With the doughboy in France : a few chapters of an American effort

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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.

got*

THE MACMILLAN COMPANY
1920

All rights reserved,

COPYRIGHT, 1920,
BY THE MACMILLAN COMPANY

Set up and electrotyped. Published November, 1920.

TO THE
CROIX ROUGE AMERICAINE

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

5034-.J.

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 fash-
ion, 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 clear-
ing and packing the records. In a short time the Croix
Rouge Americaine 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 can-
not 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 ade-
quate 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 pic-
tures of America in a big job, the pictures made from the
standpoint of a witnesser of her largest humanitarian ef-
fort — 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

PREFACE

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 per-
sonal and sincere opinion that, in the workings of our Red
Cross overseas, there seemed to me to be such an outpour-
ing 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.
ISTew York — January, 1920.

CONTENTS

CHAPTER I PAGE

AMERICA AWAKENS ........ >•••:•• 1

CHAPTEK II
OUR EED CROSS GOES TO WAR ......... 6

CHAPTEK III
ORGANIZING FOR WORK .......... . . 13

CHAPTEK IV
THE PROBLEM OF TRANSPORT ........ . . 39

CHAPTEK V

THE AMERICAN RED CROSS AS A DEPARTMENT STORE ... 80

CHAPTER VI
THE DOUGHBOY MOVES TOWARD THE FRONT ....... 100

CHAPTER
THE RED CROSS ON THE FIELD OF HONOR ..... . 128

CHAPTER VIII

OUR RED CROSS PERFORMS ITS SUPREME MISSION . . . .182

CONTENTS

CHAPTER IX PAGE

THE KED CROSS IN THE HOSPITALS OF THE A. E. F. . . . 208

CHAPTEE X
"PACK UP YOUR TROUBLES IN YOUR OLD KIT BAG" ... 238

CHAPTER XI
WHEN JOHNNY CAME MARCHING HOME 259

CHAPTER XII
THE GIRL WHO WENT TO WAR . . .278

ILLUSTRATIONS

SUPPER HOUR AT BORDEAUX Frontispiece

No matter what hour; always the gobs and buddies —
other armies as well as our own — ready with 100 per
cent appetites. FACING

PAGE

So THIS Is PARIS 20

A. E. F. Boys, guests of our A. R C. in its great hos-
pital at St. Cloud, look down about the " Queen City of
the World."

CHOW " 62

The rolling kitchens, builded on trailers to motor
trucks, brought hot drinks and food right up to the men
in action.

OUR KED CROSS AT THE FRONT 100

A typical A. E. C. dugout just behind the lines.

As SEEN FROM ALOFT 140

The aeroplane man gets the most definite impression at
the A. R. C. Hospital at Issordun, which was typical
at these field institutions.

TICKLING THE OLD IVORIES 180

Many an ancient piano did herculean service in the
A. R. C. recreation huts throughout France.

BANDAGES BY THE TENS OF THOUSANDS 220

An atelier workshop of the A. R. C. in the Rue St.
Didier, Paris, daily turned out surgical dressings by
the mile.

NEVER SAY DIE 262

Sorely wounded, our boys at the great A. R. C. field
hospital in the Auteuil race track outside of Paris,
kept an active interest in games and sports.

WITH THE DOUGHBOY
IN FRANCE

CHAPTEE 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 Eed Cross was ready. Long before that
historic evening of the sixth of April, 1917, when Con-
gress 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 con-
flict 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 organ-
izations 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/7
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

2 WITH THE DOUGHBOY IN FRANCE

— if anything else had been true. It would have been
unpardonable if the American Ked Cross had not, long
before our entrance into the conflict, scented that forth-
coming 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 inevit-
able ? Certainly none of the mothers of the hundred thou-
sand 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 on-
coming 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, 191Y, awakened her. It galvanized her from a

AMERICA AWAKENS 3

passive repugnance at the scenes of the tragic drama being
enacted upon the great stage of Europe into a bitter deter-
mination 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 Eed 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 at-
tention which it needed, he quickly appointed a War Coun-
cil. 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 prepa-
rations 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 Mon-
tana or Wyoming. The lawyer closed his brief case and
the doctor placed his practice in other hands. The manu-
facturer bade his plant " good-by " and the big mining
expert ceased for the moment to think of lodes and strata.

4 WITH THE DOUGHBOY IN FRANCE

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 re-
sponsibilities, 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 — aero-
planes 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 pre-
pared 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. Eor 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

AMERICA AWAKENS 5

American achievement, if you please. We builded a ma-
chine, 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 head-
quarters 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 dis-
perse ; 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 ap-
peared, while the crowd below him went wild in its en-
thusiasm.

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

OUR RED CROSS GOES TO WAR 7

first Americans to greet their high commanding officer in
France. And so also to give him promise that the organ-
ization which they represented would he 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
Generale Transatlantique, on the second day of June. It
consisted of eighteen men, headed by Major Gray son M.-
P. Murphy, a West Point man of some years of active
army training and also a New York banker of wide expe-
rience. The other members of the party were James H.
Perkins, afterward Ked 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 Mc-
Cullough, 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 pre-
liminary 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 pre-
ceding 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 execu-
tives 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,

8 WITH THE DOUGHBOY IN FRANCE

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 Secre-
tary 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 ex-
plained 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 regula-
tions at that time prevented relief workers of any sort ap-
pearing 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 At-
lantic, 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,
sil vous plait" boat drill, and all the rest of this partic-
ularly grim part of the bigger grim business, good-hum-
oredly and light-heartedly, yet kept its mind on the grim-
mer business on the other side of the Atlantic. And, so

OUR RED CROSS GOES TO WAR 9

that it might become more efficient in that grimmest busi-
ness, 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 child-
hood 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 or-
dinarily 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 plail"
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

10 WITH THE DOUGHBOY IN FRANCE

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 busi-
ness conferences wherein ways and means for meeting the
big problem so close ahead were given attention. It mat-
ters 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 serv-
ice — 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, al-
though 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 Generale Transatlantique, driven from
Havre by the submarine menace and the necessity of giving
up the Seine embrochure 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

OUR RED CROSS GOES TO WAR 11

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 unim-
pressive, 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 Orleans 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 Francois 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

12 WITH THE DOUGHBOY IN FRANCE

and many a Red Cross man and Eed 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 hun-
dreds of them rode in the night train of the Orleans Rail-
way to Paris, and in all probability stood the entire dis-
tance. 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 hav-
ing entered the great fight he would give his all, if neces-
sary, 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.

CHAPTEE III

ORGANIZING FOR WORK

AT No. 5 Rue Francois Premier stood the American
Relief Clearing House. It was a veritable light-
house, 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 kin-
dred 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 heart-
felt 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 transporta-
tion of relief supplies. This phase of its work we shall see
again when we consider the organization of the transporta-
tion 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

13

14 WITH THE DOUGHBOY IN FRANCE

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 Amer-
ica not only of the receipt of these supplies but of the uses
to which they were put. The main framework of the or-
ganization 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 enter-
prise 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 organi-
zation 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, suc-
ceeded 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

ORGANIZING FOR WORK 15

Europe's great war for world democracy. These two sec-
tions 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-
liar jes Ambulance Service.

At the time of the arrival of the American Red Cross in
France this organization actually had in the field five sec-
tions 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, col-
lege 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-
liar jes service is to this day a mark of distinction com-
parable 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 there-
fore 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 respon-
sibility 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 Distrib-
uting 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 in-

16 WITH THE DOUGHBOY IN FRANCE

struments for a particular instance — were received and in
due turn distributed.

For a short time after the arrival of the first Commis-
sion from America, the possibility of affiliating the Amer-
ican Red Cross with the Clearing House was seriously con-
sidered. 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 Francois 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 Francois Premier almost imme-
diately were found too small for the greatly enlarged activ-
ities 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 " Num-

ORGANIZING FOR WORK 17

ber 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 1'Elysee.

Yet in time these, top, 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, leav-

18 WITH THE DOUGHBOY IN FRANCE

ing behind him a record for expertness and efficiency that
has never been beaten. He was, in reality, merely bor-
rowed from the United States Army, and to that organiza-
tion, which then stood badly in need of both expertness and
efficiency, he was returned, while his place as captain of
our American Eed 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 as-
sociates. 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 organiza-
tion, 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 serv-
ices 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

ORGANIZING FOR WORK 19

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 ex-
perience 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 trou-
bles 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 cure. " 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.

20 WITH THE DOUGHBOY IN FRANCE

Never before has so great a humanitarian work been under-
taken 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 Per-
kins ideas came into use, saw that they did not overshoot
the mark.

It was under the regime 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 main-
taining 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 Petain'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 meet-
ing its two greatest military emergencies — the great Ger-
man offensive in the Somme in March, 1918, and the bitter
fighting in and about Chateau-Thierry some four months

ORGANIZING FOE WORK 21

later. The official records of both the French and the
American armies teem with communications of commend-
ation 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 Eed 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 effec-
tive 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 full-
est 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 organ-
ization 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

22 WITH THE DOUGHBOY IN FRANCE

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 quali-
ties 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 or-
ganization, without the promptings of the human heart to

ORGANIZING FOR WORK 23

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 Commis-
sioner 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 Eed
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
Eed 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 suc-
ceeded 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 Com-
missioner for Europe. Between Burr and Olds there
was the finest sort of team-work. The period in which
they worked was far from an easy one. With the armis-
tice 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 struct-
ure down to its original dimensions. A job much more
easily said than done; but one that was done and done
very well indeed.

24 WITH THE DOUGHBOY IN FRANCE

We have digressed from the days of the war. Keturn
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 com-
missioners 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 Com-
missioner 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 affil-
iated an advisory council, a bureau of legal advice and gen-
eral policy, and various administrative bureaus and stand-
ing committees. The chief plan of the organization, how-
ever, 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, repatries, re-
formes, and mutiles, reconstruction and rehabilitation work
in the devastated districts, and both direct and cooperative
work in the cure and prevention of tuberculosis; and the

ORGANIZING FOR WORK 25

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 nurs-
ing and hospital supply and surgical dressings services,
canteens, rest stations and infirmaries, nurses' homes, mov-
able kitchens, and the relief of mutiles. 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 of-
fered. 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 be-
fore 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

26 WITH THE DOUGHBOY IN FRANCE

divided its work. In the fall of 1917, Major Perkins be-
came Commissioner for France and a short time afterwards
separate commissioners were appointed for Great Britain,
for Italy, for Switzerland, for Belgium, and for other coun-
tries. And these in turn appointed their own individual
organizations, complete structures erected for business ef-
ficiency 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 Com-
mission 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 air-
ships 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 noth-
ing of typewriters and the more complicated paraphernalia,

ORGANIZING FOR WORK 27

the problem of service of every sort — clerical, steno-
graphic, telephone, repair — can easily be imagined.
There were times when to an ordinary business man they
would have seemed insurmountable; but the Ked 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 Eed 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 Eelief 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 re-
sult that the American Eed Cross organization in Paris was
called upon to bend every effort toward rushing whole train-
loads 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 his-

28 WITH THE DOUGHBOY IN FRANCE

tory 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 Com-
missioner and assistant, George Murnane, evolved an en-
tirely 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 civilan af-
fairs, 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 Eliza-
beth Shipley Sergeant, of this older plan in The New Re-
public, ". . . 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 asso-
ciate 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*

ORGANIZING FOR WORK 29

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 work-
ings, such as those of which we have just spoken — trans-
portation, 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 de-
tail 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 in-
stance. In France they not only were not readily obtain-
albe, 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
Neufchateau, just back of the big front line ! It was well
that the plan of organization under which he worked pro-
vided definitely he was to requisition Paris for such sup-
plies — 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 be-
fore under the separate headings of Military and Civilian.

