Percy Kitchen left Buenos Aires aboard the Royal Mail Steam Packet Company liner Araguaya and landed at Liverpool on 16^th December 1914. Since 1910, Percy Kitchen’s parents had lived at Stockheld Grange Farm, and so when he returned from Argentina, for the first time, his home would be in Scholes.

Despite returning to England at the end of 1914, Percy Kitchen did not immediately enlist into the army. He enlisted towards the end of September 1915. At the time, enlistment was still wholly voluntary, but the rate at which men were joining the army of their own volition was not sufficient to meet its requirements for replacing casualties and expand the army to the size that was required. To remedy this shortfall and to regulate the flow of men into the army, the Director General of Recruiting, the Earl of Derby, devised a scheme whereby men could enlist voluntarily and choose to either begin their military service immediately, or they could enlist and be transferred to the reserve, known as deferral, to await their call up when the army needed them. Men who deferred their service and went into the reserve were organised into groups categorised by their age and marital status. Because of this aspect of the scheme, it was officially called the Group System, but was more commonly known as the ‘Derby Scheme’.

Percy Kitchen deployed overseas, arriving in Egypt on 19^th December 1915, which coincides with the arrival of the medical units attached to 31^st Division, and is suggestive of Percy Kitchen belonging to one of the Field Ambulances in the Division. Because the infantry battalions of the division arrived in Egypt a few days later, it seems unlikely that Percy Kitchen would have been attached to any of them, as the battalion and its attached personnel would travel as one body.

The 31^st Division was made up of soldiers of the ‘New Army’, often referred to as Kitchener’s Army, and they were the men who flocked to volunteer in response to Lord Kitchener’s appeal for recruits in the first weeks of the war. The battalions they belonged to were some of the most famous of the ‘Pals’ battalions that were raised on the back of an attractive promise that the men who volunteered together, would train together and fight together, and, so it turned out, they would also die together, sometimes in huge numbers. Hull raised an entire brigade of four battalions of the East Yorkshire Regiment, with the battalion nicknames reflecting where their soldiers originated from. There were the ‘Commercials’, the ‘Tradesmen’, the ‘Sportsmen’, and for any man that did not fit in to any of those, the ‘t’Others’. Barnsley and Bradford raised two battalions each, while Accrington, Durham, Leeds, and Sheffield raised a battalion each, all of them happy to be known simply as ‘Pals’, except the Sheffield men, who insisted on being called the ‘City Battalion’. The battalions made up three brigades of four battalions each, and each brigade had a RAMC Field Ambulance to support the medical needs of their men. After their arrival on the Western Front, it became the norm for the three Field Ambulances to work on a rota system, with one or two of them being on duty at any time to receive sick and wounded from the entire division. During major offensives, the two duty Field Ambulances might stipulate that one would receive only thoracic and head wounds, while all other wounds and the sick would be directed to the other, and in this way more effective use of the available personnel, equipment, and stores could be made.

The role of the Field Ambulance was not to act like a hospital, and provide accommodation for wounded soldiers while they recovered, but was to be more of a staging post. Those wounded men who could be treated and returned to their units, were, while those who were seriously wounded might be cleaned up and have the wounds redressed before being sent further back (to a Casualty Clearing Station), they may undergo immediate emergency surgery to stabilise their condition before being sent back. In many respects the Field Ambulance acted as a triage centre to decide on the best course of action for each wounded or sick soldier it received. Across the Western Front, the sites where Field Ambulances worked are now the sites of some of the medium sized cemeteries that litter the landscape. They are generally larger than the true battlefield cemetery, and generally more easily accessible, as they would have needed to be sited near a reasonably good road or track to allow the wounded to be brought in and taken away.

The medical orderlies working at a Field Ambulance would either form part of the evacuation chain between the unit medical posts in the front lines and the Field Ambulance, or they might be in the Field Ambulance, assisting the Medical Officers to clean and dress wounds, or ensuring that those who were, had a supply of bandages and dressings with which they could work. In many respects RAMC Orderlies, because of the way the Field Ambulances worked, could find themselves, if not in the front lines proper, close to them, more often than the fighting men of the infantry they supported.