Prelude: Etaples, Winter 1916–1918

Abstract

In the winter of 1915, as Germany was reinforcing its extensive trench system at Ypres, the British Army began the construction of what would be the largest hospital camp any government has ever built abroad. The site selected for this ambitious project was Etaples, a small village 15 miles south of Boulogne, labelled a ‘sand heap’ by a leading British medical journal because of its proximity to the windswept dunes of the northeastern French coast.