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Five things you didn’t know about the First World War

By Katrina Crew
November 10, 2009 at 11:41 am

Well, you probably didn’t know them. But read this post, and you’ll be able to impress your friends with some geeky history facts.

Fact 1: It was the first time the British army used motorised ambulances

At the beginning of the war, the army was still using horse-drawn ambulances. Alfred Keogh, leader of a Red Cross commission to establish hospitals in France, knew that motorised transport was essential for helping the wounded.

On 12 September 1914, the Royal Automobile Club had a meeting and a few members offered to place themselves and their cars at the Red Cross’ disposal. The Red Cross established the motor ambulance department, which sent 3,446 motor vehicles (including 2,171 motor ambulances) to various destinations by the end of the war.

Fact 2: Famous people volunteered

They may not have been famous at the time, but they’re famous now. Agatha Christie, who nursed soldiers at a hospital in Torquay from 1914 to 1918, attributed her knowledge of poisons to her experience dispensing medicines.

Vera Brittain (pictured) wrote diaries about her time as a Red Cross nurse, which were later published as Testament of Youth and Chronicle of Youth.

E.M. Forster was a Red Cross searcher for the missing and wounded in Egypt. That meant he drove around battlefields looking for soldiers who were still alive and transported them to hospital.

Rudyard Kipling helped with the Red Cross and Order of St John war library, which supplied free books and magazines to sick and wounded soldiers and sailors.

Fact 3: Regular people gave up their homes for hospitals

When the war began, the British Red Cross and the Order of St John joined together to form the Joint War Committee. The committee trained thousands of nurses to care for wounded and convalescing servicemen.

Unfortunately, so many soldiers were wounded and ill that hospitals in the UK were overflowing. On the positive side, though, families were so generous the Joint War Committee was inundated with offers from the public to use buildings they owned as auxiliary hospitals.

Fact 4: There were so many prisoners of war, the international community got together to create a new Geneva Convention

The First Geneva Convention was adopted in 1864 to protect wounded and sick soldiers on land during war. It also protected people who were indirectly involved in war but who didn’t fight, like medical and religious personnel, medical units and medical transports.

The Second Geneva Convention extended protection to wounded, sick and shipwrecked military personnel at sea.

There were some treaty provisions protecting prisoners of war at the time of the First World War, but the large number of soldiers taken prisoner during that conflict, and their treatment during that time, prompted the international community to adopt the Third Geneva Convention in 1929 to better protect them.

To give you an idea of how many prisoners there were, this photo shows the prisoner of war records room at the ICRC in Geneva. If you go to the fascinating Red Cross Red Crescent Museum in Geneva, you can see seven million file cards that document two million prisoners of war.

Fact 5: Humans weren’t the only ones who got artificial limbs

One of our historic collections officers, Emily (who tells me basically all the cool history stuff I write on this blog), told me an artificial limb maker made a leg for a dog who was wounded during active service taking medical supplies to the frontline.

That’s all the information we know about the dog, though, so if anyone knows more about the story, please let us know in the comments below!

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Tags: animals, archives, famous volunteers, First World War, history

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