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From: America
in the War. The Vanguard of American Volunteers in the Fighting Lines and
in Humanitarian Service, August, 1914 --April, 1917
by Edwin W. Morse
New York, Charles Scribner's Sons, 1919
"No historian of the future will be able to ignore the important part which that small but heroic band, the Vanguard of American Volunteers, played in the great war to make the world safe for democracy. For it was they who were the voluntary leaders along the path which the people and the government of the United States, after more than two years and a half of hesitation, were to follow; and it was they who, by the inspiring example of their self-sacrificing devotion to the cause of the Allies, were largely instrumental in creating and in crystallizing public opinion among their own countrymen in favor of the entrance of the United States into the war."
From : CHAPTER IV: AMERICAN AMBULANCES IN FRANCE
XXI
A PRINCETON MAN'S EXPERIENCES
When the war broke out Clarence V. S. Mitchell, of New York, was in the Harvard Law School, having been graduated from Princeton, in 1913, and from St. Paul's School, Concord, four years earlier. He sailed for England on the Olympic in September, 1914, to Join the American Ambulance service in France. From the letters that he sent to his parents, his father, Clarence Blair Mitchell, has compiled a small volume which he has had privately printed under the title, "With a Military Ambulance in France, 1914-15." A large part of the value of this intimate personal record lies in the freshness and spontaneity of these letters, informal in character ;and, of necessity, unstudied in form...
By November Mitchell got his ambulance, a big six-cylindered Packard, and was assigned to a section of the Formation Harjes, with headquarters at the Château d'Ayencourt, near Montdidier, under the immediate leadership of Paul Rainey, the big-game hunter, who became his roommate. Four of the party were Princeton men, two of whom were doctors. Their principal work was the transportation of wounded soldiers from the railway-station to the military hospital of Val de Grace. Mitchell brought a serene philosophy to bear upon his job.