LES HÔPITAUX

In September 1914, Bar-le-Duc narrowly escaped the German invasion and fighting that could have been destructive. After the battle of the Marne, the front stabilised about fifty kilometres further north, at Verdun. Bar-le-Duc then became, for four years, a rear-front town. It was the link between the French rear and the nearby front. You are at the entrance to the former hospice-hospital of Bar-le-Duc, opposite the building that now houses the Tourist Office. From the autumn of 1914, this hospital was not big enough to receive all the wounded soldiers brought from the front. The Army therefore set up several hospitals in the town, notably at the Lycée, at the École normale de filles (now the Hôtel du Département), in the Pensionnat Jeanne d'Arc (rue Voltaire) and in the barracks, which were empty of troops and which alone offered 3,500 beds. All of them were fully used in 1916, during the Battle of Verdun. Several associations, under the emblem of the Red Cross, and many Barisiennes, provided assistance to military personnel. Scottish nurses also intervened, like those shown in this photo. Most often, wounded soldiers were transferred to Bar-le-Duc by the "Meusien" medical trains, a narrow-gauge railway network. When they arrived at the station, they presented a terrible spectacle of wounded, dying and dead. The less seriously wounded only passed through the city hospitals before being sent to the rear. The others stayed longer in Bar-le-Duc but, for many, the outcome was fatal. A military cemetery had to be specially laid out. By the end of the war, it would contain almost 3,000 graves.