The Project Gutenberg eBook, With the Doughboy in France, by Edward Hungerford

WITH THE DOUGHBOY IN FRANCE

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WITH THE DOUGHBOY IN FRANCE

A FEW CHAPTERS OF AN AMERICAN EFFORT

BY

EDWARD HUNGERFORD

Author of The Modern Railroad, The Personality
of American Cities, etc., etc.
NEW YORK
THE MACMILLAN COMPANY
1920
All rights reserved

Copyright, 1920,
By THE MACMILLAN COMPANY
Set up and electrotyped. Published November, 1920.

TO THE
CROIX ROUGE AMÉRICAINE

The girl in the steel-gray uniform with the crimson crosses,
who toiled and endured and danced and laughed
and lived, that the heart and soul of the
boy in khaki might remain untroubled,
this book is affectionately
inscribed

PREFACE

Six months ago I finished writing the chapters of this book. At that time the American Red Cross still had a considerable force in Paris—throughout France for that matter. It was still functioning and, after its fashion, functioning extremely well. In the language of the French it "marched." To-day its marching days in the land of the lilies are nearly over. The personnel have nearly all returned home; the few that remain are clearing and packing the records. In a short time the Croix Rouge Américaine which for months was so evident in the streets of the French capital will be but a memory along the Boulevards. But a memory of accomplishment not soon to be forgotten. If there is one undying virtue of the Frenchman it is that of memory. Seemingly he cannot forget. And for years the remembrance of our Red Cross in his land is going to be a pleasant thought indeed. Of that I am more than sure.

To attempt to write a history, that should be at all adequate as complete history, of a great effort which was still in progress, as the writing went forward, would have been a lamentable task indeed. So this book makes no pose as history; it simply aims to be a picture, or a series of pictures of America in a big job, the pictures made from the standpoint of a witnesser of her largest humanitarian effort—the work of the American Red Cross.

I should feel embarrassed, moreover, at signing my name to this book were any reader of it to believe that it was in any large sense whatsoever a "one man" production. The size of the field to be covered, the brief space of time allotted in which to make some sort of a comprehensive picture of a really huge endeavor, made it necessary for the author to call for help in all directions. The answers to that call were immediate and generous. It hardly would be possible within a single chapter of this volume to make a complete list of the men and women who helped in its preparation. But the author does desire to state his profound sense of indebtedness to Mrs. Caroline Singer Mondell, Mrs. Kathleen Hills, Miss E. Buckner Kirk, Major Daniel T. Pierce, Captain George Buchanan Fife and Lieutenant William D. Hines. These have borne with him patiently and have been of much real assistance. His appreciation is great.

This picture of an American effort tells its own story. I have no intention at this time or place to attempt to elaborate it; but merely wish in passing to record my personal and sincere opinion that, in the workings of our Red Cross overseas, there seemed to me to be such an outpouring of affection, of patriotism, of a sincere desire to serve as I have never before seen. It was indeed a triumph for our teachings and our ideals.

E. H.

New York—January, 1920.

CONTENTS

ILLUSTRATIONS

WITH THE DOUGHBOY IN FRANCE

CHAPTER I

AMERICA AWAKENS

In that supreme hour when the United States consecrated herself to a world ideal and girded herself for the struggle, to the death, if necessary, in defense of that ideal, the American Red Cross was ready. Long before that historic evening of the sixth of April, 1917, when Congress made its grim determination to enter the cause "for the democracy of the world," the Red Cross in the United States had felt the prescience of oncoming war. For nearly three years it had heard of, nay even seen, the unspeakable horrors of the war into which it was so soon to be thrust. It had witnessed the cruelties of the most modern and scientific of conflicts; a war in which science seemingly had but multiplied the horrors of all the wars that had gone before. Science and kultur between them had done this very thing. In the weary months of the conflict that began with August, 1914, the American Red Cross had taken far more than a merely passive interest in the Great War overseas. It had watched its sister organizations from the allied countries, already involved in the conflict, struggle in Belgium and France and Russia against terrific odds; it had bade each of these "Godspeed," and uttered many silent prayers for their success. The spirit of Florence Nightingale and Clara Barton still lived—and still enthused.

It would have been odd—almost inconceivable, in fact—if anything else had been true. It would have been unpardonable if the American Red Cross had not, long before our entrance into the conflict, scented that forthcoming step, and, having thus anticipated history, had failed to make the most of the situation. We Americans pride ourselves as a nation upon our foresightedness, and an institution so distinctly American as the American Red Cross could hardly fail to have such a virtue imbedded in the backbone of its character.

Ofttimes, as a boy, have I read of the warriors of long ago, and how, when they prepared for battle, it was their women—their wives and their mothers, if you please,—who girded them for the conflict; who breathed the prayers for their success, and who, whether or not they succeeded in attaining that success, bound up their wounds and gave them comfort upon their return. Such is the spirit of the Red Cross. The American artist who created that most superb of all posters, The Greatest Mother in the World, and who placed in the arms of that majestic and calm-faced woman the miniature figure of a soldier resting upon a stretcher, sensed that spirit. The American Red Cross is indeed the greatest mother in the world, and what mother—what American mother in particular—could have failed in the early spring of 1917 to anticipate the inevitable? Certainly none of the mothers of the hundred thousand or more boys who anticipated our own formal entrance into the Great War, by offering themselves—bodies and hearts and souls—to the armies of Britain, France, and Canada.

Other pens more skilled than mine have told, and will continue to tell, of the organization of the Red Cross at home to meet the certainties and the necessities of the oncoming war. For if America had not heretofore realized the magnitude of the task that was to confront her and had even permitted herself to become dulled to the horrors of the conflict overseas, the historic evening of the sixth of April, 1917, awakened her. It galvanized her from a passive repugnance at the scenes of the tragic drama being enacted upon the great stage of Europe into a bitter determination that, having been forced into the conflict, no matter for what reason, she would see it through to victory; and no matter what the cost. Yet cost in this sense was never to be interpreted into recklessness. Her boys were among her most precious possessions, and, if she were to give them without stint and without reserve—all for the glory of her supreme ideal—she would at least surround them with every possible requisite for their health, their comfort, and their strength. This was, and is, and will remain, the fundamental American policy.

With such a policy, where should America turn save to her Red Cross? And who more fit to stand as its spiritual and actual head than her President himself? So was it done. And when President Wilson found that the grave responsibilities of his other great war tasks would prevent him from giving the American Red Cross the detailed attention which it needed, he quickly appointed a War Council. This War Council was hard at work in a little over a month after the signing of the declaration of war. It established itself in the headquarters building of the Red Cross in the city of Washington and quickly began preparations for the great task just ahead.

For the fiber of this War Council the President scanned closely the professional and business ranks of American men. He reached out here and there and chose—here and there. And, in a similar way, the War Council chose its own immediate staff. A man from a New York city banking house would find his office or his desk—it was not every executive that could have an office to himself in those days—adjoining that of a ranch owner from Montana or Wyoming. The lawyer closed his brief case and the doctor placed his practice in other hands. The manufacturer bade his plant "good-by" and the big mining expert ceased for the moment to think of lodes and strata. A common cause—a common necessity—was binding them together.

War!

War was the cause and war the necessity. A real war it was, too—a real war of infinite possibilities and of very real dangers; war, the thing of alarms and of huge responsibilities, and for that war we must prepare.

It was said that America was unready, and so it was—in a way. It was unprepared in material things—aëroplanes and guns and ships and well-trained men. But its resources in both money and in men who had potential possibilities of becoming the finest soldiers the world had ever seen, were vast, almost limitless. And it was prepared in idealism, and had assuredly a certain measure of ability. It was prepared too to use such ability as it had in turning its resources—money and untrained men—into a fighting army of material things; material things and idealism. One thing or the other helped win the conflict.

"They said that we could not raise an army; that if we did raise it, we could not transport it overseas; and that if we did transport it overseas, it could not fight—and in one day it wiped out the St. Mihiel salient."

These words tell the entire story—almost. Not that it becomes us Americans to talk too much about our forces having won the war. For one thing, it is not true. The British and the French armies also won the war, and if both had not hung on so tenaciously ours would not even be a fair share of the victory. But for them there would have been no victory, not on our side of the Rhine, at any rate, and men in Berlin, instead of in Paris, would have been dictating peace terms.

It is true, however, that without our army, and certainly without our moral prestige and our resources, the fight for democracy might have been lost at this time, and for many years hereafter. Count that for organization—for real American achievement, if you please. We builded a machine, a huge machine, a machine not without defects and some of them rather glaring defects as you come close to them, but it was a machine that functioned, and, upon the whole, functioned extremely well. It took raw materials—men among them—and fashioned them into fighting materials; fighting materials which flowed in one channel or another toward the fighting front overseas. And with one of these channels—the work of the American Red Cross with the Army of the United States in France—this book has to do.

CHAPTER II

OUR RED CROSS GOES TO WAR

On the day that General John J. Pershing first came to Paris—it was the thirteenth of June, 1917—the American Red Cross already was there. It greeted the American commanding general on his arrival at the French capital, an occasion long to be remembered even in a city of memorable celebrations. For hours the historic Place de la Concorde was thronged with patient folk. It was known that General Pershing was to be quartered at the Hotel Crillon—since come to a new fame as the headquarters of the American Commission to Negotiate Peace—and it was in front of the doors of that establishment that the crowd stood thickest. There were many, many thousands of these waiting folk, close-packed upon the pavement, and only giving way to a dusty limousine in which sat the man who was to help bring salvation to France and freedom to the democracy of the world.

After the doors of the hotel had swallowed General Pershing and his French hosts, the crowd refused to disperse; also, it became less patient. A long swinging chant began—the typical chant of the Paris mob. "Balcon, balcon, balcon," it sang in rhythmic monotony, and upon the balcony of the hotel in a few minutes Pershing appeared, while the crowd below him went wild in its enthusiasm.

But before the American commanding general had made his appearance upon the balcony he had been greeted in the parlors of the Crillon, both formally and informally, by the members of the first American Red Cross Commission to Europe. By coincidence that Commission had arrived in Paris that very morning from America, and were the first Americans to greet their high commanding officer in France. And so also to give him promise that the organization which they represented would be ready for the army as soon as it was ready; for back in the United States widespread plans for the great undertaking so close at hand already were well under way.

This American Commission had sailed from New York on the steamship Lorraine, of the French Compagnie Générale Transatlantique, on the second day of June. It consisted of eighteen men, headed by Major Grayson M.-P. Murphy, a West Point man of some years of active army training and also a New York banker of wide experience. The other members of the party were James H. Perkins, afterward Red Cross Commissioner for France; William Endicott, afterward Red Cross Commissioner for Great Britain; Frederick S. Hoppin, Rev. Robert Davis, Rev. E. D. Miel, F. R. King, Philip Goodwin, Ernest McCullough, Ernest T. Bicknell, C. G. Osborne, R. J. Daly, A. W. Copp, John van Schaick, and Thomas H. Kenny. They were men who had been hastily recruited and yet not without some special qualifications for the difficult preliminary work which they were about to undertake. Until the preliminary "get-acquainted" luncheon which Major Murphy gave for the party in New York on the day preceding its sailing, comparatively few of them knew one another. Yet the great task into which they were entering was to make them lifelong friends, and to develop for the Red Cross, both in Europe and in America, many executives whose real abilities had not really been attained at the time of their appointment to Red Cross service.

These men were volunteers. With a few exceptions, such as clerical workers and the like, the early members of the Red Cross served without pay. At first they had no military rank. Apart from Major Murphy, who bore the title of Commissioner to Europe—there being at the time no separate Commissioner to France or to Great Britain—there were merely deputy commissioners, inspectors, and secretaries. Major Murphy's title had come to him through his army service. It was not until some time later that the War Department issued General Orders No. 82 (July 5, 1917), conferring titles and fixing the assimilated rank of Red Cross personnel. Accordingly commissions and rank were given and the khaki uniform of the United States Army adopted, with distinctive Red Cross markings. Though it is not generally understood, American Red Cross officers have received from the President of the United States, issued through and over the signature of the Secretary of War, commissions which appointed them to their rank and held them to the discipline and the honor of the United States Army.

Before the Lorraine was well out of the upper harbor of New York on that memorable second day of June, Major Murphy called a meeting of the Commission. He explained to them in a few words that they were, in effect, even then, military officers and would be expected to observe military discipline, and as a beginning would appear at dinner that evening in their uniforms—the army regulations at that time prevented relief workers of any sort appearing in the United States in their overseas uniforms—and thereafter would not appear without their uniforms until their return to America. The grim business of war seemingly was close at hand. It began in actuality when one first donned its accouterments, and was by no means lessened in effect by the stern war-time rules and discipline of a merchant ship which, each time she crossed the Atlantic, did so at grave peril.

Yet peril was not the thing that was uppermost in the minds of this pioneer Red Cross party. It took the many rules of "lights out" and "life preservers to be donned, s'il vous plaît," boat drill, and all the rest of this particularly grim part of the bigger grim business, good-humoredly and light-heartedly, yet kept its mind on the grimmer business on the other side of the Atlantic. And, so that it might become more efficient in that grimmest business, undertook for itself the study of French—at one and the same time the most lovable and most damnable of all languages.

"I shall not consider as efficient any member of the party who does not acquire enough French to be able to navigate in France under his own power in three months."

Major Murphy laughed as he said this, but he meant business. And so did the members of the Commission. As the ship settled down to the routine of her passage, the members of the Commission settled down to a life-and-death struggle with French. For two long hours each morning they went at it. At first they gathered in little groups upon the decks, each headed by some one capable of giving more or less instruction; then they found their way to the lounge, where they grouped themselves round about a young woman from Smith College who had taught French in that institution for some years. It was this young woman's self-inflicted job to give conversational lessons to the Red Cross party, and this she did with both enthusiasm and ability. She chose to give them conversational French—in the form of certain simple and dramatic little childhood epics.

"This morning we will have the story of Little Red Riding Hood," she would say, "and after I am done telling it to you in French, you gentlemen, one by one, will tell it back to me—in French."

