THE SECTION IN FLANDERS
The Section which is here designated as the "Section in Flanders" has at least two distinguishing characteristics. This was the first Section of substantial proportions to be geographically separated from the "American Ambulance" at Neuilly and turned over to the French army. Until it left "for the front" our automobiles had worked either to and from the Neuilly hospital, as an evacuating base, or, if temporarily detached for service elsewhere, they had gone out in very small units.
Secondarily, it has the distinction of having been moved about more frequently and of having been attached to more diverse army units than any other of our Sections. During the first year of its history, it was located successively in almost every part of Flanders still subject to the Allies: first at Dunkirk and Malo, then at Poperinghe and Elverdinghe, then at Coxyde and Nieuport, then at Crombeke and Woesten, Then after a full year in Flanders it was moved to Beauvais for revision, and since then it has worked in the region between Soissons and Compiègne and subsequently in the neighborhood of Méricourt-sur-Somme.
During most of the time the men have been quartered in barns and stables, sleeping in lofts in the hay or straw, or on stretchers on the floor, or inside their ambulances, or, during the summer, on the ground, in improvised tents in the open fields.
The opportunities for comfortable writing have been few, and no complete story of the Section's experiences has ever been written. The following pages give only glimpses of a history which has been crammed with incidents and impressions worth recording.
The Section's story began in the cold wet days of early January, 1915, when twenty men with twelve cars left Paris for the north. We spent our first night en route in the shadow of the Beauvais Cathedral, passing the following day through many towns filled with French troops, and then, as we crossed into the British Sector, through towns and villages abounding with the khaki-clad soldiers of England and her colonies and the turbaned troops of British India. The second night we stayed at Saint-Omer, the men sleeping in their cars in the centre of the town square, and the third morning, passing out of the British Sector once more into the French lines, we arrived in Dunkirk where our work began.
AMERICANS IN THEIR GAS-MASKS IN FRONT OF THE BOMB-PROOF SHELTER OUTSIDE OF THE HEADQUARTERS
We were at once assigned to duty in connection with a hospital established in the freight shed of a railway station, and from then on for many a long day our duty was to carry wounded and sick in a never-ending stream from the station, where they arrived from the front by four or five daily trains, to the thirty or more hospitals in and about the city. Every school, barrack, and other large building in the town (even the public theatre) or in the neighboring towns within ten miles of Dunkirk, seemed to have been turned into a hospital. Our work was extremely useful, the Section carrying scores and scores of sick and wounded, day after day, week in and out. The first incident of an exciting nature came on the second day.