Talmage's painting depicts a scene on the road to Heminel, in the Cambrai front area of France. A Canadian Mobile Veterinary Unit is shown taking wounded horses from the front line of battle to an evacuating station. The mobile veterinary units were part of the Canadian Veterinary Services, and worked in the field to collect and give first aid to wounded, sick or overworked animals before evacuating them by train back to base hospitals. Algernon Talmage was exempted from active service in 1914 because of a gun injury to his left hand in youth. When he received the commission for two paintings from the Canadian War Memorials Fund, he was well known in England for his landscape and animal paintings.
<bdi><a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/en:Algernon_Talmage" class="extiw" title="w:en:Algernon Talmage"><span title="British artist (1871-1939)">Algernon Talmage</span></a>
</bdi>
1919 <a href="https://www.wikidata.org/wiki/Q76435513#P571" title="Edit this at Wikidata"><img alt="Edit this at Wikidata" src="https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/8/8a/OOjs_UI_icon_edit-ltr-progressive.svg/10px-OOjs_UI_icon_edit-ltr-progressive.svg.png" decoding="async" width="10" height="10" style="vertical-align: text-top" srcset="https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/8/8a/OOjs_UI_icon_edit-ltr-progressive.svg/15px-OOjs_UI_icon_edit-ltr-progressive.svg.png 1.5x, https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/8/8a/OOjs_UI_icon_edit-ltr-progressive.svg/20px-OOjs_UI_icon_edit-ltr-progressive.svg.png 2x" data-file-width="20" data-file-height="20"></a>
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