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In the sketch 'Heroes', a soldier who can no longer bear the war shoots himself in the head. The surgeons and nurses work hard to save his life. Once he recovers, he will be court-martialed and executed for trying to desert through suicide, so the hospital's full skill serves only to keep him alive for the firing squad.
Heroism and battle are the visible front wave of war. Behind them runs a backwash: the stinking wounds, the slow deaths, the pettiness, the vanity and the moral decay that pile up out of sight in rear hospitals.
War propaganda says wounds and death purify men and make them heroic. La Motte shows that the wounded stay exactly as petty, crude, frightened or ordinary as they were before, and pain mostly shrinks them. Treating suffering as ennobling lets onlookers feel uplifted by violence while the people inside it simply degrade.
Look at military medicine by asking whose goals it serves. The field hospital patches men up so they can be sent back to the trenches, court-martialed, or decorated for show. The patients' own interests hardly figure. Once you notice this, apparent compassion shows up as maintenance of the war machine.
La Motte describes horrors in a flat, clinical and often deadpan voice. The gap between the two produces the moral judgment, so the reader reaches the indictment alone, and the reader's conclusion is harder to dismiss than stated outrage.