In order that the effect of the lesson should not be too quickly lost Major Murphy ruled that French, and no other language, should be both official and unofficial for luncheon each day. This order quickly converted an ordinarily genial meal into a Quaker meeting. For when one of mademoiselle's more enthusiastic pupils would start an audacious request for "Encore le pain, s'il vous plaît," he was almost sure to be greeted either with groans or grins from his fellows. Yet the lessons of those short ten days were invaluable. Many of the men of that party who since have attained more than a "navigating" knowledge of French have to thank the lady from Smith College for their opportunity to acquire it. The "bit" that she did for the Red Cross was perhaps small, but it was exceedingly valuable.

Afternoons, sometimes evenings, too, were given to business conferences wherein ways and means for meeting the big problem so close ahead were given attention. It matters not that many of the plans so carefully developed upon the Lorraine were, of necessity, abandoned after the party reached France. The very men who were making these plans realized as they were making them that field service—actual practice, if you please—is far different from theory, and as they planned, felt that the very labor they were undergoing might yet have to be thrown away, although not completely wasted. For the members of that pioneer Red Cross Commission were gaining one thing of which no situation whatsoever might deprive them; they were gaining an experience in teamwork that was to be invaluable in the busy weeks and months that were to follow.

Very early in the morning of the twelfth of June the Lorraine slipped into the mouth of the Gironde river; for the Compagnie Générale Transatlantique, driven from Havre by the submarine menace and the necessity of giving up the Seine embouchure to the great transport necessities of the British, had been forced to concentrate its activities at Bordeaux, the ancient port of the Gascogne country. The ship crossed the bar at the uncomfortable hour of three in the morning, and the Red Cross party first realized the fact that in army life night hours and day hours are all the same, when it was ordered to arise at once and face the customs and the passport inspectors. That inspection was slow work, yet not delaying. For the Gironde runs to the sea many miles after it passes the curving quay and the two great bridges of Bordeaux. The fact that the Lorraine was able to reach the quay well before noon was due not only to her being a good ship but to the fact that she had both wind and tide in her favor.

At fifteen minutes before twelve she docked and the Red Cross party faced the city of Bordeaux, flat yet not unimpressive, with the same graceful quay, the trees, and the old houses lining it, and in the distance the lofty spires of the lovely cathedral, with the even loftier spire of St. Michel in the farther distance. Even the uninitiated might see upon this last the complications of a wireless station and understand that here was one of the posts from which France spake far overseas.

It is but a night's ride from Bordeaux to Paris, even though it is close to four hundred miles between the two cities. That very evening Major Murphy and his party boarded the night train of the Orléans Railway for the capital, and had their first real touch of war's hardships. The night train was very crowded. It is nearly always crowded. It was then running a solitary sleeping car, but two or three of the older members of the party were able to get reservations. Still other fortunate ones were able to obtain seats. The rest of the party stood throughout the tiresome journey of twelve long hours. Major Murphy himself stood the entire night, akimbo over the prostrate body of a groaning, snoring poilu, yet was the first to be ready at the Gare d'Orsay on the morrow; to be here, there, and everywhere seeing that all were provided with proper hotel accommodations. After which he forged through the crowd to the Crillon, there to meet the hero of the day coming to Paris with "Papa Joffre"—and, like himself, every inch an American. After which again it was in order to repair to the American Relief Clearing House in the Rue François Premier to prepare directly for the big job now so close at hand.

I have described the voyage of this first Red Cross party overseas, not only because it was the first, but also because it was so very typical of many others to follow. Many and many a Red Cross man and Red Cross woman, to say nothing of veritable hosts of doughboys and their officers, had their first glimpse of lovely France as they sailed up the broad Gironde and into that lovely port of Bordeaux. The curving quay, the spires of the lovely cathedral, and the more distant but higher spire of St. Michel was the picture that greeted thousands of them. At least hundreds of them rode in the night train of the Orléans Railway to Paris, and in all probability stood the entire distance. For traveling in France in the days of the Great War was hard whether by train or by automobile.

Before I am done with this book I am going to describe the Atlantic crossing of one of the final Red Cross parties. I belonged to one of those parties myself and so am able to write from first-hand knowledge. But between the original expedition and the one in which I sailed were many others; others of far greater import. For our Uncle Samuel was aroused, and, once aroused, and having resolved that having entered the great fight he would give his all, if necessary, toward its winning, he began pouring overseas not only his fighting legions but his armies of relief, of which the Red Cross is part and parcel.

CHAPTER III

ORGANIZING FOR WORK

At No. 5 Rue François Premier stood the American Relief Clearing House. It was a veritable lighthouse, a tower of strength, if you please, to an oppressed and suffering people. To its doors came the offerings of a friendly folk overseas who needed not the formal action of their Congress before their sympathies and their purse-strings were to be touched, but who were given heartfelt American response almost before the burning of Louvain had been accomplished. And from those doors poured forth that relief, in varied form, but with but one object, the relief of suffering and misery.

Until the coming of the American Red Cross and its kindred organizations, this Clearing House was to Paris—to all France, in fact—almost the sole expression of the real sentiment of the United States. It was organized, and well organized, with a definite purpose; on the one hand the avoidance of useless duplications and overlappings, to say nothing of possible frictions, and upon the other the heartfelt desire to accomplish the largest measure of good with means that were not always too ample despite the desire of the folk who were executing them. More than this, the American Relief Clearing House had a practical purpose in endeavoring to meet the everyday problems of transportation of relief supplies. This phase of its work we shall see again when we consider the organization of the transportation department of the American Red Cross in France. It is enough to say here and now that it possessed a very small number of trucks and touring cars which were worked to their fullest possibilities, and seemingly even beyond, in the all but vain effort to keep abreast of the incoming relief supplies.

In fact the American Relief Clearing House in its largest endeavors was in reality a forwarding agency and, although possessing no large transportation facilities of its own, made large use of existing commercial agencies and those of the governments of the Allies, to forward its relief supplies to their destination; whereupon it advised America not only of the receipt of these supplies but of the uses to which they were put. The main framework of the organization consisted of a staff of clerks who kept track of the movements of shipments and who saw to it that no undue delay occurred in their continuous transit from sender to recipient.

J. H. Jordain was the chief operating manager of this Clearing House, while Oscar H. Beatty was its Director-General. Closely affiliated with the success of the enterprise were Herman H. Harjes, the Paris representative of a great New York banking house, a man whom we shall find presently at the head of one of the great ambulance relief works which preceded the coming of the American Red Cross, J. Ridgely Carter, James R. Barbour, and Ralph Preston. Mr. Preston crossed to France on the Lorraine with the preliminary party of survey and was of very great help at the outset in the formation of its definite plans.

The most dramatic feature perhaps of the American Relief Clearing House was the Norton-Harjes Ambulance Service, which was closely affiliated with it. This organization was founded in the early days of 1914 by two men, each acting independently of the other, who, by personal influence and a great amount of individual activity, succeeded in forming ambulance sections of the French Army maintained by American funds and manned by American boys and nurses who could not wait for the formal action of their government before flinging themselves into Europe's great war for world democracy. These two sections first were known as Sections Sanitaire Nu. 5 and Nu. 6 of the French Army. At a later day it was found better policy, as well as more convenient and more economical, to merge these two sections. This was done, and the merged sections became known more or less formally as the Norton-Harjes Ambulance Service.

At the time of the arrival of the American Red Cross in France this organization actually had in the field five sections of twenty cars each, two men to a car and two officers to a section. The men who offered themselves for this work were all volunteers and were, for the most part, college graduates and men of a disposition to give themselves to work of this sort. A spirit of self-sacrifice and self-denial was represented everywhere within the ranks of the organization. To have been identified with the Norton-Harjes service is to this day a mark of distinction comparable even with that of the ribbon of the Croix de Guerre.

The Red Cross in the United States, long before our actual entrance into France, had been helping this service with both money and supplies. It was quite natural therefore that it should take over this unit, which immediately assumed the name of the American Red Cross Ambulance Service. Between that time and the day on which responsibility for ambulance transport was taken over by the American Army, it organized, equipped and put in service eight additional sections. Before disbanding, the number of men had been brought to over six hundred, five hundred and fifty of them at the front and the remainder in training camp.

A third facility of the American Relief Clearing House which is worthy of passing note was the American Distributing Service, organized and financed by Mr. and Mrs. Robert W. Bliss of our embassy in Paris. It was first put in operation to furnish supplies to French hospitals throughout and behind the fighting areas. It operated a small warehouse in which many specialties—surgical instruments for a particular instance—were received and in due turn distributed.

For a short time after the arrival of the first Commission from America, the possibility of affiliating the American Red Cross with the Clearing House was seriously considered. It became quite evident, however, that this would not be a feasible plan, but that the American Red Cross, just beginning to come into the fullness of its strength as a war-time organization, in order to attain its fullness of efficiency, would have to become the dominating factor of relief in France. This meant that the short but useful career of the American Relief Clearing House would have to be ended and its identity lost in that of the larger and older organization. This was done. The plant and the equipment and personnel as well of the Clearing House were formally turned over to the Red Cross Commission and its first headquarters offices established there in the Rue François Premier, while Mr. Beatty's title changed from Director-General of the Clearing House to that of Chief Executive Officer of the American Red Cross in France.

The offices in the Rue François Premier almost immediately were found too small for the greatly enlarged activities of the Red Cross, and so the large building on the corner of the Place de la Concorde and the Rue Royale, known as No. 4 Place de la Concorde, was engaged as headquarters. These premises were rented through Ralph Preston for $25,000 a year and, although it was not so known at the time, this rental was paid by Mr. Preston out of his own pocket as his personal contribution to the work of the American Red Cross. Seemingly the new quarters were large indeed; yet what a task awaited the secretary when he was compelled to install a force of three hundred people in eighty-six rooms! The executive of modern business demands his flat-top desk, his push buttons, his letter files, his stenographer, his telephone, and "Number Four" was a club building—originally a palace with crystal chandeliers and red carpets and high ceilings and all the things that go ordinarily to promote luxury and comfort, but do not go very far toward promoting business efficiency.

Yet the thing was managed, and for a time managed very well indeed. But as the work of our Red Cross in France progressed, "Number Four" grew too small, and from time to time various overflow, or annex offices were established near by in the Rue Bossy d'Anglais, the Avenue Gabriel, and the Rue de l'Elysée.

Yet in time these, too, were found insufficient. The army and the navy in France kept growing, and with them, and ahead of them, the work of the American Red Cross. Moreover, it was found in many ways most unsatisfactory to have the work of a single headquarters scattered under so many different roofs. So in June, 1918, these many Red Cross activities were brought under a single roof. With the aid of the French government authorities it was enabled to lease the six-story Hotel Regina on the Place de Rivoli and directly across from the Louvre. Into this far more commodious building was moved the larger portion of the American Red Cross offices in Paris, with the exception of the headquarters of the northeastern zone, which remained for a little longer time at No. 4 Place de la Concorde. Upon the signing of the armistice and the appointment of the American Commission to Negotiate Peace, the United States government, through the French, requisitioned both No. 4 Place de la Concorde and the Hotel Crillon for its peace headquarters. The headquarters of the northeastern zone of the Red Cross, much smaller with the coming of peace, were moved into the upper floor of the Hotel Regina.

In the meantime there were many, many changes in the American Red Cross in France other than those of mere location. Major Grayson M.-P. Murphy resigned as head of the French Commission early in September, 1917, leaving behind him a record for expertness and efficiency that has never been beaten. He was, in reality, merely borrowed from the United States Army, and to that organization, which then stood badly in need of both expertness and efficiency, he was returned, while his place as captain of our American Red Cross overseas was taken by one of his associates, Major James H. Perkins. Later this Red Cross chief attained the army rank of lieutenant colonel; yet with Perkins, rank did not count so very much at the best. To most of his fellow workers he was known as Major Perkins; yet, to many of them, "Jim Perkins" was the designation given to this much-loved American Red Cross officer. For if Major Murphy left behind him a splendid reputation for expertness and efficiency, Major James H. Perkins left his monument in Paris in the great affection which he gained in the hearts and minds of each of his associates. He won the love and respect of every man and woman in the organization. For here was a real man; a man who, if you please, preferred to gain loyalty—the quality so extremely necessary to any successful organization, whether of war time or of peace—through his own personality, his kindliness, and his fairness rather than by the authority vested in his office.

"It is impossible to exaggerate the whole-heartedness which Major Perkins gave to the upbuilding of our work here (France)," wrote Henry P. Davison, chairman of the War Council of the Red Cross at the time when the army, following its example in the case of Major Grayson M-P. Murphy, reached out and demanded Major Perkins's services for itself. He continued:

"We can understand the appeal that the army service makes to him, but we greatly regret the loss of his guidance and association. Whatever we have accomplished or may accomplish, it must never be forgotten that Major Perkins and Major Murphy were the pioneers who showed the way, who interpreted in practical fashion the desire of a whole nation to help through the Red Cross in the greatest cause to which a people ever gave their hearts and their resources. They, and we who carry forward the work of the Red Cross, will always be keenly sensible of what we owe to the energy, resourcefulness, and devotion which Major Perkins put into the task of developing from its beginning the mission of the Red Cross in the war."

And while I am quoting, perhaps I can do no better than to quote from a report of Major Perkins, himself, in which he summed up the work of the American Red Cross after its first year in France. He wrote:

"It is impossible for any one who has not had the experience of the last year in France to realize the difficulties which stood in the way of organizing an enormous quasi business, quasi relief organization; personnel was hard to get from America, supplies were hard to get, transportation was almost impossible, the mail service was bad and the telephone service was worse; but in spite of all these troubles the spirit with which the men of the organization undertook everything, carried things through in the most wonderful manner."

Spirit! That was Major Jim Perkins. His was a rare spirit; and the Red Cross men who had the pleasure and the opportunity of working under and with him will testify as to that. Spirit was one of the big things that made this captain of the Red Cross in the months when the difficulties of its task overseas were at high-water mark carry forward so very well indeed. Another was his rare breadth of vision. He, himself, still loves to quote an old French priest, whose parish children had been greatly helped by the work of our Red Cross among them.

"The American Red Cross is something new in the world," once wrote this venerable curé. "Never before has any nation in time of war sought to organize a great body to bind up the wounds of war, not only of its own soldiers but of the soldiers and peoples of other nations. Never before has so great a humanitarian work been undertaken or the idea in such terms conceived, and the result will be greater than any of us can now see."

