На отливе войны: Рассказы

by Ellen N. La Motte, Эллен Н. Ла Мотт

Запрещенная в свое время в нескольких странах из-за слишком откровенных описаний ужасов войны, эта книга — одно из самых громких антивоенных высказываний в литературе XX века. В сентябре 1916 года, когда начинался третий год Первой мировой войны, американка Эллен Н. Ла Мотт опубликовала сборник рассказов о своем опыте работы медсестрой в прифронтовом госпитале. Полагая, что он наносит ущерб боевому духу, сборник немедленно запретили как в Англии, так и во Франции, а позже подвергли цензуре в Америке.
Книга представляет собой уникальное свидетельство разрушений, нанесенных войной человеческому телу и духу, глубоко шокирующее, при этом не лишенное черного юмора. Высоко оцененный Гертрудой Стайн и повлиявший на стиль Эрнеста Хэмингуэя, этот текст заслуживает быть в числе самых значительных книг о войнах XX века.

Genres: Nonfiction, History, War, World War I, Medical, Military Fiction, Biography

200 pages, Unbound

First published January 1, 1916

About the author

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.

After the war, La Motte travelled to Asia, where she witnessed the horrors of opium addiction. These travels provided her with material for six books, three of them explicitly dealing with the opium problem: Peking Dust (1919), Civilization: Tales of the Orient (1919), Opium Monopoly (1920), Ethics of Opium (1922), Snuffs and Butters (1925) and Opium in Geneva: Or How The Opium Problem is Handled by the League of Nations (1929). The Chinese Nationalist government awarded her the Lin Tse Hsu Memorial Medal in 1930.

Reviews

[Chrissie · Rating 5 out of 5]

http://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/26884 has the Gutenberg link, if I can figure out how to do it....

Here is the webpage, which might be simpler:
http://www.gutenberg.org/files/26884/...

Thanks, Steelwhisper!

This short collection of vignettes, written by an American nurse, is based on her service at field hospitals in Belgium during WW1. It speaks volumes about the reality of that war and about the absurdity of all wars. This book should be read by all who want to know what that war really was like.

Ellen Newbold La Motte was deeply moved by her experiences. What you read is deeply cynical. This cynicism is absolutely appropriate. Her message rings loud and clear.

[Sue · Rating 4 out of 5]

Ellen La Motte, a woman who made her name in nursing in the United States by developing new, and at the time controversial, methods for treating tuberculosis, was among the first American nurses to volunteer to work in Europe during the early years of The Great War. She worked not in Paris, but in a front line unit 10 kilometers from the front line, a line which, she points out, never moves, merely takes lives on both sides. She is stationed at that field hospital for months and primarily works with the most gravely wounded.


There is a dirty sediment at the bottom of most souls. War,
superb as it is, is not necessarily a filtering process, by
which men and nations may be purified. 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. (loc 696)


The details are often bloody and graphic for this was a bloody and graphic war, violence was all around, with occasional days of quiet and boredom waiting for the next influx of casualties. There is so little to be done. Surgery, morphine, the priest, the medals, death. This war was called the first industrialized war but man had not yet learned how to treat it's "heroic" victims.

The tone of the book varies from affronted to cynical to what seems veiled (and not so veiled) sarcasm. She is a nurse but also a reporter.

La Motte originally sent articles back to The Atlantic Monthly and then published these 14 in a book under the title "Backwash" in 1916. The United States entered the War in 1917 and the government banned her book in 1918. She republished it in the 1930s. It has been reissued now for the Centenary of World War One.

This is a short book but that is really all one needs.

An ecopy of this book has been provided by the publisher through NetGalley for the purpose of review

[Steelwhisper · Rating 5 out of 5]

I stumbled across The Backwash of War while looking for accounts and diaries from medical personnel.

Already then I had been aware of something curious in some of the (nurses') diaries I had been reading. You get to think, and it's maintained then as now, that all these nurses, whether professionals or VADs, were "angels in white", relieving the pain, sadnesses and stress of the freshly wounded soldiers, or holding their hands as they died. That sort of thing, the propaganda.

