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ELLEN N. LA MOTTE
THE BACKWASH OF WAR The Human Wreckage of the Battlefield as Witnessed by an American Hospital Nurse
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This edition © Conway Publishing 2014 First published 1916 This edition first published in Great Britain in 2014 by Conway A Division of the Pavilion Books Group Ltd 10 Southcombe Street London W14 0RA www.conwaypublishing.com Twitter: @conwaybooks Publisher’s Introduction by Martin Robson Distributed in the US and Canada by Sterling Publishing Co. Ltd 387 Park Avenue South, New York, NY 100016-8810 All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise, without the prior written permission of the copyright owner. British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data: A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library. ISBN 9781844862580 Printed by CPI Group (UK) Ltd, Croydon, CR0 4YY To receive regular email updates on forthcoming Conway titles, please email info@conwaypublishing.com with Conway Update in the subject field.
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INTRODUCTION Arriving in France in 1915 was an intelligent, independent-thinking, strong-willed and highly literate American nurse in her early forties. She was to become one of the most celebrated voices of the First World War and, alongside brave and inspirational nursing women including Edith Cavell, Mairi Chisholm, Elsie Knocker, Dorothy Fielding and Elsa Brandstrom, she was to demonstrate that lives could be saved as well as lost on the front-line and that courage was not solely confined to the soldiers of the savage conflict. Ellen N. La Motte was born into a relatively privileged Louisville family in 1873 and graduated from Johns Hopkins Hospital in Baltimore, perhaps the leading training hospital for nurses in the United States, in 1902. She then spent the next two years as the supervising nurse at Johns Hopkins Hospital before moving to St. Luke’s Hospital, St. Louis, as assistant superintendent, before moving once again, back to Baltimore in 1905. As an Instructive Visiting Nurse in Baltimore she specialised in the treatment of tuberculosis, recognising that successful treatment could only come from the segregation of tuberculosis patients from those suffering from other ailments. She also ensured that her nursing role was independent from constant observation, in effect delegating the assessment, supervision and treatment of patients to the nurse rather than relying upon
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diagnosis by doctors. Here she was leading the way in the professionalisation of nursing. Unsurprisingly, she was not afraid to criticise ‘official’ treatments, methods and organization and was criticised for her views by the Tuberculosis Association. By 1913 she was the Superintendent of the Tuberculosis Division of the Baltimore Health Department and with the 1914 publication of her first book, The Tuberculosis Nurse, had perhaps reached the top of her career ladder within that field. Upon the outbreak of the First World War, while other prominent nursing figures set up organisations to promote peace, Ellen adopted a more practical course of action. An old friend, the writer Gertrude Stein, was in Paris and after conversations between the two Ellen decided to head for war-torn Europe. Given her career position and some criticism of her methods, it was an opportunity to escape the politicking of the US public health debates as well as a new challenge and an opportunity to use her nursing skills in the most taxing of environments. Her family was originally from France, so that would have played some part. She first volunteered to serve as a nurse with the American Hospital in Paris but found that adequately staffed. After meeting Mary Borden, who was running a French Army field hospital in Belgium, she decided to join her serving as a nurse to the French army between 1915 and 1916. Working in a field hospital ten kilometres from the front-line provided her with a unique perspective of the
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effect of the First World War upon the human mind and body. Ellen’s 1914 book had already displayed her literary talents and now her vignettes, written in Paris, of life and death in a French Army Hospital were published in Atlantic Monthly. She had, in effect, started a new career as a journalist. They were collected together and published in 1916 as The Backwash of War: The Human Wreckage of the Battlefield as Witnessed by an American Hospital Nurse. After 1917, with American soldiers fighting and dying on European battlefields, Ellen’s stark and depressing descriptions of the effect of modern, industrialised killing were too much for the American Government which banned her book in 1918. It is her use of the words ‘Human Wreckage’ that really conveys the magnitude of Ellen’s first-hand experiences; for there is a depressing amount in the fourteen individual ‘vignettes’ that make up the book. There is the hopeless case of a deserter, his skull mangled from a failed suicide attempt, who, even if he were to be nursed back to health, would face a firing squad. Or the surgeon ‘bent on making a reputation for himself… trying to prolong the lives of wounded men who ought normally and naturally to have died’. His patient this time, a petty thief had been sentenced not to prison but the Bataillon d’Afrique. Wounded in the abdomen and with nothing to go back to civilian life for, no family, no future, he was subjected to experimental procedures which enhanced and prolonged his suffering. Like
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many in wartime he was a ‘victim of circumstances’, his fate determined by forces beyond his control or comprehension. After many months of excruciating pain met with fortitude and resolution, he died twenty minutes before he was due to receive the Croix de Guerre. Medals, Ellen notes, were often given to hopeless cases as a form of compensation for their pain and suffering for France, and to provide their widows with a 100 franc pension. While wives were forbidden at the front-line, because they were thought to lower morale, prostitutes were necessary ‘because they cheer and refresh the troops’. As well as the French Army’s rather rudimentary triage procedures, Ellen also describes the effects of shell splinters, high-velocity rounds, poison gas and infection upon the human body. She describes the broken bodies of men, the dirt, the ever-present stench of death and the moans and groans of dying men, set against the background rumble of artillery fire. She notes the use of an epidural on one patient and the development of plastic surgery to rebuild the shattered body of another – the conscripted son of Antoine, a Parisian barber. The best surgeons in France considered their efforts a ‘surgical triumph’, they were proud of their work. Upon meeting his son Antoine saw the two artificial legs he had purchased for the boy at the cost of several hundred francs. Artificial arms were also available, teeth could be replaced, and artificial eyes bought.