So it was that Major Jim Perkins "saw big"—much larger, perhaps, than some of his associates at the time when the press of conflict was hard upon all of them. Some of these might have thought his plans large or even visionary; one or two frankly expressed themselves to that effect. Yet these were the very men who, when the Perkins ideas came into use, saw that they did not overshoot the mark.

It was under the régime of this Red Cross captain that the American Red Cross established a service to the French army in the form of canteens, hospitals, supplies, and money donations that led many of its commanders as well as several prominent French statesmen to remark that its steps along these lines were of inestimable value in maintaining the morale of the poilu and so in the final winning of the war. In later chapters of this book we shall describe in some detail the first canteen efforts of our Red Cross in France, and find how they were given to the faithful little men whose horizon blue uniform has come to designate tenacity and dogged purpose.

One of the very typical actions of the Military Affairs Department under Major Perkins was the help given to General Pétain's army, which had suffered acutely. His assistance came at a time which rendered it of double value to the French commander. In fact that was a trait of very real genius that Major Perkins displayed again and again throughout his management of the Red Cross—the knack of extending the aid of his organization at a time when its work would be of the greatest assistance to the winning of the war. In fact, it was upon his shoulders that there fell the task of directing our American Red Cross in meeting its two greatest military emergencies—the great German offensive in the Somme in March, 1918, and the bitter fighting in and about Château-Thierry some four months later. The official records of both the French and the American armies teem with communications of commendation for the efforts of the American Red Cross on those two memorable occasions.

Once in stating his policy in regard to the direction of the Red Cross Department of Military Affairs, of which he had been chief before succeeding Major Murphy as Commissioner to France, Major Perkins laid down his fundamental principles of work quite simply: they were merely to find and to develop the quickest and most effective way of helping the soldiers of the allied armies, and, particularly in the case of the United States Army, to put the Red Cross at the full service of every individual in it, not only in succoring the wounded but in making a difficult life as comfortable as was humanely possible for the well, and to perform these duties in the most economical and effective manner possible.

Here was a platform broad and generous, and, with the greatest armies that the world in all its long centuries of fighting has ever known, affording opportunities so vast as to be practically limitless. One might have thought that in a war carried forward on so unprecedented and colossal a scale that the Red Cross—or, for that matter, any other relief organization—might have found its fullest opportunity in a single activity. But seemingly that is not the Red Cross way of doing things. And in this particular war its great and dominating American organization was forever seeking out opportunities for service far removed from its conventional activities of the past, and of the things that originally might have been expected of it. Count so much for its versatility.

Consider, for instance, its activities in the field with the American Army—we also shall consider these in greater detail farther along in the pages of this book. The field service of the Red Cross in France—the distribution of such homely and needed man creature comforts as tobacco and toilet articles to the troopers in the trenches or close behind them—was a work quite removed from that started by women such as Florence Nightingale or Clara Barton. But who shall rise to say that, in its way, it was not nearly if not quite as essential?

It was this field service that Major Perkins inaugurated, then urged, and, in its earliest phases, personally directed. In addition he had charge of the first developments of the canteen or outpost services at the front. This consisted of the establishment of more or less permanent stations by the Red Cross as close to the front-line trenches as was either practicable or permissible. Open both day and night, these outposts took, at night under the cover of darkness, hot drinks and comforts to the men holding the trenches and at all hours took care of them as they came and went to and from the lines of advanced fighting.

When, slowly but surely, the American Army began to be a formidable combat force in France, the already great problems of Major Perkins were vastly increased. Up to that time the allied soldiers had been receiving the bulk of the assistance of our Red Cross. Now the balance of the work had to be changed and its preponderance swung toward our own army. Yet Perkins did not forget the grateful words and looks of thanks that he had received so many, many times from the poilus and all of their capitaines.

"Not less for the French, but more for the Americans," he quietly announced as his policy.

So it was done, and so continued. The sterling qualities of leadership that this man had shown from the first in the repeated times of great stress and emergency stood him in good stead. He already had instilled into the hearts and souls of the men and women who worked with him that consecration of purpose and enthusiasm for the work in hand which rendered so many of them, under emergency, supermen and superwomen. I have myself a high regard for organization. But I do believe that organization, without the promptings of the human heart to soften as well as to direct it, is as nothing. How often have we heard of the man with the hundred-thousand-dollar mind and the two-cent heart. And how well we all know the fate that eventually confronts him.

To Harvey D. Gibson, who succeeded him as Commissioner to France in the summer of 1918, Major Perkins turned over an organization whose heart was as big as its mind, and then wended his own way toward the army, where he repeated so many of his successes in the Red Cross. But, as we have said, left behind him in this last organization enduring memorials of great affection.

Eventually there came other big chiefs of our American Red Cross in France. Colonel Gibson returned to the United States in March, 1919, with the satisfaction of having done a thorough job thoroughly. He was succeeded by Colonel George H. Burr, as big-hearted and as broad in vision as Perkins. At the same time that Burr came to the seat of command in Paris, Colonel Robert E. Olds, whom Gibson had brought to Paris, became Commissioner for Europe. Between Burr and Olds there was the finest sort of teamwork. The period in which they worked was far from an easy one. With the armistice more than three months past, with the constantly irritating and unsettling effect of the Peace Conference upon Paris and all who dwelt within her stout stone walls, with the mad rush of war enthusiasts to get back to the peace days in the homeland, with the strain and overwork of long months of the conflict finally telling upon both bodies and nerves, the necessity of maintaining the morale of the Red Cross itself, to say nothing of the men it served, was urgent. The dramatic phases of the work were gone. So was the glory. There remained simply the huge problem of orderly demobilization, of bringing the structure down to its original dimensions. A job much more easily said than done; but one that was done and done very well indeed.

We have digressed from the days of the war. Return once again to them. In all that time there were many, many changes in our American Red Cross in Paris—one might fairly say, "of course." Men came and men went and plans and quarters were changed with a fair degree of frequency. But far more men—women, too—came than went, and moving days and plan changings grew farther and farther apart; for here was a definite and consistent planning and upbuilding of organization. If there is any one material thing upon which we Americans pride ourselves to-day more than another it is upon our ability to upbuild our efficiency through organization. And I think it is but fair to say if it had not been thoroughly organized much of the effort of the American Red Cross in France would have been lost. Commissions and commissioners might come and commissions and commissioners might go, but the plan of organization stood, and was at all times a great factor in the success of the work overseas.

The original plan of organization was simple. It did not, in the first instance, comprehend more than a Commissioner for Europe, with the bare possibility of other commissioners being appointed for the separate countries—if there should be found to be sufficient need for them. With the Commissioner for Europe was to be directly affiliated an advisory council, a bureau of legal advice and general policy, and various administrative bureaus and standing committees. The chief plan of the organization, however, divided the work of the American Red Cross in Europe into two great divisions: the one a department of civil affairs, which would undertake relief work for the civilian population of France, which in turn embraced the feeding, housing, and education of refugees, répatries, réformes, and mutilés, reconstruction and rehabilitation work in the devastated districts, and both direct and coöperative work in the cure and prevention of tuberculosis; and the other the department of military affairs, which undertook, as its province, military hospitals, diet kitchens, relief work for the armies of the Allies, medical and surgical and prisoners' information bureaus, medical research and nursing and hospital supply and surgical dressings services, canteens, rest stations and infirmaries, nurses' homes, movable kitchens, and the relief of mutilés. It is of the work of this latter department as it affected the boys of our army in France that this book is written.

Before Major Murphy, the first American Red Cross Commissioner to France, had proceeded very far with his work, he found that he would have further to divide and subdivide its activities. In connection with his deputy, Major James H. Perkins, he held several conferences with General Pershing who, day by day, was becoming better acquainted with the situation and the opportunities it offered. General Pershing stated quite frankly that in all probability it would be many months before his army would be an effective fighting force and that the Red Cross must, during those months, carry the American flag in Europe.

The first organization scheme comprehended several American commissions for the various countries in the zones of military activities, each independent of the other, but all in turn reporting to the Commissioner for Europe at Paris, who was responsible only to the War Council of the Red Cross at Washington. As a matter of actual and chronological fact the Commission to Belgium antedated the coming of the first Red Cross party to France. Long before even that stormy and historic April evening when the United States formally declared war upon the Kaiser and all the things for which the Kaiser stood, the American Red Cross was in Europe, helping to feed and clothe and comfort ravished Belgium. And its Commissioner ranked only second in importance to Herbert C. Hoover, who was in entire charge of the situation for America.

So, with its activities increasing, the Red Cross further divided its work. In the fall of 1917, Major Perkins became Commissioner for France and a short time afterwards separate commissioners were appointed for Great Britain, for Italy, for Switzerland, for Belgium, and for other countries. And these in turn appointed their own individual organizations, complete structures erected for business efficiency and to get a big job done quickly and well.

All this sounds simple, but it was not; for it is one thing to accomplish business organization, and accomplish it quickly, here at home in a land which has barely been touched by the ravages of war and not at all by invasion, and quite another to set up such a structure in a land shell-shocked and nerve-racked and man-crippled by four years of war and actual invasion. Poor France! The war smote hard upon her. By the time that the Murphy Commission reached her shores she had even abandoned the smiling mask which she had tried to carry through the earliest months of the conflict. In Paris the streets were deserted. By day one might see an omnibus, or might not. Occasionally an ancient taxi carriage drawn by an ancient horse, too decrepit for service of any sort at the front, might be encountered. By night the scene was dismal indeed. Few street lights were burning—there was a great scarcity of coal and street lights meant danger from above, from the marauding raids of the great airships of the boche. The few street lamps that were kept alight as a matter of safety and great necessity had their globes smeared with thick blue paint and were but faint points of light against the deep blackness of the night. So that when the glad day of armistice finally came and the street lights blazed forth again—if not in their old-time brilliancy at least in a comparative one—Paris referred to the hour as the one of her "unbluing."

The difficulties of obtaining materials, even such simple office materials as books and blanks and paper, to say nothing of typewriters and the more complicated paraphernalia, the problem of service of every sort—clerical, stenographic, telephone, repair—can easily be imagined. There were times when to an ordinary business man they would have seemed insurmountable; but the Red Cross is not an ordinary business man. It moves under inspiration—inspiration and the need of the moment. And so it does not long permit difficulties, either usual or abnormal, to block its path.

To reduce all of this to organization was a distinct and difficult problem. Our Red Cross which had jumped into the French civilian and military situation while it awaited the coming of the first troops from America, first organized in practically the only way that it was possible for it to organize. It found men in big jobs—some of those very activities that we found more or less correlated in the work of the American Relief Clearing House—and told other men to take other big jobs and work them out in their own way.

This was far from ideal organization, of course. It meant much duplication and overlapping of functional work—in purchasing, in transportation, personnel, and the like. But it was the only sort of organization that was possible at first, and for a considerable time afterward. By the fall of 1917, when Commissioner Perkins had settled down to the details of his big new job and was ready to take up the reorganization of the Red Cross activities in France, there came the great drive of the Austrians and the Germans against the Italian front, with the direct result that the American Red Cross organization in Paris was called upon to bend every effort toward rushing whole trainloads of workers and supplies southward toward Italy. And in the spring of 1918 came the last great drive of the Germans in France—that supreme hour when disaster hung in the very air and the fate of the democracy of the world wavered.

Yet the first half of 1918 was not entirely spun into history before the Red Cross in France was beginning its reorganization. The third Commissioner for France, Harvey D. Gibson, had been appointed and by June was on his way to Paris. One of the first of the huge tasks that awaited him—for it then seemed as if the war was to last for years instead of but four or five months longer—was this very problem of reorganization. Without delay he set upon it, and with the help of his Deputy Commissioner and assistant, George Murnane, evolved an entirely new plan, which gave far larger opportunities for the development of the American Red Cross in France and was, in fact, so simple and so logical in its workings as to become the permanent scheme of organization.

Let me emphasize and reiterate: the old plan, with its two great separate departments of military and civilian affairs, was not only not essentially a bad plan, but it was the only plan possible with the conditions of great stress and strain under which our Red Cross began its operations in France. But it was quickly outgrown. It did not and could not measure up to the real necessities of the situation.

"The double program of the Red Cross, under two large departments of military and civilian affairs," wrote Elizabeth Shipley Sergeant, of this older plan in The New Republic, "... followed a good Red Cross tradition and seemed to be based on a genuine separation of the problems involved. The great crisis in France a year ago was a civilian crisis, and the distinguished American business men who directed the Red Cross were wise enough to associate with themselves specialists in social problems and to give them a free hand. The chiefs of the military bureau, some of whom, like the doctors, were also specialists, had no less a free hand. Indeed the situation was so complex and the necessities were so immediate that every bureau chief and every field delegate was practically told to go ahead and do his utmost. The result was great vitality, great enthusiasm, genuine accomplishment...."

In the twelve months that the American Red Cross had been established in France its work had multiplied many, many times; in but six months the size of the American Army there had quadrupled, and the end was by no means in sight. To plan an organization that would measure up to meet such vast growth and meet it adequately was no child's play.

To begin with, he decided that the great functional workings, such as those of which we have just spoken—transportation, supplies, personnel, construction, and the like—should be centralized in Paris and the great duplications and overlappings of the old system avoided. This, in turn, thrust far too great responsibilities and far too much detail upon those same Paris headquarters. So in turn he took from it its vast overload and divided the organization into nine zones, of which more in good time. If these zone organizations had been situated in the United States instead of in France it is quite possible that the functional activities might have been very largely concentrated at their several headquarters. For in our own land such things as personnel, transportation, supplies, and construction could be readily obtained at headquarters points—Boston, New York, Chicago, New Orleans, or San Francisco, for instance. In France they not only were not readily obtainable, but rarely obtainable at any cost or any trouble. Think of the difficulties of obtaining either motor trucks or canteen workers which confronted the zone manager at Neufchâteau, just back of the big front line! It was well that the plan of organization under which he worked provided definitely he was to requisition Paris for such supplies—human or material—and that in turn Paris might draw upon the great resources of America.

