Drawing from the Illustrated London News showing British ambulance cars, 10 July 1915, (Catalogue ref: ZPER 34/147)
Transcript
After the day’s work in Flanders: the passing of the Red Cross – British Ambulance-cars on their way from the field-hospitals to Boulogne.
This long-drawn-out procession of British motor-ambulance-cars is one of the sights but too sadly familiar day by day along the tree-fringed highways that lead across the Franco-Belgian frontier from the trenches in the district round Ypres and Neuve Chapelle to the advanced base-hospital and clearing-house for the wounded, just within the French frontier, and thence to Boulogne, where is the main British base-hospital, and whence the hospital-ships leave for England. The picture of the swiftly moving, smoothly, almost silently, running grey-bodied cars, each carrying its four stricken occupants on their stretchers, with grey canvas hoods badged with the staring red Geneva cross in its white circle, tells its own tale with sufficient completeness. ‘One of the most remarkable features in connection with the work of the British Army in the field,’ says a special correspondent of the ‘Times,’ ‘is our ambulance and hospital work. It is admittedly far in advance of anything that has ever been done in this way before…. None of these hard-wrought Red Cross men could be other than a gentle, kindly man. You can see they are by watching them at their work.’
Facsimile drawing by Frederic Villiers, our special artist in the Western Theatre of War. [Copyrighted in the United States and Canada.]