Wounded Prisoners
Wounded prisoners benefited from the First Geneva Convention (1864), article 6 of which stated: “Wounded or sick combatants, to whatever nation they may belong, shall be collected and cared for”. Wounded soldiers were transported to a “Lazarett”, the most important of which was the Lazarett Saint-Clément of Metz. In his book, Robert d’Harcourt gives a very detailed description of the treatments practiced on prisoners.
Amputation was commonplace, even when unnecessary, and care quite rudimentary.
Charles Hennebois touches on a wrenching aspect concerning the wounded. Some of them, instead of being transported to the hospital, were finished off on the field of battle: “Men wounded the day before were calling them from afar and asking to drink. The Germans finished them off by butting them with their rifles or bayoneting them, then despoiling them. I saw this from several metres away. A group of seven or eight men, felled by machine-gun crossfire, found itself at that point. Several were still alive, as they were begging the soldiers. They were finished off like I just said, shaken down and heaped up in a pile”. This claim is refuted in a German propaganda book about what happened in the camps published in 1918.
Read more about this topic: World War I Prisoners Of War In Germany
Famous quotes containing the words wounded and/or prisoners:
“Nature herself her shape admires;
The gods are wounded in her sight;
And Love forsakes his heavenly fires
And at her eyes his brand doth light:
Heigh ho, would she were mine!”
—Thomas Lodge (1558?–1625)
“When posterity judges our actions here it will perhaps see us not as unwilling prisoners but as men who for whatever reason preferred to remain non-contributing individuals on the edge of society.”
—George Lucas (b. 1944)