Such in brief was the plan. It was simplicity itself; yet was builded to measure to the necessities of the situation. And so it did measure—to the necessities of the situation. Time and experience proved that; also they proved the value of central bureaus, but did not segregate them as before under the separate headings of Military and Civilian. Instead there proved necessary seven "functional departments"—to be responsible for plans and programs and instructions for carrying on the work. The directors of those seven departments served as assistants to the administrative head of the American Red Cross, the Commissioner to France. Considering him as the commander in chief and his seven directors as his staff officers, the Red Cross in France began to take on a distinctly military form.

The seven departments were as follows:

Department of Requirements: Bureau of Supplies; Transportation; Personnel; Permits and Passes; Construction; Manufacture.

Medical and Surgical Department: Bureau of Hospital Administration; Tuberculosis and Public Health; Children's Bureau; Reëducation and Reconstruction; Nurses.

Medical Research and Intelligence Department.

Department of Army and Navy Service: Bureau of Canteens; Home and Hospital Service; Outpost Service; Army Field Service.

Department of General Relief: Bureau of Refugees; Soldiers' Families; War Orphans; Agriculture.

Department of French Hospitals.

Department of Public Information.

So much for the general, or staff, organization. It covered, of course, all France. Yet for practical operations France was divided into nine great geographical zones which in turn were subdivided into districts. Each zone possessed its own warehouses and supply and transportation organization, and in each the entire operating organization came under a single head, the Zone Manager, whose responsibility for his own particular area was similar to that of the Commissioner's authority for all France. The Zone Manager had on his staff representatives of any of the headquarters departments which might function in his area.

The scheme was simple, and it worked. Correspondence was free between headquarters at Paris and the individual workers in the field, but copies of all instructions were also sent to the Zone Managers—in some cases to district managers also—so that they might be properly informed and all the operations coördinated.

The nine zones of military operations with their headquarters were as follows:

Now consider, if you will, the workings of the seven great central bureaus, in so far at least as they concern the province of this book. The scheme for the Department of Requirements, as you may see from the table that I have just given, included not only the Bureau of Supplies, Transportation, Construction, and Manufacture—which we will consider in separate chapters—and Permits and Passes, but a section of General Insurance, to be responsible for all insurance matters except life insurance for Red Cross workers, which fell within the province of the Bureau of Personnel. The Medical and Surgical Department had its functions definitely outlined. It was stated that it was to be in charge of all the medical and surgical problems of the American Red Cross in France (except those specifically assigned to the Medical Research and Intelligence Department); that it was to formulate policies and to undertake a general supervision of medical and surgical activities. Moreover, it was to maintain the necessary contact with the United States Army and Navy authorities, so that the Red Cross could be prepared to render prompt service in the event of medical or surgical emergencies. It was to be responsible for the determination of all medical and surgical American Red Cross standards; for decisions regarding supplies and manufactures for medical and surgical purposes; and for judgment regarding medical requisition. These things were set down with great exactness, and it was well that they should be; for the position of the Red Cross in regard to the medical departments of both the army and the navy has ever been a delicate as well as an intricate and helpful one. So it was, too, that it was determined that each of the nine zone organizations should include a Medical and Surgical Department representative who should report to the Zone Manager and be responsible for executing for him all the medical and surgical instructions received from headquarters as well as for the study and development of medical and surgical opportunities within the zone. It was further set down that this zone representative should be in charge of Red Cross hospital administration within its territory and should direct its operations at the American Red Cross hospitals, dispensaries, infirmaries, convalescent homes, and all similar activities.

The work of the Army and Navy Department also was expanded in great detail. And, inasmuch as all of its work comes so closely within the province of this book, I shall follow some of that detail. For instance, the plan of its organization set down not only the Bureaus of Canteens, the Home and Hospital Service, Outpost Service and Army Field Service, but also laid down the definite plans of action to be followed by each of these bureaus. Starting with the first of them, the Bureau of Canteens was to be responsible, through the zone organizations, for the development of this service—always so dear to the heart of the doughboy—throughout all France, for the inspection of its operations including reviews of its operating costs and for all activities regarding plans for the supplies, construction, and equipment of the canteens. The Headquarters Bureau of this work at Paris was to develop instructions and formulate policies for the operation of these stations, but in the zones their actual operation was to fall under the jurisdiction of the local representatives of the Army and Navy Department who in turn, of course, reported direct to the Zone Manager controlling supplies and transportation movement in and out of the district.

The Bureau of Home and Hospital Service was divided into three sections—great sections because of the vastness of the work that it might be called upon to perform for an army of two million, or perhaps even four million men. These were the Home Communication Section, the Home Service Section, and the Section of General Service at Military Hospitals. The task of the first of these sections—which presently we shall see amplified—was to obtain and transmit to the United States or to authorized army and navy officials in France and also to relatives in the United States, such information as might possibly be obtained in regard to dead, wounded, missing, or prisoner American soldiers or sailors. It was to be supplemental to and not in duplication of the service of the quartermaster of the United States Army. As a part of its work the section was to render aid in registering and photographing the graves of our soldiers and sailors.

At headquarters in Paris the work of the Home Communication Section was to be concerned with general executive direction, the determination of policies, the issuance of instructions, and the actual transcribing and forwarding of the reports to America. In the zones its activities were brought under the zone Army and Navy Bureau. Its actual work was planned to be conducted through searchers in the field, in camps, and in hospitals.

The Home Service work, while in a sense similar to that of the Home Communication Section, in another sense was quite the reverse. For while the first of these two services concerned itself with supplying the anxious mother back home with information regarding the boy from whom she had not heard for so long a time, it was the task of the Home Service also, through its representatives in the field, camps, or in hospitals (in many instances the selfsame representatives as those of the Home Communication) so far as possible to relieve the anxieties of soldiers regarding affairs at home.

The third section of the Home and Hospital Service bore the rather imposing title of Section of General Service at Military Hospitals. Its task was to assist in furnishing medical and surgical supplies to army and navy hospitals in accordance with the plans of the Medical and Surgical Department, to distribute general comforts to our sick and wounded, to erect and operate recreation huts at the hospitals, and even to develop gardens at the hospitals for furnishing fresh vegetables to patients—a part of the program which, because of the sudden ending of the war, was never quite realized. Furthermore, the work of this Section contemplated the operation of nurses' homes and huts. All of these activities were to be under the chief representative at the hospital whose task it was to correlate and direct all the operations.

Alongside of Home and Hospital Service in the army and navy stood the Bureaus of Outpost Service and of Army Field Service. In the plan for the first of these, the American Red Cross would endeavor to maintain at as many points as was consistently possible outposts at which supplies would be kept and comforts and necessities distributed to men in the line. From these points, as well as from points even in advance of their locations, emergency sustenance and comforts were to be given men at advanced dressing stations and at every other point along the front where our troops might actually be reached.

In the Army Field Service, the American Red Cross was to have, with each army division, a representative to coöperate with the Army Medical Corps to furnish supplementary medical and surgical supplies, to distribute supplies and comforts to troops, to perform such canteen service as was possible in emergencies, and for a general coöperation with the men working in the Home Communication and the Home services.

If I have taken much of your time with the rather lengthy details of this final war-time plan of organization of the American Red Cross in France, it is because one cannot well understand the results of a great machine such as it became—with more than six thousand uniformed workers in the field, the hospitals, the canteens, and the headquarters of France—without looking a little bit beneath its hoodings and its coverings and seeing something of the actual working of its mechanism.

I like, myself, to think first of the Red Cross in its vast humanitarian aspects; and yet the business side of the great organization, so far as I have had the opportunity of seeing into it, has fascinated me. To go behind the scenes of the greatest helping hand of all time and there see system, precision, and order, is a mighty privilege. The Headquarters building of the American Red Cross in the city of Washington is a monumental structure—an architectural triumph in white marble, planned as a great and enduring memorial long before the coming of the war. Even in the busiest days of 1918 its beautiful and restful exterior gave little evidence of the whirl of industry within and behind, for far to the rear of the main Headquarters building, designed, as I have just said, with no immediate thought of war, stretched great, plain emergency buildings, each a hive of offices and each peopled with hundreds of clerks, with desks and typewriters and telephones—all in coördination and all a part of the paraphernalia that goes to the making of the cogs and wheels and shafts and cylinders of the great modern machine of business of to-day.

Behind this building there were many other such headquarters structures—buildings here and there across the face of the United States and in some of the great capitals of Europe—Paris, London, Rome, Geneva, for instance. Of these, none more important, none busier than the headquarters of the American Red Cross in France, in the six-storied Hotel Regina, Paris, in its turn a veritable hive of offices and peopled with more clerks, more desks, more typewriters, more telephones, and all this paraphernalia coördinated as we have just seen, by modern and detailed business system.

Again behind these headquarters buildings still others; concentration warehouses in each of America's forty-eight states, to say nothing of her Federal capital; warehouses at ports of embarkation; warehouses at ports of debarkation; at central points in France, and points behind the firing line; huts, canteens, in some cases entire hospitals, motor trucks, camionettes, supplies in the hundreds of thousands of tons to go from the warehouses into the camions and back again into the warehouses, and ten thousand workers, six thousand in France alone. What a mess it all would have been without a coördinated system, definitely laid down and definitely followed!

To have builded such a machine, to have laid down so huge and so definite a plan in the days before the war would seemingly have been a matter of long years. But we now know that the Red Cross is an emergency organization. In emergency it was developed—not in years, but in months, nay, even in weeks.

"We had to build an organization—and operate it all the time that we were building it," one of the Washington officers of the organization once told me. "We had to start to get actual materials and supplies for field relief work of every sort at the very hour and minute that we were sending our first working commission to France and were struggling to get a competent field relief organization. In every direction raw and inexperienced human material confronted us. We were raw and inexperienced ourselves. And yet, as we confronted the big problem and turned it over between us, we saw light. We began to realize certain definite things. We realized, for instance, that when we needed an executive to supervise the turning out of many hundreds of millions of hospital dressings, we did not, after all, need a nurse or a doctor, but a man or a woman who had the experience or the technique to turn out dressings in huge quantities. We needed an executive. We found such a man in the person of a lumberman out in the Middle West. We brought him to Washington and there he made good on the job."

These experiences were paralleled in Paris even through the exigencies of the situation, the extreme emergency which at all times confronted our Red Cross there, until the fateful eleventh hour of the eleventh day of the eleventh month of 1918 had been met and long since passed. It therefore was not always possible to pick executives with such care and discrimination as would be possible in the United States; in fact the best results were obtained by the more or less firmly fixed method of finding the personnel here—generally in response to definite cable requests from Paris—and sending it to France, but not always. Occasionally the reverse was true. Men already overseas were thrust quite unexpectedly into posts of great trust and great responsibility—posts requiring broad and instant initiative—and in those posts developed abilities which they, themselves, had not realized they possessed.

In fact it is worth stating that the zone plan of organization contemplated this very possibility, and so gave to each Zone Manager great autonomy and freedom of action. In no other way would it have been possible to obtain immediate and efficient results, particularly in a war-beset land where communication of every sort, by train, by motor car, by post, by telegraph, and by telephone, was so greatly overburdened. The very autonomy of the final organization plan was largely responsible for its success. It was one of the lubricants which made the big business machine of the American Red Cross in France function so well.

Have you ever stood beside a fairly complex machine—a linotype or a silk loom or a paper machine, for instance—and after examining its intricacy of cams and cogs and shafts, wondered how it turned out its product with such precision and rapidity? So it is with the big business machine of the American Red Cross. You might stand close to any one of its many, many individual activities—the sewing room of a chapter house here in the United States, a base hospital behind the front in France, a transport receiving its medical supplies—and wonder truly at the coördination of such huge activities; for they did coördinate. The big machine functioned, and as a rule functioned very well indeed. And because it did function so very well the largest single humanitarian effort in the history of the world was carried forward to success with a minimum of friction and loss of precious energy.

So much, if you please, for practical business methods in an international emergency.

CHAPTER IV

THE PROBLEM OF TRANSPORT

To attempt aid or comfort to a fighting army six hundred miles inland from the coast without adequate transportation was quite out of the question. Transportation, in fact and in truth, was the lifeblood of the American Expeditionary Forces which began to debark at the Atlantic rim of France before the summer of 1917 was well spent. It was the obvious necessity of transportation that made it necessary for the War Department of the United States to plan to operate an American railroad system of some 6,000 miles of line—all told about equal to the length of the Northern Pacific system—over certain designated portions of the several French railway systems. Nothing was ever more true than the now trite Napoleonic remark, that an "army travels on its stomach." The imperial epigram about the progress of an army meant transportation, and little else.

In other days in other wars the transport of the United States was in the completely adequate hands of its Quartermaster General and its Corps of Engineers. But in those days we fought our wars in North America. The idea of an army of two million men—perhaps even four or five million—fighting nearly four thousand miles away from the homeland was quite beyond our conception. When that remote possibility became fact the necessities of our transport multiplied a thousandfold. They swept even beyond the capabilities of a Quartermaster General and a Chief of Engineers who found their abilities sore-taxed in many other directions than that of the water, the rail, and the highway movement of troops. It became a job for railroad men, expert railroad men, the most expert railroad men in the world. And where might railroad men be found more expert than those of the United States of America?

Purposely I am digressing for the moment from the Red Cross's individual problem of transport. I want you to see for an instant and in the briefest possible fashion, the United States Military Railroad in France, not alone because it must form the real and permanent background of any study of the transportation of the American Red Cross—itself a structure of no little magnitude—but also because in turn the Red Cross was able to render a large degree of real service to the railroad workers who had come far overseas from Collingwood or Altoona or Kansas City to run locomotives or operate yards or unload great gray ships. No Red Cross canteens have been of larger interest than those which sprung up beside the tracks at Tours or Gièvres or Neufchâteau or St. Nazaire or Bassens—all of these important operating points along the lines of the United States Military Railroad in France.

