce the volume on a nonprofit basis. Within a couple of weeks, she had secured offers of artwork from Claude Monet, Auguste Rodin, Jacques-Émile Blanche, Charles Dana Gibson, Leon Bakst, designer for the Ballet Russe, and Pierre-August Renoir, who sent a charcoal sketch of his son, who had been recently wounded at the front, one of the finest items in the book. James, despite his reservations about the genre, turned out to be a willing and effective assistant, liaising with his literary and artistic contacts such as Joseph Conrad, William Dean Howells, Thomas Hardy, and John Singer Sargent. However, still smarting from their recent quarrel, James drew the line at corresponding with H. G. Wells, and Wharton had to deal with him directly. Laurence Binyon, John Masefield, Paul Bourget, Arnold Bennett, Mary Ward, Max Beerbohm, John Galsworthy, Edmund Gosse, Josephine Preston Peabody, Sarah Bernhardt, Eleanora Duse, and Claude Debussy: the list of contributors provides a vivid snapshot of the cultural landscape of the moment—or at least of Wharton’s carefully composed landscape, which is not quite the same thing. Edward Marsh gave permission for a poem by Rupert Brooke to be included posthumously. André Gide, who was closely involved in the Foyer Franco-Belge, also provided a piece, but there were few representatives of the younger, or more experimental generation of writers and artists: no Gertrude Stein, no Roger Fry, no T. E. Hulme, no Ezra Pound, certainly no Wyndham Lewis. W. B. Yeats, at James’s request, provided a short but pithy six-line poem, “A Reason for Keeping Silent,” voicing dissent at the whole project. Wharton, to her credit, printed it anyway.13
She did not agree with Yeats that the poet had “no gift to set a statesman right.” Indeed, the point of the venture was to allow her poets a platform to speak over the heads of the statesmen, society figures, or religious leaders, who were notably absent in this volume—certainly in comparison with the competition. The Book of France had a decidedly aristocratic tone. The London branch of the French Parliamentary Committee’s Fund for the Relief of the Invaded Departments which had benefited from the book was headed by an honorary committee which boasted five British government ministers, including Winston Churchill, and a number of peers of the realm. While most of the articles were contributed by prominent French writers, many of the translations were provided by the wives of the great and the good of the British Empire: Lady Randolph Churchill, the Duchess of Sutherland, Lady Frazer, Lady Glenconner. However, this society gathering was nothing compared to Kipling’s bewildering list of over two hundred contributors in King Alfred’s Book.14 In that introduction, Hall Caine, one of the most popular novelists of the day, boasted that the volume had been created “by the pens of a large number of representative men and women of the civilised countries,” though one has to wonder exactly who or what this select cast represented.15 Alongside a rich array of writers, artists, and composers (many of whom also contributed to Wharton’s book), sat the names of the British prime minister, H. H. Asquith; the chancellor of the exchequer, David Lloyd George; the former U.S. president Howard Taft; the former viceroy of India Lord Curzon; plus Lord Kitchener, Lord Bryce, and a score more of earls, admirals, members of Parliament, and public figures, including Emmeline Pankhurst, the chief rabbi, and no less than six archbishops. In contrast, Wharton’s book was self-consciously, if not quite exclusively, artistic. The French generals Joffre and Humbert found their way into the volume, as did her old friend the Boston judge and novelist Robert Grant—although when he sent a caustic anti-Wilson essay about the trivialities of the upper classes at Newport, Rhode Island, for inclusion, Wharton asked him to withdraw it and submit a thoughtful poem instead. As is obvious from her preface, The Book of the Homeless was not intended as an overtly political text—though it is often read as such. Apart from one reference to the “senseless and savage bombardment” of southwest Belgium in April 1915, Wharton’s preface makes no direct allusion to the war, focusing instead on the stories of the refugees and the activities of the relief workers. This was a volume dedicated to those willing to “carry the burden of humanity,” and which was to impress through the “beauty and variety” of the work of Wharton’s collaborators.16 With her famous good taste, selecting and directing the finest cultural talent of her era, she clearly believed she was creating, or at least curating, a work of art.
So, it seems ill-judged that Wharton should have commissioned an introduction from Theodore Roosevelt. Scribner was initially in agreement with this choice, but when Roosevelt caused a public stir with his attack on Wilson’s administration in America and the World War, which Scribner himself published 1915, he became nervous that a highly politicized introduction might give the book “a somewhat controversial character.” Scribner reminded Wharton that the former president was “so much disliked in some quarters and has hit the Administration so hard” that Wilson’s supporters might be put off from buying the book.17 These fears were not allayed when Scribner saw Roosevelt’s copy, in which he noted pointedly that Wharton’s relief work went some way to atone for “our national shortcomings.”18 But Scribner could no more say “nay” to Wharton than anyone else could—and as usual she got her way. Wharton knew Roosevelt personally, and admired his pro-Allied stance on the war. She was also captivated by his energy, eloquence, and charisma. After his death in 1919, she would write to his sister Corinne Roosevelt Robinson: “When I write of your brother my heart chokes in my throat & I can’t go on. No one will ever know what his example & his influence were to me.”19 His sense of urgency and responsibility, his appeal to duty, and his conviction of the ennobling influence of service to one’s nation chimed forcefully with her own ideas. Nevertheless, it is hard to imagine that Wharton, with her nuanced opinions on social manners and transactions, could ever have fully taken on board his aggressive nationalism or his essentialist attitudes to gender roles.20 What they did share, however, was the conviction that the war with Germany was the supreme test of their society, that it was not just a conflict about geopolitical boundaries and international economics, but of ideals and moral absolutes. Hence, Wharton’s willingness to include Roosevelt in what was fundamentally a cultural project. His visionary rhetoric made him, in Wharton’s eyes at least, more than a mere politician. He spoke for the values of civilization.
And what better way to declare one’s belief in the future of civilization than by creating an object of aesthetic and cultural value that would bear witness to the suffering of the war being fought to sustain it? Wharton is sometimes accused of degrading her art for fund-raising purposes during the war. However, the production of The Book of the Homeless suggests the opposite: here was a women determined not to compromise on artistic standards. Every inch of The Book of the Homeless, and every element of its production spoke of Wharton’s discrimination and her faith in the ability of the reading public, or at least an elite strata of it, to appreciate the quality of the object in hand. Scribner’s was the perfect publisher for such a project. Since the 1870s, the firm had been acquiring a reputation as a publisher of deluxe editions of classic writers such as Stevenson, Kipling, Carlyle, and Hawthorne.21 These series—often available by subscription only, which prevented the purchase of single volumes, thus putting these items firmly out of the financial reach of a whole class of readers—were calculated to appeal to the image-conscious nouveau riche of Gilded Age America, for whom book-owning was often more important than reading itself. Henry James’s New York Edition (1907–9) had been just such a project, offering beautifully crafted books printed on specially watermarked paper with photographic plates and elegant, hand-finished bindings—but many of the copies circulating today still have uncut pages. These were books to be displayed, handled, and admired, rather than actually read.22
Wharton herself had grown up in a house which boasted a “gentleman’s library” of several hundred books, mostly just such sets of calf-bound volumes: Macauley, Victor Hugo, Sainte-Beauve, the Brontës, Ruskin, Coleridge, and assorted French and English classics. “Were these latter ever read?” she asked in her autobiography, “Not often, I imagine; but they were there; they represented a standard.”23 Wharton, therefore, well understood the material role of books in upper-class American life as symbols, not simply of conspicuous leisure and consumption, but also as totems of some governing, if remote, cultural “standard”—the standard of civilization. She was capable of mocking this attitude, as she had begun to do in the unfinished novel Literature, which she abandoned at the outbreak of the war, but she also participated in it. Witness her lavish construction of a personal library of several thousand volumes at her house, The Mount, in Lenox, Massachusetts, which significantly was also one of her favorite rooms for entertaining visitors.24
