“The Backwash of War” by Ellen La Motte, is a series of short personal experience stories about the cruelty and harshness of war. While being a nurse in the French Army Hospital during WWI in France, she started a new career as a journalist. She is described as an “intelligent, independent-thinking, strong willed and highly literate American nurse in her early forties” (La Motte iii), which helps her audience not question her knowledge, and the information which is stated is trustworthy. Her scenes are full with description due to her experience, she wants her audience to see the harsh reality. “After 1917, with American soldiers fighting and dying on European battlefields, Ellen’s stark and depressing description of the effect of modern, industrialized…show more content… Although both patients were suffering, they were both different, in the way they were being treated and how they would respond to things. Marius was aware of reality “Marius gave forth freely to the ward his philosophy of life, his hard, bare, ugly life, as he had lived it… He screamed in his delirium, and no one paid much attention thinking it was delirium” (La Motte 22), he criticized the medical personnel, and always had something to say. Patients as well as everyone were annoyed by his smell, his agony, and attitude (La Motte 22-23). Rochard on the other hand, scream in agony due to his pain. He was in really bad conditions, the doctors were not reliable. Since they were either young men who did not know much or older men that simply forgot things (La Motte 50-51). Rochard was being was taken care of by a nurse that truly cared about him, when taking a lunch break Rochard died under the care of two elderly men. “So Rochard died a stranger among strangers… There was no one there to see the beyond the horror of the red, blind eye, of the dull, white eye, of the vile, gangrene smell. And it seemed as if the red, staring eye was looking for something the hospital could not give. And it seemed as if the white, glazed eye was indifferent to everything the hospital could give” (La Motte 58-59). His eyes were a symbolism to the story, the hospital needed more doctors with knowledge, more medicine, and people that truly cared. The things they had were caring nurses, and very few technology or