To run this Yankee railroad across the land of the lily required, as already I have intimated, expert railroad mentality. To head it no less a man than W. W. Atterbury, operating vice-president of the Pennsylvania Railroad, was chosen and given the rank of brigadier-general in charge of the rail transport of the S. O. S., as the doughboy and commissioned officers alike have come to know the Service of Supplies of the American Expeditionary Forces. Around himself General Atterbury assembled a group of practical railroaders, men whose judgment and experience long since have placed them in the front rank of American transportation experts. Among these were Colonel W. J. Wilgus, former engineering vice-president of the New York Central system and the man who had made the first studies of the necessities and the possibilities of the United States Military Railroad in France; Colonel James A. McCrea, a son of the former president of the Pennsylvania and himself general manager of the Long Island Railroad at the time of our entrance into the war; Colonel F. A. Delano, a one-time president of the Wabash, who left a commissionership in the Federal Reserve Board to join the army, and Colonel G. T. Slade, former vice-president of the Northern Pacific. These men are only a few out of a fairly lengthy roster of our Yankee railroad men in France. Yet they will serve to indicate the type of personnel which operated our lines in France. It would not be fair to close this paragraph without a reference to the patent fact that the high quality of the personnel of the official staff of our Yankee railroad overseas was fully reflected in the men of its rank and file. These, too, were of the highest type of working railroaders, and to an American who knows anything whatsoever about the railroads of his homeland and the men who work upon them, more need not be said.

The United States Military Railroad in France, it should clearly be understood, was not a railroad system such as we build in America by patient planning and toil and the actual upturning of virgin soil. While many millions of dollars were expended in its construction, it was not, after all, a constructed railroad. In any legal or corporation sense it was not a railroad at all. It was in fact an adaptation of certain lines—side lines wherever possible—of long-existent French railways. To best grasp it, one must first understand that the greater part of French rail transportation is divided into five great systems. Four of these—the Nord, the Etat, the Paris-Lyons-Méditerranée, and the Orléans—shoot many of their main stems out from the heart of Paris, as the spokes of a wheel extend out from its hub. These spoke lines, if I may be permitted the phrase, long since were greatly overburdened with the traffic which arose from the vast army operations of the French, the British, and the Belgians. The problem was to make the French railway system bear upon its already much-strained back the additional transport necessities of our incoming army of at least two million men within the first twelve months of its actual operations.

Between the radiating spoke lines of the French railways leading out from the great hub of the wheel at Paris is a network of smaller and connecting lines, the most of them single-tracked, however. The whole structure, in fact, greatly resembles a huge spider's web; far more so than our own because of its more regular outlines. Colonel Wilgus and Colonel William Barclay Parsons, the designer of the first New York subway system, who accompanied him in the first inspection of the army transportation problem in France, quickly recognized this spider's web. And a little inspection showed them the great burden that its main spokes already were carrying; convinced them of the necessity of using other lines for the traffic of the American Army. For it was known even then that in addition to carrying the men themselves there would have to be some 50,000 tons a day transported an average distance of six hundred miles for an army of two million men.

To strike across the spider's web! That was the solution of the problem. Never mind if most of those cross-country connecting lines running at every conceivable angle to the main spoke lines and in turn bisecting the greater part of them, were for the most part single-tracked. Never mind if, as they began to climb the hills of Eastern France which held the eastern portions of the battle front—sectors assigned quite largely to the Americans—they attained one per cent grade or better. In the valley of the Loire where a good part of our military rail route would be located there is the easiest and steadiest long-distance grade in all France. With American ingenuity and American labor it would be comparatively easy to double track the single-track lines and in some cases even to lower the gradients, while, for that matter, the ingenuity of American locomotive builders might rise quite easily to the problem of producing an effective locomotive to overcome these one per cent pulls.

I have spoken of the valley of the Loire because almost from the beginning it was chosen as the location of the chief main routes of the United States Military Railroad in France. Necessity dictated that location. It was both logical and efficient that the British should be given the great Channel ports for their supply service of men and munitions. Their endeavors so crowded Havre and Boulogne and Dieppe and Calais and Cherbourg, to say nothing of the rail lines which serve these ancient ports of the north of France, that they were out of the question for any large movement of American forces, although, as we shall see in good time, much Red Cross material, particularly in the early stages of our participation in the war, did come through Havre.

The more distinctly American ports, however, were Brest, St. Nazaire, La Rochelle, and Bordeaux, as well as the rapidly created emergency port at Bassens, just across the Gironde from Bordeaux. All of these harbors are on the west coast of France and give more or less directly in the Atlantic Ocean itself. With the possible exception of Bordeaux, in recent years they have been rather sadly neglected ports. That no longer can be said, however, for within a space of time to be measured by weeks and months rather than by years, they have become worthy of rank with the most efficient harbors of the world. It was necessity that made them so—the supreme necessity of the greatest war in history. So does the black cloud of war sometimes have its silver lining of permanent achievement.

These were the ports that became the starting points of the two main stems of the United States Military Railroad in France. Upon the great docks and within the huge warehouses that sprang up seemingly overnight were placed the constantly incoming loads of men and mules and horses and food and guns and camionettes and tents and five-ton trucks—all the seemingly endless paraphernalia of war. And from those docks and from those warehouses moved at all hours of the day and night long trains emptying them of all that same endless paraphernalia of war and in the same good order as that in which it arrived. And these trains were for the greater part of American-builded cars, hauled by locomotives from the engine-building shops of Philadelphia or Schenectady or Dunkirk and all operated by 75,000 expert railroaders, picked and culled from every state of the Union.

I shall not attempt here to go into further detail of the operation of our military railroad in France, although there is hardly a detail of it that is not fascinating in the extreme. It is enough here and now to say that it functioned; that our "contemptible army" wiped out the Saint Mihiel salient in one day, and, what is perhaps far more important, there were comparatively few instances where an American soldier went for a day without his three good meals. If I were an artist I would like to paint a picture for the beginning of this chapter. And because it was for a book of Red Cross activities primarily, the painting would show the operations of the United States Army Transport on land and water as a huge motley of ships and trains and warehouses and cranes in a gray monotone in the background; while in the foreground in gay array one would find the motor trucks, the camionettes, and the touring cars of the Red Cross's own transportation department.

To that department we now have come fairly and squarely. And, lest you should be tempted to dismiss it with a wave of the hand and a shoulder shrug, let me ask if you have been a woman worker for the Red Cross somewhere in our own beloved country, if you ever have given more than a passing thought to the future of that gauze bandage that you made so deftly and so quickly and so many, many times? Did you ever wonder what became of the sweater, the helmet, or the wristlets which you knitted with such patient care and patriotic fervor? Or that warm and woolen gown which you took down from the closet hook with such a real sigh of self-denial—it still was so pretty and so new? How was it to reach some downhearted refugee of France?

It is comparatively easy to visualize the movement of the munitions of war across the three thousand miles of Atlantic and six hundred miles of France between our northeastern seaports and our front lines of battle—powder and food and uniforms and even aëroplanes and locomotives in giant crates. It perhaps is not quite as easy to trace, even in the mind's eye, the vast passage of the steady output of the 20,000,000 pairs of patriotic hands from America to the boys at the front. It is a vast picture; a huge canvas upon which is etched at first many fine streams of traffic, gradually converging; forming rivulets, then rivers, and finally a single mighty river which, if I may continue the allegory without becoming too mixed in my metaphor, is carried overseas and across the entire width of the French republic. Sometimes the swift course of the river is checked for a time; the little still-water pools and eddies are the concentration stations and warehouses in America; and the other pools and eddies in France are where the precious relief supplies are held for careful and equitable distribution.

To the streams that have poured out of the homes and the Chapter workrooms that have supported the Red Cross so loyally and so royally, must be added the great floods of traffic, of purchased raw materials and supplies of every sort. Some of these last, like the output of the home workshops, will go to the boys at the front practically unchanged. But a considerable quantity will be filtered through huge Red Cross workshops in Paris and other European cities, yet also goes forward to the front-line trenches.

It is well enough to look for a time at this huge problem as a great allegory or as a great picture; perhaps as one looks upon a great pageant. It has been a good deal more than that to the men who have had to be responsible for the successful working out of the problem. Come back behind the scenes and I shall try to show you the project as it appears to these men—a thing of hard realities and seemingly all but endless labor.

When Grayson M.-P. Murphy and his Commission made the preliminary survey trip to France in the interests of the American Red Cross in June, 1917, they took the man who was to solve their transportation problem right along with them. He was and still is Major Osborne. There have been changes in the Red Cross personnel since first the American organization took up its big part of the international job at Paris. Men have come and men have gone. Big executives—five, ten, twenty-thousand-dollar-a-year men a plenty—have slammed down their desks in New York or Pittsburgh or Chicago or San Francisco and have given six months or a year willingly and gladly to the service of the Red Cross. For many of them well past the army age it seemingly was the only way that they could keep pace with their boys or their nephews in khaki. But Osborne did not measure his service by months. He came with the first and remained on the job until long months after the signing of the armistice.

I wish that I might write of C. G. Osborne as some veteran American railroader or at least as a man experienced in motor truck or highway transportation of some sort. For when one comes to measure the size of the job and the way that he measured up to it, it seems incredible that he has not had large transportation experience of some sort. Yet when the truth is told it is known that Major Osborne is a college man, with an astounding record as an athlete, but with little more actual traffic experience than falls to the lot of any average business man. Perhaps, after all, that was just as well, for to his big new job he not only brought vigor and strength but a freshness of mind that made him see it in all the breadth of its possibilities.

There were eighteen men in that pioneer survey party of the American Red Cross to France. Before the ship had left her dock in New York, Osborne was on his big new job, wiring the American Relief Clearing House in Paris—which at that time was the unified agency for all the American relief work of every sort that had sprung up in France since the war began in August, 1914, to buy six touring cars and to have them at Paris to meet the party. The American Relief Clearing House moved quickly. It already possessed three Renaults—good cars of a sort well suited to the hard necessities of the war-scarred highroads of France. It purchased three more touring cars of the same general type, and in these six cars the American Red Cross took its first real look at the field into which it was to enter—the field in which it was destined to play the greatest rôle in all of its eventful career.

The Clearing House, it should be understood quite clearly, was not at any time a war-relief agency upon its own account. It was, as its name indicates, a real clearing house or central station for a number of American relief organizations who came to the aid of the French long before the United States had entered the war, and the American Red Cross was privileged legally to enter into the relief work in connection with it. It received goods—sweaters, socks, medicines, even food—from the states and from England and distributed them, although not even this work was undertaken directly, but was handled through transitaires, who made the direct distributions. Because of the rather limited nature of its work, therefore, it needed little actual equipment. In June, 1917, it only owned eight touring cars and three trucks; and all of these were pretty badly shot to pieces by hard service and by lack of repairs. But these it turned over to the Red Cross and they became the nucleus of the American Red Cross transportation organization in France.

"What we are going to need here," said Major Osborne to his fellows before he had been on the new job a fortnight, "is to create a real transportation service and to build it up from the bottom. What I really have in mind is the organization of something like one of our express companies back in the United States."

If you know anything at all about our inland transportation system in America you must realize that our express companies—one of our most distinctive forms of national transportation, by the way—although closely related to our railroads are in no real sense a part of them. For, while they have their largest functions upon railroad trains, particularly passenger trains, they also maintain in all the towns and cities that they serve great fleets or squadrons of horse-drawn or motor-drawn trucks. And in recent years they have increased their carrying functions from the small parcels for which they originally were designed into the heaviest types of freight. I have known a carload of steel girders to move from New York to Newark, eight miles distant, by express.

Osborne's idea of the Red Cross Express was fundamentally sound, and perhaps it is because it was so fundamentally sound that it has been so very successful, although working many times against tremendous odds. He recognized from the first that it would be foolish to use Red Cross motor trucks for long-distance hauls, such as from Havre to Paris, for instance, save in cases of great emergency. The railroad service of France, although greatly hampered and handicapped during the war, was at no time broken down. And it was not necessary, as in Great Britain and in the United States, to take it out of the hands of its private owners and place it under direct government control.

Osborne realized that he would be compelled to place his chief reliance upon the French railways. The United States Military Railroad, especially at the outset, was not to be compared in value with that of the main stems of the French systems, particularly those which radiate out from Paris. So he made immediate arrangements with the French Minister of Railways for the transport of Red Cross supplies from the various Atlantic ports to Paris and other distributing stations as well as right up to the railheads behind the lines themselves. And the French on their part generously and immediately gave free transportation to all Red Cross supplies, as well as to all persons bound to any part of France exclusively on Red Cross work. In addition arrangements were made by which the Red Cross personnel bound on vacation leaves or other personal errands through France might avail themselves of the very low passenger rates heretofore only granted to soldiers in uniform.

With his plan of utilization of the railroads for long-distance hauls firmly fixed, Osborne promptly went to work to organize his fleet of trucks and touring cars in the various cities of France where the American Red Cross has touched with its activities. That meant not alone the securing of sufficient motor cars of the various sorts necessary to the situation, but of garages and repair facilities of every sort; this last particularly difficult in a nation which for three years had been war-racked and hard put to it to meet her own necessities of motor transportation. But from a beginning of three trucks and eight touring cars from the American Relief Clearing House, whose activities were quickly absorbed by the Red Cross, a mighty fleet of trucks and camions and camionettes and touring cars slowly was assembled. Before Osborne had been in France a month he had purchased at Paris fifty-five sizable trucks, twenty-five of which had been unloaded at Havre and which had been destined originally for an American firm in France and another thirty which were turned over by the French Minister of Munitions. The entire fifty-five trucks were all at work by the end of July, 1917, when the first of the relief supplies from America began to roll, a mighty tidal wave into France.

On November 11, 1918, the day that the armistice was signed and another great milestone in the progress of the world erected, the transport department of the American Red Cross in France possessed a mighty fleet of 1,285 trucks and touring cars, moving some 5,000 tons of supplies each week. The greater part of these were in actual and constant service, the rest being held in its great garages and shops for painting and repairs. To these shops we shall come in good time.

I would not have you think of the transport problem too largely as a problem of the motor truck, however. I should prefer to have you see another picture; this one a perspective—France rolled flat before your eyes, the blue Atlantic upon one side and the mountainous German frontier upon the other. Across this great perspective—call it a map, if you will—are furrowed many fine lines. The spider web once again! Here are the railways radiating out, like spokes of the wheel, from Paris. Here are the mass of connecting and cross-country lines. And here the one of these that must remain impressed upon the minds of Americans—the double main stem of the United States Military Railroad in France reaching chiefly from the ports of Bordeaux and of St. Nazaire with fainter but clear defined tendrils from La Rochelle and Brest as well. And if the eye be good or the glass half strong enough one can see the steady line of American transports coming to these four harbors—the "bridge across the Atlantic" of which our magazine writers used to prate so glibly but a little time ago.