Wharton did read her books, voraciously, throughout her life, but she knew that for many of her class, the look of the thing was what mattered—and it was from her own class that she hoped to eke out more funds for her relief work. So, early in her planning for The Book of the Homeless with Charles Scribner, she asked him to engage the services of Daniel Berkeley Updike, the Boston book designer and director of the Merrymount Press, to oversee the production of the book. Wharton knew Updike from her years living in Newport and Lenox, admired his work, and had consistently sent business his way when possible, insisting that her Scribner’s books be printed with Updike in the years before the company had a press of its own. However, the production of The Book of the Homeless was much more complicated than a novel. There were artworks in a number of media to reproduce, some in black and white, some as photographic plates, and several in color. The standard edition was to cost five dollars, but there were also to be small runs of limited editions, priced at twenty-five and fifty dollars, aimed at the bibliophile market, not just with different covers, but also printed on special high-quality paper.25 Wharton had originally hoped that the book would be on sale by October 1915, but her specifications required meticulous planning. With her own sense of urgency and with the astonishing amount of energy that she mustered for all of her war projects, she found it hard to understand why others could not instantly meet her demands. Various contributions came in behind schedule, including Wharton’s own translations of the French contributions, slowing down the editorial process. At one point, James feared his essay had found its way to the bottom of the Atlantic with the American ship the Arabic.26 Nor was Updike moving as fast on the production side as Scribner would have liked. To Wharton, Scribner voiced his frustration at having to send everything to Boston, “and not be able to crowd the work, as we could do in our own factory or if done under our direction.” Writing to Grant, who had offered to collate the American contributions, he noted more candidly that Wharton’s expectations were unrealistic: “It is a more difficult matter to get such a book into shape than she perhaps realizes, but we shall pull through in some way.”27
Scribner did pull through, but not in time to catch the Christmas gift-book market, which had been the main target of the project—an outcome which, as Lee suggests, contributed to Wharton’s decision to shift to Appleton as her publisher after the war.28 This was a bitter disappointment for Wharton, compounded by the news of James’s debilitating series of strokes in early December, and the upheaval of finding new premises for her sewing workroom when the French government requisitioned the building in which it had lodged. The book finally came out on 22 January 1916 and was, Scribner assured her, “a very fine example of bookmaking.”29 Good taste had triumphed, but this taste was also the Achilles’ heel of the project. By late April, Scribner could report to Wharton that sales of the book had been satisfactory, largely through the tireless efforts of Wharton’s sister-in-law Minnie Jones, who had coaxed and bullied the ranks of New York society into purchasing the volume. However, the production of the book had been so lavish that of the nine thousand dollars of sales, seventy-five hundred dollars had been eaten up in costs, mostly incurred by Updike.30
Fortunately, Wharton was not only relying on sales of the book. Through Minnie, she had arranged an auction of the original artworks and manuscripts at the American Art Gallery in New York on 25 January. Authors, including James and Roosevelt, who had submitted typescript copy for the printers, had also laboriously copied out their own words by hand to create a more marketable commodity. James’s manuscript of “The Long Wards” sold for $500; Scribner himself paid $575 for General Joffre’s contribution; Wharton’s short poem “The Tryst,” a hastily written, emotive piece, which she described to Minnie as “doggerel,” sold for $350. The auction was exactly the sort of society charity event that Wharton would lampoon in her novel A Son at the Front; but the numbers added up. After expenses, the auction netted almost seven thousand dollars—more than four times what the book itself raised in the first few months.31 Wharton had been right that the New York upper classes liked their culture in collectible form—as shown by the fact that the deluxe fifty-dollar edition of The Book of the Homeless had been the first to sell out. She also relished, no doubt, the verdict of the New York Times on the book, which praised her preface for its “direct, simple and graphic style, its personality and singleness of heart.” Like almost every other contribution, it was, the reviewer added, “a piece of real literature.”32
Wharton had not pitched the book as a political statement, but this did not mean that she wished to avoid the controversial aspects of the war within its pages. And as her own poem “The Tryst” demonstrates, accounts of the suffering of civilians, especially children, were not only powerfully poignant but also fairly effective at extracting dollars from the public—or at least they had been up until now. But as Ferris Greenslet had discovered, the best time to publish a war book was the day it was accepted by the publisher. By the time The Book of the Homeless came out, the mood both in American and Europe had shifted from that of mid-1915. Images of Belgian atrocities no longer had quite the shock value or even the credibility that they had commanded six months before, and most Americans were hoping that Wilson would negotiate both sides into peace. Ars longa, vita brevis—a phrase which in this context translates as the somewhat obvious truth that the production of beautiful art books could never keep pace with the rapid events, the fickle tastes, and the brutally short lives of the midwar period.
Slow though it was, the push to get the book through the printers meant that Wharton, overstretched with her relief work in Paris, did not take as much time over the placing of the different contributions as she might have. The book is grouped generically, with poems and artworks all placed together in the opening section, and all the prose works together at the back of the book. Opportunities to highlight many of the book’s recurring themes and motifs have been missed. Monet’s beautifully executed crayon sketch of boats on a beach might have sat dynamically alongside Conrad’s account of his escape with his family from Poland through Austria at the start of the war, full as this is of reminiscences of his life at sea and his interest in the underwater war of the U-boats. Renoir’s sketch of his young son could have illustrated James’s elegy for wounded youth in “The Long Wards.” The scattered references to homes and houses seem almost accidental, which they evidently were not in a book sold in aid of the homeless; some judicious placing would have illuminated this central image. Wharton either did not understand or did not leave time for the creative possibilities of editing, which could have fused this collection into an elegant statement about the war. The raw material was good enough; certain pieces, at least those by James and Yeats, have become canonical texts. Despite this, The Book of the Homeless offers a less satisfying and lively read than contemporary issues of Scribner’s Magazine or the Atlantic Monthly, in which poems and pictures are placed for maximum effect, and the pieces jostle against each other for attention. Nevertheless, despite the slightly wooden placement of the items (or perhaps because of it), the crush of voices and perspectives gathered in The Book of the Homeless aligns the volume with a technique that would become increasingly useful for representing the war and its aftermath: montage.
Wharton was the figure who linked everything in the project together. Yet, seen on paper without an intimate knowledge of the book’s production history, the contributors would have appeared as an unlikely, almost a surreal, grouping of disparate voices. Where else could one possibly find André Gide sharing pages with Theodore Roosevelt, or the actress Sarah Bernhardt within the same cover as the great Harvard philosopher George Santayana? The spectrum of political hues runs from pacifist to belligerent, with every shade in between. As with the potential thematic connections, Wharton has not made the most of these startling contrasts—although this failure also creates, perhaps unwittingly, a democratizing effect in which the words of the actress, the general, and the man or woman of letters are presented in flat series and without hierarchy, as though to underscore that the war described in this volume defies expression by the single voice, and can only be apprehended in fragments. This effect is also intensified by the mix of French and English in the book, and by the fact that most of the artworks are either studies for other works or unfinished sketches, thus showing artistic expression in process—in stark contrast with the lovingly produced material object in which they were embedded. The majority of these visual images are informal pencil or charcoal sketches of contributors to the volume, so that many of the named figures within the book are encountered from two angles, as both a speaker and a subject, as both a voice and a face. Each of these faces, the volume silently reminds us, sees the war through its own eyes and from its own point of view.
Fragmentation, brevity, mixed media, diverse voices, conflicting perspectives, anticlimax: over the next two decades, these would become standard devices of the self-conscious literary text—although Wharton herself would continue to deliver her carefully controlled narratives, and readers would continue to devour them. At first glance, The Book of the Homeless has little in common with the radical, collaborative literary ventures of that decade on both sides of the Atlantic, such as Blast, New Numbers, or the Seven Arts. These publications are often seen as the rightful precursors to the multimedia format of the experimental yet fashionable literary periodicals of the 1920s such as the Little Review, the Dial, or the Criterion, in which many later responses to the war, including poetry by Cummings and Eliot, were published. However, as a sustained look at The Book of the Homeless shows, many of the distinctive elements of these journals were also employed in established and elitist literary circles such as those around Wharton—partly out of necessity. The story of her book reveals how multiplicity, fragmentation, and paradox were all produced in this text by the conditions of the war, and the exigencies of producing collaborative art in the midst of cultural confusion. As such, it provides one of those missing links in the narrative of how the war shaped the literature which followed it. Wharton’s volume bears the hallmarks of a rushed job, but even that rush can be seen as a defining element of modern life, and her loss, or dispersal, of editorial control can be read as an experiment in a less individualistic, author-centered way of creating text. In her search for a format in which the bewilderment and fragmentation of war might be communicated, she had clearly struck on something that had potential.