However, while there were a very few accounts which clearly showed very compassionate nurses, the vast majority were anything but. Some of these diaries came over as downright cold, distracted even, as if the patients were a nuisance, some disturbence to whatever else for they actually had undertaken this work.

It was quite awful considering all those broken men, shuttled through the medical system like so much barely alive meat and treated without much compassion at all. I was puzzled. I mean, why would anyone risk their life and well-being, ostensibly to help, only to treat the wounded patients worse than one would treat cattle on the way to the slaughterbank?

So, I came upon La Motte's small booklet, started reading and my jaw dropped so far under the table, I had to go hunt for it. This book is dripping with the most vicious kind of sarcasm and cynicism you can imagine. It is red-hot aflame, aggressive, so brutal that you back off a bit for fear it bites you, and badly at that!

Ellen La Motte is clearly very very angry about a lot of what happened during her time at the front. She tells it in short vignettes, the length of a letter, and she doesn't spare anyone. Not the cold fellow nurses, either too religious to dress a naked man, or too intent on meeting an officer for marriage, or simply out at the front to be away from a stifling home. Not the many callous surgeons, often experimenting on the fresh meat cycled through their OP theatres and wards, or testing how much the human body could deal with before dying. The army, which on one hand forces nurses and doctors to put together the deserters, so they can be shot, or pinning medals on the chests of those about to die. The soldiers and the veterans themselves, and those gullible people at home. She gave them all her anger and rage.

Acid will drip hotly from your brains after reading, but I finally grasped why so many accounts of medical people read so very curiously. It took another book, Not So Quiet...: Stepdaughters of War, also written by a woman, an ambulance driver, to set matters really into perspective for me. Because--I have to confess--I initially thought La Motte had to be way over the top.

Smith settles the score with her book, however. La Motte quite clearly was even comparatively mild in her accusations and descriptions. She also was absolutely truthful, as Smith's book bears out by referring to many exact same things, just from another perspective.

These two women have helped me to a deeper insight into what really was taking place at the front and directly behind it during the Great War than practically everyone else put together, maybe with the exception of several of the war artists.

It is by the way absolutely not astonishing that both books, La Motte's and later Smith's were forbidden rsp. taken out of print. They both do what George Scott Atkinson demands in his A Soldier's Diary: that the truth be told to the public without belittling it.

[Kynthos-the-Archer (Kyn) · Rating 5 out of 5]

Brutal, poignant and honest account of the devastation of war and the succeeding deterioration of humanity.

Pretty tough book to read yet utterly engaging, I couldn't look away. The truth in this book is hard to swallow, the vilest side of humans could be witnessed during trying times like war.

After reading so much on the sufferings of the severely wounded from the start till the end of the book, I felt the hospital aren't really helping these people. They are just adding on to their misery and pain. Makes me think bleeding to death is more merciful than rotting inside our while you are still alive. These unfortunate soldiers could have pass on faster if not for the intervention of medicine in the guise of saving life. I felt like yelling at them to STOP PATCHING UP THE DYING AND LEAVE THEM THE HELL ALONE. Leave them in peace please.

He was pretty ill when brought in, and if he had died promptly, as he should have done, it would have been better. But it happened at that time that there was a surgeon connected with the hospital who was bent on making a reputation for himself, and this consisted in trying to prolong the lives of wounded men who ought normally and naturally to have died. So this surgeon worked hard to save Grammont, and certainly succeeded in prolonging his life, and in prolonging his suffering, over a very considerable portion of time. He worked hard over him, and he used on him everything he could think of, everything that money could buy.

The tone of this book is dripping with unbelievable amount of sarcasm. I could feel the author's intense anger reverberating through the text with such force I felt like being punch in the gut and slapped on the face. BUT it's alright because her words are nothing but the truth however ugly the truth was and I am glad she had the courage to write this book and to tell it like it is. She was using sarcasm as a medium to bring across her distaste on war and was deeply sadden by the devastation it has brought to the innocents.

