In Flanders Field

I've just come back from a fascinating four day trip to Belgium looking at the role of non-combatants (medical and nursing personnel and chaplains) in the First World War. I could certainly have done with the temperature being ten degrees cooler for standing in unshaded cemeteries and the exposed ploughed fields that had once held casualty clearing stations, but I certainly wouldn't have missed the opportunity to go to research the topic. A great deal to think about now and to follow up on for a project on which I'm just embarking.

Whilst I was away I was lent an original copy of the training manual used by the Royal Army Medical Corps at the time of the Great War. I was amazed at the breadth of subject matter covered - in fact, it didn't look that different from the syllabus I covered in my initial nurse training fifty years later! I was saddened to think though how Article 1 of the Geneva Convention - that "ambulances and military hospitals shall be acknowledged to be neutral and as such shall be protected and respected by belligerents so long as any sick or wounded may be therein" - was so blatantly disregarded by both sides (as indeed it is all too often in conflicts to this day). I visited the graves of many medical and nursing personnel killed on duty by shellfire or in air raids. A hundred years on, all of their stories still merit telling; how much we could learn if only we would listen.

On the grave of John McCrae, Canadian surgeon
and "In Flanders Field" poet