30 WITH THE DOUGHBOY IN FRANCE

Instead there proved necessary seven " functional depart-
ments " — 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 admin-
istrative head of the American Red Cross, the Commis-
sioner 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 ; Trans-
portation ; Personnel ; Permits and Passes ; Construc-
tion; Manufacture.

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

Medical Research and Intelligence Department.
Department of Army and Navy Service : Bureau of Can-
teens ; Home and Hospital Service ; Outpost Service ;
Army Field Service.

Department of General Relief: Bureau of Refugees; Sol-
diers' Families ; War Orphans ; Argiculture.
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 opera-
tions 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 respon-
sibility 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 head-
quarters departments which might function in his area.

The scheme was simple, and it worked. Correspondence
was free between headquarters at Paris and the individual

ORGANIZING FOR WORK 31

workers in the field, but copies of all instructions were also
sent to the Zone Managers — in some cases to district man-
agers also — so that they might be properly informed and
all the operations coordinated.

The nine zones of military operations with their head-
quarters were as follows :

Northern Havre

Northwestern Brest

Western St. Nazaire

Southwestern Bordeaux

Southern Marseilles

North Intermediate Tours

South Intermediate Lyons

Northeastern Paris

Eastern Neufchateau

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 re-
sponsible 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 De-
partment 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 ren-

32 WITH THE DOUGHBOY IN FRANCE

der prompt service in the event of medical or surgical
emergencies. It was to be responsible for the determina-
tion of all medical and surgical American Eed Cross stand-
ards; for decisions regarding supplies and manufactures
for medical and surgical purposes; and for judgment re-
garding 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 med-
ical 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 headquar-
ters 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 de-
velopment of this service — always so dear to the heart
of the doughboy — throughout all France, for the inspec-
tion 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 Head-

ORGANIZING FOR WORK 33

quarters Bureau of this work at Paris was to develop in-
structions 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, re-
ported direct to the Zone Manager controlling supplies and
transportation movement in and out of the district. r~

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 ob-
tained 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 Com-
munication Section was to be concerned with general ex-
ecutive 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 serv-
ices concerned itself with supplying the anxious mother
back home with information regarding the boy from whom

34 WITH THE DOUGHBOY IN FRANCE

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 hos-
pitals, 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 Eed Cross would endeavor to maintain at as
many points as was consistently possible outposts at which
supplies would be kept and comforts and necessities dis-
tributed 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 Eed Cross was
to have, with each army division, a representative to co-
operate with the Army Medical Corps to furnish supple-
mentary medical and surgical supplies, to distribute sup-
plies and comforts to troops, to perform such canteen serv-

ORGANIZING FOR WORK 35

ice as was possible in emergencies, and for a general co-
operation with the men working in the Home Communica-
tion 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 be-
neath 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, pre-
cision, and order, is a mighty privilege. The Headquarters
building of the American Red Cross in the city of Wash-
ington is a monumental structure — an architectural tri-
umph 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, de-
signed, 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 co-
ordination 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 head-
quarters 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.

36 WITH THE DOUGEBOY IN FRANCE

Of these, none more important, none busier than the head-
quarters of the American Red Cross in France, in the six-
storied Hotel Eegina, Paris, in its turn a veritable hive of
offices and peopled with more clerks, more desks, more type-
writers, more telephones, and all this paraphernalia co-
ordinated, 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 debark-
ation; at central points in France, and points behind the
firing line; huts, canteens, in some cases entire hospitals,
motor trucks, camion ettes, supplies in the hundreds of
thousands of tons to go from the warehouses into the
camions and back again into the warehouses, and ten thou-
sand workers, six thousand in France alone. What a
mess it all would have been without coordinated 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 organ-
ization. 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 con-
fronted 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

ORGANIZING FOR WORK 37

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 organiza-
tion 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 imme-
diate 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 organiza-
tion plan was largely responsible for its success. It was
one of the lubricants which made the big business machine
of the American Eed Cross in France function so well.

Have you ever stood beside a fairly complex machine —

38 WITH THE DOUGHBOY IN FRANCE

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 ma-
chine 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
coordination of such huge activities ; for they did co-
ordinate. The big machine functioned, and as a rule func-
tioned very well indeed. And because it did function so
very well the largest single humanitarian effort in the his-
tory 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 hun-
dred miles inland from the coast without adequate
transportation was quite out of the question. Transporta-
tion, in fact and in truth, was the lifeblood of the Amer-
ican 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 desig-
nated 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 im-
perial epigram about the progress of an army meant trans-
portation, and little else.

In other days in other wars the transport of the United
States was in the completely adequate hands of its Quarter-
master 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

39

40 WITH THE DOUGHBOY IN FRANCE

for railroad men, expert railroad men, the most expert rail-
road 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 be-
cause 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 be-
cause in turn the Red Cross was able to render a large de-
gree 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
Grievres or Neuf chateau 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 men-
tality. 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 com-
missioned 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 transporta-
tion experts. Among these were Colonel W. J. Wilgus,
former engineering vice-president of the New York Cen-
tral 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 him-

THE PROBLEM OF TRANSPORT 41

self general manager of the Long Island Kailroad at the
time of our entrance into the war ; Colonel F. A. Delano, a
one-time president of the Wabash, who left a commis-
sionership 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 per-
sonnel 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 re-
flected in the men of its rank and file. These, too, were
of the highest type of working railroaders, and to an Amer-
ican 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 adap-
tation 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 trans-
portation is divided into five great systems. Four of
these — the Nord, the Etat, the Paris-Lyons-Mediterranee,
and the Orleans — 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

42 WITH THE DOUGHBOY IN FRANCE

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 huh 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 dis-
tance of six hundred miles for an army of two million
men.

To strike across the spider's web! That was the solu-
tion 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 TRANSPORT 43

the problem of producing an effective locomotive to over-
come 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, par-
ticularly 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 achieve-
ment.

These were the ports that became the starting points of
the two main stems of the United States Military Rail-
road 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

44 WITH THE DOUGHBOY IN FRANCE

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-huilded 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 func-
tioned ; that our " contemptible army " wiped out the
Saint Mihiel salient in one day, and, what is perhaps
far more important, there were comparatively few in-
stances 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 fore-
ground in gay array one would find the motor trucks, the
camionettes, and the touring cars of the Bed 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 some-
where 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 PROBLEM OF TRANSPORT 45

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 — pow-
der and food and uniforms and even aeroplanes and loco-
motives 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 pic-
ture ; 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 ware-
houses 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

46 WITH THE DOUGHBOY IN FRANCE

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 expe-
rienced 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. Per-
haps, after all, that was just as well, for to his big new

THE PROBLEM OF TRANSPORT 47

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 Eelief Clearing House in Paris —
which at that time was the unified agency for all the Ameri-
can 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 al-
ready 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 role 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 be-
fore the United States had entered the war, and the Ameri-
can 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 transi-
taires, 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

48 WITH THE DOUGHBOY IN FRANCE

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 fort-
night, " 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 transpor-
tation system in America you must realize that our ex-
press companies — one of our most distinctive forms of
national transportation, by the way — although closely re-
lated 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 squa-
drons of horse-drawn or motor-drawn trucks. And in re-
cent years they have increased their carrying functions
from the small parcels for which they originally were de-
signed into the heaviest types of freight. I have known a
carload of steel girders to move from New York to New-
ark, eight miles distant, by express.

Osborne's idea of the Eed Cross Express was fundamen-
tally sound, and perhaps it is because it was so funda-
mentally sound that it has been so very successful, although
working many times against tremendous odds. He rec-
ognized 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 emer-
gency. 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 gov-
ernment control.

Osborne realized that he would be compelled to place
his chief reliance upon the French railways. The United

THE PROBLEM OF TRANSPORT 49

States Military Eailroad, especially at the outset, was
not to be compared in value with that of the 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 nec-
essary 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 size-
able 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

50 WITH THE DOUGHBOY IN FRANCE

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 sup-
plies 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 radi-
ating 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,

THE PROBLEM OF TRANSPORT 51

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 advis-
able to huy supplies, raw or manufactured, in England.

The hulk of our materials came, however, to the Ameri-
can 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 he done. The plants were huge. In St.
Nazaire, for instance, the Red Cross warehouse alone
could hold more than eight thousand cases of supplies be-
neath its roof, and in course of the busiest days of the war,
just before the signing of the armistice, it was no uncom-
mon 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 trans-
port which, although issued and personally signed by Major
Osborne, was the free gift of the French Minister of Rail-
ways. These ordres de transport differed from waybills

52 WITH THE DOUGHBOY IN FRANCE

chiefly in the fact that they give gross weights but no
listing of the contents of the cases. This last was accom-
plished by the bordereaux, which was purely a Ked 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 dodg-
ing 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 confreres
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 similiar trifles.

" I have had my trials of dealing with the formalities of
war departments, likewise with their machine-made ex-
actions, 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 loche 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,

THE PROBLEM OF TRANSPORT 53

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, Washing-
ton, to the emergency hospital near Chateau-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, hangings
about in rain and snow, nails and cords yielding under
the tension of rush and brutality, voices and hands of inim-
itable uber 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, appli-
cation, 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."

SucK 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 won-
dered 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 re-
ceived 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,

54 WITH THE DOUGHBOY IN FRANCE

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 rail-
way 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 demobil-
ized, 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 — their

THE PROBLEM OF TRANSPORT 55

is nothing light, for instance, in either medicines or sur-
gical instruments — counts even the higher record as no
extraordinary feat.

In addition to being a receiving station, this quai per-
formed 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 sur-
gical dressing to one distribution center as stoves to an-
other.

When any of these incoming supplies had been trans-
ferred 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 dele-
gated 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 main-
tained, but also owing quite largely to her comparatively
mild winters, they render both cheap and efficient transpor-
tation. And the Seine, itself, sometimes brought a thou-
sand 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.

56 WITH THE DOUGHBOY IN FRANCE

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 pur-
chased 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 over-
press 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, how-
ever — 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

THE PROBLEM OF TRANSPORT 57

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 mutiles — men who had suffered per-
manent and terrible injuries in the defense of their coun-
try. 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 transpor-
tation 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 Boule-
vard 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 en-
ergy 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

58 WITH THE DOUGHBOY IN FRANCE

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 manufactur-
ers 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 court-
yard 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 in-
sisting upon absolute cleanliness for its equipment. One
of the briskest departments in the huge Louis Blanc ga
rage 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 equip-
ment. The fact that the trucks and touring cars alike

THE PROBLEM OF TRANSPORT 59

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 re-
fitted, 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 direc-
tion and come to the so-called Buffalo Park, in ISTeuilly,
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 in-
closure, fenced in a high green-painted palisade, ingen-
iously 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
" E"ellie." In the language of the French, " Nellie " func-
tions. And functions, like most of her sex, awfully well.
She respects khaki ; but her enthusiasm and lack of judg-
ment in regard to other forms of male habiliment has oc-
casionally cost the Red Cross the price of a new pair of
green corduroy trousers, always so dear to the heart of the
peasant.

60 WITH THE DOUGHBOY IN FRANCE

Within the green-painted inclosure of Buffalo Park
there stands a permanent, especially built, fireproof ware-
house 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 un-
standardized 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 Langier, 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 reenforced concrete. It houses each night some
two hundred touring cars and has complete shops for the
maintenance and repair of this great squadron of auto-
mobiles.

