Warrington and the Great War by Hayes Janice

Author:Hayes, Janice
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Amberley Publishing
Published: 2015-06-14T16:00:00+00:00

A grainy action photograph of an injured soldier carried from the battlefield. © Lancashire Infantry Museum

The stretcher bearers don’t stay in the trenches during the day. We do our work at night time. Bullets whistle past us in all directions. Our dressing station is about a mile away from the trenches in an old building … well it has been made to look old by the shells which have broken nearly all the windows and the roof. If any of the men are wounded in the daytime they telephone to us and as soon as it gets dark we go and get them in. Dr Law attends to them and in the early hours of the morning the field ambulances come and take them to hospital.

Seriously injured men were taken to the Casualty Clearing Stations behind the lines which could each deal with up to 2,000 cases and where immediate treatment such as amputations would be carried out by the surgeons on duty. One of the biggest dangers facing wounded soldiers was the danger of sceptic poisoning as even a senior officer could discover. On 31 March 1916 newly promoted. Lt Col G.R. Crosfield sent a very matter of fact letter to his sister telling her he had received a gunshot wound to his left ankle, fracturing both his leg bones while on duty at St Eloi. ‘Isn’t it a nuisance? I got shot just above the ankle when reconnoitring some ground with the Brigade Major. Bullet wound and compound fracture. I don’t suppose I shall be fit for the field under three months.’ Unfortunately the wound turned sceptic and a week later his leg had to be amputated below the left knee. This effectively ended his army career but not his war as he was later given a commission as an observer in the RAF.

The surgeons on duty on the first day of the Battle of the Somme were faced with unprecedented numbers of severely injured men and had to work round the clock as one later recalled.

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