The American Ambulance Field Service

AFS stands for the American Field Service. It has had several names over the years: The American Ambulance Field Service, Ambulance Américane, the American Field Service, and AFS.

The organization began as a corps of volunteer medics and ambulance drivers from the United States who tended the wounded on the battlefields of Europe during the First World War, prior to the United States' entry in the war.

The horrors of war made the AFS Ambulance drivers determined to do something to help prevent future wars. From their experiences living in a foreign country, they knew that cross-cultural experiences can change the way people think, because it had changed the way they thought. They settled on student exchanges as a means of increasing cross-cultural understanding. In 1947, the first 52 students from 10 different countries came to the United States to live for a year.

These two streams being really one...

The following is an excerpt from Friends of France: The Field Service of the American Ambulance described by its members. pp 12-17 Houghton Mifflin 1916. It was written by Henry Sydnor Harrison, a volunteer ambulance driver for AFS during World War I.

Personally, I think that my sharpest impression of war as a whole came to me, not along the postes de secours or under the guns at all, but at the station place in the once obscure little town of Poperinghe, on the 23rd of April, 1915.

That, it will be remembered, was a fateful day. At five o'clock on the afternoon before (everybody was perfectly specific about the hour), there had begun the great movement now known as the Second Battle of Ypres (or of the Yser). The assault had begun with the terrifying surprise of poison-gas; the gas was followed by artillery attacks of a ferocity hitherto unequalled; Ypres had been wiped out in a few hours; the Germans had crossed the Yser. Thus the French and English lines, which were joined, had been abruptly pushed back over a long front. That these were anxious hours for the Allies, Sir John French's report of June 15 (1915) indicates very plainly, I think. But they were far from being idle hours. To-day the whole back country, which for weeks had swarmed with soldiers, was up. For miles around, Allied reserves had been called up from camp or billet; and now they were rushing forward to stiffen the wavering lines and stem the threatening thrust for the coast.

At three o'clock on this afternoon, I stood in Rue D'Ypres, before the railway station in Poperinghe, and watched the new army of England go up. Thousands and thousands, foot and horse, supply and artillery, gun, caisson, wagon and lorry, the English were going up. All afternoon long, in an un-ending stream, they tramped and rolled up the Flemish highroad, and, wheeling just before me, dipped and disappeared down a side-street toward "out there." Beautifully equipped and physically attractive - the useless cavalry especially! - sun-tanned and confident, all ready, I am sure, to die without a whimper, they were a most likely and impressive-looking lot. And I suppose that they could have had little more idea of what they were going into than you and I have of the geography of the nether regions.

This was on my left - the English going up. And on my right, the two streams actually touching and mingling, the English were coming back. They did not come as they went, however. They came on their backs, very still and remote; and all that you were likely to see of them now was their muddy boots at the ambulance flap.

Service Sanitaire as we were, I think Section 1 never saw, before or since, such a conglomeration of wounded as we saw that day at Poperinghe. Here was the rail-head and the base; here for the moment were the Red Cross and the Royal Army Medical Corps units shelled out of Ypres; here was the nervous centre of all that swarming and sweating back-of-the-front. And here, hour after hour, into and through the night, the slow-moving wagons, English, French, and American, rolling on one another's heels, brought back the bloody harvest.

The English, so returning to Poperinghe gare, were very well cared for. By the station wicket a large squad of English stretcher-bearers, directed, I believe by a colonel of the line, was unceasingly and expertly busy. Behind the wicket lay the waiting English train, steam up for Boulogne, enormously long and perfectly sumptuous: a super-train, a hospital Pullman, all swinging white beds and shining nickel. The French, alas, were less lucky that day. Doubtless the unimagined flood of wounded had swamped the generally excellent service; for the moment, at least, there was not only no super-train for the French; there was no train. As for the bunks of the station warehouses, the hopital d'évacuation, they were of course long since exhausted. Thus it was that wounded tirailleurs and Zouaves and black men from Africa, set down from ambulance, staggered unattended up the station platform, sat and lay anyhow about the concrete and the sand - no flesh-wounded hoppers these, but hard-punished men, not a few of the struck, it was only too manifest, in the seat of their lives. This was a bloody disarray which I never saw elsewhere, and hope never to see again. Here, indeed, there was moaning to be heard, with the hard gasp and hopeless coughing of the asphyxiis. And still, behind this heavy ambulance, rolled another; and another and another and another.

On my left was the cannon fodder going up; on my right was the cannon fodder coming back. The whole mechanics of war at a stroke, you might have said; these two streams being really one, these men the same men, only at slightly different stages of their experience. But there was still another detail in the picture we saw that day, more human than the organized machine, perhaps, and it seemed even more pathetic.

Behind me as I stood and watched the mingling streams of soldiers, the little square was black with réfugiés. Farther back, in the station yard, a second long train stood steaming beside the hospital train, a train for the homeless and the waifs of war. And presently the gate opened, and these crowds, old men and women and children, pushed through to embark on their unknown voyage.

These were persons who but yesterday possessed a local habitation and a name, a background, old ties and associations, community organization, a life. Abruptly severed from all this, violently hacked off at the roots, they were to-day floating units in a name-less class, droves of a ticket and number, réfugiés. I walked up the platform beside their crowded train. A little group still lingered outside; a boy, a weazened old man, and three or four black-clad women, simple peasants, with their household goods in a tablecloth - waiting there, it may be, for the sight of a familiar face, missed since last night. I asked the women where they came from. They said from Boesinghe, which the Germans had all but entered the night before. Their homes, then, were in Boesinghe? Oh, no; their homes, their real homes, were in a little village some twenty kilometres back. And then they fixed themselves permanently in my memory by saying, quite simply, that they had been driven from their homes by the coming of the Germans in October (1914); and they had then come to settle with relatives in Boesinghe, which had seemed safe - until last night. Twice expelled and severed at the roots; where were they going now? I asked the question; and one of the women made a little gesture with her arms, and answered, stoically; "To France" - which was, as I consider, the brave way of saying, God knows. As the case seemed sad to me, I tried to say something to that effect; and, getting no answer to my commonplaces, I glanced up, and all the women's eyes had suddenly filled with tears.

And outside the English were still going up with a fine tramp and rumble, nice young clerks from Manchester and green-grocers' assistants from Tottenham Court Road.