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 con-
siderable distance beyond. Remember that the few pas-
senger trains that remain upon the French railways are

THE PROBLEM OF TRANSPORT 61

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 tour-
ing 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 serv-
ices of a whole fleet of touring cars. Some seventy tour-
ing 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 dis-
patcher, 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 ex-
tremely 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 Trans-
portation Department bending to an emergency, and bend-
ing to it in a very typical American fashion. A strike of
the subway employees spreading in part to those of the

62 WITH THE DOUGHBOY IN FRANCE

omnibuses and trolley lines, had all but completely crip-
pled 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 dis-
comfort 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, Denf ert-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 had lasted two weeks it would have meant
little difference to the Red Cross workers. Their organi-
zation 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 ac-
complishment.

" How do the two kinds of workmen mix ? " we ask

.§

-fj

I

o

11

l

•

THE PROBLEM OF TRANSPORT 63

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, hut 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 hooks 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 Pare 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 mainte-
nance of the transportation department's own post-office
facilities and a cluhroom 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 souffle — the
first to greet us in the town — roast turkey, mashed
potatoes, Brussels sprouts, an American apple pie, bread

64 WITH THE DOUGHBOY IN FRANCE

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, Cap-
tain Hayes, out with him. Both confessed to a liking for
roast turkey and omelet souffle. At the officers' table there
was almost certain to be Captain Harry Taintor, a distin-
guished New York horseman, then at Buffalo Park and
gaining experience in a distinctly different form of high-
way 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 un-
selfishly 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 man-
ager 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 organi-
zation 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.

THE PROBLEM OF TRANSPORT 65

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 im-
portant garage facilities in the outlying cities and towns
of France — I want to call your attention to one impor-
tant 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 sur-
passing problem ; for gasoline seemingly was the most pre-
cious 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 aeroplanes!
Therefore every liter of it which came into France had to
be accounted for. And in the years of fighting the private

66 WITH THE DOUGHBOY IN FRANCE

motor practically disappeared. Only the militarized car
remained mobile and was permitted to retain access to the
diminished gasoline stores of the Eepublic.

Throughout the entire nation, the French Army estab-
lished 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 prop-
erly signed carnet or book of gas tickets, a military or
Eed Cross driver was permitted to obtain from any of
these depots such an amount of gas or kerosene or lubri-
cating 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 gaso-
line, 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 what-
ever way payment might be required. The French Gov-
ernment preferred to be paid in the precious fluid itself,
liter for liter, as the Eed Cross purchased it from the
American Army. If it so happened, as it often did hap-
pen, 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 Eed 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 Eed Cross in
France, we shall find that more than once they mounted
the driver's seat of a camion or touring car and remained

THE PROBLEM OF TRANSPORT 67

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 indi-
cating 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 mili-
tarized 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

68 WITH THE DOUGHBOY IN FRANCE

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 surgeons7 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 role 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 chap-
ters of this volume. For three days after the La Cour-
neuve 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 after-
noon. The force of the shock may be the better under-
stood when one knows that it broke windows more than
six miles distant from the hand-grenade depot. The
Parisians thought at first that the bodies had dared a day-
light raid upon their city, but a great yellowish-gray cloud
rising like a mighty column of smoke to the north quickly

THE PROBLEM OF TRANSPORT 69

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 Eed 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 am-
bulances 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-ad-

70 WITH THE DOUGHBOY IN FRANCE

vertised 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 sup-
plies for the rearward hospitals, and a vast amount of in-
cidental 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 out-
lying towns were threatened and must be evacuated at
once, that thousands of refugees already were falling back,
and that the Eed Cross warehouses must be stripped in or-
der 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 headquar-
ters. 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

THE PROBLEM OF TRANSPORT Tl

speed ; but as the front was neared the roads became con-
gested 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 Rove
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. Al-
though 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. Artil-
lery, 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 aeroplane. The army was mov-
ing, 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 be-
longings in barrows and handcarts. Up ahead somewhere
the guns were drumming in a long, ceaseless roll.

" As it was impossible to carrry 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

72 WITH THE DOUGHBOY IN FRANCE

"N , squeezing my way down the long, hurrying line

of troops and transport. When I reached there, the rail-
way 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 chateau. In

this were sixty wounded American soldiers and about two
hundred French. There were two American Army sur-
geons and a few French and English nurses. That after-
noon we evacuated the Americans from the hospital, and

made them all comfortable in their new lodgment at C .

After that we drove dack 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 an-
nouncement 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 con-
veyed to Paris.

" That left the hospital with only two American Army

THE PROBLEM OF TRANSPORT 73

surgeons, the Red Cross personnel, and a French Army
chaplain. The American surgeons looked ahout the place
rather lonesomely, but one of them said he felt that some-
thing 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 han-
dling 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 i 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 can-
dles 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

74 WITH THE DOUGHBOY IN FRANCE

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 hy candlelight. It was a busy
night! One lucky part of the business was that at mid-
night 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 hos-
pital, taking the wounded to C , where there were

ample facilities. And as soon as the wounded were car-
ried 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 chateau. The bombs burst-
ing 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 neighbor-
ing 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 hos-
pital 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 thou-
sands. Now and then we would get a call to go to such
and such a point because a shell had killed people, or be-
cause 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

THE PROBLEM OF TRANSPORT 75

took them to C for treatment. They did not know

what to do with their horses, and as there was no possibil-
ity 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 crea-
tures 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 over-
joyed. ' 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

Y6 WITH THE DOUGHBOY IN FRANCE

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 after-
noon, 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

THE PROBLEM OF TRANSPORT 77

was going on to the next town to fire four more shots, and
then to still another one for the same purpose. He prom-
ised 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 activ-
ities with our army we shall hear other stories such as
this ; for, of a truth, the work of the Transportation Departs
ment 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 Ameri-
can 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 gath-
ered 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

78 WITH THE DOUGHBOY IN FRANCE

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 head-
quarters, fifteen trucks were in continuous operation, evac-
uating the wounded along the routes from JSToyon, Rive-
court, Resson, and Montdidier to Beauvais. And six roll-
ing 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 en-
tire section of ambulances went into service on seven hours'
notice.

The Twenty-seventh Division — composed almost en-
tirely 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 De-

THE PROBLEM OF TRANSPORT 79

partment, 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 In-
surance 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 Chol-
monley-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 prob-
lem 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
R,ed Cross transportation.

At another time must be told the story of the work of
the Transportation Department of our Red Cross in great
bombing raids and cannonading which was inflicted upon
Paris, week in and week out and month in and month
out. It was part of its great chapter of assistance to the
war-shocked population, civil and military, of all France.
It is enough to say here and now that the problem was
met with the same promptness, the same cheerfulness, and
the same efficiency as characterized its work with our army
and our navy. This huge portion of our Red Cross ma-
chine in France functioned — and functioned thoroughly.

CHAPTER Y

THE AMERICAN BED CROSS AS A DEPARTMENT STORE

FROM the Commissioner in Paris came this cablegram :
" Get us six of the biggest circus tents that you
can."

From the Washington headquarters was flashed this
reply :

" Tents are on their way."

For the Red Cross it was all a part of the day's work.
When Colonel Harvey D. Gibson, our Red Cross Commis-
sioner in France in the latter half of 1918, found that the
absolute limit for storage supplies in and around Paris had
been reached and passed and that it would be several weeks
at least before more additional warehouses could be con-
structed, his practical mind went at once to circus tents to
meet the emergency. They would be rain-proof, sun-proof,
frost-proof as well. And so, turning to the cable, he or-
dered the tents, as casually as he might have asked for
10,000 sweaters or 100,000 surgical dressings, and received
them as he might have received the sweaters or the dress-
ings, without an hour of unnecessary delay.

When we first came to consider the work of the Trans-
portation Department of the American Red Cross in
France, I spoke of the women who, with patriotic zeal
directing both their minds and their deft, quick fingers,
turned out the sweaters, the wristlets, the knitted helmets
by not merely the tens, but by the hundreds of thousands.
Their capacity — the united capacity of a land of some
20,000,000 adult women workers — was vast. But the
necessity was even more vast. And while the proportion
of these creature comforts which were handmade and indi-
vidual grew to great size, there also were vast quantities of

80

RED CROSS AS A DEPARTMENT STORE 81

these things and others which were purchased from manu-
facturers and in quantities which not only compelled these
very manufacturers to turn over the entire output of their
plants for many months but also compelled them to add
to their factory capacity. And, of course, there were many
things which the wives and mothers and sisters and sweet-
hearts of America, with all their loving desires and keen
capabilities, could not produce. Which meant that our
Red Cross in France must have purchasing and warehous-
ing functions — like big business of almost every other
sort.

It would have been foolish and worse than foolish to have
even attempted the problem without organization. That
was the difficulty of the well-meaning American relief work
which was launched upon French soil before the coming of
our Red Cross. In the early days of the war the French
ports were littered with boxes of relief supplies addressed
" The American Embassy," " American Chamber of Com-
merce," " French Army," and just " France." People did
so want to help, and so, in our impulsive American way,
sent along things without sending any notice whatsoever as
to whom they were to go. One of the big reasons for the
foundation of the American Relief Clearing House was to
combat this very tendency. As far back as October, 1914,
it began by organizing French and American committees,
obtaining freedom of customs for relief goods, free sea and
rail freights, and finally, by organizing the War Relief
Clearing House in New York, as a complementary com-
mittee for systematic collection and forwarding.

Eventually the Clearing House brought American
donors to the point where they would actually mark the
contents of boxes, but there was always great waste in not
passing upon the serviceability of shipments until they had
reached Paris and great delay in having to pack and re-sort
them there. The secondhand material which came was of
fair quality, but not sufficient in quantity. And while
people here in the United States were always willing to

82 WITH THE DOUGHBOY IN FRANCE

contribute money generously they seemed disinclined to
have goods bought outside this country. The result was
that the American Relief Clearing House in Paris never
had a sufficient accumulation against emergency. At the
time of the first great offensive against Verdun, in the
spring of 1916, it was compelled to send out all of the
supplies which it held and to appeal to the United States
for more clothes, food, and the like, which meant all of a
six weeks' delay.

Such a state of things could not exist in our Red Cross
work there. And yet the problem in this very phase that
confronted Major Murphy and his party was tremendous.
The Compagnie Generale Transatlantique had just notified
the Clearing House that it could no longer afford to supply
free space; and in view of the subsequent shipping situa-
tion, the heavy torpedoing, and the army demand for ton-
nage, it is considered not improbable that had the Clearing
House continued it would have had to give up handling
anything except money. Yet in spite of obstacles, the Red
Cross would have to purchase and store supplies — not in
the quantities that the Clearing House had purchased and
stored them, but in far, far greater number.

Major Murphy met the problem squarely, as was his
way. He cabled to America, and seven men were sent to
him late in September, 1917. They were men taken from
various corners of the country, but all of them expert in
the task allotted to them. At once they began the work of
coordinating the vast problem of American Red Cross pur-
chase and supply. There was large need for them; for,
while at the very beginning of our Red Cross work over
there, while its problem, because of its vastness and its
novelty, was still quite largely a question of guesswork,
purchases were made for each department as it requisitioned
material or was stored for them individually. Such a
method was quickly outgrown, and was bound to be suc-
ceeded by a far better one, which, as we shall see presently,
finally did come to pass.

RED CROSS AS A DEPARTMENT STORE 83

From the beginning the main warehouses, like the main
garages, of the American Ked Cross in France have been
located in the headquarters city of Paris. Providing these
facilities was one of the first tasks that confronted Major
Murphy. And to understand the promptitude with which
he met this task understand, if you will, that by the fol-
lowing September he already had six warehouses in Paris,
organized with a capacity to handle 10,000 tons of sup-
plies a month, which might quickly be increased to 60,000
tons a month. As a matter of fact, before Armistice Day
was reached there were fourteen of these warehouses and
they actually were handling some 10,000,000 tons a month.