For a more in-depth review please do refer to Steelwhisper's thoughful review. I have to thank her bringing this book to my attention.



BOOK DETAILS:
Title: The Backwash Of War
Author: Ellen Newbold La MotteG. P. Putnam’s Sons
Publication Date: October 12th, 2008 (Ebook) - (First published in year 1916)
Publisher: G. P. Putnam’s Sons - New York and London
Type: Memoir, approximately 24,156 words
Genre: Historical War Memoir (a diary turn book)
Tags/Keywords: classics, historical, soldiers, war, severely wounded, dying, death, prolonged sufferings, war, true account, diary, nursing, military hospital, humanity, amputation, disfigurement, tragedy, disability, mutilation

Description:
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. La Motte speaks of her time in an army hospital in France as periods of boredom interspersed with moments of fright. The Backwash of War is an excellent memoir of war from the viewpoint of a woman army nurse.


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* Reviewed on April 30th, 2014

*:--☆--:*:--☆:*:--☆--:*:--☆--:*:--☆--:*:--☆:*:--☆--:*:--☆--:*

[Tshepiso · Rating 4 out of 5]

I really don't know how to describe how I feel about The Backwash of War. This book is an arresting and vicious critique of war. La Motte's writing is steeped in meticulously constructed sarcasm and irony that thoroughly scours the war machine in a visceral way. And as deeply uncomfortable as certain passages are to read I couldn't help but sit in awe at La Motte's mastery of craft and argumentation.

But there are moments in this book that didn't feel like social critique but a genuine reflection of Ellen La Motte's worldview. Her writings on disabled war veterans especially turned my stomach. Some people may argue that she simply reflects the beliefs of others at the time and therefore her horrific cruelty toward disabled people is in itself a critique. But the way she describes disabled bodies as subhuman and monstrous and disabled people as less worthy of life was so consistent throughout it felt less like a dark mirror reflecting society and more like a plain window into La Motte's sincere beliefs.

I really don't know how to describe The Backwash of War. The feeling of violent immersion in a sickening perspective was never pleasurable but it was cathartic on a level beyond enjoyment. I rated this book 4-stars but never has a rating felt more arbitrary and meaningless in capturing my thoughts. I haven't felt this way about a piece of media since I watched American Psycho and that movie still lives under the surface of my skin. So if that's any indication I think The Backwash of War is going to stick with me for a good long while.

[Daisy Holtel · Rating 3 out of 5]

“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.”
And so begins the first of thirteen vignettes, simplistic and simultaneously elegant recounts of war–The Great War, The War to End All Wars–and the events witnessed by a military nurse.
The memories, told bluntly and without apologetic snide, seem to flood into you as you read each account; the second more random than the first and the third more arbitrary than the second. All told with the same clinical monotone and the unpretentious grace of conviction, sharing only the destroyed foundation of war and its aftermath. Each one seeping into the crevices of your skin, bruising you and staining you like dried blood under the edges of your fingernails or crawling ever further into the curve of your cuticles; and yet, the accounts are ghastly, fogging your literary senses in a way that makes it feel like fiction, like fable, so clearly evident in the nearly comical and feigned detachment, articulated by strict precision of the our author, Ellen N. La Motte, “one of the most celebrated voices of the First World War...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.”
It seems to be the core belief of the novel, or series of essays rather, that lives could be saved and that lives could be lost both on the front-lines of the war–each man fighting his way through suffocation of an oppression manifesting itself in only glimpses–and on the home-fronts too; the fear of a child being taken; the death of civilians mourned only momentarily by their loved ones. Through all the accounts of death and the maladies of the body told in semi-graphic detail, one message stood out to me in its pulsating passion and its captivating conviction, a message of the decay of mind and the absence of reason.
“Somewhere higher up, a handful of men had been able to impose upon thousands, a state of mind which was not in them, of themselves...Individual nobility was superfluous. All the Idealist demanded was physical endurance from the mass.”
There was a part early on in the book that I fixated on. It was in La Patrie Reconnaissante (translated as, “recovering the homeland”), when, in a field hospital a man lay dying, suffering through agony and fits delirium as he waited for his end. Somehow, this man's death seemed, to me, to epitomize the way we wage our wars–fast and quick after the brewing of tension, with blind spots in between the start and the end making up the moments in which we wonder if the possible triumph is truly worth the callouses and cuts on our hands, before being torn down with the jagged edges of bureaucracy, leaving fire in its wake. The pain we are able to cast. The pride we carry on our dying shoulders through this all.
It all seems so simple in the end, after the blood has been shed and the nations have been divided; just a chapter in a textbook or a hour on the discovery channel. After all of this, I still believe Motte said it better:
“And all that night he died, and all the next day he died, and all the following night he died,” until towards the nearing end it became evident that “his was a filthy death. He died after three days' cursing and raving. Before he died, that end of the ward smelled foully, and his foul words, shouted at the top of his delirious voice, echoed foully. Everyone was glad when it was over.”
As for the war, like the man, it seems once it approached “The end came suddenly,” and everyone was glad when it was over.

