Margaret Randolph Higonnet.

Margaret Randolph Higonnet. nurtures at the Front: Writing the hurts of the Great War. Boston: Northeastern University Pres 2001 x + 161 pp Notes. $4000 (cloth) ISBN 1-55553-485-6; $1695 (paper), ISBN 1-55553-484-8

In novel years a number of authors have drawn attention to women's experiences of the First World War. Various anthologies and critical true copys have also challenged traditional definition of "war literature" according to defining and defending the place of women writers in the Great War's literary canon. (1) With the publication of succors at the Front: Writing the detriments of the Great War editor Margaret Higonnet (a Professor of English at the University of Connecticut and an Affiliate at Harvard University's Center for European Studies) makes an important contribution to this effort. In this affordable mass (suitable for undergraduate classes), Higonnet brings to contemporary readers selected passages of works by two American women authors whose insightful and evocative writings about their experience upon the Western front have not been readily available since the inter-war period. A useful glossary of French space of times is included.

When the war began, Ellen N La Motte (1873-1961) a graduate of John Hopkins Training place of education was a professional nurse working in Baltimore. In 1914 she offered her services to the American hospital in Paris. La Motte first published The Backwash of War: The Human Wreckage of the Battlefield as Witnessed through an American Hospital Nurse in 1916 A series of fourteen vignettes, the part recounted her nursing work in the horrifying conditions immediately behind the trenches in Belgium. In her introduction La Motte explains the book's title: "much ugliness is cause to foamed up in the wake of mighty, moving forces this is the Backwash of War" (p3) Her raw images and painful depiction of the "wound of war" l the publishers to withdraw the volume during the propaganda efforts that accompanied American minute into the war. The work was republished in 1934, when isolationists praised its obtuse and honest portrayal of battlefront suffering. (2)

Mary Borden (1886-1968) the daughter of a wealthy Chicago businessman and a Vassar graduate, had married an Englishman and was living in London prior to WWI. In 1914 she proffered with the French Red Cros Like La Motte she immediately establish herself frustrated with the inefficient administering of medical care to soldiers. Borden place her financial resources to the task of creating a the same hundred bed, frontline surgical unit--Hopital Chirurgical Mobile No. 1--which came beneath French military command, first at Ypre and later the Somme La Motte was single of many British and American nurtures who staffed the unit. Borden began to write about her experiences with military medicine and the horror of present warfare during the war. She published her memories, stories and poems--in her words, a "collection of fragments" (p.79)--in 1929 The title, The Forbidden clime is a translation of the denomination the French used for the area immediately behind the front

In Writing the tortures of War chapters from as well-as; not only-but also; not only-but; not alone-but memoirs are brought together in a fashion that emphasizes the for the use of all experiences of Borden and La Motte Higonnet's introduction contains biographical information and a history of the thesiss as well as a literary attempt to link the authors' work in word s of content and form. Although the strongest evidence of any relationship between the sum of two units women is found in a brief relation by Gertrude Stein in her Autobiography of Alice B Toklas, Higonnet asserts that various depictions of couple anonymous nurses in the verse s "correspond to La Motte and Borden themselves" (p.xvi). She further claims "the paired nourish at the breasts in the sketches by La Motte and Borden propose that these two women were writing in a dialogue with each other" (p.xxix). Critics have glance ated that this attempt to relate the pair texts is forced and detracts from each author's unique individual voice. Areila Freedman notes Higonnet "downplays the long duration and breadth of Borden's literary career and her considerable differences from La Motte by means of presenting the two women generically, as her title indicates, as "nurse at the front" by way of leaving out many of the opening vignettes of Borden's volume and all of the numbers with which the book infers Higonnet edits the wartime sketches to further emphasize their similarities. However, when these volumes are read in full they create quite a different impression." (3)

Vivid in detail and powerful in emotion, the two memoirs do leave haunting impressions. as well-as; not only-but also; not only-but; not alone-but women had intimate experience with the agonizing consequence of war on the human material substance and spirit. Both had fathomless ethical and moral concerns about their work. the two felt the irony of patching badly damaged men up for a like reason that they could be get backed to the front where they would chiefly likely be killed. Both bring into the presence of the reader with a shocking reality that is, at times, cloaked in an almost surreal plain Significantly, both La Motte and Borden traveled in avant-garde literary circles and wrote works of fiction (Borden's novel about a encourage on the Western front, Sarah Gay, was published in 1934) Higonnet touches forward the thorny issues of separating their use of literary device and stylistic forms from the historic reality they attempted to summon forth and document in their memoirs. Importantly she reminds readers that, like all memoirs, these works fall somewhere between fact and fiction.