The nucleus of this warehouse organization was again
the American Belief Clearing House. It gave the first
three of the store buildings. The next three were obtained
by Major Murphy's organization, with the typical keen-
ness of American business men who, having donated their
services and their abilities to our great adventure overseas,
purposed to make those services and abilities work to their
highest possibilities.

Warehouses to be effective and efficient must have not
only good locations, but appropriate railroad connections
and modern equipment for handling their supplies ; this is
primary. The French, themselves, long since have recog-
nized it as such. And because the freight terminal tracks
at Paris are so abundant and so generally well planned
there were plenty of warehouses there, if one could but
find them. To find them was not so hard a task, even
during the war, if one but had the time. There was the
rub. The Red Cross did not have the time ; there was not
a day, not an hour, to be wasted. It needed storage space
at once — ships with hundreds and thousands of tons of
Red Cross relief supplies already were at the docks of
French ports. More were on their way across the Atlantic.
Space to store these cargoes must be found — and found
immediately. By October 1, 1917, our Bed Cross had
twenty-one storage centers in France, giving it 5,000,000

84 WITH THE DOUGHBOY IN FRANCE

cubic feet of space as against but 50,000 three months
earlier. The largest unit was a sugar warehouse in the
wholesale center of Paris, a five-story stone structure with
twelve hoists, two railroad tracks on the outside, and two
within.

These facilities cost money, of course. And that in some
instances they cost more money because time was a large
factor in the question can hardly be denied. Yet economy
was practiced as well as speed. This is record fact. Our
Eed Cross in France did not permit itself to become a
waster j even in emergencies which called for a saving of
time — no matter at what expense — it carefully watched
the outgoing of dollars.

When, for instance, it sought to obtain one of the largest
of its needed Parisian warehouses — a really huge struc-
ture with 2,500,000 cubic feet of storage space and served
by two railroad tracks thrust into its very heart — it tried
to drive a good Yankee bargain. The place had been
found after a day of seemingly hopeless and heartless
search. Its owner was located and the rental cost dis-
cussed briefly. The owner wanted ninety centimes (ap-
proximately seventeen cents) a square meter. The Ked
Cross agents demurred. They counter-offered with eighty
centimes. The owner accepted.

" Shake ! " said the chief of the party. They clasped
hands.

" Never mind the formal papers now/7 laughed our
Yankee Red Cross bargainer, " we'll take each other's
word. I haven't a minute to lose, as we must have the
place ready for supplies within forty-eight hours."

" Impossible ! " cried the French landlord. He knew
the real condition of the place, which had been unused and
unrepaired for months.

Yet within forty-eight hours the Eed Cross supplies from
overseas actually were being moved in. Immediately upon
closing the deal, the Americans had sought labor. It was

RED CROSS AS A DEPARTMENT STORE 85

not to be found, they were told; all the surplus labor of
Paris being in the trenches or else engaged in some work
vital to the war's operations.

" Why not use permissionnaires? " some one suggested.

The hint was a good one. It so happened that the
French Government already had consented to the employ-
ment of this very sort of labor by the American Red Cross.
So down to the larger railroad stations of Paris hurried our
Eed Cross agents. Soldiers back from the trenches were
given the opportunity to earn a few francs — and gladly
accepted it. Within a few hours a crew of more than a
hundred men had been gathered and the work of making the
newly acquired property ready to receive supplies begun.
And under American supervision it was completed —
within the allotted two days.

This experience was repeated a few weeks later when the
American Red Cross took over the old stables of the Com-
pagnie Generale des Petites Voitures in the Rue Chemin du
Vert as still another warehouse and had to clean and make
them fit for supplies — all within a mere ten days. The
Compagnie Generale des Petites Voitures was an ancient
Parisian institution. It operated — of all the vehicles
perhaps the most distinctive upon the streets of the
great French capital — the little victoria-like fiacre, drawn
by a wise and ancient horse with a bell about its neck. The
war had drained the city of most of its horses — they
were in the French artillery — and for a long time before
the coming of our Red Cross the great stables in the Rue
Chemin du Vert had been idle ; in fact for the first time
in more than half a century.

In taking over the place the officers of the American Red
Cross were not blind to the fact that they were getting noth-
ing more than a great, rambling, two-story stable and its
yards, which were just as they had been left when a thou-
sand horses had been led forth from their stalls. The place
was a fearful litter of confusion, while crowded together

86 WITH THE DOUGHBOY IN FRANCE

at one end of the courtyard were the old fiacres — ancient,
weather-beaten, decrepit, abandoned. They made a pa-
thetic picture.

Rumor told the neighborhood, and told it quickly, that
the Croix Rouge Americaine — as the French know our or-
ganization over there — had taken over the old stables and
were to use them for warehousing purposes, but rumor was
not smart enough to tell how the trick was to be done. It
did not know ; the Red Cross workers did. They had found
after making a careful inventory of the place, that they had
on their hands about 8,000 square yards of ground, covered
for the greater part with more or less dilapidated buildings
a hundred years old or even older. More than that, there
were five hundred tons of manure in the structures which
must be completely removed and the premises thoroughly
disinfected before there could be even a thought of using
them for goods storage. Cleaning the Augean stables was
something of the same sort of a job.

Various Parisian contractors who specialize in that sort
of work were asked what they would charge for the task
of getting the big stables clean once again. One said seven
thousand francs. Another allowed that it would cost five
thousand. He was the lowest bidder. The Red Cross
turned from all of them and went to the market gardeners
of the great central Halles. Would they help ? Of course
they would — the name of the Croix Rouge Americaine
has some real potency in France. In four days the stables
were cleaned — perfectly and at an entire cost of less than
two hundred francs !

Then, with the aid of a hundred workmen, the work of
rehabilitating them was begun. At that time in Paris
carpenters were not to be had for love or for money, so
every available Red Cross man who knew how to saw a
piece of wood or whu could drive a nail without hitting
his thumb — and at that, there were many thumbs jammed
before the job was entirely done — was pressed into service.
From the famous Latin Quarter of Paris came many volun-

RED CROSS AS A DEPARTMENT STORE 87

teers, some of them American painters and sculptors more
familiar with working tools of other sorts, but all fired with
a zeal and a determination to help. Such a prodigious din
of work the neighborhood could not easily remember !

Lumber was scarce, almost unobtainable in fact. That
did not discourage our Red Cross. One of the lesser build-
ings in the compound was quickly marked for destruction
and actually was torn down in order to supply the lumber
needed for the repair of the others. Windows were put in
and glazed, doors were hung, wall derricks and hoistways
rigged, roofs made water-tight, and the ancient cobbles of
the courtyard scrubbed until they were almost blue in their
faces. All the stables, the vehicle rooms, and the office
quarters were disinfected, electric lights were installed in
every corner, fire extinguishers hung throughout the build-
ings, telephones placed in each department, racks and bins
for supplies constructed, lettered, and numbered, smooth
cement walks laid to connect each building with its fellows
— and not until all of this was done did the Red Cross men
who had volunteered for the long hours of hard manual
labor really dare stop for a deep breath.

" Talk about Hercules," laughed one of them when it
was all done. " He had better look to his old laurels. He
never did a job like this — in ten days."

It took the folk of the neighborhood a long time to
realize what had happened in ten days.

Yet there it was — if so you were pleased to call it —
one of the largest " retail-wholesale " stores in all Paris,
with some 15,000 tons of supplies in place in the racks
within a fortnight after the herculean and record-breaking
cleansing task had been finished; and fresh stuff arriving
daily to meet the needs of the hard-pressed peasantry and
soldiers of France. And in a little time to perform sim-
ilar service for the men of our own army and navy over
there. Yet, unlike any other general store in the world —
wholesale or retail — this Red Cross one was open for busi-
ness every hour of the day or the night. Comfortable

88 WITH THE DOUGHBOY IN FRANCE

quarters were prepared and furnished for six workers, who
volunteered to live in the warehouse and so be prepared at
any hour of the night to receive and execute an emergency
call for supplies.

One huge task of this particular warehouse was the
re-sorting of volunteer or donated shipments. From a
period in the early progress of the war the Ked Cross ac-
cepted only supplies shipped to its general stores — in no
case whatsoever to individual organizations — and ordered
that all goods should be sorted and re-packed in France for
distribution there. So one big room in the Rue Chemin du
Vert was turned over to this work. It never lacked var-
iety. In one actual instance a big box sent from some
city in the Middle West burst open and the first thing that
met the gaze of the Red Cross warehouse workers was a
white satin high-heeled party slipper poking its head out
for a look at " gay Paree." And it was by no means the
only tribute of this sort that thoughtless America gave to
starving France. There sometimes were real opportunities
for censorship in the re-sorting room.

A man who went to this great warehouse in the early
days of its existence brought back a vivid picture of its
activities.

" As one entered the long, wide courtyard through the
great arch from the street — an arch, by the way, which
reminded me wonderfully of the Washington Arch at the
foot of Fifth Avenue, New York," said he, " and caught a
glimpse of the flags of France and America — and the Red
Cross — floating over it, he became immediately impressed
with the militarylike activity of the entire place. This
was heightened by the presence of a number of French sol-
diers and some fifty Algerians in their red fezzes, who
were at work on crates and boxes. Three or four big gray
camions were waiting at the upper end of the yard while
the workmen loaded them. Opposite were what had once
been the extensive stable structures, now clean and only

RED CROSS AS A DEPARTMENT STORE 89

reminiscent of their former tenants in the long line of
chain halters hanging motionless against the walls. Here
the bulkier, non-perishable goods were stored.

" Halfway up the entrance yard began the series of
rooms whose shelves, fashioned ingeniously from packing
cases, contained the great supplies of condensed milk, to-
bacco, sugar, soap, pork, canned beef, and rice. Overhead,
on what was once the great hayloft of the stables, were the
cubicles where were stacked the paper-wrapped bundles of
new clothing for men, women, and children, every package
marked with the size, and the sabots with thick wooden
soles and the sturdy leathern .uppers — enough to outfit
a whole townful of people.

" Across a ' Bridge of Sighs ? — the opportunity to call
it that is quite too good to be lost — to another building,
one came upon stores of chairs, bucksaws, farm implements,
boxes of window glass, bedside tables, wicker reclining
chairs, iron beds, mattresses, pillows, bolsters, blankets,
sheets, pillowcases, and comforters. Through a wide door-
way whose lintel was a rough hand-hewn beam as thick as
a man's body and a century old, were the dormitory and
the messroom of the red-fezzed Algerians who, by the way,
were under the command of two French officers. Next
came the lofts, with their bins of crutches, surgical dress-
ings, rubber sheeting, absorbent cotton, enamel ware, bright
copper sterilizers, and boxes of rubber gloves for hospital
use. Still another building housed the immense supplies
of wool gloves and socks, pajamas, sweaters, and women's
and children's underwear and high stacks of brown cordu-
roy jackets and trousers, for the Red Cross sought to fur-
nish to the peasant just the same sort of clothing that he
and his father's grandfather were accustomed to wear ; even
to the beloved beret.

" Throughout the storage building one came across evi-
dences of the manner in which every available bit of old
wood was utilized for reconstruction in order to avoid fur-
ther expenditure. Bins and racks were made of ancient

90 WITH THE DOUGHBOY IN FRANCE

doors and window frames and crates had been carefully
fashioned into delivery counters. In fact small ' branch
stores ' for the distribution of goods in less than box or
crate lots were established in every corner of the Kue
Chemin du Vert warehouse, with clerks always in attend-
ance upon them. In this way it was as easy to fit out an
individual with what he or she needed as to fit out an en-
tire community, and the reverse.