As I write, the list of the French ports at which the transport department of the Red Cross conducts its chief activities is before me. In addition to the four which have just been mentioned, one finds Toulon and Marseilles, upon the Mediterranean: Bassens, La Pallice, Nantes, Havre, Rouen, Dunkirk and Calais. Not all of these were American ports. Some of them were reserved exclusively for the British. But they were all ports for the American Red Cross, which frequently found it necessary or advisable to buy supplies, raw or manufactured, in England.

The bulk of our materials came, however, to the American ports; and at some of them our Red Cross maintained more than a merely sizable organization. At least at six, it had a captain, thirty or forty French or American helpers, and perhaps from seventy-five to a hundred boche prisoners who performed the hardest of the actual work upon the piers and within the warehouses. There was much work to be done. The plants were huge. In St. Nazaire, for instance, the Red Cross warehouse alone could hold more than eight thousand cases of supplies beneath its roof, and in course of the busiest days of the war, just before the signing of the armistice, it was no uncommon thing for this great warehouse to be completely emptied and refilled within seven days. At the one port of St. Nazaire it was necessary to assign six large trucks, and yet the movement of Red Cross supplies from this great port was exclusively upon the trains of the United States Military Railroad.

As fast as the freight came pouring out from the holds of the ships it was carted into the warehouses, where it was carefully checked and a receipt sent back to America, noting any shortages or overages. Then it found its way to the trains. If it was to an American train the process was simple enough; merely the waybill transaction which is so familiar to every American business man who ever has had freight dealings with our Yankee railroads. If it went upon the French railways, however, either in carload or less than carload lots, it rode upon the ordre de transport which, although issued and personally signed by Major Osborne, was the free gift of the French Minister of Railways. These ordres de transport differed from waybills chiefly in the fact that they give gross weights but no listing of the contents of the cases. This last was accomplished by the bordereaux, which was purely a Red Cross document.

The work of the port manager of the American Red Cross at one of these important water gates of France was no sinecure, indeed. Here is the testimony of one of the ablest of them, Mr. J. M. Erwin, who was in charge of its terminal transportation work, first at Le Havre and then at Nantes. He writes:

"In my branch of the activities I have performed no heroisms. I have not rushed out in the middle of the night to carry food or dressings to the front while dodging bombs or bullets, but I have crawled out of bed at five o'clock and six o'clock in the morning to wade through snow and mud in the quays, trying to boss the unloading of Red Cross goods from a ship and their transshipment to warehouse, car, or canal boat. I am like my confrères of other seaports in France—I haven't had a chance to expose my person to battle dangers—nothing more than the hazards of abnormal movement and traffic, tumbling cranes and falling bales, automobile eccentricities, climatic exposures, and a few similar trifles.

"I have had my trials of dealing with the formalities of war departments, likewise with their machine-made exactions, and with all the types of Monsieur Le Bureau, with the general and the corporal, with the teamsters who arrive late—or not at all—with the auto truck which breaks down, with the boche prisoner gang which reports to the wrong place two miles away, with the vermin that steals things out of cracked cases, with the flivver that I can't start, with the navigation colonel who before the war was a plain clerk who wore store clothes, with the railway station master who can't give me any cars, with 119 cases of jam that are 'busted' and must be repaired, at once, and atop of all this the rain which has been raining for seven weeks and won't stop."

The tone of the port manager's letter suddenly changes from sarcasm to the romance of his big job.

"If a bale or a case of goods could talk," he writes, "and tell you all about its trip from Spokane, Washington, to the emergency hospital near Château-Thierry, its narrative would form a chain story of freight cars and docks and stevedores, somber seclusion in a deep hold, tempests and submarines alert, the clanking of chains and the creaking of slings, shouts, orders, and oaths, bangings about in rain and snow, nails and cords yielding under the tension of rush and brutality, voices and hands of inimitable über alles prisoner teams, lonesome sleeps in dark warehouses, gnawings of nocturnal rats, more trips to the unknown, petite vitesse which averages five miles an hour, and—finally—destination, arrival, identification, application, and appreciation. The voyage and itinerary of a case of goods for the Red Cross compose an odyssey and very few human packages ever perform displacements so replete with incidents and interest."

Such indeed was the day's work of the port manager's job. He was master of transportation, and at a very vital point in transportation. No matter how much he might be assailed by questions or criticisms, until he wondered whether he really is a bureau of information or one of complaint, he never forgot that transportation was his real job, which brought to the A, B, C, of human endeavor, meant that he must see that the Red Cross supplies received at his port were properly checked and without delay shipped to their destinations. Paris was most generally this last.

Put yourself back into those stirring days. Suppose, if you will, that a certain definite shipment of Red Cross supplies comes into the headquarters city of Paris, either from Rouen or Le Havre or Brest or St. Nazaire. It comes through without great delay on the small but seemingly entirely efficient goods cars of a French railway to a great freight "quai" or warehouse, set aside for the exclusive use of our American Red Cross, not far from the busy passenger terminal of St. Lazaire. This huge raised platform, some six hundred feet long and fifty feet wide, handles some eighty per cent of all the Red Cross supplies that come into Paris in the course of the average month. All of the goods that come to this Parisian freight station are import and "in bond," and so at the great exit gates there is a squad of customs guards to inspect all outbound loads. But, again through the courtesy of the French Government, all Red Cross supplies are permitted to pass without inspection. Thus a great deal of time is saved and efficiency gained.

The little railway goods cars with the Red Cross supplies pull up along one side of the quai platform, while upon the other side stand the camions or trucks to carry the supplies down into Paris. Occasionally these are not destined for the French capital; in which case they are quickly transferred and reloaded to other little railway goods cars, and destined for other points in France. For the normal handling of freight upon this particular Red Cross quai—when, for instance, two or more ships arrive within a day of one another—the number of handlers and checkers may rise quickly to eighty-five or a hundred and then there may be as many as 15,000 cases of supplies upon the platform at a single time. The men employed are mainly French soldiers on leave or already demobilized, and are strong and dexterous workers. And upon one occasion they unloaded ninety-two closely packed freight cars in thirty-two hours.

In the course of an average war-time month this Paris receiving station for American Red Cross supplies would handle anywhere from 800 to 5,000 tons of cases a week, and despite the great weight of many of these cases—there is nothing light, for instance, in either medicines or surgical instruments—counts even the higher record as no extraordinary feat.

In addition to being a receiving station, this quai performed steady service as a sorting station or clearing house. From it some fifteen warehouses or stores depots in and about Paris received their supplies. And care must be taken that the goods for each of these warehouses must go forward promptly and correctly. The need for this care was obvious. It would be as senseless to send surgical dressing to one distribution center as stoves to another.

When any of these incoming supplies had been transferred from the railway quai to the distribution stations and a receipt taken for them, they were at once stricken from the records of the transportation department until, in response to a subsequent call, they were transferred out for delivery, either to the consumer or to another storage point in an outlying region, which is where the big fleet of Red Cross trucks in the streets of Paris began to fully function. The central control bureau, to which was delegated the routine but important work of the control of this great squadron of trucks, also had charge of the reception of merchandise arriving at the Seine landings on barges from the seaports of Rouen or Le Havre. For one must not forget that in France the inland waterway continues to play a large part of her internal transport. Not only are her canals and her canalized rivers splendidly maintained, but also owing quite largely to her comparatively mild winters, they render both cheap and efficient transportation. And the Seine, itself, sometimes brought a thousand tons a week into the Red Cross at Paris.

Now are we facing squarely the problem of the motor truck in Major Osborne's big department. I think that it was the part of the problem that has given him the greatest perplexity, and in the long run the greatest satisfaction. For, before we are arrived at the fullness of this phase of his service, please consider the difficulties under which his staff and himself labored from the beginning. France was at war for fifty-two months; not fighting a tedious and tiring war in some distant zone, but battling against the invasion of the strongest army the world ever has known and facing the almost immediate possibility of national collapse; which meant in turn, if not an industrial chaos, something at times dangerously near to it. It meant that trucks, which the Red Cross organization had purchased back in America and had fought to find cargo space for in the always overcrowded transports, sometimes were no more than unloaded before the army, with its prior rights and necessities, would commandeer them for its own purposes. It meant not only hard roads, with the dangers attendant upon worn-out highway surfaces and an overpress of terrific traffic, to say nothing of the real war-time danger of a bursting shell at any moment, but the lack of proper garage and repair facilities to undo the havoc that these wrought; which, further translated, meant added difficulties not only in getting repair parts but the men properly equipped to install them.

The American Red Cross in France had at all times enough expert organization genius to enable it to organize its motor transport service upon the most modern lines of standardization and efficiency. It lacked one thing, however—time. If it had had time it might easily have selected one, or at the most, two or three types of motor trucks or camionettes and one or two types of touring cars and so greatly cut down the stock of repair parts and tires necessary to keep on hand at all times. But time did not permit this sort of thing. Time pressed and so did the Germans, and it was necessary to purchase almost any sort of truck or car that was available and put it to work without delay.

The man problem was quite as acute as that of the material. Good drivers and good repair men were alike hard to find in a nation that was all but exhausting its man power in the desperate effort to hold back the invading host. As it was, many of the workers in the Red Cross's transportation department were discharged soldiers. A few of them were mutilés—men who had suffered permanent and terrible injuries in the defense of their country. And a wearer of the Croix de Guerre more than once drove an American Red Cross car or blew a forge at one of its repair garages. The man-power question was at all times a most perplexing one.

I have mentioned this phase of the problem of my own accord. Neither Major Osborne nor any of his staff have referred to it. Yet it is typical of the many difficult phases of the big transportation problem which was thrust upon them for immediate solution—and which was solved.

To get some real idea of the magnitude of this transportation problem, come back with me for a day into the Red Cross garages of Paris. We shall once again, as in war time, have to start in the early morning, not alone because of the many plants to be visited but also because we want to see the big four-ton and five-ton trucks come rolling out of the great Louis Blanc garage, close beside the Boulevard de la Villette at the easterly edge of the city. As its name might indicate it faces the ancient street of Louis Blanc, faces it and morning and night fills it with its energy and its enterprise. Fills it completely and never disorderly. For I have seen it in the early morning disgorge from 150 to 200 trucks from its stone-paved courtyard and receive them, or others, back at night with no more confusion than a well-drilled military company would show in leaving its barracks or an armory.

The stone-paved courtyard itself is interesting. It is a bit of old Paris—the yard of an ancient stable where carters coming into the city with their produce from the fat farms of the upper Seine Valley or the Marne might rest their steeds for a time. The old structures which look down upon the courtyard have done so for two or three or four centuries—perhaps even longer. The only outward evidence of modernity about the place is its steel-trussed roof, wide of span and set high aloft, like the great train shed of some huge railroad station, and the splendidly efficient great motor trucks themselves. How those old carters of the royalist days of France would have opened their eyes if they could have seen a five-ton truck of to-day, American built, in all probability the output of some machine shop upon or near the shores of Lake Erie. They are wonderful machines—alert, efficient, reliable. I do not wonder that when one of our motor-truck manufacturers from the central portion of the United States visited the Verdun citadel—just a few months before the ending of the war—the commandant of that triumphant fortress kissed him upon the cheeks and led him to decorations and a state banquet in his apartments sixty-five feet beneath the surface of the ground. There were several hundred of the manufacturer's three-ton camions in the outer courtyard of the fortress and it only took a slight brushing away of the dust and mud to show that they had been on the job, in faithfulness and strength, since 1914.

One does not, under ordinary circumstances at least, have to brush away much dust and mud to find the number plate of the Red Cross car; for the Red Cross follows the method of the American and the British armies in insisting upon absolute cleanliness for its equipment. One of the briskest departments in the huge Louis Blanc garage is the paint shop, and the evidences of its energy are constantly in sight about the streets of Paris.

The energy of some of the other workshop departments of the garage are perhaps less in evidence upon the streets, yet if these departments were not measuring constantly to the fullness of their possibilities their failure would be evident to any one—in constant breakdowns of equipment. The fact that the trucks and touring cars alike have had so few complete breakdowns, despite the terribly difficult operating conditions, shows that the Red Cross repair shops have been very much on the job at all times.

They are complete shops. In them it is possible to take a huge camion completely apart even to removing the engine and the body from the chassis and the frame, in order that cylinders may be bored anew, piston rings refitted, and bearings entirely renewed. All this work and more has been done under emergency in less than three days.

Close beside this Red Cross truck garage in the Rue Louis Blanc is a hotel for the two or three hundred workers and drivers employed there. It is small, but very neat and comfortable and homelike, and is directly managed by the Red Cross. It gives housing facilities in a portion of Paris where it is not easy to find such. And the long hours of the chauffeurs in particular render it highly necessary that they have living accommodations close to their work.

From Louis Blanc we cross Paris in the longest direction and come to the so-called Buffalo Park, in Neuilly, just outside the gates of the city. Buffalo Park gains its name from the fact that it once was a part of the circus grounds wherein the unforgetable "Buffalo Bill" was wont to disport his redskins for the edification and eternal joy of Paris youth. To-day it is a simple enough inclosure, fenced in a high green-painted palisade, ingeniously fabricated from packing cases in which knocked-down motor cars were shipped from America and guarded by a Russian wolfhound who answers to the name of "Nellie." In the language of the French, "Nellie" functions. And functions, like most of her sex, awfully well. She respects khaki; but her enthusiasm and lack of judgment in regard to other forms of male habiliment has occasionally cost the Red Cross the price of a new pair of green corduroy trousers, always so dear to the heart of the peasant.

Within the green-painted inclosure of Buffalo Park there stands a permanent, especially built, fireproof warehouse and office building, and at all times from 175 to 200 camionettes, or light ton or ton and a half trucks. It does not undertake much repair work, particularly of a heavy nature, but its great warehouse holds hundreds upon hundreds of tires (the variety of wheel sizes in unstandardized motor equipment is appalling) and tens of thousands of spare and repair parts. The entire big plant is lighted by its own electric generating plant. A big four-cylinder gasoline engine, taken from a Yankee truck which had its back hopelessly broken on the crowded road to Rheims, and bright and clean and efficient, was thus put to an economic and essential purpose.

