This image shows Philip Glorieux of Irvington, NJ, boxing an unidentified French mechanic one morning in 1917. Glorieux served alongside the French military as an American Field Service (AFS) ambulance driver for six months during World War I.
Glorieux’s ambulance section, Section Sanitaire [États-] Unis (SSU) 9, first came into existence on August 14, 1916. The section first left for the Vosges Mountains in France from Versailles, near Paris. The men of SSU 9 later drove ambulances to their poste de secours on the Meuse River at Montgrignon near the front of Verdun, the site of the longest and one of the bloodiest battles of World War I. After Verdun, the section moved to different locations in France and ended at Saint-Max outside of Nancy, where it was taken over by the United States Army Ambulance Service (U.S.A.A.S.) as a new unit, SSU 629. Glorieux was one of the men who joined the U.S.A.A.S. after the United States entered the war in 1917.