Abstract
The conditions of nurses’ employment and their experiences were dictated by the military medical services, incorporating the national Red Cross organisations. Their planning had been an integral part of military preparations, but they were inadequate for the new industrialised war. Even when modified and improved during the war, the standards of care were always a compromise between military and medical demands; this was especially clear in triage and logistics.
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Notes
- 1.
Harrison (2010) contains extensive discussion of these differences.
- 2.
With some partial exceptions: those military health systems which were so overwhelmed that they accepted independent groups of volunteers, who were able to operate more or less autonomously; the best-known examples were in Belgium and Serbia, partly because volunteers wrote about their experiences there (e.g. St. Clair Stobart , 1916; Sturzenegger, 1915; Mitton, 1916).
- 3.
Sir John French was the first overall commander of British forces on the Western Front, in 1914–15. The mistake was further compounded by the belief, especially prevalent in the French military hierarchy, that all-out attack was the best strategy (Bertschy, 2018: 310–16); this was belatedly recognised by French commanders. The German army made the same mistake in the early months (Hartmann, 2014).
- 4.
Dunant had been moved to found the Red Cross after seeing the aftermath of the Battle of Solferino in 1859 (https://www.icrc.org/en/doc/resources/documents/feature/2010/solferino-feature-240609.htm)
- 5.
Some caution is needed in the interpretation of these figures. Each unit is a treatment admission and discharge, thus a soldier who was wounded four times and died after the fifth would count as four recoveries and one death. Many soldiers were wounded multiple times—Ernst Jünger was hit 14 times, on seven separate occasions (Segal & Ferrandis, 2012: 123).
- 6.
However, as Harrison points out, rates of death by disease varied substantially between theatres, in part due to different levels of attention given to medical matters by local commanders (2010: 298–9).
- 7.
See also Carden-Coyne, 2014: 11; Dwyer, 2017: 2. It is probably not a coincidence that the nineteenth century also sees the birth of soldiers’ memoirs as a literary genre; as Harari as shown, military memoirs moved from being the preserve of the elite to become also the property of the ordinary soldier recounting their personal experience (quoted Ramsey, 2017: 48).
- 8.
This document established the legal basis of the purpose and organisation of the military medical system in 1907 (earlier versions from 1874) (Zischek et al., 2018).
- 9.
In law this was not entirely true: in France, soldiers had the same right as anyone else to refuse surgery. The same principle applied in Germany (Peske, 2012: 66–7).
- 10.
This theme is at the heart of other texts about the medical history of the Great War, notably Carden-Coyne (2014).
- 11.
More exactly, the disastrous experiences of the first months of the war made them realise this; see below.
- 12.
See Thébaud (1986: 84–93) for details.
- 13.
See Schulte (1998: 99–100) for details.
- 14.
Or, in an alternative formulation, “the manpower-intensive form of warfare” (Harrison, 2010: 65).
- 15.
These figures include garrisons outside Europe, elsewhere in the Empire.
- 16.
The total number of doctors is taken from the website of the military medical service https://www.defense.gouv.fr/sante/actualites/le-service-de-sante-des-armees-pendant-la-premiere-guerre-mondiale
- 17.
This percentage was higher than the figures for Britain (around 45%) but lower than France (80%). The depletion of civilian health resources had an impact upon the health of the civilian populations (van Bergen, 2009: 24–5).
- 18.
Deutsche Medizinische Wochenschrift 41 (1), 7.1.15: 42. An editorial note explains that the article reproduces notes written in the previous October, that is, shortly after the defeat at the Marne and the retreat to the static positions that defined the Western Front. The figures therefore cover a period of roughly two months. From internal evidence, the doctor was stationed near Soissons.
- 19.
See Harrison (2010) for detailed analyses of the British army’s medical record outside the Western Front.
- 20.
- 21.
Hallett gives the total of enrolled nurses plus the reserve as 800 (2016: 13).
- 22.
British Medical Journal, 1.7.24: 71.
- 23.
See the contemporary account excerpted in Panke-Kochinke & Schaidhammer-Placke, 2002: 42–4.
- 24.
Schulte, 1998: 99–100. See also German press reports of complaints from the “free sisters”, for example, Vorwärts, 9.9.14; Berliner Tageblatt, 17.9.14. On 6.9.14 the Norddeutsche Allgemeine Zeitung printed a public letter from the Military Inspection asking Red Cross organisers to accept them when they were as qualified as others. The rejection was caused by the perception that the professional nurses were motivated by the desire to earn a living whereas the Red Cross nurses were motivated by ethics. This principle was already stressed in the war surgery handbook of 1882, according to which “all nursing is to be refused that is not done for the Lord’s sake” (quoted Grundhewer, 1987: 150); perhaps organisational rivalries were also present (Smith, 2010: 165; Eckart, 2014: 108).
- 25.
- 26.
Gradmann (2004: 812–3) gives a higher figure for women involved in military health care, as the usual figure excludes some categories of auxiliary workers, many of whom were women.
- 27.
Bertschy (loc. cit.) gives extensive details of French military medical observation of the Japanese wars of 1890 through 1905 and the Balkan wars of 1912–3 and how this was interpreted by the French military command. He argues that French military insistence on the primacy of rapid attack led them to prefer this interpretation of medical observations over alternatives.
- 28.
Close to the beginning of the war, this fundamental untruth about the “humanitarian bullet” was publicly repeated in the French and German press. For example, on 5.8.14 the Freiburger Tagblatt sought to reassure its readership that “wounds are getting ever slighter and the new artillery weapons are by no means as dangerous as infantry” (quoted Hartmann, 2014: 428); Bertschy gives examples of similar reports in France (2018: 325–6).
- 29.
It is sufficiently well known that the current (09.11.2018) French Ministry of Defence website notes that 1914–15 was a “sanitary disaster” (www.defense.gouv.fr/sante/actualites/le-service-de-sante-des-armees-pendant-la-premiere-guerre-mondiale)
- 30.
As late as June 1915, Agnes Warner notes receiving a train of wounded direct from the front line at her hospital close to Geneva whose wounds have only been dressed once (1917: n.p.).
- 31.
See, for example, L’Homme Enchainé, 30.12.14; Libre Parole, 4.1.15; L’Oeuvre, 18.11.15. Clemenceau received the information either from his daughter, the nurse Madeleine Clemenceau-Jacquemaire (Fell, 2011: 16–17), or from his son Michel.
- 32.
This was not entirely true: the diary of a nurse excerpted in von Hadeln shows that she was in the firing area during the campaign that led to the battle of Tannenberg in December 1914 (1934: 23–4)—indeed, she received the Iron Cross for her rescue of wounded under fire, as did a few other German nurses (see the list of awards on germannursesofthegreatwar.wordpress.com); Wenzel (1931) talks about nurses in field hospitals in Flanders in 1915 (in Altonaer Nachrichten, 24.2.32). Eckart quotes a letter from nurses near the front in Belgium in the first weeks of the war (2014: 110–1); however, Riemann says that only male nurses and orderlies were sent to the front when she arrived in Ghent in 1914 (1930: 53).
- 33.
Carden-Coyne quotes a similar experience by a British officer, whose wound was finally treated after four days’ travel (2014: 40).
- 34.
- 35.
- 36.
- 37.
- 38.
The most thorough discussion of wounds and mortality across the combatant nations is van Bergen, 2009: 140–67.
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Palmer, J. (2021). Nurses and the Military Medical Services in the Great War. In: Nurse Memoirs from the Great War in Britain, France, and Germany. Palgrave Studies in Literature, Science and Medicine. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-82875-2_3
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