On Friday 6 May 1916, John Purroy Mitchell, the mayor of New York, had a bad day at the office. He decided to request the postponement of a memorial service in Carnegie Hall the following day, organized by the American Rights Committee to mark the anniversary of the sinking of the Lusitania. It was billed as a memorial service, but there was no disguising the political intent of the event. Three thousand tickets had been issued, a program of organ music, including Chopin’s “Funeral March” and the patriotic song “America” was planned. A “Lusitania Declaration,” calling for the severance of diplomatic relations with Germany, had already been drafted. A small book of poetry had been specially printed for sale at the event. Mayor Mitchell was worried. On 4 May, the U.S. government had asked the German government to suspend submarine warfare against neutral shipping, and Mitchell claimed that the meeting would jeopardize negotiations and cause scuffles in the streets with pacifist protestors. He called in the organizers and “suggested” that they defer it. His actions were taken, he claimed, “to avoid possible embarrassment to the national government or anything which might produce disorder in the city.”33 But if he was hoping to divert attention away from the anniversary of the sinking of the Lusitania, he had miscalculated. The New York Times gave the story of the postponement front-page coverage, reported the planned program, and printed the draft “Lusitania Declaration” in full. It also gave front-page prominence to the event when it was finally allowed to go ahead two weeks later on Friday, 19 May, and printed the main speeches. However, by then most of the three thousand ticket holders had drifted away to other entertainments, and a crowd of only a few hundred showed up. The “Lusitania Declaration” was redrafted to include a condemnation of Mayor Mitchell’s “suppression” of the original meeting as well as the failure of Germany to respond satisfactorily to the U.S. request for safe passage at sea. Public outrage was successfully motivated, and letters to the editor of the New York Times about the violation of American free speech flew thick and fast. The government was unmoved. Wilson, already planning his presidential reelection campaign, which would run in the fall of 1916 on the slogan “He kept us out of the war,” was unlikely to rethink his position in the light of these events.
Caught in the middle of this debate was the small red paperback booklet of verse, sold by ushers at the Carnegie Hall event for twenty-five cents. What Is Your Legion? by Grace Fallow Norton comprised twenty-one poems calling openly for America’s involvement in the war. It sold 240 copies on the night of the meeting, which was not a bad showing considering how few people turned up. Over the next six months it would sell a further thousand copies across the United States and in Canada. Norton donated her profits from the book, in the end only a few dollars, to the American Rights Committee. But unlike The Book of the Homeless, this pamphlet was never about the money. It was a statement of allegiance.
After Norton and her husband George Macrum sailed home in November 1914, they had spent the following months between their little house in Woodstock and a rented apartment on East 31st Street in New York. Macrum gave art classes, continued painting, and tried to sell his pictures from the Brittany trip to pay the bills. Norton took her time finishing the poems for Roads, drafting and redrafting them carefully in spare evenings between her engagements as a piano accompanist. Writing about the war was a draining and seemingly futile process: “I felt like a butterfly barking at a cyclone,” she wrote to Greenslet as she sent him a section of the manuscript.34 In April 1916, just as Roads was going to the press, Norton wrote again with a suggestion for another volume of verse. “I had a writing fit about a month ago and wrote 23 poems in about three weeks, having mostly dreamed it out first in a very curious way. … And I daresay the work is as crude as though it were not so divinely inspired.”35 She had shown it around to friends and literary contacts in New York, including Professor Franklin Giddings, a sociologist at Columbia University and a key member of the American Rights Committee. This Committee, closely aligned with the Preparedness movement, was chaired by the publisher and Civil War veteran Major George Haven Putnam, and included Hamlin Garland, Booth Tarkington, Josiah Royce, and many more writers and academics within its ranks. It was bankrolled by some of the most respectable surnames in America: Adamses, Abbotts, Curtises, Emersons, Hales, Longfellows, and Wendells.36 Despite his sympathy with the content, Giddings was unable to undertake to publish a pamphlet of poems, but he showed them to Putnam, who pronounced them “well deserving to come into print.”37 Meanwhile, Norton had enlisted Greenslet. He was a little wary of the “slap-dash” quality of the verse, but still felt it was “pithy and timely stuff, and ought to see the light.”38 If a backer could be found to underwrite the project, Houghton Mifflin would, wrote Greens-let, “be very glad indeed to handle them both on poetic and patriotic grounds.” He signed off from this letter, “Belligerently yours.”39 Three days later, on 24 April, Norton sent the revised copy of the poems, along with the news that Elizabeth Stillman Chamberlain, wife of a Columbia professor, had taken an interest in the project and would back the project against any losses to the publisher. Would it be possible, Norton asked, to have the pamphlet for 7 May, for the meeting at Carnegie Hall? Could the books have a red paper cover? “It would please me enormously to have just the right shade.” She concluded, “The word ‘patriotic’ in your last letter brings its usual thrill. It is a fine, beautiful word and we may have to pay a big price for it. Who knows?” Greenslet wrote back, promising to set up the type at once, apparently undaunted by the two-week turnaround, although there was one minor disappointment: “The fact seems to be that owing to the war it is impossible to get red paper. It’s an aniline dye or something, and the Germans, among their other atrocities, have prevented its exportation.”40 Norton, however, insisted on the color, offering to “pay for that lovely red dress, if it must be paid for, out of my pocket.”41 Greenslet, patiently attentive to detail, and probably aware from Norton’s correspondence how little she could afford such a gesture, tracked some down in the end.
What did it matter—the color of the cover? Norton’s anthology Roads had been closely attuned to the moods and associations of color. Her earlier war poems in the section of Roads called “The Red Road” had played on the passionate, violent, even diabolical connotations of red, like a lit fuse running from poem to poem. But red was a term that was also beginning to carry political overtones, and which would become one of the most contentious epithets of postwar America. With her wide spectrum of friends and contacts in anti-establishment circles, Norton would certainly have known of the Little Red Song Book of the Industrial Workers of the World, in which the organization’s ambition to “form the new society within the shell of the old,” was set to music. Despite the antiwar stance of the organization, the rhetoric of militarism was regularly adapted to voice the aspirations of the working class to struggle for victory over capitalism. This was quite literally the case in the appropriation of the Civil War song “Hold the Fort,” which appeared in the 1914 edition of the Song Book with revised, labor-friendly lyrics:
We meet today in freedom’s cause
And raise our voices high;
We’ll join our hands in union strong
To battle or to die.
Hold the fort for we are coming—
Union Men, be strong.
Side by side we battle onward.
Victory will come.42
Even before the First World War broke out, lyricists such as Joe Hill, the most widely published of the IWW songwriters, was rejecting national allegiance in favor of anticapitalist radicalism. “Should I ever be a soldier,” he had written in 1913,
’Neath the Red Flag I would fight;
Should the gun I ever shoulder,
It’s to crush the tyrant’s might.43
In this song, as Van Wienen notes, class war became “the justifiable, even necessary, alternative to national defense,” and the violent wartime repressions of IWW activities were ominously prefigured.44 Hill would not witness this. In November 1915, he was executed by firing squad in a Salt Lake City jail, convicted of a murder that very few people believed he had committed. The IWW masterminded a high-publicity campaign to secure him a new trial, in which Wilson himself had attempted to intervene, but the Utah Supreme Court would not be swayed. Throughout his confinement, Hill had carried on making up songs in prison, where his songs had so often been sung by others. In 1919, the middle volume of U.S.A., John Dos Passos would characterize Hill as “forming the structure of the new society within the jails of the old.”45
Norton’s determination to issue What Is Your Legion? in the format of a blood-red pamphlet established both a kinship and a contrast with the Little Red Song Book, so recently the focus of intense public attention. Her book was the same size, weight, and color, but the opening poem, “O Say, What Is Your Legion?” announced a very different response to the war. This was a call to the American people not to stand aloof but to choose a side; and the conclusion of the poem left no doubt about which side Norton recommended:
My people, O my people, whose towns the sea has spared,
O say, what is your legion? How has your legion fared?
And the music of your marching,—is your music surging shrill
Where the world rocks and shivers, uttering its will?
My land, eyrie of eagles whose wings beat by the sea!
