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Excerpt from Diary of Section VIII: American Ambulance Field Service The human interest of this record sufficiently justifies publication, but it is printed primarily because its story is typical of the day's work of every Section in the Field Service, and in order that those Americans who have given ambulances and such practical encouragement may better realize how much their cooperation has actually accomplished. There are now nine of these Sections attached to the Armies of France at various points along the Western Front from the Channel to Alsace, and in Salonika. During the next few weeks six more are being equipped and sent out. Of the men immediately going over to drive these new cars Chicago University is sending two units of twenty-five men each, and the Universities of Leland Stanford, Harvard, Wisconsin, and California are each contributing a like unit. More than sixty other American colleges and universities are already represented. While all these men quite realize that their work is but a matter of duty to the cause and nation they wish to serve, the mere fact of their presence and voluntary sharing of the risk and labor involved has done much to convince France of the feeling that really exists for her in this country. However great the help which new circumstances might make it possible for us to render the Allies by men and money, we can never offer any truer evidence of sympathy than by the service of which these pages bear tribute. About the Publisher Forgotten Books publishes hundreds of thousands of rare and classic books. Find more at www.forgottenbooks.com This book is a reproduction of an important historical work. Forgotten Books uses state-of-the-art technology to digitally reconstruct the work, preserving the original format whilst repairing imperfections present in the aged copy. In rare cases, an imperfection in the original, such as a blemish or missing page, may be replicated in our edition. We do, however, repair the vast majority of imperfections successfully; any imperfections that remain are intentionally left to preserve the state of such historical works.
“As the quick transportation of wounded from the front to the nearest hospital is so great a factor in saving their lives, the American Ambulance Field Service was organized soon after the beginning of the war, and during the subsequent two years its achievement has fully demonstrated the value of its purpose. It has now in the field more than 300 motor ambulances. These are driven by young American volunteers, most of whom are graduates of American universities. To them has been successfully entrusted the vitally important matter of bringing the wounded in the shortest possible time from the trenches to places where the first surgical help can be given. Upon this first surgical help largely depends, naturally, the chance of the wounded surviving long enough to reach the base hospitals. These ambulances are grouped in sections of twenty to thirty cars, and attached to the French Armies. They carry wounded between the front and the Army Hospitals within the Army Zone. The French Army has cited these Sections more than twenty times for distinguished services; has conferred the Croix de Guerre, for bravery, on sixty-six members of the Service, and upon two, the Médaille Militaire, the highest honor for military valor in France.”—From the American Ambulance Service Leaflet included in the book.
They left Harvard, Yale, Princeton, Michigan, and Stanford to drive ambulances on the French front, and on the killing fields of World War I they learned that war was no place for gentlemen. The tale of the American volunteer ambulance drivers of the First World War is one of gallantry amid gore; manners amid madness. Arlen J. Hansen’s Gentlemen Volunteers brings to life the entire story of the men—and women—who formed the first ambulance corps, and who went on to redefine American culture. Some were to become legends—Ernest Hemingway, e. e. cummings, Malcolm Cowley, and Walt Disney—but all were part of a generation seeking something greater and grander than what they could find at home. The war in France beckoned them, promising glory, romance, and escape. Between 1914 and 1917 (when the United States officially entered the war), they volunteered by the thousands, abandoning college campuses and prep schools across the nation and leaving behind an America determined not to be drawn into a “European war.” What the volunteers found in France was carnage on an unprecedented scale. Here is a spellbinding account of a remarkable time; the legacy of the ambulance drivers of WWI endures to this day.
Beginning with the novelist Edith Wharton, who toured the front in her Mercedes in 1915, this book describes the wartime experiences of American idealists (and a few rogues) on the Western Front and concludes with the doughboys' experiences under General Pershing. Americans were "over there" from the war's beginning in August 1914, and because America was neutral until April 1917, they saw the war from both the French and German lines. Since most of the Americans who served, regardless of which side they were on, were in Champagne and Lorraine, this sector is the focus. Excerpts from memoirs are supplemented by descriptions of personalities, places, battles and even equipment and weapons, thus placing these generally forgotten American adventurers into the context of their times. A special set of maps based upon German Army battle maps was drawn and rare photographs supplement the text.
In this first history of the military ambulance, historian John S. Haller Jr. documents the development of medical technologies for treating and transporting wounded soldiers on the battlefield. Noting that the word ambulance has been used to refer to both a mobile medical support system and a mode of transport, Haller takes readers back to the origins of the modern ambulance, covering their evolution in depth from the late eighteenth century through World War I. The rising nationalism, economic and imperial competition, and military alliances and arms races of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries figure prominently in this history of the military ambulance, which focuses mainly on British and American technological advancements. Beginning with changes introduced by Dominique-Jean Larrey during the Napoleonic Wars, the book traces the organizational and technological challenges faced by opposing armies in the Crimean War, the American Civil War, the Franco-Prussian War, and the Philippines Insurrection, then climaxes with the trench warfare that defined World War I. The operative word is "challenges" of medical care and evacuation because while some things learned in a conflict are carried into the next, too often, the spasms of war force its participants to repeat the errors of the past before acquiring much needed insight. More than a history of medical evacuation systems and vehicles, this exhaustively researched and richly illustrated volume tells a fascinating story, giving readers a unique perspective of the changing nature of warfare in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.
The worth of dialogue with people who come from other cultural traditions was the first important discovery of the ambulance drivers at the front. It led them to care for the wounded on all sides in the war and then to create university exchanges between France and the United States. The practice of intercultural dialogue is the first training experience that is offered today to the students who leave home and to the families who receive them in their homes as new children for long periods of time. As this story unfolds, it is perhaps the border that emerges as something to question – the political borders that the American Field Service ambulance drivers crossed in two world wars, and the cultural and ideological borders overcome by students, schools, and families that answered the call of AFS.