[☼Bookish in Virginia☼ · Rating 5 out of 5]

WHAT an amazing book. Honestly, I don't believe I've ever read a historical source like it. THE BACKWASH OF WAR is not done as a documentary. And it certainly isn't first person nor the type of history you would get with Xenophone or Gregory of Tours. Instead, this is a book of vignettes. And the author, Ellen Newbold La Motte, gives you stories that are drawn on her experience as an American nurse volunteering in Flanders during WWI.

Her writing is astonishingly good. It's philosophical, poetic, poignant, and very successful in relating the horrors of war. In fact, if I had had her experiences, I'm quite sure I would have had to write them down, or else go mad.

Take the suicide.

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. This 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.

..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.


Nurse Ellen writes of the irony of the time and expense of saving this man. How the surgeon took so much time to partially repair him, and spent so much in materials to save his life, items that might have been used for men who wished to live. All that ether and gauze. All spent so that the poor fellow, with his eye left dangling, could be shot by his countrymen. Because well, discipline is important.

About the Croix de Guerre she writes,

He had performed no special act of bravery, but all mutilés are given the Croix de Guerre, for they will recover and go back to Paris, and in walking about the streets of Paris, with one leg gone, or an arm gone, it is good for the morale of the country that they should have a Croix de Guerre pinned on their breasts.


This is a blunt author. A blunt book. A book I reacted to strongly. If you are like me you'll find her insight into how 'the system' worked very interesting. Just as some of her asides are. She comments at one point, for example, about the patients in her ward discussing how when they over took a German gunnery site, they found the Germans chained to their weapons.

Read this book --which was banned in the United States after we entered the war. You will not find stories that are purposefully uplifting. But I think you'll marvel at the women and men who worked in that horrific environment. Who volunteered for it.



****
review copy.
Includes excellent introductory material that gives background information on the author and the book.

[Beth Cato · Rating 4 out of 5]

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.

[Arlette · Rating 3 out of 5]

[For English, please see below:]
Ellen N. La Motte beschreef als verpleegster in WOI het leven in een veldhospitaal vlakbij de loopgraven. Haar boek werd in 1916 verboden omdat het een kant van de oorlog schetste die de overheden liever niet gepubliceerd zagen. Mede door haar laconieke schrijfstijl zijn de verhalen erg confronterend: over kapotgeschoten mannen die gruwelijk verminkt naar huis terugkeren of voldoende opgelapt worden om opnieuw als kanonnenvoer te kunnen dienen. Erwin Mortier geeft in zijn inleiding heldere achtergrondinformatie, maar ik miste toch nog hier en daar een voetnoot met wat extra uitleg voor iemand die niet zoveel afweet van de situatie in de Eerste Wereldoorlog.

