Tommy (64 page)

At the aid post the medical officer would make a quick assessment. This was often no easy task, for in any sort of serious action he would quickly be overwhelmed by the sheer weight of casualties. Ernest Parker had never really appreciated his MO until he saw him in a trench at Loos, ‘feverishly at work, his head swathed in a bloodstained bandage'.
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Harold Dearden's aid post near Ypres was:

Some men were so badly hurt that it was a waste of time and effort to move them further back: they would be made as comfortable as possible and left to die. Many doctors took the view that a merciful overdose was the kindest treatment for a badly-wounded man. Second Lieutenant Treffry was terribly mangled by a shell on the Somme. His comrade C. P. Blacker saw it happen, and rushed forward to find that:

Blacker briefly considered shooting him, but instead had him stretchered back to an aid post near Guillemont, where a young RAMC officer agreed that there was: ‘Nothing to do but put him to sleep … But Treffry had a tough constitution and did not die until nightfall.'
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There were times too when morphine was no use. Arthur Osburn, striving desperately to care for a group of cavalrymen hit by a heavy shell on the Aisne in 1914, found:

Sidney Rogerson was a very experienced company commander by the time he fought on the Chemin des Dames in 1918, but little could have prepared him for it.

Other men could be saved by swift treatment. The medical officer would do his best with them, stopping bleeding and cleaning wounds, and then stretcher-bearers, sent forward by the bearer sections of field ambulances, would carry them back to the tent section of the field ambulance in the advance dressing station, where better treatment was possible. Soldiers whose wounds were less threatening might take longer to reach the advance dressing station; scarce places on stretchers were given to those whose need was greatest. ‘I know of no greater relief than that experienced by a Regimental M.O. on getting rid of the wounded,' reflected Cyril Helm.
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Walking wounded would be directed back, under their own steam, to a walking wounded collecting station, usually in the same vicinity as the advance dressing station. Before leaving the regimental aid post a wounded man was tagged with a label giving an initial diagnosis and specifying what drugs, if any, he had been given. ‘These tickets were issued to us in book form,' wrote Frank Dunham, ‘similar to a cheque book, so that we retained a complete list of all casualties passing through our Aid Post. This list we had to send to our Orderly Room daily, whence the information was passed on to the Base and thence to England.'
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When Harry Ogle was hit in the leg by a rifle bullet which remained in the wound, he was tagged wrongly: it took him several days to persuade the doctors to X-ray his leg, so convinced were they by the tag's insistence that the wound was superficial.

Work at an advance dressing station during a major battle was unrelenting. In July 1917 Major Martin Littlewood RAMC, who had already informed his diary that ‘I develop lice and a touch of scabies', wrote that his dressing station, near Ypres, received a ‘constant stream of wounded and now and then some who have been out two days. Awful. Busy all night until morning.' When he got out of the line in November he was so affected by the experience that he found he could no longer sleep in sheets, and when he raised the blinds to enjoy the sensation of a naked light, thought ‘of the men lying around the Menin Road'.
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Chaplains were also busy, taking dictation from men who wanted to send letters home, comforting the badly hurt, and often, when there was a heavy surge of casualties, helping with first aid. Julian Bickersteth, in an advance dressing station just behind Gommecourt on 1 July 1916, supervised the loading of ambulances – four lying and four sitting cases apiece – and organised hot tea or Oxo for the wounded. He wrote that:

Doctors often commented on the resignation of their wounded, and Lord Moran wrote that only once, during his whole time on the Western Front, did he encounter a man who was terrified of death when the moment came. He tried to give the man privacy by shoving a heavy box of dressings against the dugout door, but reflected that those who practised medicine became party to dreadful secrets.

At night Julian Bickersteth would go forward with the bearer sections of the field ambulance running his dressing station, collecting wounded from the battlefield and bagging up the identity discs and personal belongings of the dead, recording the details on a label attached to his tunic. Only his faith kept him going, he reflected, and ‘comforted me with the thought that those bodies are not down here – they are above …'. The division's assistant provost marshal sent a squad of thirty men to dig a huge grave, 26 feet long, 6 feet wide and 4 feet deep, and on one occasion Bickersteth had to take cover in it to avoid shelling – by no means a unique experience of the close proximity of the quick and the dead. Because many of the wounded who reached an advance dressing station died there, the extemporised graveyards that surrounded so many later formed the basis for several Commonwealth War Graves Commission cemeteries on the Western Front. Perhaps the best known former dressing station is Essex Farm, just north of Ypres, where the Canadian medical officer John McCrae wrote the poem
In flanders Fields.

In October 1918 Albert Bullock, with his hip wound, was taken by wheeled stretcher from his regimental aid post to the advance dressing station, and although he was very cold and wanted a drink they had nothing for him. His battalion, 8/Royal Warwicks, had suffered more casualties in forty-eight hours than it had for nearly a year in Italy, and it was not alone: the system was creaking badly. So badly, indeed, that nobody had yet relieved him of the grenades and flares in his pockets and he dumped these, with his gas mask and helmet, when he reached his next port of call, the casualty clearing station. The journey from dressing station to clearing station was usually made by motor ambulance. It could be easy enough if the system was not under pressure, but Frank Hawkings, walking wounded on the first day of the Somme, saw it close to meltdown.

The casualty clearing station was a field hospital set up in tents, Nissen huts or commandeered accommodation. A station might have half a dozen doctors and as many nursing sisters, and by September 1917 there were fifty-nine of them on the Western Front, each capable of dealing with up to 1,200 cases a day. At the peak of the third battle of Ypres there were twenty-three clearing stations behind the salient, each with three surgical teams working sixteen hours on and eight off. There was a conflict of opinion over the role of the clearing station. Traditionally, army doctors argued that the main role of the medical evacuation system was to shift soldiers along it as quickly as possible. However, there were those like Sir Anthony Bowlby, brought in as consulting surgeon to the BEF, who thought that the stations should be pushed well forward and should operate as quickly as possible, as many of the men evacuated so quickly would actually die. A change in practice brought good results, though there were suggestions that it led to the capture of part of two clearing stations during the German 1918 March offensive, for it was no easy matter to move a hospital and its patients at short notice.

But with the enhancement of the medical achievements of the casualty clearing station came, some argued, a decline in its practicality. Colonel David Rorie, assistant director of medical services, 51st Highland Division, thought that the clearing station personnel were ‘the spoilt children of the RAMC, arguing that they were always eager to obtain labour from the field ambulances, but slow to return it. And they sometimes complained when soldiers appeared with their pockets full of hand-grenades: ‘Tommy was a casual soul, and often carried an odd bomb or two inside the torn lining of his tunic pockets or otherwise bestowed about his person.'
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A man would probably not get out of his clothes till he reached a clearing station, revealing some unpleasant surprises. A captured German complained that he had not had his boot off for fourteen days. ‘Unfortunately,' wrote Rorie, ‘before I managed to leave his side he managed to get the boot off. I decided at once that he was no liar.' Some men were shocked into incontinence, or lost control of their bowels through pain or fear, and one Irish officer, in the grips of dysentery and the victim of a long carry, muttered repeatedly: ‘It's not my fault …'

From the clearing station patients, British and German, would be moved to a base hospital or on to the French coast for transport to Britain. This part of the journey was usually made by rail, and Harold Dolby saw German prisoners, who, at least in theory, received exactly the same treatment as their captors:

Private Alf Arnold, working at a field hospital behind the Somme battlefield in July 1916, told his parents that:

Bernard Martin, wounded at Passchendaele, remembered little of his own train journey: