Litter-bearer

A litter-bearer, or stretcher-bearer, carries a wounded or sick person on a litter: a frame or sheet slung between two poles. Litter is the older and the American term. Stretcher is more common in British usage. A loaded litter takes at least two bearers, and more over rough ground.

Organised carrying of the wounded is mostly a modern story. In the Napoleonic Wars, the French surgeon Dominique-Jean Larrey built "flying ambulances" to reach the wounded during battle. In the American Civil War, Jonathan Letterman reorganised the medical service of the Army of the Potomac in 1862, with a dedicated ambulance corps and a chain from the field to the hospital.

For earlier armies the record is thin. The Roman army had first-aid men (capsarii) and buildings long interpreted as hospitals, but how the injured got from the field to care in the first century AD is poorly documented. A passage in Vegetius, who wrote around AD 400, is sometimes cited for carts and stretcher-bearers. It is centuries later than the early empire, and the reference still needs checking against the text.

In the First World War, British practice gives a clear example. The chain began with regimental stretcher-bearers, often bandsmen, who brought men from the front line to a regimental aid post. Bearers from the field ambulances carried them on to dressing stations. From there, wheeled and later motor transport took them back to casualty clearing stations.

The ground set the pace. On a dry track two or four bearers could manage. In shell-cratered mud, as at Passchendaele in 1917, a single stretcher could need six or more men and hours to cover a short distance. Bearers worked in the open and under fire, and many were wounded or killed doing it.

• The Hands That Survived Rome. The episode does not show a stretcher chain at Vindonissa. The evidence for one in the first century is not there, so the film leaves the route from the training ground to treatment uncertain.