[English:]
This is the (true) story of a American nurse in a field hospital very near to the infamous trenches of World War I. I put "true" between brackets above, because it is clear that she intended this for publication and hence it is not like a real diary or journal. Her book was published during the war, but quickly got banned on both sides of the ocean because the governments didn't like her vivid and accurate description of the situation. She writes about men who return home totally mutilated, or who get patched up just so that they can get blown up again. Her laconic writing style makes it even more upsetting.
In this new Dutch edition, Erwin Mortier added an illuminating introduction. He also included two other pieces by La Motte that are less literary and more personal in style. The only drawback I noticed was that there were still some things unclear to me while reading her text, so I would have appreciated some footnotes here and there with specific explanations. Otherwise, this is a book which taught me lot about this war that's always a bit overshadowed by that other big war.

[Alex Gergely · Rating 5 out of 5]

A moving, horrific, sarcastic, slimy, uncomfortable, wonderful account of WWI and it’s “backwash” as told from a nurse near the trenches. La Motte is so smart and so precise, and I’m sad I hadn’t heard of her until now. I hope this new edition/bio brings her some deserved attention and sparks new scholarship.

[Mandy · Rating 5 out of 5]

A remarkable book. I don't think I've ever read anything quite like it. An unflinching look at the horror of war, brutal, cynical and disturbing.

[Tarissa · Rating 3 out of 5]

Rather gruesome telling of behind-the-scenes happenstances at a World War I hospital. It tells of the horrible wounds and injuries that the soldiers suffer through. And how each soldier's pain hurts the others around him.

Recommended for adults only. In addition to the gruesome details of war and medical injuries, the book also contains mature topics as well.

[The Beauty and Her Reads · Rating 5 out of 5]

“There is a dirty sediment at the bottom of most souls. War, superb as it is, is not necessarily a filtering process, by which men and nations may be purified. 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.”

This book is an account of an American nurse working in a French hospital which is ten kilometers from the front line during the First World War. This is so brutally honest and explicit that it’s bound to make anyone very uncomfortable. The author provides such a fresh perspective to a war hospital which I’ve neither seen in any movie or read in any book. The nurses and doctors do not behave in a conventional way we have come to expect. Feelings of warmth and care are woefully absent and are more along the lines of clinical detachment. But still, it is understandable for that kind of detachment to develop in such challenging times. The author is a cynic. Her attitude towards the people working in the hospital as well as the patients bounce back and forth from deep desolation to sarcasm (almost).

“ So all night Rochard screamed in agony. And turned and twisted, first on hip that was there, and then on the hip that was gone and on neither side, could he find relief. Which shows that morphia, as good as it is, is not good as death.”



There are 13 short stories in this book in the span of a few years, each of which depicts different cases. From a bullet lodged in the eye, gangrene, a suicide gone wrong to a ‘Surgical Triumph’, there are various cases which are so graphic and written in such a blunt manner.

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. This 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.

..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 excerpt is from the first story in the book, “Heroes” and tells us of a suicide gone horribly wrong. While reading the book, it bothered me so much they were willing to nurse a dying man (who wants to die) back to health, waste precious medical supplies which must have been limited during wartime on him just to shoot him in the head for the sake of ‘discipline’.



“Antoine looked down upon this wreck of his son that lay before him, and the wreck, not appreciating that he was a surgical triumph, kept sobbing, kept weeping out of his sightless, kept jerking his four stumps in supplication, kept begging in agony:

“Kill me, Papa!”

However, Antoine couldn’t do this, for he was civilized.”

This excerpt is from the story “Surgical Triumph” and highlights the conscription and various experiments that were being done on injured soldiers during the war. It was so heart-rending to read this chapter and observe how soldiers were merely being treated as subjects. There was another story in this book in which the person was almost stubbornly kept alive so that the doctors could experiment on him for research purposes.

Overall, this was the best book I read this year and will surely urge everyone to give this book a try. This book will unveil before you the devastating casualties of war, and nothing more.