" On the right side of the main courtyard, running back
from the administration offices, were the long, narrow ship-
ping rooms where the bundles called for were made up from
the stock which lined the walls and were tagged and ad-
dressed by a corps of young women; the crate lots being
attended to by the men in the courtyard below. Still far-
ther on was the department which received the packages
of used clothing, of knitted goods, or the other things sent
by humane persons in countless cities of America and
France to the needy ones in the fighting lines, or back of
them. Below and beyond this room were the coal bins, the
carpenter's shop, in which tables and bedside stands con-
stantly were being turned out from new lumber, and the
< calaboose,' for the benefit of an occasionally recalcitrant
Algerian. And adjoining the main courtyard was still
another room almost as large ; and this last was the place of
receipt of all supplies. Here they were inspected, counted,
and assigned to their proper buildings and compartments.
The entire place was a great hive, literally a hive of indus-
try. And the people of the neighborhood never passed its
arched entrance without first stopping to look in, it all was
so amazing to them. They wondered if there ever could
have been a time when a thousand horses were stabled
there."

Upon the day of the signing of the armistice and for
many months thereafter Warehouse No. 1 in the Rue
Chemin du Vert remained a busy hive of industry. It
still handled almost every conceivable sort of commodity,
and perhaps the only difference in its appearance from the

RED CROSS AS A DEPARTMENT STORE 91

day that the graphic New Yorker saw it was that German
prisoners — each with a doggedly complacent look upon
his face and a large " P. G." upon his back, — had re-
placed the Algerians for the hard manual labor. It con-
tinued to employ fifteen men and women in its office and
from thirty-five to forty Red Cross workers, American or
French, while the value of the stock constantly kept on
hand was roughly estimated at close to $2,000,000. From
thirty-five to forty tons were daily being sent out. Yet
how was a stock valuation of $2,000,000 really to be com-
pared with one of $2,500,000 in warehouse No. 6 in the
Eue Cambrai or $3,000,000 at No. 24 in the Rue Curial ?
And these were but three of eleven Red Cross warehouses
in Paris at the time of the armistice. And a report issued
very soon after showed twenty-nine other warehouses of
the American Red Cross in France, eight of them in the city
of Dijon, which, because of its strategic railroad location,
was a store center of greatest importance for our army over
there.

Perhaps you like facts with your picture.

Well, then, returning from the picture of the thing to
the fact, we find at the time of the first definite general
organization of our Red Cross in France — in September,
1917 — a Bureau of Transportation and Supplies was
formed under the direction of Mr. R. H. Sherman. A
little later a slightly more comprehensive organization was
charted, and a separate Bureau of Supplies created, with
Mr. Joseph R. Swan as its immediate director. This was
subdivided into four main sections : Paris Warehouses, Out-
side Warehouses, Receiving, and Shipping. This organ-
ization remained practically unchanged until the general
reorganization plan of August, 1918, which we have al-
ready seen, when the bureau became the Section of Stores
and, as such, a factor, and a mighty important factor, of
the Division of Requirements.

From that time forward the problem was one of growth,
great growth, rather than that of organization. It was a

92 WITH THE DOUGHBOY IN FRANCE

problem of finding warehouses to accommodate our sup-
plies over there ; of finding competent men to oversee and
operate the warehouses, and then, in due order, of keeping
the supplies moving through the warehouses and out to the
men at the front. In due course we shall see how these
supplies functioned. For the moment consider the fact
that in an initiatory six weeks, from October 11 to Novem-
ber 30, 1917, Mr. Swan submitted a detailed account show-
ing how he had invested nearly $8,000,000 in the purchase
of general stores for our Red Cross. In the press of emer-
gency work — there hardly was a month or a day from our
arrival in France until after the signing of the armistice
when the situation could not have been fairly described as
emergency — it was possible to take but one general in-
ventory. That was made, for accounting purposes, as of
February 24, 1918, and showed the value of the American
Red Cross stores then on hand in its warehouses in France
to be 33,960,999.49 francs, well over $6,000,000. At the
first of the following November — eleven days before the
signing of the armistice — another inventory was taken.
The stocks had grown. There were in the principal ware-
houses of the Red Cross alone and including its stock of
coal upon the Quai de la Lorie supplies valued at 46,452,-
018.80 francs, or close to $9,000,000. Figures are valu-
able when they mount to sizes such as these.

Yet figures cannot tell the way in which the warehousing
organization of the American Red Cross met the constant
emergencies which confronted it. Like the Transporta-
tion Department, it was forever and at all times on the job.
For instance, from the beginning of that last German ad-
vance, in the Ides of March, 1918, until it was reaching its
final fearful thrusts — late in June and early in July —
there was on hand, night and day, a crew at the warehouse,
which had been fashioned from a former taxicab stables in
the Rue Chemin du Vert, a complete crew to load camions
by the dozens, by the hundreds, if necessary. In such a
super-emergency no six men housed in the plant would do ;

RED CROSS AS A DEPARTMENT STORE 93

for there were nights on which twenty, thirty, and even
forty of the big camions went rolling out through that great
archway with their supplies for our boys at the front — the
very boys who so soon were to play their great part in the
supreme victories of the war. On those summer nights
warehouse work was speeded up, to put it very mildly in-
deed. JMen worked long hours without rest and with but a
single thought — the accomplishment of real endeavor
while there yet remained time to save Paris and all the
rest of France. And in such spirit is victory born.

Do not, I pray you, conceive the idea that all the ware-
house work was done in Paris. I have hinted at the im-
portance of Dijon, the great army store center, as a Ked
Cross stores center, and have, myself, stood in the great
American Red Cross warehouse upon the lining of the inner
harbor of St. Nazaire arid have with mine own eyes seen
8,000 cases stacked under their capacious roofs — food-
stuffs and clothing and comforts and hospital supplies
which came forever and in a steady stream from the trans-
ports docking at that important American receiving point,
and have known of warehouses to be established in strange
quarters, stranger sometimes than the abandoned stables of
the horse-drawn taxicabs of Paris, here in an ancient ex-
position building upon the outskirts of a sizable French
city, there in a convent, and again in a church or a school,
or even again in a stable.

Here was a little town, not many miles back from the
northern front. The Red Cross determined to set up a
warehouse there, both for military and civilian relief sup-
plies. An agent from the Paris headquarters went up
there to confer with the local representative in regard to
the proper location for the plant. The local man favored
one building, the Paris representative another which was
nearer to the railroad station. While they argued as to
the merits of the two buildings German airmen flew over
the town and destroyed one of them. And before they

94 WITH THE DOUGHBOY IN FRANCE

could compromise on the other, the French Government
requisitioned it as a barracks.

Now was a time for deep thought rather than com-
promise. And deep thought won — it always does. Deep
thought moved the American Red Cross warehouse into the
ancient seminary there, even though that sturdy structure
had been pretty well peppered by the boche. When the
Red Cross moved in, you still could count fifty-one distinct
shell holes in it ; another and a final one came while it still
was in the process of adaptation to warehouse uses. In this
badly battered structure lived the Red Cross warehouse
man and his three assistants — all of them camion chauf-
feurs — after they had put forty-five panes of glass in
with their own hands. Then the supply of glass ran out.
In the former chapel of the seminary fourteen great win-
dow frames had to be covered with muslin, which served,
after a fashion, to keep out the stress of weather. Twenty-
seven of the precious panes of glass went into the office —
where daylight was of the greatest necessity. The rest
were used, in alternation with the muslin, for the living
quarters, where the Red Cross men cooked their own meals,
in the intervals between dealing out warehouse supplies.
It was hard work, but the chauffeurs did not complain.
Indeed it so happened that their chief did most of the
complaining.

" What is the use ? " he sputtered one afternoon while the
war still was a day-by-day uncertainty. " Those boys will
put in a big day's work, every one of them, come home and
not know enough to go to bed. Like as not they will take
a couple of hours and climb up some round knoll to watch
the artillery fire. When the town was in the actual line of
fire — not more than a fortnight ago — one of them turned
up missing. He had been with us only a moment before,
so we began hunting through the warehouse for him.
Where do you suppose we found him ? Let me tell you : he
was up in the belfry, the biggest and the best target in
the town. Said he wanted to see where the shells were

RED CROSS AS A DEPARTMENT STORE 95

striking. I told him to come down, the Red Cross wasn't
paying him for damn foolishness. But you couldn't help
liking the nerve of the boy, could you ? "

Courage !

How it did run hand in hand with endeavor all through
the progress of this war. And it was not limited to the
men of the actual fighting forces. The Red Cross had
more than its even share of it. The great, appealing roll
of honor in the Hotel Regina headquarters — the list of
the American Red Cross men and women who gave their
lives in the service of their country — was mute evidence
of this. Courage in full measure, and yet never with false
heroics. Full of the sturdy everyday courage, the courage
of the casual things, exemplified, for instance, in this letter
from the files of the Stores Section, written by the agent
in charge of another of its warehouses in northern France :

" A shipment of four rolls of oiled cloth arrived most
opportunely a few days ago and one roll is being employed
locally to repair the many panes of window glass destroyed
in last night's air raid. In connection with this raid it
may be added that one of our chauffeurs nearly figured as
a victim of this raid, the window in his lodging being blown
in and a large hole knocked in the roof of his house.

" I presume that it is violating no military secret to add
that another raid from the bodies is looked for to-night and
in case it does come the other rolls of window cloth may
come into play. . . ."

It was in these very days of the great spring offensive of
1918, that the Supplies Department, like the Transporta-
tion Department of our Red Cross overseas, began to have
its hardest tests. For in addition to the regular routine
of its great warehousing function, there came, with the
rapidly increasing number of troops, hospitals and refu-
gees, rapidly increasing special duties for it to perform;
greatly increased quantities of goods to be shipped. And

96 WITH THE DOUGHBOY IN FRANCE

I think it but fair to state that without the vision of one
man, Major Field, there might not have been many sup-
plies to ship. Immediately after his appointment as Chief
of the Bureau of Supplies, Major Field began to purchase
goods, in great quantities and an almost inconceivable var-
iety. He bought in the French market, in the English
market, in the Spanish market, from the commissary stores
of the United States Army — in fact from every conceiv-
able corner and source of supply; as well as from some
which apparently were so remote as hardly to be even con-
ceivable. He stored away beds, tents, sheets, clothing,
toilet articles, and cases of groceries by the thousands, and
still continued to buy. The Red Cross gasped. The A.
E. F. protested. The vast warehouses were filled almost
to the bursting point. Major Field listened to the protes-
tations, then smiled, and went out, buying still mere sup-
plies. His smile was cryptic, and yet was not ; it was the
smile of confidence, the smile of serenity. And both con-
fidence and serenity were justified. For the days of the
drive showed — and showed conclusively — that if our
American Red Cross had not been so well stocked in sup-
plies it would have failed in the great mission overseas to
which we had intrusted it.

" The th Regiment has moved up beyond its bag-
gage train. Can the Red Cross ship blankets and kits
through to it ? "

This was a typical emergency request — from an organ-
ization of three thousand men. It was answered in the
typical fashion — with a full carload of blankets and other
bedding. The kits followed in a truck.

" A field hospital is needed behind the new American
lines," was another. It, too, was answered promptly ; with
several carloads of hospital equipment, surgical dressings,
and drugs. These things sound simple, and were not.
And the fact that they were many times multiplied added
nothing to the simplicity of the situation. In fact there
came a time when it was quite impossible to keep any exact

RED CROSS AS A DEPARTMENT STORE 97

account of the tonnage shipped, because the calls came so
thick and fast and were so urgent that no one stopped for
the usual requisitions but answered any reasonable de-
mands. The requisition system could wait for a less crit-
ical time, and did.

