American Volunteer Motor-Ambulance Corps
The American Volunteer Motor Ambulance Corps was organized in the fall of 1914 in London by Richard Norton, noted archeologist and son of the eminent Harvard professor, Charles Eliot Norton. With the help of two of his father's friends, authors Edith Wharton and Henry James, Norton associated his service with the British Red Cross and the St. John's Ambulance.
(Henry James) enlisted himself in the same way in the service of the particular American activity that arose in England during the early days of the war, before America's entry which he did not live to see. He accepted the chairmanship of the American Volunteer Motor Ambulance Corps in France. Richard Norton, the son of his old friend Charles Eliot Norton and a friend of Mrs. Wharton, had thrown himself into this work and James and Mrs Wharton were committed to help. James wrote a long letter to the American press on the nature of this endeavor. It was designed to be informative, as an appeal for funds. The Corps was one of the pioneer enterprises in the age of the motor.
Leon Edel, Henry James, New York 1972; p. 518
London, November 25, 1914
The idea of the admirable enterprise was suggested to Mr. Norton when, early in the course of the War, he saw at the American Hospital at Neuilly scores of cases of French and British wounded whose lives were lost or who must incur life-long disability and suffering, through the long delay of their removal from the field of battle.
After a week or two in London, Richard left for Paris, hoping to get a job as a "war correspondent"---but war correspondents, some well-known, were swarming there. The battle of the Marne was over---Joffre's victory, which grew in importance as the war progressed---and Richard saw the return of the Marne wounded to Paris. A terrible revelation! There were no adequate preparations then in the armies of the Allies for that flood-tide of suffering which had begun to flow in from the front. Hospital trains and hospitals, ambulance service, supplies for the wounded, etc., etc.---all these things were lacking. The desperate need was clear to everyone who saw those wounded.
One day---it was September then---came a cable from Richard to us in Ashfield: "I am going to organize an Ambulance Corps. See if you can raise funds." So we set to work---and in less than six weeks we raised, without any actual public appeal, $17,000. Meantime he had left Paris and gone to London to organize the intended Corps. Mr. Henry James and a number of old friends warmly took up the project. The volunteers were found easily----Americans and Englishmen joined, but later, when England needed all her men, the English who were in Richard's corps were transferred to other services in the British Army.
Sarah Norton, quoted in "Richard Norton, Class of 1892" in Harvard in the Great War , M.A. DeWolfe Howe (ed), Cambridge MA: Harvard University Press, (in 5 volumes), 1922.
By early October, 10 of the Norton cars were serving in France, the driver shaving been recruited in American colleges. Later, like the Field Service, Norton's volunteers would be attached to French combat units on the front,as Sanitary Sections 6 and 7.
I can tell you better thus moreover than by any weaker art what huge satisfaction I had yesterday in an hour or two of Richard's company; he having generously found time to lunch with me during two or three days that he is snatching away from the Front, under urgency of business. I gathered from him that you hear from him with a certain frequency and perhaps some fulness---I know it's always his desire that you shall; but even so you perhaps scarce take in how "perfectly splendid" he is---though even if you in a manner do I want to put it on record to you, for myself, that I find him unmitigatedly magnificent. It's impossible for me to overstate my impression of his intelligent force, his energy and lucidity, his gallantry and resolution, or of the success the unswerving application of these things is making for him and for his enterprise. Not that I should speak as if he and that were different matters---he is the enterprise, and that, on its side, is his very self; and in fine it is a tremendous tonic---among a good many tonics that we have indeed, thank goodness !---to get the sense of his richly beneficent activity. He seemed extremely well and "fit," and suffered me to ply him with all the questions that one's constant longing here for a nearer view, combined with a kind of shrinking terror of it, given all the misery the greatest nearness seems to reveal, makes one restlessly keep up. What he has probably told you, with emphasis, by letter, is the generalisation most sadly forced upon him---the comparative supportability of the fact of the wounded and the sick beside the desolating view of the ravaged refugees. He can help the former much more than the latter, and the ability to do his special job with success is more or less sustaining and rewarding; but the sight of the wretched people with their villages and homes and resources utterly annihilated, and they simply staring at the blackness of their ruin, with the very clothes on their backs scarce left to them, is clearly something that would quite break the heart if one could afford to let it. If he isn't able to give you the detail of much of that tragedy, so much the better for you---save indeed for your thereby losing too some examples of how he succeeds in occasional mitigations quand même, thanks to the positive, the quite blest, ferocity of his passion not to fail of any service he can with the least conceivability render. He was most interesting, he was altogether admirable, as to his attitude in the matter of going outside of the strict job of carrying the military sick and wounded, and them only, as the ancient "Geneva Conventions" confine a Red Cross Ambulance to doing. There has been some perfunctory protest, not long since, on the part of some blank agent of that (Red Cross) body, in relation to his picking up stricken and helpless civilians and seeing them as far as possible on their way to some desperate refuge or relief; whereupon he had given this critic full in the face the whole philosophy of his proceedings and intentions, letting the personage know that when the Germans ruthlessly broke every Geneva Convention by attempting to shell him and his cars and his wounded whenever they could spy a chance, he was absolutely for doing in mercy and assistance what they do in their dire brutality, and might be depended upon to convey not only every suffering civilian but any armed and trudging soldiers whom a blest chance might offer him.
Henry James. Letter to Grace Norton, dated January 1, 1915. In The Letters of Henry James (1920).
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More on Richard Norton, the American Volunteer Motor-Ambulance
Corps Arlen Hanson, Gentlemen Volunteers, New York: Arcade, 1996.
Virginia Spencer Car, Dos Passos, A Life, New York: Doubleday, 1984.
Edward Coyle, Ambulancing at the French Front New York: Britton, 1918.
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