[Illustration: _“The Autocar” illustration._
A TYPE OF EXTEMPORISED MOTOR AMBULANCE FAVOURED BY THE FRENCH AND BELGIANS.]
These notes will serve to give the necessary information to those who may wish to equip motor ambulances for any kind of use during the war, and there does not appear to be any need to go into details of all the various other varieties of ambulance body, many of them very beautifully fitted and designed, but also very expensive. One other type may, however, be mentioned, since it is being employed extensively by the French and Belgian Governments. This consists essentially of a stout floor carrying two iron frameworks of inverted V shape. Between these two and stretching fore and aft is an arrangement similar in principle to a squirrel cage, or to a water-wheel with four floats. The place of each float is taken by the necessary apparatus for the support of a stretcher, provision being made that all the four stretchers retain their horizontal position whatever the position of the framework supporting them. The stretchers can be loaded in from the side to the bottom position, and the apparatus swung round so that this operation is continued, the stretchers after being loaded being subsequently raised by the rotation of the frame. It is stated that in Antwerp and elsewhere this type of ambulance has been used extensively, and is found to be very comfortable and very easy to construct.
Turning to the work for which the ambulances are being employed, much of this is of an obvious character. Ambulance services are evidently needed both at the military hospitals, and also further back at the big base hospitals of the Red Cross Society on the Continent. They are wanted again at all the various hospitals in this country to which wounded men are brought. They are employed, for example, in London, to meet the hospital trains and carry from the stations those men who are not able to be conveyed in ordinary cars.
The requirement of motor ambulances nearer the front is almost limitless. In the system of the R.A.M.C. in service, wounded men are first removed by regimental stretcher-bearers to the “aid post,” where medical attention is first given to them. Thence, they are carried by the bearer sections of the field ambulance--and possibly, if roads permit, by motor ambulances--to the advance dressing stations, whence after treatment they are taken by the military ambulance waggons to meet conveyances from the clearing hospital, which is usually situated somewhere near the railhead. Upon this hospital falls the duty of avoiding all overcrowding nearer the front, and this must be done by employing all available means of transport. Evidently, motor ambulances are the most suitable kind of conveyance for this work, since they afford a reasonable degree of comfort to the patient, and even if their speed capacities cannot be utilised to any great extent while they are carrying wounded men, advantage can be taken of them while returning empty towards the front for further load. Once the patients have been taken as far back as the field hospital at railhead, their subsequent conveyance to the Red Cross hospitals, or any other required points, can be carried out by train supplemented by local motor ambulance services from the termini to the hospitals.