| Item Description: | Black photo album with decorative relief on the front cover. Bound with cord on the left side.
"A photo album kept by a US Navy Corpsman during the First World War while stationed in Fance. The album documents his time as an ambulance driver attached to Base Hospital Number 5 in Brest, France. The A.E.F. hospital concept, created in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania in September of 1917, was an effort to aid with the ever increasing numbers wounded during the war....Throughout the album, hospital personal [sic] can be seen working in the hospital including Captain Holton C. Curl, commander of the hospital, and head nurse Alice Garrett....A usual patient count was 400 during the war until the influenza epidemic struck in 1918 bringing the average to about 800. This corpsman and ambulance driver compiled an extensive collection of photographs from his tour of duty. He includes photos from around the hospital such as laundry day and painting a new Ford Ambulance in "her new battle color." The people of Brest are seen throughout as well as French military personnel and other soldiers helping out at the hospitals and the battlefields in the area....Two photos of a group of military and civilian men speaking outside the hospital are captioned "Rosevelt [sic]" and "Ass. Sec. of Navy Rosevet [sic]" are obscure, but show Franklin D. Roosevelt with a cane....One section of the album is dedicated to the Bois de Agincourt battlefield with dead "Bosch" (German) soldiers, some charred or decayed and almost skeletal, as well as photos of the French 120 artillery gun. Another battlefield documneted in the album is Verdun which shows its damaged buildings, dead unidentified soldiers, as well as a cemetery....The album depicts men disembarking (including a group of African-American soldiers), being loaded into trains and sent to the front lines, German prisoners laboring, and several snapshots of French recruits during their training....Once the corpsman returns to the hospital grounds he documents photos of survivors from the US Destroyer Covington which was torpedoed in the summer of 1918. An intriguing collection of photographs from an ambulance driver showing a variety of spectacular images of the First World War." |
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