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:
“But the dark changed to red, and torches shone,
And deafening music shook the leaves; a troop
Shouldered a litter with a wounded man,
Or smote upon the string and to the sound
Sang of the beast that gave the fatal wound.”
—William Butler Yeats (1865–1939)
“It is not only the prisoners who grow coarse and hardened from corporeal punishment, but those as well who perpetrate the act or are present to witness it.”
—Anton Pavlovich Chekhov (1860–1904)