The Backwash of War

By Ellen Newbold La Motte

Ellen LaMotte (1873 - 1961) was an American nurse, journalist and author. She began her nursing career as a tuberculosis nurse in Baltimore and then served as an army nurse in Europe during World War I. After that she traveled to Asia where she saw the effects of opium addiction. The Backwash of War (1934) was based on her diaries kept during her time at the front. (Excerpt from Goodreads)

• Language: English
• Publisher: Otbebookpublishing
• Release date: Sep 18, 2016
• ISBN: 9783958648630

Ellen Newbold La Motte

Ellen Newbold La Motte (1873–1961) was an American nurse, journalist and author. She began her nursing career as a tuberculosis nurse in Baltimore, Maryland, and in 1915 volunteered as one of the first American war nurses to go to Europe and treat soldiers in World War I. In Belgium she served in a French field hospital, keeping a bitter diary detailing the horrors that she witnessed daily. Back in America, she turned her diary into a book, The Backwash of War (1916), containing fourteen vignettes of typical scenes. Despite early success, the brutal imagery was unpalatable and the book was suppressed and not republished until 1934. During her time in Paris during the war La Motte formed a close friendship with the American expat writer Gertrude Stein. Researchers have speculated that Ernest Hemingway's influential unadorned style may have been influenced by La Motte's own writing, through Stein's mentoring. (Wikipedia)

Book preview

ARMIES

INTRODUCTION

This war has been described as Months of boredom, punctuated by moments of intense fright. The writer of these sketches has experienced many months of boredom, in a French military field hospital, situated ten kilometres behind the lines, in Belgium. During these months, the lines have not moved, either forward or backward, but have remained dead-locked, in one position. Undoubtedly, up and down the long-reaching kilometres of Front there has been action, and moments of intense fright have produced glorious deeds of valour, courage, devotion, and nobility. But when there is little or no action, there is a stagnant place, and in a stagnant place there is much ugliness. Much ugliness is churned up in the wake of mighty, moving forces. We are witnessing a phase in the evolution of humanity, a phase called War—and the slow, onward progress stirs up the slime in the shallows, and this is the Backwash of War. It is very ugly. There are many little lives foaming up in the backwash. They are loosened by the sweeping current, and float to the surface, detached from their environment, and one glimpses them, weak, hideous, repellent. After the war, they will consolidate again into the condition called Peace.

After this war, there will be many other wars, and in the intervals there will be peace. So it will alternate for many generations. By examining the things cast up in the backwash, we can gauge the progress of humanity. When clean little lives, when clean little souls boil up in the backwash, they will consolidate, after the final war, into a peace that shall endure. But not till then.

E. N. L. M.

CONTENTS

HEROES

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.

At the hospital, he behaved abominably. The ambulance men declared that he had tried to throw himself out of the back of the ambulance, that he had yelled and hurled himself about, and spat blood all over the floor and blankets—in short, he was very disagreeable. Upon the operating table, he was no more reasonable. He shouted and screamed and threw himself from side to side, and it took a dozen leather straps and four or five orderlies to hold him in position, so that the surgeon could examine him. During this commotion, his left eye rolled about loosely upon his cheek, and from his bleeding mouth he shot great clots of stagnant blood, caring not where they fell. One fell upon the immaculate white uniform of the Directrice, and stained her, from breast to shoes. It was disgusting. They told him it was La Directrice, and that he must be careful. For an instant he stopped his raving, and regarded her fixedly with his remaining eye, then took aim afresh, and again covered her with his coward blood. Truly it was disgusting.

To the Médecin Major it was incomprehensible, and he said so. To attempt to kill oneself, when, in these days, it was so easy to die with honour upon the battlefield, was something he could not understand. So the Médecin Major stood patiently aside, his arms crossed, his supple fingers pulling the long black hairs on his bare arms, waiting. He had long to wait, for it was difficult to get the man under the anæsthetic. Many cans of ether were used, which went to prove that the patient was a drinking man. Whether he had acquired the habit of hard drink before or since the war could not be ascertained; the war had lasted a year now, and in that time many habits may be formed. As the Médecin Major stood there, patiently fingering the hairs on his hairy arms, he calculated the amount of ether that was expended—five cans of ether, at so many francs a can—however, the ether was a donation from America, so it did not matter. Even so, it was wasteful.

At last they said he was ready. He was quiet. During his struggles, they had broken out two big teeth with the mouth gag, and that added a little more blood to the blood already choking him. Then the Médecin Major did a very skilful operation. He trephined the skull, extracted the bullet that had lodged beneath it, and bound back in place that erratic eye. After which the man was sent over to the ward, while the surgeon returned hungrily to his dinner, long overdue.

