The Red Cross Girls in the British Trenches

by Margaret Vandercook

To understand the service of the Red Cross ambulances one must be familiar with the unusual conditions which existed in this most terrible war of all human history.

Most of us know, of course, that the greater part of the fighting was done at night. By day scouts in aeroplanes endeavored to locate the enemy’s positions, while sentries kept guard along the miles of trenches to fire at any man who dared venture within what was called the zone of death. So all the work of war except the actual fighting must take place behind each army’s line of entrenchments.

This means that in the early morning, when the night’s cruelties were past, the wounded soldiers were carried from the field of battle or from the trenches to some place of safety in the rear. Here nurses and doctors could give them first aid. And this required tremendous personal bravery. The stricken soldiers must be borne in the arms of their companions to the nearest Red Cross, or else lifted into the ambulances or smaller motor cars. These traveled with all possible speed across the tragic fields of the dead, as soon as a lull in the firing made attempt at rescue possible.

There, behind a barricade of trees, or of sand bags, or of a stone wall, or whatever defense human ingenuity could invent, stood white tents, or else a stable or house. These waved flags of white bearing a crimson cross, demanding safety for the suffering.

These temporary hospitals had to be established at any place where the need was greatest. But the soldiers could not remain in these quarters. As soon as possible they were taken to the nearest properly equipped hospital, sometimes fairly near the fighting line. At other times they were loaded into trains and borne many weary miles away.

But in nearly every case they were carried to the cars or to the nearer hospitals in the Red Cross ambulances. They were the only chariots of peace the war had so far acquired.

However, it is good to know that together with all the modern inventions for the destruction of men, science had done all that was possible to make the new Red Cross ambulances havens of comfort and of cure. In Paris, the great Madame Curie, the discoverer of radium, had been giving her time and talent to the equipment of ambulances for the soldiers. From this country much of the money that had been poured so generously into Europe had been devoted to their purchase.

So the four Red Cross girls from the Hospital of the Sacred Heart (so named in honor of the old convent school) were naturally impressed with the importance of their new duties.

The plan was that they were to travel back and forth from the field hospitals with the wounded soldiers who required the most immediate attention. A doctor would be in charge of each ambulance and of necessity the chauffeur. Under the circumstances it was thought better to have two nurses instead of one. The four additional nurses were required because two new ambulances had just been added to the British service, as a gift from New York City, through the efforts of Mrs. Henry Payne, who was especially interested in the Sacred Heart Hospital.

The morning that the girls left for the nearer neighborhood of the battlefield was an exquisite June day. The sun is one of France’s many lovers, turning her into “La Belle Dame,” the name by which she is known to her own children and to some of her admirers from other lands.