Chart of Typical Ambulance Service at the Front
A division of the French Army normally included three infantry regiments and an artillery regiment, each of which had its own sanitary formation of stretcher-bearers and doctors, who gave hasty dressings at the first-aid shelters. In addition the division had its own corps of surgeons, doctors, attendants, and stretcher-bearers (G.B.D., Groupe des Brancardiers Divisionnaire), who maintained at least one central dressing-station or poste de secours, where reexaminations were made and, when necessary, further treatment given, and who served as a reserve for the regimental posies. In addition the divisional corps maintained a mobile hospital unit, which served as a sorting-station (triage), assigning cases according to their nature and gravity to particular hospitals in the rear not attached to the division.
Where conditions of the terrain allowed, motor ambulances brought wounded directly from the regimental first-aid shelters, but ordinarily the wounded were brought from these shelters to the G.B.D. postes by hand, or upon stretchers slung on a light two-wheeled frame. The ambulances then carried them back to the triage and from there again to the base or evacuation hospitals.
History of the American Field Service in France, « Friends of France », 1914-1917, volume 1, Boston and New York, Houghton Mifflin Company, The Riverside Press Cambridge, 1920, p. 28.
Langlois • Histoire &c. 