In the ward, the man was a bad patient. He insisted upon tearing off his bandages, although they told him that this meant bleeding to death. His mind seemed fixed on death. He seemed to want to die, and was thoroughly unreasonable, although quite conscious. All of which meant that he required constant watching and was a perfect nuisance. He was so different from the other patients, who wanted to live. It was a joy to nurse them. This was the Salle of the Grands Blessés, those most seriously wounded. By expert surgery, by expert nursing, some of these were to be returned to their homes again, réformés, mutilated for life, a burden to themselves and to society; others were to be nursed back to health, to a point at which they could again shoulder eighty pounds of marching kit, and be torn to pieces again on the firing line. It was a pleasure to nurse such as these. It called forth all one’s skill, all one’s humanity. But to nurse back to health a man who was to be court-martialled and shot, truly that seemed a dead-end occupation.

They dressed his wounds every day. Very many yards of gauze were required, with gauze at so many francs a bolt. Very much ether, very much iodoform, very many bandages—it was an expensive business, considering. All this waste for a man who was to be shot, as soon as he was well enough. How much better to expend this upon the hopeless cripples, or those who were to face death again in the trenches.

The night nurse was given to reflection. One night, about midnight, she took her candle

Reviews for The Backwash of War

[linda_andrews-1 · Rating: 5 out of 5 stars]

Oh boy, this is an in your face why are we bothering to save these soldiers anyway kind of story. Not a concise narrative, this is more a series of vignettes told through a cold and dispassionate nurse. To give you an idea, it starts with a deserter who shoots himself in the head but doesn't die so the nurses must heal him so he can be executed by firing squad. It also tells in gruesome detail, how freedom isn't just won on the suffering and blood of soldiers but so too are medical advances. The stories are moving but I was thankful that it was short.

[janarose1 · Rating: 5 out of 5 stars]

During WWI, Ellen serves as a nurse in France. She offers several short stories about the cruelty and harshness of war. A viewpoint rarely seen elsewhere. The stories themselves were fairly short, just quick snapshots into a patient, a procedure or an odd situation. She presents a very vivid, very honest point of view, which works well with her subject manner. Overall, highly recommended.

[toobusyreading · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

This short nonfiction book packs a powerful punch. Vignettes written by an American nurse about field hospitals during WWI, it is dark and graphic and disturbing. It is all too real.There are heroes in the book, and there are also just plain people, people who ended up as fodder for war and those who ended up treating them. While emergency treatment for soldiers has changed drastically since the period of this book, and methods of fighting war have changed, the effect on bodies and souls is still devastating.This is not a book full of hope and feel-good stories of redemption. It is a books of despair and hopelessness, and the timeless, relentless brutality and reality of war.

[ladycato · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

I was provided a gratis ebook copy of this book through NetGalley.This 200-page book packs a powerful punch. It's said that any book that's truly about war is anti-war, and that's the case here. La Motte never judges the politics behind the Great War (the greatest open criticism she offers is in one section where she scoffs at the men who show off pictures of their wives and sniffle at how they miss her, then use convenient Belgian prostitutes), but she paints a visceral image of the consequences. The forward of the book says that the original publication sold well in America in 1916, but after the country entered the war, the government quietly banned its publication. That doesn't come as a huge surprise to me. The book is extremely graphic even by modern standards.These are the two opening sentences in the first story: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.In particular, La Motte isn't shy about describing the conflicting stenches in the ward. I had to Google the term "anal fistula"--good times, there. As a writer who loves researching medical subjects, this book is gold. I will likely buy a print copy so I can easily bookmark sections. I can compare it to A Surgeon in Khaki by Arthur Anderson Martin, a WWI memoir of a doctor who died in duty soon after his book's publication; Martin is far more gentlemanly in his ward descriptions, instead going into detail about the different damage offered by varying types of bullets, and a constant frustration at Britain's lack of preparedness for the war. La Motte as a female and American nurse is much deeper into the psychology of the ward--she offered true vignettes, rather than stories. Both are excellent books, and the writers bring very different viewpoints to the same horrible place.There are many books and reprints on World War I being released right now at this centennial of the war's begin. These chronicles are invaluable. They offer an important look at the past, but also show how little has changed.

[elizajane_1 · Rating: 3 out of 5 stars]

AUG 5 - Opens with an introduction by the publisher setting up a background on the author and the circumstances under which the book was written. Is then followed by the author's introduction to the 1934 edition which discusses the books suppression during the war years. Then includes the original 1916 author introduction. This is an interesting first hand account of the WWI French front from a field nurse's point of view. It is a short book and makes fast reading with each chapter being a vignette of a different patient and the medical case he represents. Ms. Motte is very candid in her discussions of the wounded and the treatment making the book probably graphic for its time, though not so much for the modern day reader. While I found the book interesting as a contemporary piece of history from the war, I didn't connect with the author's voice at all. She is quite stand-offish and never really gives a personality or emotion to her storytelling. Oddly enough, we never get to know the author as she never refers to herself when telling her stories. She refers to "the nurse" or "the Directrice", which I came to conclude was her in the third person. A couple of times she does speak of herself as "I" but this is only during two passages in which she goes on a personal discourse of her opinion of war, and yet these are also removed from any emotion as they are written sarcastically. She speaks in a condescending tone of how war, the bureaucracy, etc. must be, is perfect, is right, and yet it fair oozes with sarcasm showing her true meaning and thoughts but missing the mark on connecting with the reader's sentiments. In my opinion, these passages could well have been the reason the book was "banned" in the latter years of the war, due to there anti-propaganda message. I've read a lot of first-hand accounts of war and perhaps it has conditioned me a bit, but I am more inclined to think that this author, while showing a fair enough account of her experiences, was just not a good enough writer to get any emotion across to the reader. There are much more well-written accounts that are also moving and poignant, neither of which I find "Backwash" to be.

