ARTICLE: The Wounded Taxi Driver

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I don’t plan to do this often, but today I’m handing over the reins to someone else. The woman in question is Ellen La Motte, and she was a nurse. In December 1915 she was 42 years old. Originally from Louisville, Kentucky, in 1915 she volunteered to treat the wounded long before America entered the war and travelled to Europe. From the Western Front, she wrote a series of vignettes based on what she saw, and she was brilliant. She arguably (via Gertrude Stein) influenced the style of Ernest Hemingway, and her subsequent book, The Backwash of War: The Human Wreckage of the Battlefield as Witnessed by an American Hospital Nurse, was so visceral that it was banned in America.

So today, I’m giving her the floor. I spend a lot of time writing about battles and making note of casualty figures. Dead, wounded, missing. But I think what we forget sometimes as military historians is to stop and consider the fact that every single one of those wounded is a human being with thoughts, feelings. They didn’t all suffer nobly in silence. So 109 years exactly after Ellen wrote this down, I want to bring you the story of one very pissed off, wounded Frenchman who had lain on the battlefield for ten hours waiting for help, and the raged against the hand that fate had dealt him.

LA PATRIE RECONNAISSANTE (The Grateful Homeland)

They brought him to the Poste de Secours, just behind the lines, and laid the stretcher down gently, after which the bearers stretched and re-stretched their stiffened arms, numb with his weight. For he was a big man of forty not one of the light striplings of the young classes of this year or last. The wounded man opened his eyes, flashing black eyes, that roved about restlessly for a moment, and then rested vindictively first on one, then on the other of the two brancardiers.

‘Dirty cowards’ he cried angrily. ‘How long is it since I have been wounded? Ten hours! Fourteen hours have I laid there, waiting for you! And then you come to fetch me, only when it is safe! Safe for you! Safe to risk your precious, filthy skins! Safe to come where I have stood for months ! Safe to come where for ten hours I have laid, my belly opened by a German shell! Safe! Safe! How brave you are when night has fallen, when it is dark, when it is safe to come for me, ten hours late!’

He closed his eyes, jerked up his knees, and clasped both dirty hands over his abdomen. From waist to knees the old blue trousers were soaked with blood, black blood, stiff and wet. The brancardiers looked at each other and shook their heads. One shrugged a shoulder. Again the flashing eyes of the man on the stretcher opened…