Page 33 - Greystones Archaeological Historical Society

GREYSTONES ARCHAEOLOGICAL & HISTORICAL SOCIETY JOURNAL VOLUME 8

Lizzie, therefore, was already well acquainted with the work
of the British Ambulance Committee (BAC), and shortly after her
return to England took up the post of head of its appeal
department, with responsibility for raising the necessary funding
of £1,200 a week. Set up in the early days of the war, the BAC
was a voluntary organisation, dedicated to providing ambulance
transport for the French army. The first contingent of vehicles set
off for France in December 1914, and by April 1915 three
convoys, each of twenty-five vehicles, each with a volunteer
driver, had been sent out to the French sections of the Western
Front. By 1918 the BAC was sponsoring five convoys, each
consisting of twenty motor ambulances, a travelling workshop,
two lorries and staff cars, as well as a motorcycle section,
consisting of ten motorcycle side-cars with stretchers, and its
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personnel in France numbered about 300 men.
Herbert Ward, one of the early volunteers, published an
account of the six months he spent as a BAC driver on the
Vosges Front. In his diary entry for 29 September 1915 he
recorded the danger and discomfort facing soldiers and
volunteers alike:

‘We came in my own car, with two French officers – four long
hours in the cold and wet, with shells continually screaming
overhead and occasionally dropping around us … We
floundered about in the dark, loading wounded men into each
ambulance as it arrived. The poor chaps were lying about on
their stretchers in the mud – out in the pouring rain.

Lizzie Le Blond and the early days of the Ladies’ Alpine Club’, Journal of the Irish
Mountaineering and Exploration Historical Society, volume 4, 2015 (forthcoming).
7 Day in, day out, pp 193-194. For information on the operations of the British
Ambulance Committee, see Herbert Ward, Mr Poilu: notes and sketches with the
fighting French, 1916, and Laurence Binyon, For dauntless France: an account of
British aid to the French wounded and victims of the war, ?1918.
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