Norton-Harjes Ambulance Corps

Norton-Harjes Ambulance Corps is the historical name given to The American Volunteer Motor Ambulance Corps, which was an organization started in London, England, in the fall of 1914 by Richard Norton, a noted archeologist and the son of Harvard professor Charles Eliot Norton. Its mission was to assist the movement of wounded Allied troops from the battlefields to hospitals in France during World War I. The Corps began with two cars and four drivers. The service was associated with the British Red Cross and St. John Ambulance.

The "Harjes" part of the name refers to Henry Herman Harjes, a French millionaire banker who wished to help Norton by donating funds and ambulances. When John Dos Passos joined the corps in 1917, the service had thirteen sections of six hundred American volunteer drivers and three hundred ambulances.

The American poet E. E. Cummings joined the Norton-Harjes Ambulance Corps in 1917, before the USA entered the war. During this time he was briefly imprisoned on false grounds. His 1922 autobiography The Enormous Room documented his experiences of the war.