Women in a Forbidden Zone

A few blogs ago I talked about The Forbidden Zone by Mary Borden. Another book that was an influence in the development of my forthcoming novel, Where No Shadow Awaits, is Ellen Newbold La Motte’s 1916 collection, The Backwash of War. During the First World War, La Motte, an American nurse, worked with Mary Borden (who was the Directrice) in the Hôpital Chirurgical Mobile No. 1 and both used their experiences as source material for their writing. Indeed, stories of the same patients can be found in both publications, although the representations are subtly different. In the sketches that make up her book, La Motte is even more critical of the war and the treatment of the wounded. It is a more immediate response, first published in Britain and the USA in December 1916, but immediately withdrawn in Britain. It did not appear in France at all. It was just a bit too close to home.

La Motte was no doubt influenced stylistically by her friend Gertrude Stein and other experimental writers whom she met in Paris early in the war. Structurally Backwash is very similar to The Forbidden Zone, but without the poems. The sketch that particularly influenced me when conceiving my own novel is entitled ‘Women and Wives’. This was the trigger for Gabrielle and provides me with my epigraph:

There are many women at the Front. How do they get there, to the Zone of the Armies? On various pretexts - to see sick relatives, in such and such hospitals, or to see other relatives, brothers, uncles, cousins, other people's husbands - oh, there are many reasons which make it possible for them to come. And always there are the Belgian women, who live in the War Zone, for at present there is a little strip of Belgium left, and all the civilians have not been evacuated from the Army Zone. So there are plenty women, first and last.

‘Women and Wives’ is a bitter attack on the misogynist behaviour of the men in the war zone, on the commodification and consumption of women who are not and never will be wives. La Motte’s anger is directed at the men of all nations, who, in the absence of their wives (they all have absent wives) feel entitled to make whatever use they choose of other women available.

Gabrielle Rochard is a young Belgian woman who lives in the War Zone. She is alone, her family has dispersed, and she has her own reasons for wishing to stay despite the hardships she encounters in doing so. Her family farm is located close to the embattled city of Ypres and not far from a hospital very like the one in which La Motte and Borden worked. In Where No Shadow Awaits, I explore this hidden side of First World War experience; the women that nobody thinks of or remembers. Everything changes for Gabrielle when she meets the young English soldier, Joe Smith, but not in ways you might imagine.

Watch this space…

OUT 5TH SEPTEMBER 2025