One day a message came that a certain field hospital was
out of ether — that its surgeons were actually performing
painful operations upon conscious men — all because the
army had run out of its stock of anaesthetics. The men at
the American Eed Cross supply headquarters sickened at
the very thought ; they moved heaven and earth to start a
camion load of the precious ether through to the wounded
men at the field hospital, and followed it up with twenty-five
truckloads of other surgical supplies.

Under the reorganization of the American Red Cross in
France which was effected under the Murnane plan, the
entire work of purchase and warehousing was brought un-
der a single Bureau of Supplies, which was ranked in turn
as a Department of Supplies. This Bureau was promptly
subdivided into two sections: that of Stores and that of
Purchases. Taking them in the order set down in the
official organization plan, we find that the headquarters
section of Stores — situated in Paris — was charged with
the operation of all central and port warehouses and their
contents and was to be in a position to honor all properly
approved requisitions from them, so far as was humanly
possible. It was further charged to confer with the comp-
troller of our French American Red Cross organization and
so to prepare proper system and check upon these supplies.
In each of the nine zones there were to be subsections of
stores, answerable for operation to the Zone Manager and
for policy to the Paris headquarters, but so organized as to
keep not only sufficient supplies for all the ordinary needs
of the zones, but in various well-situated warehouses, enough
for occasions of large emergency — and all within com-
paratively short haul.

98 WITH THE DOUGHBOY IN FRANCE

The Section of Purchases corresponded to the purchasing
agent of a large corporation. Remember that the pur-
chasing opportunities in France were extremely limited,
so that by far the greater part of this work must be per-
formed by the parent organization here in the United
States, and sent — as were the circus tents — in response
to requisitions, either by cable or by mail. Incidentally,
however, remember that no small amount of purchasing for
the benefit of our army and navy in France was done both
in England and in Spain, which, in turn, was a relief to
the overseas transport problem. For it must ever be re-
membered that the famous " bridge across the Atlantic "
was at all times, until after the signing of the armistice at
least, fearfully overcrowded. It was only the urgent neces-
sities of the Red Cross and its supplies that made it suc-
cessful in gaining the previous tonnage space east from
New York, or Boston, or Newport News. And even then
the tonnage was held to essentials; essentials whose abso-
luteness was almost a matter of affidavit.

Yet even the essentials ofttimes mounted high. Before
me lies a copy of a cablegram sent from Paris to Washing-
ton early in January, 1919. It outlines in some detail the
foodstuff needs of the American Red Cross in France for
the next three months. Some qf the larger items, in tons,
follow :

Sugar 50 Bacon 50

Rice 100 Salt Park 50

Tapioca 10 Ham 50

Cheese 50 Prunes 50

Coffee 50 Soap 100

Chocolate 50 Apricots 25

Cocoa 100 Peaches 25

And all of this in addition to the 10,000 cases of evap-
orated milk, 5,000 of condensed milk, 3,000 of canned corn
beef, 2,000 of canned tomatoes, 1,000 each of canned corn
and canned peas, and 1,000 gross of matches, while the

RED CROSS AS A DEPARTMENT STORE 99

quantities ordered even of such things as cloves and cinna-
mon and pepper and mustard ran to sizable amounts.

I have no desire to bore you with long columns or tables
of figures — for this is the story of our Red Cross with our
army in France and not a report. Yet, after all, some
figures are impressive. And these given here are enough
to show that of all the cogs and corners of the big machine,
the Purchase and Stores sections of the organization in
France had its full part to do.

CHAPTER VI

THE DOUGHBOY MOVES TOWARD THE FRONT

BY July, 1917, the first Divisions of our amazing army
began to seep into the battle countries of Europe. It
had not been the intention of either our War Department
or its general staff to send the army overseas until the first
of 1918 ; the entire plan of organization and preparation
here in the United States had been predicated upon such a
program. Yet the situation overseas was dire indeed.
Three years of warfare — and such warfare — had begun
to fag even the indomitable spirits of England and of
France. The debacle of Russia was ever before the eyes
of these nations. In the words of their own leaders, their
morale was at its lowest point. France, in one glorious
moment in 1917, had seemed, under the leadership of
Nivelle, to be close to the turning point toward victory.
But she had seen herself miss the point, and was forced
again in rugged doggedness to stand stoutly with England
and hold the line for the democracy of the world.

In such an hour there was no opportunity for delay ; not
even for the slight delay incidental to raising an American
Army of a mere half million, training it in the simplest
possible fashion, and then dispatching it overseas. Such
a method would have been more gratifying to our military
pride. We sacrificed that pride, and shall never regret the
hour of that decision. We first sent hospital detachments
from our army medical service to be brigaded with the
British, who seemed to have suffered their most severe
losses in their hospital staffs, and sent engineer regiments
not only to build the United States Military Railroad, of
which you have already read, but also to aid the weakened
land transport sections of the French and British armies.

100

OUR RED CROSS AT THE FRONT
A typical A. R. C. dugout just behind the lines

THE DOUGHBOY MOVES TOWARD THE FfeONT' 101

And General John J. Pershing, with adequate staff assist-
ance, crossed to Paris to prepare for the first and all-
glorious American campaign in Europe.

" The program had been carefully drawn up," wrote
Lieutenant Colonel Repington, the distinguished British
military critic, in a review on the performance of our army
in the London Morning Post, of December 9, 1918. " It
anticipated the orderly arrival in France of complete units,
with all their services, guns, transport, and horses, and
when these larger units had received a finishing course in
France and had been trained up to concert pitch it was in-
tended to put them into the line and build up a purely
American Army as rapidly as possible. After studying
the situation, the program and the available tonnage in
those days, I did not expect that General Pershing could
take the field with a trained army of accountable numbers
much before the late summer or autumn of 1918."

Yet by the first day of January, 1918, there were al-
ready in France four American Divisions, each with an
approximate strength of 28,153 men, by February there
were six Divisions, and by March, eight. It is fair to say,
however, that even by March only two of the Divisions were
fit to be in the line, and none in the other active sectors.
Training for modern warfare is indeed an arduous task.
Yet our amazing army did not shirk it, and even in the dis-
piriting and terrifying days of the spring of 1918 kept
to its task of preparing itself for the great ordeal just
ahead, and, almost at the very hour that the last great
German drive began to assume really serious proportions,
was finishing those preparations. Ten Divisions were
ready, before the spring was well advanced, to stand
shoulder to shoulder with British Divisions should such an
unusual course have been found indispensable. In fact,
anticipating this very emergency, brigading with the Brit-
ish had already been begun. But as the British reinforce-
ments began pouring into Northern France the possibil-
ities of the emergency arising diminished. And five of

102 WITH THE DOUGHBOY IN FRANCE

our Divisions were returned south into the training camps
of the United States Army.

The War Department figures of the size of our army in
France throughout 1918 — which at the time could not be
made public, because of military necessities — tell the
story of its rapid growth. They show the number of Divi-
sions in France and in line and in reserve to have been as
follows :

1918 In France In Line and Reserve

April 1 10 3

Hay 13 4

June 16 6

July 24 9

August 32 20

September 37 25

October 40 31

November 42 30

This tabulation takes no count whatsoever of the non-
combatants of the S. O. S. — as the army man knows the
Service of Supplies — or the other great numbers of men
employed in the rearward service of the United States
Army. It is perhaps enough to say that the largest num-
ber of our troops employed in France was on September 26,
the day that General Pershing began his Meuse-Argonne
offensive. On that day our army consisted of 1,224,720
combatants and 493,764 noncombatants, a total of 1,718,-
484 men in its actual forces.

It is known now that if the war had continued we should
probably have doubled those figures within a compara-
tively few months and should have had eighty Divisions in
France by April, 1919, which would have made the United
States Army by all odds the most considerable of any of
the single belligerent nations fighting in France.

We have told elsewhere a little of the romance of the
transport of our men ; here in cold figures — statistics
which scorn romance in their composition — is their result.
We shall see through our Red Cross spectacles again and

THE DOUGHBOY MOVES TOWARD THE FRONT 103

again the performances of that army, as the men and the
women of the American Red Cross saw them.

In the meantime let us turn again, therefore, to Lieu-
tenant Colonel Repington, whose reputation in this regard
is well established, and find him saying of the commanding
general of our army :

" To my mind, there is nothing finer in the war than the
splendid good comradeship which General Pershing dis-
played throughout, and nothing more striking than the de-
termined way in which he pursued the original American
plan of making the American arms both respected and
feared. The program of arrivals, speeded up and varied
in response to the appeal of the Allies, involved him in
appalling difficulties, from which the American army suf-
fered to the last. His generous answer to cries for help
in other sectors left him for long stretches almost, if not
quite, without an army. He played the game like a man
by his friends, but all the time with a singleness of pur-
pose and a strength of character which history will ap-
plaud; he kept his eyes fixed on the great objective which
he ultimately attained and silenced his detractors in at-
taining it. To his calm and steadfast spirit we owe much.
To his staff, cool amidst the most disturbing events, im-
pervious to panic, rapid in decision, and quick to act, the
allied world owes a tribute. To his troops, what can we
say ? They were crusaders. They came to beat the Ger-
mans and they beat them soundly. They worthily main-
tained the tradition of their race. They fought and won
for an idea."

Truer words have not been written. To one who has
made even a superficial study of our army in France, the
figure of the doughboy — the boy from the little home in
Connecticut or Kansas or Oregon — looms large indeed.
I did not, myself, see him in action. Other and abler pens
have told and are still telling of his unselfishness, his
audacity, his seemingly unbounded heroism both in the
trenches and upon the open field of battle. The little rows

104 WITH THE DOUGHBOY IN FRANCE

of crosses in the shattered forest of the Argonne or upon
the roads leading from Paris into Chateau-Thierry, else-
where over the face of lovely France, tell the story of his
sacrifice more graphically than any pen may ever tell it.

Frequently I have seen the doughboy in Paris as well as
in the other cities and towns and in our military camps in
France. He is an amusing fellow. One can hardly fail
to like him, I have talked with him — by the dozens and
by the hundreds. I have argued with him, for sometimes
we have failed to agree. But I have never failed to sym-
pathize, or to understand. Nor, as for that matter, to
appreciate. No one who has seen the performance of our
amazing army in France, or the immediate results of that
performance, can fail to appreciate. If you are a finicky
person you may easily see the defects that haste brought
into the making of our expeditionary army — waste in ma-
terial and in personnel here and there ; but, after all, these
very defects are almost inherent in any organization raised
to meet a supreme emergency, and they appear picayune
indeed when one places them alongside the marvel of its
performance — when one thinks of Chateau-Thierry or
Saint Mihiel or the Argonne.

It is not the province of this book to describe the opera-
tions of our army in France except in so far as they
were touched directly by the operations of our Ked
Cross over there. So, back to our text. You will recall
that Major Grayson M.-P. Murphy, our first Eed Cross
Commissioner to France, and his staff arrived in Paris
coincidently with General Pershing on the thirteenth of
June, 1917. They went right to work, despite terrific
odds, in the building of a working organization. At about
the hour of their coming there was developing here in the
United States a rather distinct feeling in certain wide-
spread religious and philanthropic organizations that they
should be distinctly represented in our war enterprise in
Europe. The patriotism that stirred these great organ-

THE DOUGHBOY MOVES TOWARD THE FRONT 105

izations was admirable; it was unmistakable, and finally
resulted in certain of the larger ones — the Young Men's
Christian Association, the Knights of Columbus, the Young
Women's Christian Association and the Salvation Army —
being given definite status in the war work overseas. In
the case of the Y. M. C. A. — by far the largest of all these
organizations — it was allotted the major problem of pro-
viding entertainment for the enlisted men and the officers
at the camps in France, in England, in Italy and, in due
time, in the German valley of the Rhine. At a later hour
the very difficult problem of providing canteens, that would
be, in effect, nothing more nor less than huge post exchanges,
was thrust upon the Y. M. C. A. It accepted the problem
— not gladly, but in patriotic spirit — and even though
the experiment brought upon its shoulders much thought-
less and bitter criticism, saw it bravely through.

The Y. M. C. A. therefore, was to undertake, speaking
by and large, the canteen problem of the camps, while that
of the hospitals, the clocks at the ports of debarkation and
embarkation, the railroad junctions, and the cities of
France was handed to the American Red Cross. The Red
Cross began its preparations for this particular part of its
task by establishing stations for the French Army, which,
pending the arrival of the American forces, would serve
admirably as experiment stations. Major Murphy at once
conferred with the French military authorities and, after
finding from them where their greatest need lay, proceeded
without delay to the establishment of model canteens on the
French lines of communication; in the metropolitan zone
of Paris and at the front. And before our army came, and
the great bulk of the work of our Red Cross naturally
shifted to it, these early canteens supplied rations to liter-
ally millions of French soldiers.

" In view of keeping up the good spirits of troops it is
indispensable that soldiers on leave be able to find, while
waiting at railroad stations in the course of their journeys,

106 WITH THE DOUGHBOY IN FRANCE

canteens which will allow them to have comfortable rest
and refreshment. Good results have already been obtained
in this direction, but it is necessary to improve the can-
teens already existing and to create new ones in stations
that do not already have them."

The above is a translation of a quotation from a note
written by the French Minister of War to a general of his
army, at about the time of our first Red Cross Commission
over there. If one were to attempt to translate between
the lines he would be certain to find that the soldiers going
home on leave or discharge, obliged to wait long hours in
railroad stations, sometimes without food or other com-
forts, and ofttimes, too, forced to sleep upon a cold, stone-
flagged floor, had often a greatly lowered morale as the
result of such an experience. And if their mental state
was not lowered, their physical condition was almost sure
to be.

So it was that the American Eed Cross jumped into the
immediate assistance of its rather badly burdened French
brothers — the various organizations of Croix Rouge Fran-
gaise. It seized as its most immediate opportunity, Paris,
and particularly the junction points of the Grande Cein-
lure, the belt-line railroad which completely encircles the
outer environs of the city, and provides track-interchange
facilities for the various trunk-line railroads which enter
her walls from every direction. For lack of funds and a
lack of personnel the French Red Cross authorities were
about to close some of the canteens which they already had
established upon the Grande Ceinture, while the real neces-
sity was that more should be opened. Such a disaster our
American Red Cross prevented. On July 18, 1917, Colo-
nel Payot, Director of the French Army Transports, wrote
to H. H. Harjes — at that time representative of the Amer-
ican Red Cross at the general headquarters of the French
Army — giving a list of railroad stations where canteens
were needed, and in the order of their urgency. In the cor-
respondence which followed between the French authorities

THE DOUGHBOY MOVES TOWARD THE FRONT 107

and the American Ked Cross, various agreements were
reached.

It was agreed that the French administration would
furnish the necessary buildings and provide electric light,
running water, and coal for heating. On the other hand,
the American Eed Cross undertook to furnish all other
supplies — cooking appliances, coal for cooking, equip-
ment, stores, medical supplies, and personnel. As early
as July 31, Major Perkins wrote that our American Eed
Cross was now ready to serve a full meal at seventy-five
centimes (fourteen or fifteen cents) a person, and other
drinks and dishes at small cost to the poilu. Men without
funds on receiving a voucher from the Commissaire de la
Gare (railroad-station agent) could obtain meals and hot
drinks without charge. The sale of wine, beer, and spirits
was prohibited in our canteens. And because of the French
cooperation in their establishment, they were named Les
Cantines des Deux Drapeaux and bore signs showing both
the Tricolor of France and our own Stars and Stripes,
with their designating name beneath.

The original list of outside stations suggested by the
French author ites were five in number: Pont d'Oye, Chal-
ons, fipernay, Belfort, and Bar-le-Duc. Finally it was de-
cided to reduce this list — the hour of the arrival of the
American forces in number steadily drawing nearer — and
Chalons and fipernay were definitely chosen for American
Red Cross canteen work. At that time both of these cities
of the Champagne district were well behind the lines ; after-
wards the Germans came too close for comfort and shelled
them badly, which meant the withdrawal of the French
troops and a closing of the neat canteens for a time; but
they were reopened. When I visited fipernay in January
1919, the Red Cross canteen there was again open and in
charge of two young ladies from Watertown, N". Y. — the
Misses Emma and Kate Lansing, sisters of the then Secre
tary of State. You could not keep down the buoyant spiri
of our Red Cross.

108 WITH THE DOUGHBOY IK FRANCE

Before the American Red Cross undertook to establish
fully equipped canteens — on the scale of those at Chalons
and at Epernay — the London Committee of the French
Red Cross had been operating at many railroad stations
small canteens known as the Gouttes de Cafe, where
coffee and bouillon were served free to the soldiers in
passing trains. In several cases agreements were made
with the French society by which certain individual
Gouttes de Cafe passed to the control of the American Red
Cross and were, in other cases, absorbed in the larger in-
stallation which it was prepared to support. This, how-
ever, took place only when the demands of the situation
really called for a larger canteen, prepared to serve full
meals and operate dormitories and a recreation room. Oc-
casionally it was found advisable for our Red Cross to
inaugurate a canteen of its very own, while the Goutte de
Cafe continued to carry on its own work on the station plat-
form or in the immediate vicinity.

I remember particularly the situation in the great cen-
tral station of the Midi Railroad in Bordeaux. This huge
structure is a real focal point of passenger traffic. From
beneath its expansive train shed trains come and go ; to and
from Paris and Boulogne and Biarritz and Marseilles and
many other points — over the busy lines, not only of
the Midi, but of the Paris-Orleans and the Etat. A great
proportion of this traffic is military, and long ago the
French Red Cross sought to accommodate this with a huge
Goutte de Cafe in a barnlike sort of room in the main sta-
tion structure and opening direct upon its platforms. I
glanced at this place. It was gloomy and ill-lighted by the
uncertain, even though dazzling, glow of one or two electric
arc lights. It was fearfully overcrowded. Poilus oc-
cupied each of the many seats in the room and flowed over
to the floor, where they sat or reclined as best they might
on the benches or on their luggage. The place was ill-
ventilated, too. It was not one that offered large appeal.

How different the appearance of the canteen of our own

THE DOUGHBOY MOVES TOWARD THE FRONT 109

Red Cross. It had a far less advantageous location ; well
cutside the station train shed and only to be found by one
who was definitely directed to it. Two buildings had been
erected and another adapted for the canteen. They were
plain enough outside, but inside they were typically Amer-
ican — which meant that light and color and warmth had
been combined effectively to produce the effect of a home
that might have been in Maine, or Ohio, or Colorado, or
California, or any other nice corner of the old U. S. A.
There was homelike atmosphere, too, in the long, low build-
ings enhanced by the unforgetable aroma of coffee being
made — being made American style, if you please. That
building boasted a long counter, and upon the counter
miniature mountains of ham sandwiches and big brown
doughnuts — sandwiches and doughnuts which actually
had been fabricated from white flour — and ham sand-
wiches with a genuine flavor to them. And all in great
quantity — 2,000 meals in a single day was no unusual
order — and for a price that was nominal, to put it lightly.
In another building there were more of the lights and
the warm yellows and greens of good taste in decoration ;
a big piano with a doughboy at it some twenty-three hours
out of the twenty-four — whole companies of divans and
regiments of easy-chairs: American newspapers, many
weekly publications, a lot of magazines, and books in pro-
fusion. The room was completely filled, but somehow one
did not gain the sensation of its being crowded. The feel-
ing that one carried from the place was that a bit of the
U. S. A. had been set right down there at the corner of
the great and busy chief railway terminal of the French
city of Bordeaux. Only one forgot Bordeaux.

What was done at Bordeaux — and also at St. Nazaire
and Nantes and Brest and Tours and Toul and many,
many other points — by our Red Cross in the provision of
canteen facilities was repeated in Paris, only on a far
larger scale than at any other point. The A. R. C. L. 0. C.

110 WITH THE DOUGHBOY IN FRANCE

canteens in Paris — there seems to be no holding in check
that army passion for initialization — soon after the sign-
ing of the armistice had reached fourteen in number, of
which about half were located in or close to the great rail-
road passenger terminals of the city. The others were
hotels, large or small, devoted in particular to the housing
of the doughboy and his officers on the occasions of their
leaves to the capital — for no other point in France, not
even the attractions of Biarritz or the sunny Riviera, can
ever quite fill the place in the heart of the man in khaki
that Paris, with all her refinements and her infinite variety
of amusements, long since attained. These last canteens
we shall consider in greater detail when we come to find
our doughboy on leave. For the present we are seeing him
still bound for the front, the war still in action, the great
adventure still ahead.

A single glance at the records of the organization of the
Army and Navy Department under which the canteen
work along the lines of communication is grouped at the
Paris headquarters of the American Red Cross, shows that
it was not until February, 1918, that the inrush of the
American Army in France had assumed proportions ample
enough to demand a segregation of canteen accommodations
for it from those offered to the poilus. As I have said, the
canteens for the poilus were in the general nature of train-
ing or experimental stations for our really big canteen job
over there, and as such more than justified the trouble or
the cost; which does not take into the reckoning the valu-
able service which they rendered the blue-clad soldiers of
our great and loyal friend — the French Republic.

Take Chalons, for instance: Chalons set an American
Red Cross standard for canteens, particularly for such
canteens as would have to take care of the physical needs
and comforts of soldiers, perhaps in great numbers. This
early Red Cross station was set in a large barracks some
fifty yards distant from the chief railroad terminal of that
busy town. And, as it often happened that the leave per-

THE DOUGHBOY MOVES TOWARD THE FRONT 111

mits of the poilus did not permit them to go into the town,
a fenced passage, with a sentinel, was builded from the
train platforms to the canteen entrance. At that entrance,
a coat room where the soldier could check his bulky kit
was established.

On going into the restaurant of the canteen one quickly
discovered that what might otherwise have been a dull and
dreary barracks' interior had been transformed by French
artists — the French have a marvelous knack for doing this
very sort of thing — into a light, cheerful, and amusing
room. The effect on the poilus who visited it for the first
time was instantaneous; they had not been used to that
sort of thing.

At one end of the gay and happy room was the counter
from which the meals were served by the American women
working in the canteen. The soldier went first to the
cashier and from her bought either a ticket for a complete
meal, or for any special dish that might appeal to his
fancy or to his jaded appetite. He then went to the
counter, was handed his food on a tray, and took it to one
of the clean, white-tiled tables that lined the room. Groups
of friends might gather at a table. But no one was long
alone, unless he chose to be. Friendships are made quickly
in the spirit of such a place, and the chatter and laughter
that pervaded it reflected the gayety of its decorations.

After eating, if it was still summer, the poilu might
stroll in the garden where there were seats, a pergola, even
a Punch and Judy Theater — for your Frenchman, be he
Parisian or peasant, dearly loves his guignol — or he might
find his way to the recreation room, where there were writ-
ing materials, games, magazines, lounging chairs, a piano
and a victrola. Here men might group around the piano
and sing to their hearts' content. And here the popularity
of Madelon was quite unquestioned.

