With the outbreak of the First World War in 1914, the Royal Automobile Club began assisting the war effort with the creation of the Royal Automobile Club Volunteer Force. On 12 September 1914 several members of the club volunteered their services to the British Red Cross, which established the Motor Ambulance Department. Warewho was 45 years oldhad been rejected from serving in the British Army because he was too old, and obtained an appointment to command a mobile Red Cross ambulance unit with the assistance of Lord Milner. He arrived in France and took command of the unit on 19 September 1914. One of several Red Cross units in France, Ware's unit operated in northern France as a semi-autonomous command. He had a degree of independence afforded by the Joint Finance Committee of St John Ambulance and the Red Cross, who gave Ware his own operating budget for three-month periods. Ware was struck by the lack of an official mechanism for managing the graves of those killed and following British defeats at Mons and Le Cateau in September, Ware's unit began sharing information with Lord Robert Cecil, the head of the Red Cross's Wounded and Missing Department.