When shall we cry to Belgium, “Our hearts are with you—free!”?46
Unlike Wharton, Norton does not labor the plight of Belgium as an incentive for action. Instead she appeals to the past—most specifically the shared republican past of France and America. “When Lafayette Came” recalls America’s debt to the French general who defied King Louis XVI to serve against the British in the Revolutionary War. She also aligns the reader’s sympathy with Daniel Webster, whose powerful speech in favor of Greek independence in 1824 was an open criticism of the newly minted Monroe Doctrine, and with Germany’s failed revolution of 1848,
that dear lost year, so great,
So brief, so black, so bright—
When your soul yearned for liberty.47
Defiance of a misguided government, these poems suggest, is often the noblest route. The obvious implication, especially given the context of the book’s debut at Carnegie Hall, was that these instances from the past served as models for speaking out against Wilson’s policy of neutrality. However, there are also poems in the booklet which betoken a more radical attitude to government. In “Blunders and Faults” and in “Vast Russia” she condemns the tyranny of czarist Russia, while celebrating the “young noble students crying, ‘Liberty!’”48 In “Come to the Door of Your Heart” she berates the captains of American industry, the very class of people who had put up the money for the Lusitania rally, for growing rich on the proceeds of the wartime economy:
O come to the door of your heart!
Your servants would send me away;
They say you are sitting apart,
Counting your gold all the day.
They say your tills overflow,
That your bright gold rings and chimes,—
That its chiming covers so
The din of these warring times!49
The speaker of the poem stands at the door, Christ-like, unregarded, offering redemption and wholeness through engagement with the fate of the wider world. Norton’s depiction of Germany seems cartoonlike in “Blood and Iron,” where she characterizes “An iron land with an iron god / and no faith in man save under an iron rod.”50 However, her invective is all for the kaiser, and ultimately her justification for the Allied cause is that France and Britain are fighting to topple “an armed and iron monarchy,” to free the German people (although she does have to do some fancy footwork to excuse Britain its king and its empire).51 Perhaps the most vivid statement of Norton’s position is in the coda to the collection, “This Book”:
I saw this book in a dream.
I held it within my hands;
I waited my soul’s commands.
Red is the color of blood,
The color of brotherhood;
Red is the color of flame—
I saw this book in a dream.52
This poem makes no secret of its political sympathies. However, there are other resonances at work here too. There is more than an echo of the “Author’s Apology” which opens the second volume of John Bunyan’s The Pilgrim’s Progress, another work of conscience, also based on a dream, also defiant of political authority and insistent on the rights of the individual—but ironically also a text which had become widely accepted as an exemplar of sound moral and cultural values in the prewar era.53 Indeed, this is a text that resonates through other poems of Norton’s both in this collection and in Roads, which is so clearly structured around the idea of a spiritual journey, though not an explicitly religious one, through the turmoil of emotional change and war. Norton deftly maneuvers her reader into, at the very least, acquiescence with her aspirations for international political change by her apparent acceptance of mainstream values. However, woven through certain familiar and bland points of reference are those other more radical sentiments, which would not have been at all out of place in the Little Red Song Book: “The brothers of our souls! Who are they? When / The cry is ‘Men or Kings?’ our brothers answer ‘Men!’”54 In 1916, this sympathy with international socialist ambitions did not appear to present Norton or—perhaps more tellingly—her publisher with any dilemma about her commitment to American nationalism. As her comments to Greenslet show, Norton considered herself “patriotic,” and her poems express a blend of Emersonian individualism and socialist comradeship that would have been impossible to market even a few months later to an American public suspicious of Bolshevik designs on Western democracy. However, in May 1916, this position dovetailed neatly with the rhetoric of benevolent expansionism that was quickly becoming the most convincing argument for American intervention in the war. This was certainly the tone of the Lusitania meeting. Putnam’s speech, reported the next day in the New York Times, offered a rationale for action which has an oddly familiar air for modern-day readers:
We have a State gone mad to deal with. The other States of Europe are trying now to curb this mad State, and I declare that the time has now come when the United States should act with France and England and Belgium and their allies in the cause they are fighting for. They are fighting for principles which every American should hold dear. They are fighting for democracy against autocracy. Germany believes that the United States is her enemy. The German people have been fed lies concerning the United States and its attitude in this war. If at the end of this war the Teutons win we will have the job on our hands of fighting for our lives. We are sure of one enemy. Let’s be careful to keep the friendship of those who are still our friends.55
The fear of the “rogue” state, the sense of alliance with a common international cause, the promotion of democracy and founding principles, the distinction between foreign states and their peoples, but the unity between the American state and hers, national security, special relationships: these have become familiar arguments for American intervention overseas throughout the past century. Woodrow Wilson and his advisors are often accused of inventing these tropes retrospectively to justify a decision to act in 1917, when neutrality became politically untenable. However, these ideas were clearly well-rehearsed among the American intellectual classes many months before they became White House policy.
After America entered the war in 1917, Norton’s husband, George Macrum, volunteered to work with wounded soldiers with the YMCA in France. Later, he was seriously ill during the Spanish flu epidemic of 1919. Norton tried to get back to France too, but her poor eyesight and a recurring cough barred her from volunteer service. The little house which she had built in Woodstock burned to the ground, destroying many of Macrum’s paintings from the months in Brittany, and many traces of her childhood. Norton increasingly earned a living through translation work, and in 1917 found herself caught up with a bestseller as the translator of The Odyssey of a Torpedoed Transport, a series of anonymously published letters supposedly written by a French merchant seaman, “Y.,” but really the fictional work of Maurice Larrouy (1882–1939). In 1919, Norton joined Macrum in Paris after his discharge, and around the time of the Paris Peace Conference, which she found profoundly disillusioning, she was translating political pamphlets for the League for International Conciliation. One of these recounted the German workers’ revolution of 1918; another called for more lenient treatment of postwar Germany in the Treaty of Versailles, warning that a harsh settlement would store up trouble for the future. The couple were largely based in France through the 1920s and 1930s, but by the outbreak of the Second World War, Norton and Macrum were back in the United States, living in Sloatsburg, New York, and voting for F.D.R. During the 1940s, Macrum abandoned his painting because of a shake in his hands caused by a palsy; Norton gave up writing in solidarity. However, she never gave up her left-wing views. Her great niece Ellen Weiss recounts the story of an elderly Norton in the 1950s on a family visit to Washington, DC, asking to be taken to the visitors’ gallery in the Senate but having to be hastily ushered out when it became clear that what she planned to do when she got there was to lean over the balcony and spit on Senator McCarthy’s head. It would have been a dramatic gesture of contempt for his treatment of the creative community, but not even that would have made Grace Fallow Norton “un-American.” Hers was a view of nationality that transcended party politics.
4. Grace Fallow Norton’s passport photograph, c. 1920. Photograph courtesy of Ellen Weiss.
Across the Atlantic, another aspiring writer was experiencing the disillusionment of war, but this time at closer quarters. Ellen La Motte had arrived in Paris in November 1914, eager to put her extensive nursing skills to good use, but soon found herself asking: “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?”56 She had been determined to work at the front, although she was, as her friend Gertrude Stein noted, rather “gun shy.”57 It was probably Stein who sent what La Motte called the “cryptic message” which brought her to France in the first place. It said simply, “Come—American Ambulance,” a phrase which called up images of “service on the battlefield, gathering in the wounded on stretchers and conveying them to a waiting ambulance,” or working night and day for eighteen-hour shifts in a dressings station without time to eat or sleep.58 Gun shy or not, La Motte accepted the challenge, but she was quickly to discover that little in this war would be as expected. The “Ambulance” turned out to be the spacious and lavishly equipped American Hospital in the suburb of Neuilly. There were ten-hour shifts and regular days off; there were wealthy volunteers who showed up for work wearing the family pearls with their uniforms; there was tea every day at three o’clock; and there was an overabundance of clean sheets and medicines, of dressings and cigarettes for the patients.
