and the original object of the Unit was to search for British wounded and missing in the district which had been overrun by the Germans during the retreat from Mons, and to convey them back to the British lines or to a British base. Fighting was still proceeding in some of these districts, and the French authorities invited the help of ambulance care for the conveyance of the wounded.
That ‘invitation’ had come at Amiens in early October at a time when the town of Albert was under heavy bombardment and for the next six months the Mobile Unit worked increasingly with the wounded and dying of the French army. By the middle of the month Ware had added a mobile light hospital and medical staff to his growing fleet of ambulances, and before the unit was finally disbanded it had dealt with more than twelve thousand casualties, ferrying and treating the wounded from Amiens to Ypres as the rival armies began their crab-like ‘race for the sea’ and stalemate.
After the years of frustration and disappointment, Ware was in his element, crisscrossing north-western France, liaising one day in Paris and the next in London, putting down his marker here, warning off a potential rival there, his energy and optimism seemingly inexhaustible. ‘October 29th’, his diary reads – a typical, and gloriously White Rabbit-ish entry, sent off to London to explain why he had no time to send the Joint War Committee the full report he owed them,
Left Doullens 6.10 a.m., where I had arrived the night before (in order to confer with Colonel Barry and to define sphere). Breakfasted at St Pol 6.50. Met and despatched from here one of our sections at 7 a.m. (This had come to me by appointment at Headin.) Arrived Houdain Station at 7.30 a.m. Met a party in charge of Dr Kelly which I had sent out the night before in order to determine the site of our light hospital. Arrived at Bethune 8.55 a.m. Consulted with the director of the RAMC there. Left Bethune at 9.45 a.m. … Arrived Noeux les Nines at 10.5 a.m. … Arrived Merville 11.45 a.m. Arranged with the General commanding the 1st Corps of French Cavalry to place our light hospital at Merville for the use of both French and British. Left Merville 2 p.m.
There was, too, in these early fluid days, real danger, and the unit’s work could often bring them under direct enemy fire. ‘To be fair to them, and heap coals of fire on their heads,’ Ware wrote to Sir Arthur Lawley, another Milner appointee in the Transvaal and a staunch support at the Red Cross, after a second abortive attempt to rescue a wounded girl from among the ruins of Albert had brought the German artillery down on their defenceless convoy,
I think it possible that they may not have distinguished the Red Cross at that distance … I have never been in such a scene of desolation – it was like nothing on earth but the pictures one saw in one’s childhood of the Last Day. The place was so ruined that they couldn’t recognise the streets and there was a minute when I thought that we should go round and round and never find our way. All the time we were going towards the guns! … We stopped at the remains of a corner to ask a man the way, but he wouldn’t stay long enough to do more than point down a street and then run off … We found the house, and a woman with two dear little children came up from the cellar, and crying her heart out told us the girl was dead.
Ware was no more immune to the frisson of danger than his men – ‘the thought that [the shells] were meant for oneself brought rather a sporting element in to the thing’, he reported – but as an old newspaperman he also knew good copy when he saw it and was not going to be slow to pass it on. ‘The strong and able had been able to quit long before,’ he wrote of another rescue from among the shattered ruins of a nursing convent, proffering it with the suggestion that the Red Cross might think about exploiting the story for fundraising purposes,
and these poor helpless, old souls, cared for so kindly by the Sisters of the Convent, alone remained perforce. Could any request to members of our Society be more fitting? Would not every member at once go forward and rejoice at having this opportunity?
The utter desolation and destruction baffles description; let it suffice to explain that below were over fifty women of ages varying from 70 to 95 years – many bedridden for years and others too infirm to help themselves …
Five dead were removed from this awful debris, others it was impossible to extricate. Of those who lived some had limbs shattered by the cruel missiles of a heartless enemy … all bearing an expression of awful terror, such a scene only seen on the field of war …
It was 4 p.m. when we had finished our work at Ypres, but what cared members of the Red Cross for the incessant cannonading or for the constant and deafening explosion of bursting shells. We knew we were carrying out the work of some of those generous subscribers at home by making such use of their ambulances, and if any of them could have seen and understood the expressions of relief and gratitude in the faces of those we saved he would indeed have felt that his money had been well spent.
A streak of genial cynicism in Ware and an unashamed gift for self-promotion make it easy to forget that they were only the accidental trappings of a deeply romantic attachment to France and her people. In the letters and memoirs of the British soldier one glimpses a very different world, but in the Panglossian France that Ware inhabited – a France in which everything was for the best even in the worst of all possible worlds – nothing is ever allowed to darken the sunlit landscape or shake the faith and love of his Paris youth.
There are no defeatists in Ware’s France, no meanness, no ugliness, no deep-rooted suspicions, no resentment of Albion, no offending calvaries, no truculent farmers, no haggling women, no syphilis, none of the stock French characters with their ‘monkey’ language and monkey habits and monkey morals who fill the British Tommy’s memories of this time, but only a country of devoted doctors and tireless curés, of debonair cavalry generals and saintly bishops, of grateful faces, ‘delightful camaraderie’ and stoic courage in which none but the Hun is vile.
The remarkable thing about Ware, though, was that he was one of the few men connected with the BEF in France with the charm and the language to turn this dream of France into something approaching reality. There is no reason to believe that the reports he sent home offer anything more than a highly subjective truth, but in these early months with the Mobile Unit, the only cloud on his horizon was one that had bubbled up on the other side of the Channel. ‘It is good work out here,’ he insisted in a letter to his old chief, Lord Milner, on 13 October,
Of course we can be crabbed for working for the French only, but everybody so far who has come to crab has ended by begging to be allowed to join us and the search for the missing is going on.
If only I had time to write a letter to The Times on this:- an extraordinarily fine French priest who I have met once or twice with the wounded & become friends with put his hands on my shoulder the other day as I was [showing] an English paper to one of my men for its prominent account of a football match, & said in an inexpressibly pained but friendly way ‘mais, mon commandant, ce n’est past le moment pour le football’. If only people at home could have seen the surroundings in which that was said, wounded & dying all around us, they would at least stop reporting their damned football.
God protect us from ‘all the muddle and mischief which Satan finds for idle hands in England’, he complained again to Milner, and in letter after letter he returned to the same theme. ‘The British Red Cross has been directly or indirectly responsible for men working among the French, whose presence among them has I think done positive harm to the Allied cause,’ he lectured Lawley,
Therefore it is absolutely essential that they should be carefully selected. Men of the proper sort are, as you know, extremely rare, and there are very few men who we could think really qualified to go off alone with a few cars uncontrolled and in a position to make their own arrangements and conduct negotiations with the French. Of the men who are not competent two extreme