[Ruhi · Rating 4 out of 5]

All incidents have been told so matter of factly that they didn’t seem sad they just seemed. It was just stuff that was happening. People were dying and that’s what happens in wars. The normalcy of death during war makes you immune I guess. It was a good read.. almost poetic.

[Nikki in Niagara · Rating 3 out of 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.

[Maria Beltrami · Rating 4 out of 5]

Probably taking the occasion of the hundredth anniversary of the outbreak of the First World War, this small but dense collection of stories written by a great character like Ellen La Motte is republished. Nurse and journalist, La Motte served as a nurse in field hospitals, and witnessed the utter absurdity of war and the moral depravity caused by the war itself of all the people involved, whether they were soldiers, officers, doctors or civilians. His stories are so raw and merciless as they were at the time banned because detrimental to the morale of the belligerents. From a purely literary point of view, sometimes the writing is a bit repetitive, but the images evoked are so strong and disturbing to make not very evident this issue of style.
Thank Pavillon Books and Netgalley for giving me this book in exchange for an honest review.

Probabilmente cogliendo l'occasione del centesimo anniversario dello scoppio della prima guerra mondiale, viene ripubblicata questa piccola ma densa raccolta di racconti scritti da un personaggio eccezionale come Ellen La Motte. Infermiera e giornalista, la La Motte servì come infermiera negli ospedali da campo, e testimoniò la totale assurdità della guerra e la depravazione morale causata dalla guerra stessa su tutte le persone coinvolte, che fossero soldati, ufficiali, medici o civili. I suoi racconti sono così crudi e impietosi da essere stati a suo tempo banditi perché dannosi per il morale dei belligeranti. Dal punto di vista puramente letterario, a volte la scrittura è un po' ripetitiva, ma le immagini evocate sono talmente forti e inquietanti da rendere scarsamente evidente questo problema di stile.
Ringrazio Pavillon Books e Netgalley per avermi concesso questo libro in cambio di una recensione onesta.

[Wayne McCoy · Rating 5 out of 5]

War is hell, and certainly nobody knows this more than the doctors and nurses serving in the field hospitals near the battlefields. Especially those serving the wounded during World War I in Belgium and France. 'The Backwash of War' is a firsthand series of vignettes by Ellen N. La Motte who was an American nurse serving as an army nurse in Europe during the Great War. The release of this version of the book coincides with the 100th anniversary of World War I.

The first thing that struck me was how cynical the book is. I'm more familiar with that tone in books from later wars. Certainly the futility must have been felt, but it comes through clearly here. From a patient with a botched suicide that must be tended to just so he can die to the little Belgian boy who is wounded and his mother is too busy to come visit him because of her business making money off of soldiers. A patient getting a medal means a pension, but also means the patient will die. Patching and healing and returning soldiers to the front only to have them come back to repeat the cycle. Also, the soldiers got older as the war went on as the younger soldiers were all used up.

It's a quick, brutal read and I found it completely engaging. The title is completely perfect. There is apparently a BBC drama called the Crimson Field that is based on this book and I'll have to go looking for that next. If this sounds at all appealing, I can't recommend it enough.

I was given a review copy of this ebook by Pavilion Books, Conway and NetGalley in exchange for an honest review. Thank you for allowing me to read this great book.

[Susan · Rating 5 out of 5]

From 1914-1916, the author worked with the American Ambulance Serice in Paris and as a nurse at a French Army field hospital in Belgium. At the fiel hospital, there were three possibilities in that the soldier healed or died or went home missing a limb. She write about her fear. She describes the dirt, blood, and the terrible smells of the wounds.this memoir is about seeing through her eyes the horrors of World War I in her eyes as an army nurse. The author gives us fourteen stories. It describes one time where a man tried to kill himself but failed. He is nursed back to health only to be taken to the wall and shot. Medals were handed out freely to build the morale of the soldiers.