It was only the patients themselves who were in short supply. During the Battle of the Marne, earlier in the autumn, the wounded had come in twenty a day and more; now there were barely twenty a week. There were 350 patients in a hospital that could hold 400. La Motte heard that over thirty thousand hospital beds in the city lay empty. Since the Germans had retreated, Paris was too far from the front to serve as a major medical clearing center; the hospital was now, she noted wryly, nothing more than “a clearing house for sentiment.”59 Anyone who wanted to help was taken on, regardless of their experience or skills: aristocrats, both American and French, artists, painters, opera singers, writers. Some were hardworking and adaptable. Others seemed more intent on “gathering experiences which will tell well in next year’s ball-rooms.” Many came for the regular meals and the company. “Do come down to tea,” an upper-class auxiliary urged La Motte one afternoon. “Why, one meets all the smartest people in Paris down at tea!”60 There were, of course, terrible injuries to be treated. As La Motte quickly surmised, those patients who had lived long enough to make it to hospital were not so likely to die of their wounds, as of the gangrenous infections that set in from lying too long in the mud of no man’s land, or waiting for days in railway stations or hospital trains on the way to Paris. What was needed, she could see, was more effective care closer to the front. “Somewhere off, outside of Paris, there is Hell let loose, and daily we hear tales of wounded men lying in hundreds in the market place of some little French village, neglected and uncared for; but that is another story.”61
La Motte’s exasperation with the amateur, thrill-seeking volunteers of the American Hospital was to be expected, perhaps. Its patrician atmosphere offended both her nonconforming views about the position and potential of women in society, and her long years of medical training and experience. Ellen Newbold La Motte was born in Louisville, Kentucky, in 1873. Her father, Ferdinand La Motte, was from French Huguenot stock, and her mother, also Ellen, was a Newbold—a name which figures regularly in Wharton’s family tree.62 La Motte had studied at the Johns Hopkins Training School for Nurses in Baltimore, graduating in 1902, and then serving as a supervising nurse for the Johns Hopkins Hospital. It was during these years that she had struck up a friendship with Stein, who was studying there for a medical degree, which she never completed. From 1904 to 1905, La Motte was assistant superintendent at St. Luke’s Hospital in St. Louis, but in 1905 she returned to Baltimore to work as a tuberculosis nurse with the Instructive Visiting Nurses Association. In 1910, she took up a role as the superintendent of the Tuberculosis Division of the Baltimore Health Department, a position she held until 1913.63 Her methods were modern and radical. Shortly before leaving for France, she wrote a handbook for TB nurses, dismissing the established modes of treating the disease via home care, and advocating the voluntary segregation of patients in isolated hospital wards to halt the spread of the disease.64 It was a characteristically unsentimental solution to a difficult and emotive issue. The British Medical Journal praised her approach, but this was a controversial stance, which set La Motte at odds with her own colleagues, many of whom had long campaigned for a greater reliance on visiting nurses.65 However, the picture that emerges of La Motte through her own writing is one of a woman who rarely flinched from telling an uncomfortable truth.
La Motte’s public health role was also characterized by an awareness of the potential of women professionals in a heavily male-dominated field. So, it was no surprise that on her arrival in Paris she engaged with another of the careers increasingly opening up for women: journalism. Buoyed up by the completion of her book on TB, and sharply aware that as a nurse she would have access to places and scenes which professional correspondents would never be allowed to see, La Motte was keen to capitalize on this privileged viewpoint. Unlike Borden, she had limited literary experience, although in her thirties she had published essays on European hospitals, each of which was a curious blend of public-health research and travel writing; she also edited the Johns Hopkins Nurses’ Alumnae Magazine in 1908.66 She had always wanted to write, and a monthly stipend paid to her by a cousin, the wealthy industrialist Alfred I. DuPont, had encouraged her to resign her nursing post in Baltimore in 1913 with a view to developing her literary abilities. La Motte was always grateful to DuPont for this “stipe.” As she would write to him after the war: “I shall never forget that it is owing to you entirely that I was able to give up my work in Baltimore and to have the leisure to undertake the work that I had always wanted to do, that is, write. Without your help all these years that would have been impossible. I should have just had to go on doing work which finally grew to be dull and mechanical, and could never have afforded to live while I tried to make myself known as a writer.”67 However, there must have been many moments during the war when she was sharply aware of the irony that the money which supported her humanitarian and literary activities was made by the wartime boom of activity at the DuPont munitions factories at Wilmington. During the winter of 1914–15, La Motte was also beginning to mix with the British and American writers that circulated through Stein’s Paris home, and learning to appreciate the sharp contours of Stein’s own literary style, contours that would shape her own expression also. La Motte began by writing up her impressions of the American Hospital for the Survey, a weekly journal devoted to social welfare issues, originally launched by the Charity Organisation of the City of New York in the 1890s as a vehicle for discussing and disseminating philanthropic ventures. By 1915, it had moved decisively to the left of the political spectrum, partly through the editorial involvement of the prominent social reformer and pacifist Jane Addams, whose return from her peace tour to Europe, including the International Women’s Congress at The Hague, headed the front page of the issue in which La Motte’s article about the American Hospital appeared in July 1915. However, by the time this piece was in print, La Motte herself was in Belgium.
As her presence at the American Hospital came to seem more and more superfluous, La Motte had begun to consider other opportunities for wartime service. Initially, she thought she might go to work in Serbia with her friend Emily Chadbourne, who would become her long-term companion, to work with the Scottish Women’s Hospitals. However, at some point in the spring of 1915, La Motte was introduced to Borden, probably by Stein, who was on friendly terms with the Borden-Turners.68 Soon afterward, La Motte took the decision to join the new hospital at Rousbrugge, and on 20 June, she set off with a group of nurses for Dunkirk. It took ten hours to complete a journey that before the war would have taken three. Papers had to be checked and rechecked, and La Motte had the sensation “of being locked in” to the military zone like “a prisoner at large.”69 They were met at the station by “B.,” who drove them to a little, wooden seaside hotel. In the morning they sat on the beach and explored the bustling town. There were plenty of signs of the war, pasted strips of paper in the windows, distant guns, an occasional damaged house, but the sun was shining, the sea wind was sweet, and the water in the bay glittered and sparkled. “After the fever, the rush, the gossip and intrigue of Paris, this war zone seemed restfulness and peace.”70
It was all different the following day. After six weeks of relative quiet, Dunkirk faced a fourteen-hour bombardment. It began at three in the morning, with a bomb dropped by a German plane, and all day at forty-minute intervals seventeen-inch shells fell on the town. The residents hid in their cellars, or fled to the beach, but nowhere was safe. This was the same bombardment that Wharton heard as she drove to La Panne to meet the Belgian king, the bombardment that ripped apart the Church of St. Eloi and the bourgeois house nearby. This was the work of the siege gun at Dixmude that had sounded to Wharton like “the closing of all the iron shop shutters in the world,” announcing the end of domestic and mercantile normality.71 Like Wharton, La Motte was both fascinated and appalled at the contrast between “the peaceful workaday life of yesterday and this sunlit, silent, stricken scene of today.”72 Caught in the town center as a new round of firing began with her fellow nurse “W.,” La Motte felt utterly outwitted by the situation: “In that fearful moment, there was not one intellectual faculty that I could call upon. There was nothing in past experience, nothing of will-power, of judgement, of intuition, that could serve me. I was beyond and outside and apart from the accumulated experience of a lifetime. My intelligence was worthless in this moment of supreme need. Every decision would be wrong, every movement would be in the wrong direction, and it was also wrong to stand still.”73 It was a sharp and vivid lesson to La Motte that the war would test her capacities in ways that she could not previously have imagined.
A local family took the two nurses down to their cellar to shelter until the firing paused, and then they scrambled back to the hotel. But there was nowhere to hide and nothing to do. La Motte sat on the shuttered balcony with the other nurses, drinking tea and eating chocolate, “six of us, calm, smiling, apparently indifferent.” Meanwhile the shells whistled overhead or struck nearby, once less than a hundred yards away. They could have asked an ambulance to drive them away into the countryside, but it seemed an admission of failure before they had even reached their hospital. “The authorities,” she reasoned, “would consider it an indication of how we would stand by our patients under fire.” So, to calm her nerves, La Motte picked up her pen, composing the account of the bombardment that she would later send to the Atlantic Monthly with the title “Under Shell-Fire at Dunkirk.” “I am writing this to kill time,” she wrote, “yet as each shell strikes I spring to the window, and my chair falls backwards, while the others laugh. … And so we sit on the balcony and watch the bursting shells—and wait.”74
Did she really write an elegant eight-page journal article as shells whistled overhead? The final result seems too polished; the beginning of the piece gives no clue of this origin; the admission of her paralyzing fear under fire for the first time seems too considered. The task would have required incredible composure. However, it is not at all unlikely that something, which later became the article, took shape on that day and in that place—in the same way that many of Borden’s sketches were drafted on location. There are too many accounts of soldiers and other service personnel turning to reading and writing as a way of distracting the mind during shelling for La Motte’s claim to be dismissed as fanciful. Siegfried Sassoon writes vividly of repeating verse to himself during shell bombardments, and of reading to maintain his sense of identity during the endless, impersonal hours of boredom and waiting that army life induced.75 Captain, later Lieutenant Colonel F. J. Roberts, MC, founding editor of the trench magazine the Wipers Times (named after the pronunciation of Ypres by the British troops), even copyedited under fire. “Have you ever sat in a trench in the middle of a battle and corrected proofs?” he would write after the war, “Try it.”76 But whatever she put on paper that day, La Motte’s presentation of herself in the act of writing is significant. Like James, she wished to present herself to the world as an author, as an independent consciousness. Her tactics here are also like those in Mildred Aldrich’s stylized “letters” from her house on the Marne, or in Borden’s present-tense internal monologue in “Moonlight.” The reader is invited to step into the immediate instant of the writer’s experience, as the distance between events and the moment of reading is collapsed by the use of present tense, of small sensory details, and a stream-of-consciousness blend of external and internal data. But there is more to it than that: writing is also presented as antithetical to the destruction of war. The violence and fear cannot be halted or reversed, cannot even at times be made to make sense, but if they can be put into words, they can to some extent be controlled. That, as James might have said, is one of the ways in which “art makes life,” and shapes experience. The act of writing in the face of death seems in some ways a trivial defiance—hence the laughter of La Motte’s companions, perhaps—but in a war where civilization seemed at stake to so many, it was a powerful statement of the cultural worth of text. Writing is always an attempt to cheat mortality, especially in a war zone, where the author both hopes and fears that the words committed to paper may outlive him or her. So, there is something doubly resonant in La Motte’s expression that she is “writing this to kill time”—before time can kill her. This was her attempt to “make a little civilization,” with “the inkpot aiding,” as James had suggested to Alfred Sutro.