[timbazzett · Rating: 5 out of 5 stars]

THE BACKWASH OF WAR (original subtitle, THE HUMAN WRECKAGE OF THE BATTLEFIELD AS WITNESSED BY AN AMERICAN HOSPITAL NURSE), Ellen La Motte's little book of stories from the Belgian front of WWI was successful enough to go through multiple printings in the U.S. in 1916-17, although it was banned in France and England, where its dark tone was considered detrimental to morale and to the war effort itself. And, once the U.S. entered the war, the book was suppressed there too.I had never heard of BACKWASH until very recently, when I ran across a mention of this new edition in a WWI Centennial Newsletter. As a "war lit" buff (in fact I'd just finished reading another obscure WWI memoir by an English private, A.M. Burrage's WAR IS WAR, about his time in the trenches of Belgium), I was immediately intrigued and decided to read it. And I was not disappointed. Cynthia Wachtell, an American Studies prof at Yeshiva University, has rescued the book from decades of obscurity, adding an erudite and scholarly Introduction and a perhaps first-ever biography of La Motte, to a well-annotated text of the original volume. She also added three other published wartime essays by LaMotte, along with an extensive list of other LaMotte writings, followed by her own extensive research notes and a useful index. In other words, the Wachtell edition - a fascinating mix of history, literature and women's studies - is a very important piece of scholarship, deserving of a wide audience.Ellen La Motte's life was one of great accomplishment. Trained at Johns Hopkins as a nurse, she became a recognized expert on tuberculosis, publishing numerous articles about the disease and its treatment, and also held important administrative positions with the Health Department of Baltimore. Though not wealthy herself, she enjoyed the patronage of a very wealthy cousin, which gave her the opportunity to volunteer as a nurse overseas during the Great War. La Motte was already over forty when she traveled to France to try to "do her bit" for the war. Her experiences in a large Paris military hospital and then in a French field hospital near the Belgian front formed the basis for her BACKWASH stories, all of them dark and filled with starkly grim descriptions of the wounded and dying men she treated there.While the stories are compelling enough in themselves - and I can see why they enjoyed such success in those early years of the war - what I found even more interesting here in the Wachtell edition was La Motte's own life story, brought out so well in the added biography and historical timeline. After she got to France, La Motte met Emily Crane Chadbourne, a wealthy divorcee from Chicago, heiress of the Crane Company (known primarily today for its bathroom fixtures). They began a relationship which would endure until La Motte's death in 1961. In Paris they would become close friends with another unorthodox couple, Gertrude Stein and Alice B. Toklas - a friendship which endured for nearly forty years. One is compelled to wonder if Ernest Hemingway, a frequent guest at Stein's salon in the postwar years, read BACKWASH (maybe even got a copy from Stein?), and developed his own terse, declarative style of writing in imitation of La Motte. Because the stylistic similarities are striking. But, having read another fascinating book, STEIN AND HEMINGWAY: THE STORY OF A TURBULENT FRIENDSHIP, by Lyle Larsen, I know that Ernie & Gert's friendship had its ups and downs, and that the macho Hemingway would have been loathe to admit being influenced by any woman, whether it be Stein or La Motte.I was intrigued to learn that, despite her many accomplishments in the field of health and medicine, La Motte's real ambition was to be a writer, a dream she could follow freely, having become independently wealthy, first through her cousin, and then through her life-partner, Chadbourne. Following the success of BACKWASH, she became interested in the scourge of opium addiction, and traveled to China and other parts of the Far East to research it, later publishing numerous articles and several books on the opium trade. I wonder if any of those pieces would be relevant again today in light of the current opioid addiction crisis here in America.When one thinks of literary classics of WWI, Hemingway's A FAREWELL TO ARMS, Remarque's ALL QUIET ON THE WESTERN FRONT, and perhaps e.e. cummings' THE ENORMOUS ROOM usually come to mind. To those I've previously added another favorite of my own, Frederic Manning's HER PRIVATES WE. And now there's this one, THE BACKWASH OF WAR: AN EXTRAORDINARY AMERICAN NURSE IN WORLD WAR I, which came before any of those others. There are several editions of La Motte's book available now, since it is in the public domain, but I will strongly recommend this one from Johns Hopkins University Press, with all of its important and illuminating addendums from editor Cynthia Wachtell. History, Literature and Women's Studies professors and teachers should take note, because this is a very important contribution to all of those fields. My congratulations to Dr Wachtell. My highest recommendation. - Tim Bazzett, author of the Cold War memoir, SOLDIER BOY: AT PLAY IN THE ASA