Silver War Badges were also issued to soldiers who had completed the length of service they had signed up for, mainly regular soldiers who had served before the war and whose period of service expired before the end of the conflict. The badges were individually numbered and numbers are recorded the the medal cards of those who received them. Those who did not recover sufficiently to return to active service in any formwere issued with a Silver War Badge, to wear on their lapel, this signified that they had completed their war service. If fitness was not fully recovered, a man may be transferred to a non front line unit, such as the Labour Corps or to a training battalion so that he could put his field experience to use in training others or a home service unit which had lower fitness requirements. Those being treated wore a blue uniform with a red tie, known as "Hospital Blues", once a solider was deemed fit enough to leave convalescence, he would return to one of the Command Depots for the rehabilitative training after which they would be allocated to a battalion, frequently a different battalion or regiment to that in which he had previously served, as his place would have been taken by another man to maintain numbers. Many large houses and hotels were used as Convalescent Hospitals or Class B hospitals, they usually accepted patients from Class A Hospitals once the man had recovered sufficiently. This is the reason why the majority of the wounded were send to hospitals many miles from their homes. With the wide range of serious injuries before faced, hospitals began to specialise in certain types of injury in order to provide the best treatment, with soldiers being sent by train to the relevant hospital. If further treatment was needed he would be moved to a Casualty Clearing Station, a tented camp behind the lines and then if required moved to one of the base hospitals usually by train, the seriously wounded were taken back to Britain by Hospital Ship and onto the relevant hospital for further treatment. Additional nursing staff were needed and this was met by a mixture of qualified nurses and volunteers.Ī soldier who was injured in the field would be treated firstly at a Regimental Aid Post in the trenches by the Battalion Medical Officer and his orderlies and stretcher bearers, then moved to an Advanced Dressing Station close to the front line manned by members of a Field Ambulance, RAMC. As demand for beds grew, large buildings such as Universities and hotels were transformed into hospitals and wooden huts sprang up in hospital grounds and at army camps to cope with the huge numbers. A solution had to be found quickly and many civilian hospitals were turned over to military use, a large number of asylums were also converted to military hospital, with the asylum patients being sent home, often to unprepared families. The nature of the fighting during the Great War led to a huge number of injured soldiers and the existing Military medical facilities in the United Kingdom were soon overwhelmed.
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