TRANSPORTING THE WOUNDED.

Press, Volume L, Issue 15156, 21 December 1914, Page 8

TRANSPORTING THE WOUNDED.

"ENORMOUS NUMBERS."

■ The difficulties experienced in the conveyance of wounded soldiers to the hospitals in England are described in a letter received by the last mail from I>r. L. A. Lewis, formerly a member of the staff of the Waikato Sanatorium. Writing from Calais on October 29th, Dr. Lewis gave an account of his own experiences in the transportation cf Belgian wounded across the English Channel in a Belgian steamer named Jan Breydal, on which there were four officers and 20 men of the Royal .Army .Medical Corps and four nurses. "There are enormous numbers of wounded being sent down from the front, which, is not far away from Calais," he states. "Only the very bad cases are kept here. The others are sent to England and the less severely wounded to Cherbourg. Tho chaos _ere when wo arrived was utter and absolute. The British, naval and military, the French and Belgians were all working at cross purposes. The idea of the French is to get rid of all the Belgians, so they arc all pushed off to England. Thousands hare gone across to Southampton from here in the last few days. Trains are waiting at tho docks and they are taken all over the country. Calais was full of wounded coming down in ambulances and wandering about the streets. "'We had a pretty awful experience taking our shipload across. There were 230 stretcher cases, a number of them very bad. It was impossible to examine a number of them, let alone do anything for them. They had all been wounded days before and only had their field dressings on. They were all wet and covered in mud just as they came- out of tho trenches. Altogether we had 400 cases; they were wounded in a battle at a place called Dixmudo. They must have been in a perfect hail of lead. Many of them had several wounds. One man had 10 bullet wounds in his legs. There were a number with shrapnel wounds, and others concussed by bursting shells." Referring to the journey from France to England, Dr. Lewis states that the hospital shins "run through a lino of battleships all the way. It takes about 10 hours for the run and altogether about 24 hours embarking, transporting and disembarking the wounded."