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His son, a facially disfigured, blind, eighteen-year-old quadruple amputee ‘kept begging in agony: “Kill me, Papa!”’ Antoine can be seen as an allegory for France, who lost so much of its male population during the First World War. He rages against the English for not making the maximum effort and not trying to end the war until France was exhausted. He rages against Russia’s poorly organised commitment and political divisions. ‘In fact’, Ellen notes, ‘Antoine was far more furious against the Allies of France than against Germany itself’. Despite the heart-felt tragedies contained in her writings, Ellen certainly enjoyed the freedom from stuffy American public health bureaucracy granted by her position. She complained of boredom when the heavy guns were silent and ventured into the militarised war zone, was shelled, and found the whole experience exhilarating. Her naturally inquisitive mind and keen eye for observation, present in both her successful careers as nurse and journalist, yearned for new experiences. Moreover, given her medical and literary talents, La Motte seems to have been attracted to highlighting human suffering and, perhaps frustrated in her role in France, she left for China. Her two years in Asia provided sufficient experiences for six books, published between 1919 and 1929; three were about the opium trade and marked her as an expert in the human suffering inflicted by opium addiction and the exploitative nature of western colonialism. Opium Mo-
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nopoly (1920) and Ethics of Opium (1922) tapped into a far wider campaign to address the trade, culminating in the League of Nations 1925 International Opium Convention, which imposed some restrictions upon the trade but stopped short of banning the production and trading of opium. In 1929 Ellen published Opium in Geneva: Or How The Opium Problem is Handled by the League of Nations as a final plea for the ultimately doomed international body to act on the problem. In later life she remained active in nursing, literary and scientific circles. She died in 1961. Nearly one hundred years after they were composed, Ellen’s unique perspectives and vignettes in The Backwash of War still possess the power to raise strong emotions in the reader. They remain fresh and, given the perspective of a century of writing about the First World War, much of her bitterness, cynicism, and sense of hopelessness about the war remain painfully valid. Perhaps the most depressing aspect of The Backwash of War is the utter helplessness and hopelessness of the situation described by Ellen. Wounded men in a hospital have no military value, they use up valuable resources, they need to be returned to the front-line trenches, or to cease being a burden and die. The men of France had been dying for two years by the time the book was published in 1916 – little was Ellen to know that they were not even half way through the cataclysmic conflict that was the First World War.
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AUTHOR’S INTRODUCTION TO 1934 EDITION THE BACKWASH OF WAR was first published in the autumn of 1916, and was suppressed in the summer of 1918. Until this happened it went through several printings, but the pictures presented—back of the scenes, so to speak—were considered damaging to the morale. In the flood of war propaganda pouring over the country, these dozen short sketches were considered undesirable. From its first appearance, this small book was kept out of England and France. But it did very well in the United States, until we entered the War. Even then, by some oversight, it continued to be sold, although suppression and censorship held full sway. In the summer of 1918, however, something happened. An issue of THE LIBERATOR was held up—it could not be released until a certain objectionable passage, it appears, was a reference to THE BACKWASH OF WAR. THE LIBERATOR carried a column in each issue of books specially recommended by the editor. In each issue, month after month, appeared a short paragraph of three or four lines, recommending THE BACKWASH OF WAR. So—when THE LIBERATOR was held up till this passage could be inked out, one suspected that something had happened to the BACKWASH itself.
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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. Now that we are again going through a period of peace, it seems an opportune moment for a new edition of this book. The sketches were written in 1915 and 1916, when the writer was in a French military field hospital, a few miles behind the lines, in Belgium. War has been described as “months of boredom, punctuated by moments of intense fright.” During this time at the Front, the lines moved little, either forward or backward, but were deadlocked in one position. Undoubtedly, up and down the long reaching kilometers of “Front” there was action, and “moments of intense fright” which produced fine deeds of valor, courage and nobility. But where there is little or no action there is a stagnant place, and in that stagnant place is much ugliness. Much ugliness is churned up in the wake of mighty, moving forces, and this is the backwash of war. Many little lives foam up in this backwash, loosened by the sweeping current, and detached from their environment. One catches a glimpse of them—often weak, hideous or repellent. There can be no war without this backwash.
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July 18, 1934, E.N.L.M.
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To MARY BORDEN-TURNER “The Little Boss” to whom i owe my experience in the zone of the armies
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