Abstract
This chapter examines the juxtaposition of war and gender in The Backwash of War, a collection of thirteen short stories by Ellen Newbold La Motte (1873–1961) based on her experience as a volunteer nurse in Belgium at a hospital behind the French lines during World War I. La Motte's stories literally devoted to the wounds of the Great War, as well as the psychological and moral degradation caused by the conflict. Yet La Motte also acknowledges how even her own critiques, no matter how intransigent, are always at risk of feeding back into the machinery of war on both ideological and practical grounds. As a woman, she understood quite well how war discourse strategically exploits the opposition it sets up between the peaceful virtues of womanhood and the warlike instincts of masculinity by constructing the protection of the former as a license for the latter. This chapter also considers the themes of medicine and torture in The Backwash of War.
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