After reading this, I hope that others will not see WW I in a "romantic" view. War is terrible in more ways than one can imagine. Reading this reminded me that we should not forget our history especially when it comes to war. Everyone should read this!

Disclaimer: I received an arc of this book free from the author/publisher from Net-galley. I was not obliged to write a favorable review, or even any review at all. The opinions expressed are strictly my own.

[Linda · Rating 4 out of 5]

Because of the sexual assaults on women in the military that are going on today, I was curious to see if this was always the case. When I saw that this nurse's memoir of World War I was so graphic that it was taken out of publication from 1916 to 1935 because it was considered demoralizing, I thought I might get some insights into the treatment of women. Most of the book was the grim, sad, and graphic accounts of the war wounded she tended. There was a telling chapter on the military's treatment of women. Although she never used the term hypocrites, it was clearly what she thought. The German soldiers raped women in Belgium and the propaganda was that Germans were barbarians. The British raped women in Belgium and the propaganda was that the women "cajoled" the men into having illicit sex. This was an interesting read.

[Susan (aka Just My Op) · Rating 4 out of 5]

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.

[Linda Andrews · Rating 5 out of 5]

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.

[Lies Depuydt · Rating 5 out of 5]

'Het kielzog van de oorlog' is een vertaling geschreven door de Vlaamse auteur Erwin Mortier. Het oorspronkelijke boek 'Backwash of the war' is van Ellen La Motte. Ze vertelt over haar dagelijkse belevenissen tijdens de Eerste Wereldoorlog. Als verpleegster werkte ze in een veldhospitaal nabij Roesbrugge. Ze deed ook uitstappen in de streek, waaronder Duinkerke, Poperinge en Ieper.
Zeer indrukwekkend boek waarin duidelijk wordt wat de mensen in die tijd meemaakten.
Een aanrader.

[Ruth · Rating 5 out of 5]

Thanks to Pavilion Books and Netgalley for the ARC.

Read on the heels of a book on the famine during Mao's Great Leap Forward, this book has sunk me further into a deep morass of feels. Excellent first-hand vignettes written by an an American nurse while stationed on the French front during WWI. I'd put this on par with Ambrose Bierce's Civil War Stories in terms of quality, keenness of observation, and sheer emotional impact. Recommended.

[Harry · Rating 5 out of 5]

This short collection of stories are extremely powerful; I will carry their impact for a long while. The writer, in her wisdom and sensibilities, seems ahead of her time. Not many have taken the time, or interest, in writing about the backwash of war, about the lingering and suffering in its wake. This work gives life to these less glamorous, necessary journeys between glory and death.

[Jos Deroo · Rating 4 out of 5]

A collection of short stories about life (or more to the point, death) in a fieldhospital in Flanders during the First World War, recorded by Ellen N. La Motte who worked as nurse in such a hospital. Horrific, terrifying and at times strongly sarcastic she perfectly conveys the terrors of trench warfare. Now translated into Dutch by Erwin Mortier under the title "Het Kielzog van de oorlog".

[Brad Medd · Rating 5 out of 5]

A set of brutal, beautiful, damning vignettes that exposes the profound suffering not only of soldiers, but the lives of everyone and everything that fell beneath the guise of WW1. Ellen N.La Motte's accounts are richly varied and unpolished, speaking for themselves. It's no surprise her work was banned.

[Nils · Rating 4 out of 5]

Horrifying first hand account, written in a rather mawkish style, of the wounds sustained by men on the western front during the first two years of the Great War. Captures we'll both the human horror and literally visceral stench of the human damage.

[sassafrass · Rating 3 out of 5]

Whilst La Motte does cut right to the quick of the brutality of war, it is hard to swallow her class snobbery and disdain for women in particular. Also a lot of random French is left untranslated, which can be a little irritating.

[Margaret · Rating 4 out of 5]

It feels odd to say you really like a book that is so honest about what nurses dealt with during the First World War. The Backwash of War is one such book and very well written.

[Laura]

Free download available at Project Gutenberg.