Yet another excellent addition to a very popular series that presents outstanding images of war. Unfairly dubbed ‘Rob All My Comrades’ by soldiers in the trenches, the RAMC introduced a very professional field medical service that saved huge numbers of lives from battle injuries and epidemics during WWI – Very Highly Recommended.
NAME: Images of War, The Royal Army Medical Corps in the Great War, Rare Photographs From Wartime Archives FILE: R2649 AUTHOR: Timothy McCracken PUBLISHER: Pen & Sword BINDING: soft back PAGES: 189 PRICE: £14.99 GENRE: Non Fiction SUBJECT: WWI, World War 1, World War I, First World War, Great War, 1914-1918, triage, field hospitals, ambulance, stretcher bearers, pacifists, gas, shell shock, shrapnel, machine guns, carnage, trench warfare, sickness ISBN: 1-47389-232-5 IMAGE: B2649.jpg BUYNOW: http://tinyurl.com/y73xfmk4 LINKS: DESCRIPTION: Yet another excellent addition to a very popular series that presents outstanding images of war. Unfairly dubbed 'Rob All My Comrades' by soldiers in the trenches, the RAMC introduced a very professional field medical service that saved huge numbers of lives from battle injuries and epidemics during WWI - Very Highly Recommended. Florence Nightingale highlighted the woeful level of medical care for soldiers in a battle zone and made some important improvements in nursing, but the RAMC was to be the first really professional field medical service that came of age in the carnage of the trench warfare of the Great War. Setting up field hospitals and dressing stations close to the front line, and making maximum use of railways and motor ambulances to bring in the sick and wounded was to save huge numbers of soldiers and also make those who could not be saved more comfortable in their final hours. After the end of the Great War, the RAMC successes in the field were to cause new problems because society was not ready for the large number of disabled veterans, particularly those suffering mental problems from the trauma of constant shelling and the daily horrors of trench warfare. The RAMC was rewarded for its epic service to soldiers by being dubbed 'Rob All My Comrades' by those soldiers. There was a suspicion that stretcher bearers were more interested in robbing the dead than bringing back the wounded, even though every day saw immense bravery by stretcher bearers in braving the machine guns and artillery to crawl out into the mud of Flanders to bring back any wounded they could find. It was common for these brave men not only to go out into 'No Man's Land' unarmed and unprotected not just once but many times each day. What may have made soldiers think badly of RAMC personnel was that a number were 'conchies'. Today it may seem strange that someone who refused to carry arms but was prepared to brave enemy fire to rescue the wounded was regarded as a coward, but attitudes were different then. In the same way those who were pounded until they cracked and ran were rounded up and put before firing squads. At a time when school teachers try to avoid detail of war and teach 'empathy', spending a day in a muddy trench teaches very little about the living hell of WWI trench war. The lack of sound, the lack of constant shaking of the earth, the flying bullets, the attitudes to some of those facing the same terrors, and the brave young men who eventually broke under the relentless terror, are absent. This book contains good concise text to ably present some moving and outstanding images of war.