La Motte’s intimate and confessional account of her experience at Dunkirk is stylistically very different from Borden’s sketch “Bombardment,” which narrates a scene of destruction from an aerial perspective, looking down like the insouciant plane on the antlike people of the “human hive” who “swarmed out onto the sands.”77 However, the two accounts fit closely together: the early-morning plane, the crowds on the beach, the siege gun in the distance, and the crater in the town square. It seems remarkable enough that Wharton and La Motte should both have witnessed and written about the same attack on 22 June 1915, but Borden’s account suggests that she, perhaps, was there too and used the same event in her writing. Of course, Dunkirk faced bombardment many times during the war, and Borden had worked there for several months earlier in 1915. Moreover, she does not name her bombarded town in The Forbidden Zone. It could be anywhere. High up where the plane flits about in the early-morning sunshine, names of towns, let alone of people, do not very much matter—which is exactly her point. Alternatively, she could have worked up her piece from firsthand accounts of the bombardment by La Motte or the other nurses. Her imagination was equal to that. Nevertheless, it also seems likely that Borden would come to Dunkirk to greet her hospital team. Who was “B.” who met them at the station with the motor car and drove to the dock to pick up supplies during the shelling? Was Borden one of the six sitting on the balcony watching the explosions all around them in the dusk? Did she recognize in La Motte’s compulsion to write under stress an instinct like her own?
Borden and La Motte would work closely together over the following year, often confined for weeks at a time in the claustrophobic world of the hospital compound, but their relationship remains something of a mystery. Borden makes no specific mention of La Motte in her writings, and does not appear to have corresponded with her after the war. La Motte’s correspondence with Stein and DuPont has been archived, and further unpublished material is still held privately, but no letters to Borden appear to have survived.78 In The Backwash of War, Borden appears as the directrice of the hospital, a cool, detached figure in an immaculately starched white uniform, level-headed in an emergency, but also capable of arguing with generals. In “A Joy Ride,” published in the Atlantic Monthly in October 1916, La Motte describes her as “the Directrice, who is my friend”—but even here the directrice gives orders, which La Motte must follow.79 It is tempting to think that the two women might have shared ideas and read drafts of each other’s work—but no real evidence of this has emerged, and there must have been little time for such niceties at the front. The writing of both women becomes markedly more daring after the summer of 1915, but whether this is due to an innovative lead given by one to the other, or the recent impact of Stein’s work on both of them, or is simply a reaction to the intensity of their war-zone experiences is impossible to say. Probably all of these factors were at play to some extent.
Despite this uncertainty about the impact of their shared context on their writing (or perhaps because of it), Borden and La Motte are often discussed together, under one chapter heading, as though two sides of some war-minted coin—the writer turned nurse on one side, and the nurse turned writer on the other.80 Margaret Higonnet describes their complementary accounts of the Rousbrugge hospital as like the “double X-ray” technique developed during the war for locating foreign bodies, usually shrapnel or bullets, hidden deep within the human form, by coordinating two X-ray pictures taken from different angles.81 This effect is most striking in those places where their narratives overlap—as they apparently do in their accounts of the bombardment at Dunkirk. But texts are never comprehensive—though, like X-rays, they do at times offer a view of what lies below the surface—and these contrasting verbal accounts create as much uncertainty and dislocation as they do precision. The apparent symmetry of Borden’s and La Motte’s binary view of the hospital at Rousbrugge is also further complicated by the perspective of Agnes Warner, who joined the unit in September 1915, and whose letters home describing the unit were published as a fund-raising collection My Beloved Poilus in 1917. Here Borden appears as Mrs. Turner, the capable manager, organizing concerts and paying for Christmas dinners. The intensity of experience voiced in La Motte’s and Borden’s texts is veiled by Warner’s optimism about her patients’ chances of recovery, and in conventional aspirations of service and resilience. “Good night, mother,” she writes, “these are sad times, but we must not lose courage.”82 Nevertheless, even Warner described in detail the grim injuries which flooded into the casualty clearing station, and began to question her nursing vocation under the stress of action at the front: “I think I shall have to find a new job when the war is over,” she wrote in April 1916, “for I don’t think I shall ever do any more nursing.”83 Warner’s letters, which were never intended for the public and were published without her knowledge, might have been expected to provide the most immediate view of Hôpital Chirurgical Mobile No. 1. However, the censoring of letters by military authorities, and the self-censorship of those who wrote home, often constrained by a desire to spare relatives and friends the full horrors of war, make these letters oddly less vital than the highly stylized and depersonalized texts of Borden and La Motte. Among other things, Warner’s letters serve as a reminder of Genthe’s point that the experimental litanies of futility, which have become accepted by many present-day readers as the definitive texts of the war, were only a tiny portion of the material published at the time: “Bitter narratives such as Ellen La Motte’s The Backwash of War were exceptions,” he writes. For Genthe, La Motte’s book is “the most bitterly disillusioned” of them all.84
One should also remember that for all their similarities of scene and even at times of tone, Borden and La Motte were sharply individual personalities, and responded to the war in different ways. Borden’s writing, like her life, is characterized by warmth, engagement and passionate determination, sometimes to the point of obsession. La Motte’s response to the war, both written and personal, is marked by reserve and irony. If they agreed on the fact that something was wrong with the running of this war and that readers had a right to know about it, this did not necessarily demonstrate how much they had in common, but rather that the great futility of the waste of human life at the front was so enormous as to override their differences. The persistent critical habit (which I am, of course, repeating here) of presenting Borden’s and La Motte’s work in tandem, although rewarding in so many ways, also runs the risk of fusing them into a composite figure, something like both of them, but not exactly either of them, a representative type—a daring, articulate, cynical yet dedicated war nurse, but a type nevertheless. However, if research into women’s accounts of the First World War has achieved anything in recent years, it has been to expose the dangers of creating such types, of attempting to generalize about women’s experience of the conflict—indeed about anybody’s experience of it.85 As La Motte’s writing demonstrates, one of the most insidious traits of war is the way in which it strips the individual of his or her particularity, and presents them as the arbitrary emblem of some group or cohort: a nation, a class, a gender, a regiment, an illness, or an injury. Their personalities, situations, and injuries are blurred, their features smoothed over, like those of a patient after clumsy plastic surgery. It is perhaps for this reason that her sketches of hospital life in The Backwash of War are so often titled with these labels which prove again and again, on a closer reading, to have so little to do with the people they describe: “Heroes,” “Women and Wives,” “A Belgian Civilian,” “Pour la Patrie,” “Locomotor Ataxia.” The only chapter that is titled with a personal name, “Esmerelda,” turns out to be about a goat—and a short-lived one at that. La Motte reminds us that just as texts do not always create clarity, names and categories do not always tell us what we need to know. Words are not reliable—especially the words of war.
La Motte’s work expresses a contradiction. Writing can function as a creative antidote to the destructive power of war, as a redemptive, truth-telling activity; it can also be used to skew perception, to wrong-foot the reader into accepting bland or flawed values. This contradiction is evident everywhere in The Backwash of War, where La Motte persistently undermines the rhetoric of war that would have been so omnipresent to her contemporary readers. For example, in the opening sketch of the book, “Heroes,” also published as an article in the Atlantic Monthly in August 1916, La Motte interrogates not just the prevalent use of the term hero to describe any soldier injured in action, but also the deeper cultural idea of what might constitute heroism. This sketch offers another example of Borden and La Motte overwriting each other, as it appears to relate the same set of events that Borden recounts in “Rosa”:
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. The journey was made in double-quick time, over rough Belgian roads. To save his life, he must reach the hospital without delay, and if he was bounced to death jolting along at breakneck speed, it did not matter. That was understood. He was a deserter, and discipline must be maintained. Since he had failed in the job, his life must be saved, he must be nursed back to health, until he was well enough to be stood up against a wall and shot. This is War. Things like this also happen in peace time, but not so obviously.86
Like Borden’s story, “Heroes” features a night nurse, although here she appears as a woman “given to reflection” who muses on the wastefulness of squandering valuable medical supplies on a man who is later to be executed. “However,” remarks the narrator, “the ether was a donation from America, so it did not matter.” This night nurse initially seems to stand in for the narrator, implying, as Higonnet suggests, that La Motte herself is the night nurse of Borden’s tale, the one who colludes in allowing the patient to rip off his dressings and thus hasten his own death.87 But La Motte’s decision to distance her night nurse into third-person narrative makes the equation of the author with her own character problematic. There is no “I” in this sketch, as there is in several others. If the thoughts or actions of the night nurse were ever those of La Motte, she has her own reasons for wanting to detach from them: perhaps so that the reader encounters these ideas not as the opinions of the narrator, but as floating questions to be tackled on their own merits; perhaps so that the division between character and narrator can be used to convey a range of conflicting responses to the situation; perhaps so that she can stand back and observe her own reactions. It is this sort of technique that distinguishes La Motte’s book from the vast majority of the nursing memoirs published both during and after the war, and makes her writing function as literature rather than reportage—even though many of the tactics of reportage also persist in her writing, the short sentences, the paucity of adverbs and adjectives, the plain but vital details. The indeterminacy of viewpoint in this sketch mirrors the ethical uncertainly posited by the events it portrays. La Motte does not answer the complex questions that she raises in “Heroes.” Is the attempted suicide more or less of a hero than the other wounded soldiers in the ward? Here is Alexandre, who smokes in his bed, making the other patients nauseous; vain Felix who is more concerned about his mustache than the fistula “which filled the whole ward with its odour”; Alphonse, who eats a box of pears sent from home without offering a bite to anyone else, then vomits up the whole lot; Hippolyte, with his filthy jokes. Are these men heroes? They have been forced to fight by ideals not their own. Is there not also something heroic in the attempt at escape from the pointlessness of military service? And is there anything heroic about the “dead-end occupation” of patching men up to be shot at again?
La Motte’s book and its title are predicated on the awareness of a deep ambiguity in everything connected to the war. As she writes, “everything has two sides,” and any nobility of action is balanced by the “dirty sediment at the bottom of most souls.” La Motte’s sense of her role as a writer is as one who takes on the task of exposing that sediment: “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. They are both true.”88 Thus, The Backwash of War, betrays her increasing disquiet at her own part in a medical and military system that can celebrate as a “surgical triumph” the medical treatment of a quadruple amputee, sent home to his father, blinded, without hands or legs, wishing only to be allowed to die. As Hallett notes, for many nurses at the front, writing, in its many forms, offered a means of “containing” the trauma of war, which threatened at times to overwhelm them: “Effective, efficient and disciplined, their compassion cloaked by their apparently closed and impenetrable personalities, nurses poured their own trauma into the pages of their letters, diaries and semi-fictional accounts, where it survives to haunt us today.”89 However, one of the troublesome and distinctive elements of La Motte’s work is her apparent anxiety about the inability of words and texts either to “contain” experience, or to generate purposeful meaning from it. Her own expression is weighted with heavy irony, constantly establishing double readings and reversals of reference: the inconsiderate “heroes”; the “surgical triumph” which is so far from triumphant; the assurance that “France is democratic,” despite the fact that the load of the war is so unequally spread between social classes.90 “Finished here!” cries the surgeon on one side of the surgical screen to announce to the nurses that his operation is a success. “Finished here,” replies the directrice from the other side of the blood-spattered sheet to relate that his patient is dead.91
The Backwash of War explicitly voices unease about the nature and purpose of writing in the war zone, partly to underscore the difficulty of articulating the reality of war, but also to allow La Motte to explore her own growing sense of the contradiction between the demands of literature and of nursing. Marius the dying taxi driver shouts out his fury at the American volunteers who drive him to the hospital in the ambulance: “Strangers! Sightseers,” he sobs, “Do I not know how to drive, to manage an engine? What are they here for—France? No, only themselves! To write a book—to say what they have done—when it was safe!”92 The book to which Marius objects is presumably exactly the kind of book that La Motte herself was writing, a set of wartime sketches, a memoir, a book that suddenly seems heavy and uncomfortable in the reader’s hand. There are other forms of writing in the hospital too, though it is striking how seldom these represent genuine communication. In “The Interval,” a chapter concerned with the “gross, absurd, fantastic” interval between life and death, La Motte describes a soldier with a head injury, who writes continually, compulsively, but whose writing makes no sense to anyone:
Always and always, over and over again, he writes on the paper, and he gives the paper to every one who passes. He’s got something on his mind that he wants to get across, before he dies. But no one can understand him. No one can read what he has written—it is just scrawls, scribbles, unintelligible. … Once we took the paper away to see what he would do and then he wrote with his finger upon the wooden frame of the screen. The same thing, scribbles, but they made no mark on the screen, and he seemed so distressed because they made no mark that we gave him back his paper again, and now he’s happy. Or I suppose he’s happy. He seems content when we take his paper and pretend to read it. He seems happy, scribbling those words that are words to him but not to us. Careful! Don’t stand too close! He spits.93
Like La Motte writing under fire at Dunkirk, the scribbling man finds consolation in the act of putting pen to paper. However, the desire to cheat mortality by communicating the “something he wants to get across, before he dies” is cruelly frustrated by his inability to articulate his ideas in words that anybody else can understand. His written marks are no more effective than the tracing of his finger over the wooden frame of the screen. These words are words to him, but to no one else. He is appeased when others take his paper and “pretend to read it,” but in this case both writing and its counterpart of reading are worthless. The action of pouring out written signs parallels the action of spitting—an expulsion, a compulsion, not a signal from one consciousness to another. Nothing is passed on. The soldier’s thoughts, confused and fractured as they are, go unrecorded. Death engulfs them.
La Motte’s description of the scribbling man suggests a level of doubt in her own mind about the impact of the written word. What is most poignant about this anecdote is the urgency of the soldier’s activity, the evident importance of the material that must be relayed but cannot be understood. Something similar takes place in the sketch entitled “At the Telephone,” in which a delirious patient on the operating table imagines himself back in the trenches, trying to convey or receive a message over the telephone: “He struggled hard to get the connection, in this mind, over the telephone. The wires seemed to be cut, and he cried out in anxiety and distress. Then he grew more and more feeble, and gasped more and more, and became almost inarticulate in his efforts. He was distressed. But suddenly he got it. He screamed out very loud, relieved, satisfied, triumphant, startling them all. “Ça y est, maintenant! Ça y est! C’est le bon Dieu à l’appareil! (All right now! All right! It is the good God at the telephone.)”94 Like the papers handed out by the scribbling man, this message is delivered yet remains incoherent to those who receive it. The broken telephone connection and the scrawled, indecipherable text: both offer powerful metaphors for the breakdown of the individual consciousness and for the difficulty of conveying the reality of war to those who have not witnessed it for themselves.
