Friends in Flanders: Humanitarian Aid Administered by the by Linda Palfreeman PDF

the buddies' Ambulance Unit (FAU) used to be created presently after the outbreak of conflict. the belief of the unit's founder, Philip J. Baker, used to be that it'll offer younger pals (Quakers) with the chance to serve their nation with no sacrificing their pacifist ideas. the 1st volunteers went to Belgium on 31 October 1914, lower than the auspices of the Joint struggle Committee of the British crimson move Society and the Order of St John of Jerusalem. The FAU made a sustained contribution to the army scientific providers of the Allied countries, setting up army hospitals, working ambulance convoys, and staffing sanatorium ships and ambulance trains, treating and transporting wounded males. made up our minds to carry succour to all these in desire, the FAU additionally assisted civilians trapped within the battle quarter and dwelling in determined situations. Nowhere used to be this extra acute than within the besieged and battered city of Ypres the place hundreds of thousands sheltered within the underground passage-ways of the town's historical fortifications - 'a subterranean inhabitants, hopeless, usually lightless', wrote Geoffrey younger, the Unit's younger box commander, 'living on what they may and breeding disease.' The Unit supplied hospitals for the therapy of civilians, and labored intensively within the containment and therapy of the typhoid epidemic that swept the area, finding victims, offering them with remedy, and inoculating humans opposed to the affliction. It performed a massive position within the purification of the town's infected ingesting water, allotted milk for babies and nutrition and garments to the ill and needy. It helped came across orphanages, made provision for education and organised gainful employment for refugees until eventually, ultimately, it turned chargeable for the definitive evacuations of the civilian population.