[Photo Album]: World War I Special Reserves of the Royal Army Medical Corps

Oblong quarto. Measuring 12" x 9½". Brown cloth over stiff paper boards with "photographs" stamped on the front board. Contains 115 sepia-toned or black and white gelatin silver photographs measuring between 1½" x 2½" and 3" x 5" with captions. Very good album with rubbing, chips, and tears with near fine photographs. A photo album kept by a British soldier, Colonel I.D. Evans, while serving with the Special Reserves of the Royal Army Medical Corps during World War I. He enlisted with the reserves as a lieutenant on May 21, 1914 and was promoted to captain in April of 1915. The album opens with photos from a transport ship, the S.S. *Caledonia*, which was later sunk by German submarines in 1916 which is mentioned in one of the caption, "since sunk by submarine." These photos of the ship show its military passengers in uniform waiting by the docks and waving from the departing ship as well as horses and military vehicles and weapons it was transporting. Evans' unit teamed with a French hospital in Orleans and he often photographs men in his troop posed with French interrupters. One photo shows men on a French artillery train camouflaged with trees, another shows a soldier with a "Baluchi patient." Other photos show nurses and various troops including Scottish, French, and Turkish soldiers. Evans photographs the wounded walking to a hospital train which would take them to a hospital ship to be treated or transported. Also included here are wounded prisoners being led away. Later photos show Evans at the 10th Stationary Hospital in St. Omer which was the General Headquarters of the British Expeditionary Force from October 1914 to March 1916. Here a photo of a fellow soldier posed next to glasses and a decanter notes that shortly after the photo he was killed in action. His photographs capture images of tented encampments, working nurses, resting soldiers, patients, torpedoed ships, and other moments from his time abroad. Some of the later images show Evans and his companions having a picnic in the ruins of Ypres. From a much later letter additionally laid in it appears that Evans continued with the Special Reserve until retiring in 1934. A wonderful collection of World War I images from France through the lens of a British soldier.…