At times, the distortions and incoherencies of the messages of the war zone are intentional. In “Women and Wives,” the heavily censored letters that travel back and forth between those working in the hospital and their wives deliberately conceal the horrors and hardships of life at war or at home, and the infidelities of the men with the sexually available women of the front. Letters must function as substitutes for wives, who are prohibited in the militarized zone. Indeed, it is the very inefficiency of these written letters as forms of communication which makes them desirable in a climate where the authorities would prefer certain truths not to be told: “Letters can be censored and all the disturbing items cut out, but if a wife is permitted to come to the War Zone, to see her husband, there is no censoring the things she may tell him. The disquieting, disturbing things. So she herself must be censored, not permitted to come. So for long weary months men must remain at the front, on active inactivity, and their wives cannot come to see them. Only other people’s wives may come. It is not the woman but the wife that is objected to. There is a difference. In war, it is very great.”95 La Motte goes on to muse about the corruption of a system which prefers the men of the front to have sex with the women of the war zone, to whom they have no commitments, than to be allowed visits from their wives who might bring tales from home, reminding the men of domestic obligations—thus inviting them to question the validity and necessity of their wartime roles. La Motte’s language here is striking. It is not just the letters that are censored, but the wife herself. The woman is not just debarred from writing freely, but is effaced, shut out—because she might tell the truth.
Such questions of censorship and access would acquire an immediacy of their own for La Motte in the months to come. By July 1916, the French line near Ypres had largely been taken over by the British army, and the hospital at Rousbrugge, now expanded to eighteen huts, including a specialist dental unit, was relatively quiet. Borden wrote to Colonel Morier, her main ally within the bureaucratic system of the French army, suggesting that the unit be moved to the Somme, where the British-French offensive that would generate over a million casualties was beginning. However, this was not straightforward. The French commander in the region was keen to keep a medical presence at Rousbrugge. There were also issues of red tape concerned with moving international nurses from one part of the front to another. New military regulations forbade non-French nurses from entering la zone interdite to nurse French soldiers—but Borden was not happy with the level of training which most French volunteers had received, and was furious that the service she and her nurses had given over the past year had not earned them more trust and respect from the authorities. She bombarded her superiors with letters, and eventually a compromise was reached.96 Hôpital Chirurgical Mobile No. 1 remained in Flanders with Agnes Warner in charge. British, American, and Canadian nurses working there would be allowed to continue to do so. Borden, however, would leave to run the new Hôpital d’Evacuation 32 at Bray-sur-Somme. In the end, she was allowed to take a handful of experienced nurses with her, on the understanding that these would be replaced by French nurses as they became available. It is not clear whether La Motte, who appears to have been in Paris in May and June of 1916, was denied permission to return to the military zone, or whether she took this breakup of the unit as an opportunity to turn her back on the war. What is certain is that in the summer of 1916, she gave up nursing for good, and turned her full attention to her writing. Stein noted that La Motte had “collected a set of souvenirs for her cousin Dupont of Nemours.” By this title, Stein meant Alfred I. DuPont, whose family mansion near Wilmington was named Nemours in recollection of the French city from which his ancestors had emigrated. These “souvenirs” were probably the shell cases, pieces of shrapnel and other military bric-a-brac that so many people collected in the war zone.97 But Stein’s turn of phrase suggests that La Motte’s writings from the front were in their own way “souvenirs,” twisted fragments of the war zone carried away as evidence of the reality of war. These verbal souvenirs were also, to an extent, for DuPont, whose money had allowed La Motte to travel. Over the summer, these fragments were brought together as The Backwash of War, and sent to G. P. Putnam in New York. It was issued in December 1916 in New York and London, although the British edition was almost immediately withdrawn. It was neither published nor distributed in France. It was, however, a modest success in the United States, where, as La Motte noted, “it did very well.”98
Just as La Motte was no longer in Paris when her impressions of the American Hospital went to press, by the time The Backwash of War was in the bookstores, she was almost as far away from the Western Front as it was possible to get. Traveling with Emily Chadbourne, she spent a year in China, where she quickly took an interest in the detrimental impact of the opium trade. The ironies and injustices of the drugs trade, sanctioned at this point by American and European governments alike, would form the backdrop to two books which she would write before the end of the war, a collection of short stories, Civilization (1919) and a book of travel writing and polemic Peking Dust (1919). This contentious issue would be the main focus of her writing for the rest of her career. She continued to publish books and magazine articles on the subject right up to her late sixties, and took an active role campaigning for international regulation of the opium trade.99 In the 1920s she advised the League of Nations on this problem, but became deeply frustrated at its inability to broker an agreement between the key nations. She was awarded the Lin Tse Hsu Memorial Medal by the Chinese Nationalist government in 1930 for her efforts. She also received the Order of Merit from the Japanese Red Cross, of which she was a special member. She remained active in the Johns Hopkins Nurses Alumnae Association as well as the Huguenot Society of America, the Authors League of America, the Society of Women Geographers, and the Women’s National Republican Club in New York. If anyone had imagined that redefining herself as a writer would distance La Motte from the world of public health and politics, they could not have been more mistaken.
Early in 1918, La Motte and Chadbourne were back in New York, preparing for the publication of La Motte’s collections of short stories and making plans for a second trip to China. However, passports were hard to obtain now that America was fully involved in the war, and much more sensitive than before about the political opinions of its citizens traveling abroad on nonmilitary business. La Motte enlisted the help of DuPont, who was willing to vouch personally for her loyalty to the United States—though not for that of Mrs. Chadbourne. He also warned the two women that in the current political climate any evidence of a proneutrality stance would immediately veto any chance of a passport to travel.100 Something else was about to happen which was to suggest to La Motte that her opinions and activities were being viewed with some suspicion. For several months The Backwash of War was advertised in the radical journal the Liberator, which had been conceived as a replacement for the Masses, which had collapsed in the wake of the unsuccessful trial of its editorial team in November 1917 on charges of obstructing enlistment. News vendors had refused to carry the paper, and soaring postal charges had made subscriptions unviable. The title folded. However, its charismatic editor, Max Eastman, was unwilling to keep out of circulation, and in March 1918 he launched a new venture which resurrected the name of William Lloyd Garrison’s anti-abolitionist paper the Liberator. Ellen La Motte was listed as a “contributing editor” and among the book notices in the back pages of the journal The Backwash of War appeared, price one dollar, with the description: “A Masterpiece.”101 In July, however, the publication of the Liberator was delayed. It appeared that something had caught the eye of the censor and had to be blacked out before the paper could be distributed. It was the recommendation of The Backwash of War. La Motte suspected that it would not be long before something went amiss with the publication of the book itself. As she wrote years later:
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.
“But why not? It reveals no military secrets. These sketches, while written of a French hospital, could apply equally well to any other hospital back of the lines—whether German, Russian or Serbian. They are true—”
“That is exactly the trouble,” I was told. Truth, it appears, has no place in war.102
Eager to avoid further official scrutiny or surveillance, La Motte abandoned her attempt to acquire a U.S. passport until the war was over, spending the final months of the conflict in the Catskill Mountains, New York State, with Chadbourne, writing and learning to drive a Ford car.103 G. P. Putnam issued a British edition of The Backwash of War in 1919, but it would be 1934 before it was available again to American readers. By the 1930s, perceptions of the war had changed radically—partly due to the emergence of many more disillusioned accounts of the war, such as those by Remarque, Sassoon, and Graves. La Motte’s text found its place among these, though it was difficult for readers even in the 1930s to remember how shocking this material had been in 1916 when it first emerged. One 1934 review compared the book to Henri Barbusse’s Le feu, also published in 1916.104 It was a shrewd comparison—not just because of the brutal honesty of both texts, but also because each of these works had, in their own ways, developed new strategies for writing about violence on an unfamiliar scale, and had laid the tracks on which later, more celebrated, narratives would run.
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. As an emerging writer, self-conscious about the role of literature in war and about her own developing voice, La Motte was perhaps more open to being shaped by her circumstances than those writers who arrived in the war zone with a set of ready-made literary strategies, which had to be unlearned before they could find words for what they wanted to say. As an American, representing an ostensibly neutral nation, she was able to offer a devastating critique of the war’s systems and practices without compromise to her own sense of national identity. Moreover, access to an American publisher and readership allowed La Motte to publish while the conflict was ongoing. She seems an unlikely figure to break new literary ground: a forty-two-year-old nurse arriving in Dunkirk in 1915 with a suitcase and a notebook. Nevertheless, La Motte was perfectly placed to produce a new kind of text in that narrow window of opportunity for plain speaking and plain writing, before the publishing climate of the United States changed so dramatically in April 1917. In The Backwash of War, she created a something stark and unflinching which, despite its anxieties about the limitations of language, showed a sharp edge of authenticity in its depiction of the human cost of war. Other writers would follow.