2. Methodology.

Tatham and Miles’s official history of the Friends’ Ambulance Unit offers an extraordinarily
comprehensive, if somewhat effusive, first-hand account of the daily activities of the unit’s various
sections in France and Belgium (Tatham and Miles 1920).6 Similar publications produced by members of the French Motor Convoys and the FAU Ambulance Trains (see, for example, Lidbetter and Monk-Jones 1919; Harrison and Young 1919) record the undertakings of these particular divisions, as do the accounts of some individual volunteers (see, for example: Catchpool 1940; Pearson and Pearson 2015; Pettifer 2014).

 

In addition to these published sources—for the most part, sadly, out of print and difficult to obtain—many individual members of the FAU kept diaries and described the work being done in correspondence with their families and friends. It is these texts, not intended for publication, that offer the writers’ spontaneous, heartfelt reactions to what was going on around them. Just like in the letters home of many thousands of soldiers and other first-hand witnesses of those tragic events, tales of heroics are told together with all their blips and blemishes, when chinks appearing in the outer-armour of supreme courage and boundless good humour reveal moments of anger and revulsion and utter despair at the horror of it all. They also reveal something of the moral and religious dilemma being faced by these particular volunteers. (See, for example, Catchpool 1940; Pearson and Pearson 2015; Pettifer 2014.)

Whilst of inestimable social and historical value, most of these documents remain hidden in the
archives of libraries and universities and in private collections all over Britain and beyond. Though
widely dispersed, and not on general view, most are, nevertheless, available to the interested reader.

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They offer detailed insight into the undertakings of the Friends’ Ambulance Unit, as well as into the
various motivating forces driving the individual members of this particular band of brothers.7

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Battle of Ypres (the Battle of Passchendaele), 31 July to 10 November 1917; and the Fourth Battle of Ypres (known as the Battle of the Lys) over 9–18 April 1918.

6 Tatham and Miles were themselves both members of the unit, part of the group of enthusiastic young men bound for France in what they themselves describe as “knight errant fashion”, bent on carrying out good and heroic deeds. Their account of events, whilst incredibly informative, cannot be described as either detached or objective.

7 See reference section for archival details.

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3. The Declaration of War: A Quaker Dilemma

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