Some of the most famous factual and fictional accounts of the Great War are by those who fought in it, suffered its horrors, and lived to tell their tales. By coincidence or design, many classic works appeared in a clump in 1929, a decade after the Treaty of Versailles: Robert Graves’s Goodbye to All That, Richard Aldington’s Death of a Hero, Frederic Manning’s The Middle Parts of Fortune and, possibly the best of them all, Erich Maria Remarque’s All Quiet on the Western Front. The same year saw the publication of two very different books by two American novelists who drew on war experience of another nature: A Farewell to Arms by a former ambulance driver on the Italian front, and The Forbidden Zone by Mary Borden, a nurse who ran a French Army field hospital in Belgium—both cases being vital reminders that in war lives can be saved as well as lost.

There was, however, one singular book about the war that was written and published as it raged. Ellen N. La Motte penned the thirteen fictionalized vignettes that comprise The Backwash of War between 1915 and 1916 while working at Borden’s military field hospital. The Atlantic Monthly published some of those sketches separately, and then in 1916 they were collected together in one volume. This year marks the book’s centenary—and yet few know it.

For The Backwash of Warremains something of an overlooked or underappreciated curio. La Motte’s