Mobile Medical-Military Machines

Abstract

This chapter focuses on mostly European wartime from the late nineteenth and early twentieth century to examine quite different evacuations where ambulances were developed as a means to remove the injured and wounded from battlefields. Drawing on concepts of the viapolitical, the chapter explores the struggles at stake in the innovation of different evacuation vehicles and technologies that would alter the geo-rhythms of war. The innovations in horse-driven ambulances, motor ambulances, and ambulance trains are explored as battlefields were reconfigured to enable the wounded to be brought back for treatment or put back into martial circulation. At the same time, those very modes of evacuation mobilities were often the symbol of national and highly politicized debates over the state’s sense of care for and responsibility to the young fighters going to war, where the embodied sensibilities of evacuation mobilities became a proxy for government interests in protecting its fighting forces.