The Ambulance Column

The Organisation which brings each Patient from the Train to the War Hospital: A Note by our C.O.

The general run of patients have but little knowledge of the organisation that is responsible for their transport from the station to the hospital. It is a purely voluntary one, started by Mr. and Mrs. Lancelot Dent in the early days of the war, and it has grown under their care with the increasing demands that have been made upon them. The ladies who help are largely those who before this have had their time entirely at their own disposal. Now night and day they are at the call of their country. There is no band playing when in the small hours they meet the trains which bring home the maimed of the war. The stretcher bearers are men, who, for various reasons, must stay at home, and they at a moment's notice leave their offices and work at the unloading.

There are a couple of things I still wait for, and am confident I shall never see, when a train of sick and wounded is being detrained - one is a howl of pain from the wounded man, and the other is a suspicion of impatience on the part of the ambulance column. The same gentleness is present today as was noticeable a year ago. Often the members of the column have had but little rest, and less prospect of any, yet the patients would not suspect it, and each patient is handled on his stretcher as if he were the one person for whom they had come. There are, to my mind, no words of praise too great for this column, and their record will take a good deal of beating. They have moved 45,715 cases in a year, and of these 13,452 were so severely injured that they were stretcher cases, and this has been done without a single death occurring en route.

One of the little acts which are symptomatic of the whole work was this - when the exchanged wounded came home each man had a rose handed to him by Mrs. Dent as he was brought to the column. Many of the men were too touched to speak.

H.E.B.P.