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139 The Canadian Army Medical Corps at Vimy Ridge HEATHER MORAN A total of 3,598 men of the Canadian Corps died during the Battle of Vimy Ridge, while another 7,004 were wounded.1 The Vimy battlefield thus posed one of the most daunting medical challenges in Canadian military history. This chapter argues that the very features that made the battle a success in turn imposed enormous difficulties on those whose job it was to evacuate the battlefield and tend the wounded. The basic medical system at Vimy Ridge had been in place from the beginning of the war. The main front line medical units were the regimental aid post, the field ambulance and the casualty clearing station. The regimental aid post served the wounded of every battalion, often from a large dugout in the trenches. It employed a medical officer, an orderly and a four-man water detail that helped treat the wounded. Each division had three field ambulances whose stretcher-bearers evacuated the wounded from regimental aid posts to the advanced dressing stations. The field ambulance staff generally consisted of nine medical officers and 238 other ranks including stretcher-bearers, orderlies, male nurses, a chaplain and a dentist. No 8. Field Ambulance, for example, supported General Lipsett’s 3rd Division in La Folie sector of the front. The Acting Commanding Officer was Major John Nisbet Gunn, a thirty-eight-year-old doctor from Calgary trained at the University of Toronto. He organized two advanced dressing stations for each of the attacking brigades, one in a series of dugouts in the Pont Street trench, the other in a wine cellar beneath the ruined village of Neuville St. Vaast which lay less than two kilometres behind the line.2 Several features of this battlefield were to be especially important to the handling of medical cases. Because the Germans held the high ground overlooking the Canadian lines and rear areas, many of the medical units were located much further back than in previous battles. 8 140 HEATHER MORAN No. 1 Canadian Casualty Clearing Station, for example, was at Aubigny near Amiens, a distance of over 80 kilometres from Arras. A casualty clearing station could treat 900 patients and had a staff of 22 medical officers, eight of whom were surgeons, and 29 nursing sisters to care for the wounded. By 1917 surgical teams from the base hospitals reinforced casualty clearing stations to improve efficiency and treat serious cases during battles. To that end eight to ten surgical teams joined each casualty clearing station in the days before the Vimy offensive. These stations marked the final echelon on the battlefield before ambulance trains evacuated the wounded to base hospitals.3 The crucial link in this evacuation system was the stretcher bearer, who trudged through the dirt and mud with little time to sleep or eat. In 1915 there were 16 bearers allotted to each regimental aid post, but fatigue among their ranks created a serious problem; in 1916 their numbers were doubled to 32, then to 60. For the Battle of Vimy Ridge each regimental aid post was provided with 100 bearers. Squads were arranged by height to make it easier to carry the wounded. Friends were often paired up “with the idea of gaining the best results from the services at our disposal.”4 The bearers gained further relief from another innovation that was used at Vimy for the first time. Hand trucks on narrow-gauge railways between the regimental aid posts and the advanced dressing stations allowed two stretcher bearers to do the work of ten by transporting four stretcher or ten sitting cases.5 To make better medical and triage decisions, one orderly from the field ambulances supervised each squad to ensure that dressings were applied properly and that the general state of trench medicine was improved.6 These innovations were just a few of the extensive preparations for Vimy. On 11 March 1917 the first advanced parties for No. 8 Field Ambulance arrived at the front under the supervision of Major Ernest Raymond Selby, a doctor from Bradford, Ontario. Their job was to prepare the medical units to handle the expected casualties. In the advanced dressing station in Neuville St. Vaast, several rows of wine racks were removed: This left a good open space, with sufficient room for 3 stretcher cases to be dressed, and also for a small dressing table in the centre. The left...

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