The other large garage and repair shop of the Red Cross transportation department in Paris is situated at No. 79 Rue Tangier, close to the plants in Neuilly, yet just within the fortifications. It was the first garage to be chosen, and one easily can see why Osborne and his fellows rejoiced over its selection; for it is one of the most modern and seemingly one of the most efficient buildings that I have seen in Paris—three stories in height and solidly framed in reënforced concrete. It houses each night some two hundred touring cars and has complete shops for the maintenance and repair of this great squadron of automobiles.

Up to the present moment I have only touched upon the use of touring cars for the American Red Cross in France. Yet I should like to venture the prediction that without these cars, the greater part of them of the simplest sort, our work over there would have lost from thirty to forty per cent of its effectiveness. It is useless to talk of train service in a land where passenger train service has been reduced to a minimum and then a considerable distance beyond. Remember that the few passenger trains that remain upon the French railways are fearfully and almost indecently crowded. Folk stand in their corridors for three hundred or four hundred miles at a time. For a Red Cross worker bound from point to point to be forced to use these trains constantly in the course of his or her work is not only a great tax upon the endurance but a fearful waste of time.

The same conditions which exist in the outer country are reflected in Paris. The subway, the omnibus, and the trolley systems of the city all but completely broke down in the final years of the war when man power depletion was at its very worst. The conditions of overcrowding upon these facilities at almost any hour were worse even than the overcrowding upon the transit lines in our metropolitan cities in the heaviest of their rush hours. To gain a real efficiency, therefore, it became absolutely necessary many times to transport Red Cross workers, when on business bent, in touring cars. And because there were at the height of the work some six thousand of these folk—five thousand in Paris alone—it became necessary to engage the services of a whole fleet of touring cars. Some seventy touring cars were assigned to the Paris district. With very few exceptions these were operated on a strictly taxicab basis, with the Red Cross headquarters in the Hotel Regina as an operating center. Here, at the door, sat a chief dispatcher, who upon presentation of a properly filled order, assigned a car; and assigned it and its fellows in the precise order in which they arrived at that central station. It was all simple and efficient and worked extremely well. In the course of an average day the chief dispatcher at the Regina handled from eighty to one hundred requests, for runs lasting from twenty minutes to an entire day.

In the latter part of January, 1919, I saw this Transportation Department bending to an emergency, and bending to it in a very typical American fashion. A strike of the subway employees spreading in part to those of the omnibuses and trolley lines, had all but completely crippled the badly broken-down transportation of the city. And not only was the Red Cross being greatly hampered, but the personnel was being put to inconvenience and discomfort that was not at all compatible with the Red Cross idea of proper treatment of its workers.

In this emergency the transportation department jumped in. It moved up to the front door of the Regina on the first night of the strike a whole brigade of heavy camions and a squad of omnibuses such as it uses in transferring officers and men on leave between the railroad terminals and its various hotels in Paris. These were quickly but carefully assigned to definite routes which corresponded in a fashion to those of the more important subway routes. Huge legible placards announced the destination of each of the buses or trucks—Porte Maillot, Denfert-Rochereau, Place de la Bastille—as the various instances might be. Definite announcement was made of the hours at which these trucks would return on the following morning to bring the workers back again. The strike was over in two days, but if it had lasted two weeks it would have meant little difference to the Red Cross workers. Their organization had shown itself capable of taking full care of them.

We have drifted away, mentally at least, from the big touring-car garage at No. 79 Rue Langier. Yet before we get entirely away from it we will find that it pays us well to see its shops; great, complete affairs situated in a long wing which runs at right angles to the main structure, and which employ at almost all times from eighty to one hundred mechanics—blacksmiths, machinists, painters, even carpenters, among them. French and American workmen are employed together, but never in the same squad. That would be an achievement not easy of accomplishment.

"How do the two kinds of workmen mix?" we ask the young Red Cross captain in charge of the garage.

He does not hesitate in his answer.

"The French are the more thorough workmen. They are slower, but their output is finer. The American gains the point more quickly and goes at it to achieve his end in a more direct fashion. Each is good in his own way. And each realizes the strong points of the other."

The Rue Langier garage keeps complete books for all four of the Paris Red Cross garages. We have seen three of them already, and inasmuch as the lunch hour approaches will prefer visiting the motor camp at Parc du Prince, just outside the fortifications and close to the Bois de Boulogne, used chiefly as an overflow park during the stiffest days of Red Cross activities. But in addition to this it does other things, not the least of them the maintenance of the transportation department's own post-office facilities and a clubroom for the use of the chauffeurs when they are off duty, not a very frequent occurrence.

"Do the chauffeurs ever play poker?" we ask Captain Conroy.

He assures us that they do not.

Also poker is supposedly interdicted at the big hotel which Major Osborne has established for the officers and men of his department out in Neuilly, just around the corner from Buffalo Park. There are plenty of other amusements to be found, however—books, games, cigars, cigarettes, a phonograph, and a remarkable cage of rare Oriental birds which, with pretty good success, at times try to silence the phonograph.

It is to this hotel that we find our way for lunch and, without hesitation, pronounce our meal the best we have had in Paris, which has more than a local reputation as a capital of good eating. We find an omelet soufflé—the first to greet us in the town—roast turkey, mashed potatoes, Brussels sprouts, an American apple pie, bread and butter, and coffee with real creamy milk. And all for three francs! It is unbelievable. Our hotel charges us six francs for one pear—and an uncooked pear at that!

This remarkable hotel, which houses about two hundred of the transportation department workers, was one of Major Osborne's pet projects. It more than earned its modest cost in the promotion of the morale, and hence the efficiency, of his department. To its mess table, the major himself often came. Sometimes he brought his aid, Captain Hayes, out with him. Both confessed to a liking for roast turkey and omelet soufflé. At the officers' table there was almost certain to be Captain Harry Taintor, a distinguished New York horseman, then at Buffalo Park and gaining experience in a distinctly different form of highway transportation; Captain M. D. Brown, also of Buffalo Park; Captain F. D. Ford, over from Rue Louis Blanc, and Captain Conroy from Rue Langier. These men and many others came to the hotel, and among them not to be forgotten a certain splendid physician who left a good practice up in Minnesota somewhere to come to Paris and look after the health and strength of the transportation-department personnel. More than sixty years young, no youngster in his twenties gave more freely or more unselfishly than this man. He was always at the service of his fellows in the Neuilly hotel.

His service was typical of the entire remarkable morale organization of the transportation department. It was the same sort of service that Miss Robinson, the capable manager of the hotel, forever was rendering, that the little supply shop across the street gave, that one found here and there everywhere within the department; a morale organization so varied and so complete that it might well stand for the entire American Red Cross organization in France, and yet served but one of the multifold activities of that organization.

Before we have quite left the more purely mechanical phases of the transportation department—and lack of space or time will forbid my showing you the other important garage facilities in the outlying cities and towns of France—I want to call your attention to one important part of the problem, the supplying of fuel for the many hundreds of trucks and cars which the Red Cross operates throughout the French republic. You may have noticed at Buffalo Park one or two of the huge 7,500-gallon trailer trucks used to bring gasoline from the United States Army oil station at Juilly, outside of Paris, to the Red Cross garages within the city.

In the months of its greatest activities, the Red Cross in France used an average of 25,000 gallons of gasoline. To have secured and transported this great quantity of oil even in normal, peaceful years would have been a real problem. To secure it, to say nothing of transporting it, in the hard years toward the end of the war, was a surpassing problem; for gasoline seemingly was the most precious of all the precious things in France. If you did not believe it, all you had to do was to ask a Paris taxi driver—even after taxis had become fairly plentiful once again upon the streets of the capital—to take you to distant Montmartre or Montparnasse—and then hear him curse Fate and lack of "essence" in his fuel reservoirs.

But the Red Cross, thanks to the French and American army authorities as well as to its own energies, did get the "essence." How it did it at times is a secret that only Osborne knows. And he probably never will tell.

Remember, if you will, that gasoline was the vitalizing fluid of the war; therefore, in France, it was guarded and conserved with a miser's care. For without it one knew that there could be little mobility of troops, little transport of supplies and ammunition, and no tanks or aëroplanes! Therefore every liter of it which came into France had to be accounted for. And in the years of fighting the private motor practically disappeared. Only the militarized car remained mobile and was permitted to retain access to the diminished gasoline stores of the Republic.

Throughout the entire nation, the French Army established gasoline supply stations. In its zones of special activity the American Expeditionary Forces had their own great stations in addition. On the presentation of a properly signed carnet or book of gas tickets, a military or Red Cross driver was permitted to obtain from any of these depots such an amount of gas or kerosene or lubricating oil as he might really need. The carnet slips were in triplicate, so that three records might be kept of the dispensation. No money was paid by the driver; his slip signed and delivered to the depot superintendent was sufficient. And by this method every gallon of gas so obtained was eventually paid for.

The basis of this entire plan was that a gallon of gasoline, no matter where it might be obtained, was a gallon of gasoline from the Allies' supply of the precious fluid and must not only be accounted for but paid for, in whatever way payment might be required. The French Government preferred to be paid in the precious fluid itself, liter for liter, as the Red Cross purchased it from the American Army. If it so happened, as it often did happen, that the restitution was made at a French port, although the original supply was drawn at depots many miles inland, the French were further compensated by the payment of a sum to represent the freight charges from that port to the distribution centers which supplied the depots. But for all the gasoline drawn from the American Army stores cash payment was made by the Red Cross.

To insure the conservation of the gas, the greatest care was used in choosing the men and women—for when we come to consider in detail the peculiarly valuable services rendered by the women personnel of the Red Cross in France, we shall find that more than once they mounted the driver's seat of a camion or touring car and remained there for long hours at a time—for drivers. And woe betide the man or woman caught wasting "essence." For when a driver left any of the garages with a car or camion—even if he were going but a short four blocks—he carried with him a time-stamped ordre de mission indicating his destination. The quantity of gasoline either in the car's tanks or in the spare containers also was carefully registered. And if the driver should be discovered to have deviated from the shortest path between his garage and his destination he was called upon for an explanation. If this proved unsatisfactory he was warned for his first offense; for the next he went to a punitive period on the "wash rack" in the garage, which meant that from two or three days to two weeks or more he stepped down from the driver's seat and washed the dirty cars as they came in, and to the best of his ability, too. If discipline of this sort was found ineffectual, the culprit, being militarized as a member of the American Expeditionary Forces, was turned over to the provost marshal of the American Army in Paris for such punishment as he might see fit to impose. The latter might extend—and sometimes did extend—to deportation to America.

So far we have not even touched upon the dramatic phases of the work of the transportation function of our Red Cross. Yet do not for one moment imagine that it lacked these a-plenty. I said at the beginning of this chapter that the trucks and camionettes were not used for long hauls—ordinarily. It was far too wasteful and far too extravagant transportation. Yet, extraordinarily, these found their way the entire length and breadth of France. It might not be efficient or economical to ship beds and bedding in trucks; the food relief afforded by even a tightly packed five-ton camion was almost negligible save in a very great crisis. But think of the emergency possibilities of a truckload of surgical instruments rolling up to the battle line, or of five tons of ether finding its way to a field hospital all but overwhelmed by the inrush of wounded men. These were functions the transportation department could and did perform, and performed them so well as to merit the Croix de Guerre more than once for its men.

On one occasion, in particular, the drivers of a fleet of camions stood by the surgeons of a big field hospital as they performed operation after operation—each a trying mental strain, but performed apparently with no more effort than the simplest of mechanical processes. These boys—the most of them were hardly more than boys—in that long forty-eight-hour trick were surgeons' helpers. They held the arms and legs that the scalpel severed and in the passing of but two days of their lives ceased to be boys and became case-hardened men.

How shall one best describe the really magnificent work of the Red Cross's efficient Transportation Department in such supreme emergencies as the last great drive of the Germans upon the western front; or in emergencies slightly smaller in area yet vastly important in the rôle they played to the rest of the war—such as the fearful explosion in the hand-grenade depot at La Courneuve, just outside of Paris, early in 1918? Of the work of the Red Cross in detail during the drive we have yet to read in other chapters of this volume. For three days after the La Courneuve disaster the French newspapers printed accounts of the American Red Cross work there, and every editorial writer in Paris paid his tribute to the promptness and courage with which that aid was given.

This explosion shook Paris, and the country roundabout for many miles, at a little before two o'clock in the afternoon. The force of the shock may be the better understood when one knows that it broke windows more than six miles distant from the hand-grenade depot. The Parisians thought at first that the boches had dared a daylight raid upon their city, but a great yellowish-gray cloud rising like a mighty column of smoke to the north quickly dispelled that notion. Only a mighty explosion could send such a beacon toward the heavens.

Major Osborne chanced to be at luncheon at the moment of the explosion. He jumped from the table and speeded to the main garage of the Red Cross in Paris as quickly as the nearest taxicab could take him; there he ordered five ambulances to be equipped and manned and held for orders. The superintendent of the motor division of the service also had seen that beacon, and he, too, had driven at top speed to the garage. The two men, with the aid of that beacon and a good map of the environs of Paris together with their knowledge of the war activities around about it, decided instantly that it must be La Courneuve that was the scene of the disaster, and without hesitation ordered the ambulances to hurry there.

"Hurry" to an ambulance driver! It was part of his gospel and his creed. In fifteen minutes the squad was at the smoking ruin, and the Red Cross, as usual, was the first ready to render help. It was needed; for although the death list was comparatively small—and one can say "Thank God!" for that—owing to the fact that the first of three thundering detonations had given the workmen a chance to run for their lives, practically all the houses in the near by communities had been shattered, and a great many folk wounded in their homes by falling walls and ceilings. The depot was ablaze when the Red Cross ambulances arrived, and from the center of the conflagration came the incessant bursting of grenades. Although pieces of metal were flying through the air with every explosion, the Red Cross workers went to the very edge of the fire, crawling on hands and knees over piles of hand grenades in search of the wounded. It was courage, courage of the finest sort; courage—I may say—of the Red Cross type.

On the morning of the twenty-second day of March, 1918, Parisians read in the newspapers that came with their matutinal coffee that the long-heralded and much-advertised German drive was actually beginning. Major Osborne and his fellows saw those startling headlines. Instead of wasting time upon speculating as to what their final significance was to be, they interpreted them as a direct and personal call to duty. Within the hour they were at the big garage in the Rue Louis Blanc, realizing that the Transportation Department once again had an opportunity to demonstrate its real efficiency.

