Hôpital Temporaire d'Arc-en-Barrois was an emergency evacuation hospital serving the French 3rd Army Corps during World War I. It was organised and staffed by British volunteers and served French soldiers.
History
Hôpital Temporaire d'Arc-en-Barrois was a voluntary civilian British hospital unit established in the Château d'Arc-en-Barrois, Haute-Marne, France, for the aid of wounded French soldiers in the Great War. Founded in January 1915 under approval of the Anglo-French Hospital Committee of the British Red Cross Society, London, the hospital of 110 beds was conducted under military command of the French army's Service de Santé. The hospital's first military casualties arrived on 27 January 1915 from the Argonne Forest battlefront. In February 1915 the regional Service de Santé requested an expansion of hospital services and a convalescent hospital was established in the vacant village hospice building, bringing the total number of beds to 180.
Located sixty miles or more to the rear of the war's entrenched front lines, Hôpital Temporaire received casualties from battles in the Argonne Forest and Champagne Offensive (1915), Verdun (1916) and the Meuse-Argonne Campaign (1918). Throughout the war wounded soldiers arrived in Haute-Marne via hospital train through Latrecey-Ormoy-sur-Aube, a remote station located 11 miles from Arc-en-Barrois, and were transported to the château aboard Hôpital Temporaire's small motor ambulance fleet. Wounded and sick soldiers were attended in hospital by a staff of female trained nurses, a small contingent of surgeons and medical students and female auxiliary hospital staff provided by the British Red Cross Voluntary Aid Detachment (V.A.D.). Male volunteers authorized by the British Red Cross typically served as hospital orderlies and ambulance drivers. The hospital maintained numerous essential services—operating theatre, anesthesia, radiography, dentistry, apothecary and clinical laboratory--was financially supported by a large international donor base and supplied regularly by voluntary British war supply depots.
In continuous service until its official demobilization in February 1919, the hospital received a total of 3071 patients; 76 deaths were recorded. More than 400 voluntary and contracted staff served at Hôpital Temporaire, representing the United Kingdom, Canada and Newfoundland, Australia, USA and Denmark.
The Hospital's founding: 1914
In the autumn of 1914 four English sisters, Madeline and Susan Bromley-Martin, Eleanor Martin-Holland and Anora Russell, natives of Worcestershire, learned of the French military's catastrophic shortage of military hospital beds and trained nurses. Among British civilians eager to supply their French ally with medical supplies and hospital staff, the Bromley-Martin sisters gathered financial donors and hospital volunteers to offer humanitarian aid to the French military. A family friend, Lady Kathleen Scott, the Rodin-trained sculptor and widow of the Antarctic explorer Robert Falcon Scott, helped organize a hospital plan and recruited volunteers from her circle of London artist friends.
The British Red Cross and War Office officials did not want civilian interference in international military medical affairs and deterred amateur organizers from sending unauthorized voluntary hospitals to France. In 1914 the British Red Cross and Order of St. John Ambulance Association officially combined forces to both authorize and restrict ad hoc philanthropy with tough committee oversight. Social connections helped the Bromley-Martins obtain the personal support of the joint committee's chairmen, Sir Claude Maxwell MacDonald and the Hon. Arthur Stanley, M.P. The hospital project gained approval in November 1914 after Emily Georgiana Kemp, a British artist, writer and international explorer, offered salary support for an 11-member corps of experienced trained nurses.
Two additional challenges remained: obtaining French military authorization to permit the installation of a civilian-run British hospital, and the acquisition of a temporary hospital building to house it. By December 1914 there were no sites available in proximity to the French coastline. The project appeared headed for failure. Lady Scott and E.G. Kemp made an emergency trip to France to search for a location and work to get the French military approval. The two women grasped at the French Red Cross offer of an empty château in the rural eastern France village of Arc-en-Barrois, Haute-Marne. In December the building, the hospital proposal and the installation of British hospital workers were approved by French Minister of War Alexandre Millerand and Service de Santé chief, Dr Ange François Troussaint.