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Initiation is so closely linked to the mode of being of human existence that a considerable number of modern man's acts and gestures continue to repeat initiatory scenarios. Very often the "struggle for life," the "ordeals" and "difficulties" that stand in the way of a vocation or a career, in some sort reiterate the ordeals of initiation; it is after the "blows" that are dealt him, the moral and even physical "suffering" and "torture" he undergoes, that a young man "proves" himself, knows his possibilities, grows conscious of his powers, and finally becomes himself, spiritually adult and creative.
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The hills of Verdun and the red sun setting back of the hills and the charred skeletons of trees and the river Meuse and the black shells spouting up in columns along the road to Bras and the thunder of the barrage and the wounded and the ride through red explosions and the violent metamorphose from boy into man.
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The Field Service, as part of a larger whole, had two complementary sides: organizational and experiential, social and individual, collective and personal.
The "red cross" of altruism symbolized the common aims which, alongside many an individual motivation (such as a thirst for adventure!), guided the drivers through the inevitable confrontation of good feelings and hard facts---as described humorously by Lansing Warren of SSU 70:
An American ambulance driver is a fellow who comes to France to save Humanity. But by the time he has been on the western front for a couple of weeks, his efforts in this pursuit have been concentrated on one integral portion of the whole in the animated endeavor to save himself. From Peoria to Paris is a long, simmering journey in aspirations.
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Lo, the poor ambulance driver! He exchanges his dreamy delusions for materialistic maxims, and when he returns, he is thoroughly demoralized --- and infinitely wiser!Lansing Warren, "The American Ambulance Man", in History of the American Field Service in France, "Friends of France," 1914-1917, Told by its Members. Boston and New York: Houghton Mifflin, 1920. Volume III.
In working with others towards common aims, in doing things that others did, each individual nonetheless had a unique experience---his own "rites of passage" through the Field, as it were, which transformed him.
His experience, viewed retrospectively, would be remembered as a kind of ritual drama---an initiatory scenario---one shared by others and forming the basis for future Field Service "traditions."