The drive was on; the pathetic and tragic seeming defeat of the allied forces begun. Retreat meant that refugees would soon be fleeing from the newly created danger areas, that there would be necessity for increased medical supplies for the rearward hospitals, and a vast amount of incidental work for both camions and men. The work of a transportation function in war is by no means limited to armies that are advancing or even stationary.

At Louis Blanc orders were given to make ready a battery of trucks at once to take on emergency supplies. Even while this was being done, a mud-spattered car came in from the danger zone with the news that important outlying towns were threatened and must be evacuated at once, that thousands of refugees already were falling back, and that the Red Cross warehouses must be stripped in order to prevent the precious stores from falling into the enemy's hands. Ten minutes later the telephone brought even more sinister news. In several villages close to the changing front, folk had been without food for twenty-four hours. Rations must go forward at once. Delay was not to be tolerated, not for a single instant.

Steadily the telephone jangled. Messengers by motor car or motor cycle came in to the transportation headquarters. Major Osborne made up his mind quickly. He is not of the sort that often hesitates. Within a half hour he was on his way toward the front in a car loaded with as many spare tires and tubes and gasoline as it could possibly carry, and headed straight for the little village of Roye. At first it was possible to make a fair degree of speed; but as the front was neared the roads became congested with a vast traffic, so fearfully congested that the men in the relief car counted it as speed that they were able to make the seventy-five miles between Paris and Roye in an even three hours. Between Montdidier and Roye the highroads were all but impassable because of the press of the traffic—fleeing townsfolk and the movement of troops and artillery.

At an advanced Red Cross post, Osborne began to get glimmerings of definite information. With them he set his course toward Noyon, eleven miles to the southeast. There was another Red Cross post there where he obtained full enough information to cause him to turn his car squarely around and begin a race against time to Paris. In less than two hours he was in his biggest garage there, drawing out trucks, giving definite orders, and beginning an actual and well-thought-out plan of relief. The story of the execution of that plan is best told in the words of the man who carefully supervised its details. Said he:

"There were six big trucks in the convoy that I took up to the front. We left Paris at midnight, the trucks loaded down with food and medical supplies and blankets. Although there was a great deal of movement on the roads, we plugged along all night without many delays and at five o'clock in the morning had to come to a dead stop. Artillery, transport camions, soldiers, and refugees blocked the way. We couldn't go a yard farther. Our orders were to go to N—— with the supply stuff, but we couldn't have done it without an aëroplane. The army was moving, and the little space that it left in the roadway was occupied by the refugees. They came streaming back in every sort of conveyance or on foot, pushing their belongings in barrows and handcarts. Up ahead somewhere the guns were drumming in a long, ceaseless roll.

"As it was impossible to carry out the original orders, the trucks were sent by crossroads to A——, the nearest important point, and I went on in a little, light car to N——, squeezing my way down the long, hurrying line of troops and transport. When I reached there, the railway station was under shell fire and all about it were British machine guns and gunners awaiting the Germans, who were even then on the outskirts of the town. The attack was being made in force and it was only a matter of a few more hours that the defenders could hope to hold out. They had mined all the bridges over the Oise and were ready to blow them up as they retreated.

"There was one Red Cross warehouse in N—— and when I ran around to it I found that, very properly, the British and French troops had helped themselves from its stores. It was lucky they did, because the town fell into German hands that evening.

"With N—— off the map, as it were, I speeded back to A——, where there was a hospital in an old château. In this were sixty wounded American soldiers and about two hundred French. There were two American Army surgeons and a few French and English nurses. That afternoon we evacuated the Americans from the hospital, and made them all comfortable in their new lodgment at C——. After that we drove back to A—— and turned in, because we looked forward to a hard day. But at two o'clock in the morning a French general waked me up with the announcement that the Germans were advancing and that the hospital had to be completely evacuated in ten minutes. He made it very clear that it would have to be done in ten minutes, otherwise we'd find ourselves in No Man's Land. So I turned the men out and we went to work in the dark. As a matter of fact those ten minutes stretched from two o'clock until a little after six, when we carried out the last of the wounded. Some of them were in a bad way and had to be handled very slowly. We put them in our camions and took them ten kilometers to the Oise Canal, there transferred them to barges and thus they were conveyed to Paris.

"That left the hospital with only two American Army surgeons, the Red Cross personnel, and a French Army chaplain. The American surgeons looked about the place rather lonesomely, but one of them said he felt that something was going to happen and that before long there would be plenty of work for everybody. The guns thundering all around us seemed to bear him out.

"And he made no mistake! The very next afternoon several American Army ambulances arrived with loads of English and French wounded. They had been hurried down from the advanced dressing stations and a large percentage of them were in bad shape. Although we made only a handful of people, we hustled about and got the hospital going again somehow and started in to take care of the wounded. There were no nurses about the place, none in the town, because the civilians had been ordered out, so the drivers of the Red Cross camions offered their services. Two or three of them had been ambulance men at the front and knew a little something about handling wounded, but there wasn't one who had ever been a nurse! And the stiff part of it was so many of the wounded soldiers brought in were in such a condition that operation without delay was vital.

"When everything was made ready the two American surgeons started operating. They began at 7:30 o'clock in the evening and kept at it steadily until 3 o'clock in the morning. We—I say 'we' because every one had to do his bit—performed seventeen major operations, and every last one was successful! There wasn't a hitch in spite of all the difficulties of the job. In the first place only one set of instruments had been left behind. These had to be sterilized by pouring alcohol over them after they had been used for one operation so they'd be ready for the next. There wasn't time to boil them. And the light by which the surgeons worked was furnished by six candles stuck with their own wax to a board. I held the board. As the surgeon worked I moved it around so he might have the most light on the probing or cutting or sewing, or whatever it was he had to do. Three of the operations were trephining the skull. Another of the soldiers had fifty-nine pieces of shell in him, and every one of these was located and taken out by candlelight. It was a busy night! One lucky part of the business was that at midnight another American Army surgeon arrived and relieved at the operating table. The worst part of it was that the other worked so steadily that he knocked out most of the drivers and they couldn't give any help at all after a while, so that at last there were only two of us left to bear a hand.

"In the morning we succeeded in evacuating the hospital, taking the wounded to C——, where there were ample facilities. And as soon as the wounded were carried from our trucks we were put to work getting out of the town the refugees who had accumulated there for several days. Then we turned to moving the Red Cross stores. C—— was under air raid every clear night, so we had to sleep in the cellar of its great château. The bombs bursting all about the place made sleep almost impossible.

"And when this little bit of work was ended, the last of the refugees and their baggage transported to a neighboring railroad station, word came the Germans had dropped a .240 on a train at R—— a few kilometers away. So we hustled two camions over there and found four men killed and five wounded. We packed them into the trucks and brought them out, delivering the wounded to the hospital at C——. For two or three days we were busy in that neighborhood taking care of refugees, because they were streaming toward the haven of Paris by the thousands. Now and then we would get a call to go to such and such a point because a shell had killed people, or because stores had to be moved to more secure places. On one of these trips we met two men of an English lancers regiment who had been badly wounded and had ridden twenty kilometers in search of a base hospital. We picked them up, as this was one of our many appointed tasks, and took them to C—— for treatment. They did not know what to do with their horses, and as there was no possibility of getting food for them every day, they debated whether to shoot them. They solved the problem by giving the two animals to me! And there isn't a doubt the creatures would have turned into elephants on my hands if I had not met a British battery on the road the next day. I offered the horses to the commander and he was overjoyed. 'I've lost eight horses already,' he explained, and hitched up my two and went rumbling off with his guns.

"In a little while the trucks were ordered to swing northward to S——. The French had been there, but had retreated to straighten their lines, and at once the Germans began to shell the place. This eventually drove out the entire civilian population. It then became such a hot corner that it was no longer a billeting area for troops, and army camions were not allowed to pass through the city. But there was a Red Cross staff on the job there, and as it had been decided that no civilian relief was possible, the only task was to get out the staff and all the supplies it would be possible to move from the Red Cross warehouse.

"We went up with three camions, and as we entered the city we saw three big German sausage observation balloons watching the place and directing the gunfire. The boche guns were after some of the Aisne bridges, the railway station, or a big supply depot in the city. Within a short time after we got in, the shells began falling all around us. The savages had seen us, there wasn't any doubt of it. There had been no shelling of this place since the battle of the Aisne in 1915, but the Germans were making up for that.

"The Red Cross warehouse was in the chapel of the big seminary in the city, and while we were at work getting things out and loaded, the shells from the .240's came screaming in. The first one banged its way through a house directly across the street, and made a puff of dust of it, but as we were in the courtyard of the seminary we were protected from flying pieces. After that, at three and a half minute intervals by the watch, the firing continued. The second shell went over our chapel and exploded in an orchard fifty yards back of us. It showered us with mud, and a small piece of shell scored one of our fellows on the cheek. The third one the Germans sent over landed directly in the seminary garden. This was almost a bull's-eye, so far as we were concerned, but we kept at it, making trip after trip, and when the last load left late in the afternoon, we had taken two hundred tons of precious supplies out of that warehouse and stored them several kilometers away.

"The last place on our list was hotter than any of the others, because the Germans were constantly changing their ranges and shelling everything in the back areas. We went to the little town of M—— to bring out a Red Cross unit there which was at work only two kilometers in the rear of the French lines. We had no difficulty in getting the unit out, but when it came to getting the supplies, that was a different matter. We went up there with three cars and tried our best, but the shelling was too severe and we were ordered to come away. Nothing could have lived in that town the day we tried to make it.

"That's the little story of a week, and it was a full one. While the German guns were hunting out the important towns the French batteries were thundering back at them. And it seemed that everywhere we went the French guns came up, planted themselves, and went into action. In one town two .155's were towed in by gigantic tractors, stopped beside our trucks, and as soon as pits could be dug, began firing. Each gun fired four shots as quickly as possible and then the battery limbered up to the tractors and went on its way. I asked the commander why he didn't stay, because it seemed to me that a little protection wouldn't have been a half bad thing for us. He replied that as there was no camouflage possible in that town the guns had to be got away before they were spotted. He added that he was going on to the next town to fire four more shots, and then to still another one for the same purpose. He promised to come back to our little town soon, but I thanked him and said, 'Never mind, we'll be gone by that time.'"

And experience such as this was typical; not in the least unusual. And this, please remember, was the narrative of but one convoy; there were four others in that same sector, and in the same week, that had similar experiences. When we come to consider the Red Cross in its field activities with our army we shall hear other stories such as this; for, of a truth, the work of the Transportation Department is eternally intermeshed and interwoven with that of American Red Cross relief service of every sort in France. Without transportation, little could ever have been done.

While convoys and relief supplies rushed toward the front, refugees found their way back from it. They came into Paris at the rate of nearly 5,000 a day and the American Red Cross was a large factor in taking care of them, of course. Their arrival at the railroad stations of the city gave the Transportation Department of the American Red Cross another task. All day, and day after day, its camions took food supplies to these terminals and afterward gathered the refugees and their baggage and bore them to other railroad stations and to the trains which were to carry them to their temporary destination.

"It was a busy week," laconically remarked a local Red Cross historian at that time.

These were but the beginnings of the days of real test of Major Osborne's department. For be it recorded that it was in the spring, the summer, and the fall of 1918 that the rush calls for Red Cross service came—and found its Transportation Department ready. We were just speaking of those doleful days of the March retreat, when things looked red and gray and black and misty before the eyes of those who stood for the salvation of the democracy of the world. We spoke in drama, now let us translate drama into cold statistics; understand quite fully that in the first thirty days of that March retreat, 162 truckloads of Red Cross supplies and materials were sent out on less than twelve hours' notice, 288 truckloads and material on twenty-four hours' notice, and 61 truckloads on forty-eight hours' notice; 511 loads in all. At one time, 35,000 front-line parcels were sent out within ten days.

And while these supplies were going out from headquarters, fifteen trucks were in continuous operation, evacuating the wounded along the routes from Noyon, Rivecourt, Resson, and Montdidier to Beauvais. And six rolling kitchens, operating in that selfsame territory, supplied hot food to the troops, which is typical of the work of the Red Cross Transportation Department in many similar territories. For instance, in that memorable year, in the attack on Pierrefonds, on July 29, word was received that several thousand wounded had been lying on the ground for two days. Twenty fully equipped ambulances went out at once and for seven days worked steadily evacuating the wounded, and all the while under constant fire. The entire section of ambulances went into service on seven hours' notice.

The Twenty-seventh Division—composed almost entirely of former members of the New York National Guard—did not hesitate, in emergency, to call upon our Red Cross. Major General John F. O'Ryan found that he was about to go into action and that less than fifty per cent of his army ambulance equipment was available. He turned to the Red Cross. Could it help him out with ambulances? Of course it could. That was part of its job—the big part, if you please—helping out in war emergencies. Twenty ambulances were immediately sent out from Paris, and during the attacks which took Le Catelet and Solenne, operated all the postes-de-secour of the Division.

There is still another phase of the Transportation Department, which as yet we have not even touched upon. I am referring now to the actual aid it lent the army with its vehicles from time to time. The Army War Risk Insurance Bureau, for instance, would not have been able to get about France at all if it had not been for twenty Red Cross cars. Its chief, Lieutenant Colonel Richard Cholmonley-Jones, so testified when he wrote to the American Red Cross heads in Paris, saying:

"... I desire to express to the American Red Cross our deep appreciation of the assistance of the organization in our work. By furnishing motor transportation you enabled our field parties to reach the officers and enlisted men of the Expeditionary Forces, to place before them their opportunities under the War Risk Act. Our problem was, after all, a question of transportation. This you solved and I believe that in doing so you could have done no greater service, for you assisted in thus relieving these men of anxiety as to their families at home."

Nor was the aid of our Red Cross limited to the men of our army. It so happened that we had a navy overseas; and it was a real navy and filled with very real boys and men. It, too, came in for its full share of American Red Cross assistance. In fact, one of the larger camps of its aviation service was entirely constructed with the aid of Red Cross transportation.