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LE DONNE NEL PRIMO CONFLITTO MONDIALE 182

post(wo)men and assistant clerks soon turned into symbols of the dissolution of
gender boundaries. Against this background this paper focuses on a very specific
part of the female workforce, those women who were deployed close to the Au-
stro-Hungarian front lines, i.e. the theatre of war operations and especially the
communications zone.

1. Medical and Nursing Services

Already in peace times medical establishments were set up to provide troops in the
respective theatre of operations with medical service. Some of them already existed as
part of the peace-time army structure. Those were 27 ‘stationary’ garrison hospitals,
furthermore so called troop hospitals, institutions for the treatment of minor injuries
and sicknesses and sanatoriums for recovery and rehabilitation. There were also me-
dical facilities for the two ‘Landwehr’ components of the Austro-Hungarian armed
forces. The staff of these institutions consisted of the medical officer corps and the
members of the medical corps of enlisted rank and therefore commonly of soldiers. 3
Out of these ‘stable’ institutions the medical facilities of the ‘army in the field’ were to be
formed in case of mobilization. A medical facility was to be attached to each division and
independent brigade while on higher levels field hospitals, mobile reserve field hospitals
4
and field establishments for the treatment of minor injuries and sicknesses were provided.
Furthermore, in both parts of the Empire there were facilities of the so called ‘vo-
luntary medical service’. They were expected to support and complement the regular
medical services in the event of war. Regarding numbers and equipment the ‘Austrian
society of the Red Cross’ for the Austrian part of the Empire and the ‘Association of
the Red Cross in the lands of the Holy Hungarian Crown’ for the Hungarian part of
the Empire constituted the most important of these groups. Apart from that there was
also the ‘Teutonic Order’ as well as the ‘Sovereign Military Order of Malta’. Women
had been accepted in all three associations and trained as auxiliary nurses already be-
fore the outbreak of the war.
At the beginning of the war the voluntary Red-Cross organizations, as well as fur-
ther associations and the knightly orders were pooled in one organization, integrated
into the military structures and placed under the command of the ‘General Inspector
of the Voluntary Medical Service’ (Generalinspektor der freiwilligen Sanitätspflege) - a po-

3 Eduard Seling, Rudolf Rieth, Leitfaden zum Unterrichte der Heeresorganisation, Vienna 1887, p.
205-211.
4 Hugo Schmidt, Heereswesen. 2. Teil. Österreich-Ungarn, Vienna 1916, p. 160-165.

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