And after all of this was done, he might retire to the
dormitories with absolute assurance that he would be called
in full time for his train — whether that train left at one

112 WITH THE DOUGHBOY IN FRANCE

o'clock in the morning or at four. And if he so chose, in
the morning might refresh himself in the fully equipped
washrooms, shower baths, or the barher shop, have his
coffee and eggs, his fruit and his beloved confiture and go
aboard the train in the full spirit of a man at complete
peace with the world.

The orders that came in February, 1918, calling for the
segregation of the accommodations for the A. E. F. from
those given to the French, did not result in withdrawing
financial support from Chalons and the other canteens
which our Red Cross had established particularly for the
poilus, but did result in the establishment of rest stations,
or canteens, exclusively for our own men. This organiza-
tion of canteens extended particularly along the lines of
communication between the area of action and the Service
of Supplies zone, and was quite distinct from the canteen
organizations at the ports and the evacuation hospitals;
these last we shall come to consider when we see the part
played by our Red Cross in the entire hospital program
of the A. E. F. The Lines of Communication task was a
real job in itself.

One could hardly rub the side of a magic lamp and have
a completely equipped canteen materialize as the fulfill-
ment of a wish. Magic lamps have not been particularly
numerous in France these last few years. If they had
been France might have been spared at least some of her
great burden of sorrow. And so, even for our resourceful
Red Cross, buildings could not always be provided, nor
chairs, nor counters, nor even stoves. That is why at
Vierzon, a little but a very busy railroad junction near
Severs, there was, for many months, only a tent. But for
each dawn of all those months there was the cheering aroma
of fresh coffee steaming up into the air from six marmites,
as the French know our giant coffee containers. And the
figures of American girls could be seen silhouetted against
the glow of bonfires, while the line of soldiers, cups in

THE DOUGHBOY MOVES TOWARD THE FRONT 113

hand, which started at that early hour, would continue for
at least another eighteen, or until well after midnight

Bemember, if you will, that making coffee for a canteen
is not making it for a household dining room. One does
not measure it by teaspoonfuls. It is an affair of pounds
and of gallons. The water — ten gallons for each marmite
— was procured from a well which had been tested and ad-
judged pure. The sandwiches, with their fillings of meat
or of jelly, were not the dainty morsels which women
crumble between their fingers at bridge parties. They
were sandwiches fit for fighting men. They were the sort
that hungry soldiers could grip with their teeth.

Because of the necessary secrecy in reference to the exact
numbers of passing troops, in turn because of military
necessities, the American Bed Cross was not permitted
during the war to keep an exact record of the number of
men who visited its canteens. But where hundreds were
accommodated, even at as comparatively small a place as
Vierzon, thousands were fed at the larger places, such as
Dijon or Toul, for instance. And it is to be noted that in
all these canteens food was being served to regular detach-
ments of the A. E. F. as well as to casuals leaving or re-
joining their commands.

In the great September drive of 1918 a canteen was set
up by the roadside at Souilly. Night and day and without
intermission it was maintained. It was there that
stretcher bearers and ambulance drivers were given hot
drinks and warm food — all that they wanted of both —
and where sometimes they toppled over from sheer fatigue
and wearied nerves. From this one tent — and this is but
one instance typical of many, many others — three hun-
dred gallons of chocolate were served daily. And while
bread was procured with the utmost difficulty, no boy was
turned away hungry. Many times the snacks of food so
offered were, according to the statements of the soldiers
themselves, the first food that they had received for three
days.

114 WITH THE DOUGHBOY IN FRANCE

And whether the canteen of our Red Cross was in a tent
or a pine structure with splintery and badly put together
walls, or, as ofttimes it was, in the corner of a baggage
room of a railroad station, an attempt was always made to
beautify it. We learned several things from the French
since first we moved a part of America into their be-
loved land, and this was one of them. The example of the
Chalons canteen was not lost. There is a psychological
effect in decorative beauty that is quite unmistakable;
translated it has a definite and very real effect upon that
important thing that all really great army generals of
to-day know as morale. It was the desire for good morale,
therefore, that prompted the women of our Red Cross to
decorate their canteens. And because skilled decorative
artists were not always at hand, as they were as Chalons,
makeshifts — ingenious ones at that — were often used.
Magazine covers could be fashioned into mighty fine wall
posters. In some instances, camouflage artists and their
varied paint pots were called into service. For window
curtains materials of gay colors were always chosen and,
wherever it was possible, the lights were covered with
fancy shades, designed according to the individual taste or
the ingenuity of some worker.

Pianos were dug out of ruined houses or were even
brought from captured German dugouts. A boche piano
served as well as any other for the " jazz " which we took
to poor France from the United States. The pianos in
these Red Cross canteens hardly would have passed muster
for a formal concert. But that did not matter much. It
mattered not that they had the toothless look of old age
about them, where the ivory keys had been lost ; they were
still something which a homeless Yankee boy might play
— where he might still build for himself a bridge of
favorite tunes right back into the heart of his own beloved
home.

At Issoudon, the canteen reached an ideal of organiza-
tion not always possible in some more isolated spots. At

THE DOUGHBOY MOVES TOWARD THE FRONT 115

that point there was a mess for officers, a canteen for
enlisted men, and clubrooms with books and the like for
both. Moreover, a resthouse was inaugurated for officers
and men by the Eed Cross for the accommodation of those
who stayed there overnight or even for a considerable num-
ber of hours. Eventually this last project was absorbed by
the army, which took it under its direct control. The army
knew a good thing when it saw it. The Issoudon rest-
house was a good thing. It served as a model for a much
more elaborate scheme of entertainment for our khaki-
coated men which, at a later time, was established by the
American Red Cross in Paris. And which — so far at
least as the officers were concerned — also was taken over
by the army.

" A piece of fairyland " was the name that a doughboy
with a touch of sentiment gave to the canteen at Nevers.
A gardener's lodge attached to a chateau was loaned the
American Red Cross by a titled and generous lady. It pos-
sessed a " living room " and a dining room that needed few
changes, even of a decorative order. Upon the veranda,
which commanded a view of a gentle and seemingly peren-
nial garden, were many easy-chairs, while somewhere among
these same hardy flowers was builded a temporary barracks
for the housing of casuals and for shower baths for the
cleanly comfort of the guests.

In the course of my own travels through the Red Cross
areas in Europe I came to another canteen center other than
that of the Bordeaux district, which still clings to my mem-
ory. I am referring to Toul, that ancient walled city of
eastern France which has been a great fortress for so many
centuries that mortal man seems fairly to have lost count
of them. Eew doughboys there are who traveled at all
across the land of the lilies who can easily forget Toul —
that grim American army headquarters close by its stone
walls and ancient gates, a marais of tight-set buildings
and narrow stone-paved streets and encircled by a row

116 WITH THE DOUGHBOY IN FRANCE

of hills, which bore a row of fortresses. If the line had
failed to hold at Verdun or at Pont-a-Mousson, Toul
would certainly have become the next great battle ground,
another gray city for which men might give their short
lives in order that it might continue its long one.

This " if " was not realized — thank God for that !
And the French, with their real generosity, realizing that
the American headquarters in their eastern territory must
be a city of great accessibility and real military strategic
importance, quickly tendered Toul, which was accepted by
our army in the same generous spirit in which it was
offered by our Allies.

With Toul settled as a military center the problem of
the Red Cross in connection with it at once became definite
and important. It, of course, demanded immediate as
well as entirely comprehensive solution. And that it had
both was due very largely to the efforts of one woman, Miss
Mary Vail Andress, of New York.

Miss Andress, who was one of the very first group of
women to be sent by our Red Cross to France, arriving
there August 24, 1917, came to Toul in January, 1918,
Captain Hugh Pritchitt, who had been assigned to the
command of the American Red Cross work at that Ameri-
can Army headquarters point, already of great and growing
importance, had preceded her there by but four days, yet
had already succeeded in making a definite survey of the
entire situation. Out of that survey, and the more ex-
tended knowledge of the problem that came to the Red Cross
folk as they studied it in its details, came the big canteen
activities. For before the American Red Cross had been
in the ancient French town a full fortnight, the men of the
American Expeditionary Forces began pouring through it
in great numbers. It takes only a single glance at the map
to realize the reason why ; for to the east of Toul are Nancy,
Pont-a-Mousson, and the Lorraine line, while to the north
and even a little to the west one finds Saint Mihiel, Ver-
dun, St. Menehold, and the Argonne — places that already

THE DOUGHBOY MOVES TOWARD THE FRONT 117

are household names all the way across America, while
from Toul to the south and west, even unto the blue waters
of the Atlantic, stretch the main stems of the United
States Military Railroad in France — that remarkable
railroad which, as you already know, really is no railroad
whatsover.

So do not wonder that at the ancient railway station just
north of the town walls and contiguous to the well-traveled
Route de Paris, 1918 saw more and more of the long special
trains stopping and debouching boys in khaki — hungry
boys, thirsty boys, tired and dirty boys, and no provision
for the relief of any of these ordinary human miseries.

It was a real situation, and as such the New York woman
in the steel gray Red Cross uniform quickly sensed it.
She moved toward its solution ; which was easier said than
done. For one thing the Red Cross chiefs in Paris, con-
sidering the thing judiciously from long range, were not at
all sure of its practicability. But Miss Andress had no
doubts, and so persisted at Paris until Paris yielded and
permission was granted her to start a small canteen ; yet
this was only the first step in the solution of her problem.
A second and even greater one was the securing of a
location for canteen facilities. The meager facilities of
Toul, selected as the field headquarters of an American
Army, had been all but swamped by the fearful demands
made upon them. Yet Miss Andress, moving heaven and
earth itself, did secure a small apartment house in that
same well-traveled Route de Paris, which was well enough,
so far as it went, but did not go half far enough. She
quickly determined that this building would serve very
well as a hotel or resthouse for the casual soldiers and
officers passing through the town, but that the real canteen
would have to be right at the station itself.

Now the station of the Eastern Railway at Toul was
amply large for the ordinary peace-time needs of the
eleven thousand folk who lived in the town, but long since
its modest facilities had also been swamped by the war-

118 WITH THE DOUGHBOY IN FRANCE

time necessities thrust upon it. It was humanly impossi-
ble to crowd another single facility within its four tight
brick walls. They told her as much.

" I know that," said Miss Andress quietly. " We shall
have to have a big tent set up in the station yard. I
spall speak to the railway authorites about it, and gain
their permission."

In vain the army officers argued with her as to the
futility of such a step. They, themselves, had thought of
such procedure for their own increasing activities, but
had been refused a tent, very politely but very firmly.
Yet those refusals were not final. There were two other
factors now to be taken into consideration — one was the
potency of the very phrase, Croix Rouge Americaine, with
the French, and the other was the persuasive ability of
a bright New York woman who, having made up her mind
what it was that she wanted to get, was not going to be
happy until she had gotten it.

She got the tent — the permission and all else that went
with the getting it up, of course. In the spring of 1919
it still was there, although in use as a check room instead
of a canteen; for the canteen service long before had out-
grown even its generous facilities. It spread in various
directions; into a regular hotel for enlisted men, right
across the narrow street from the station; a resthouse for
both officers and enlisted men back on the Route de Paris
about a block distant; a huge new canteen on the station
grounds, and still another on one of the long island-plat-
forms between the tracks, so that men held in passing trains
— all of which stopped at Toul for coal and water, if noth-
ing else — and so unable to go even into the station to feel
the comforting hand of the Red Cross, might be served with
good things of both food and drink.

To maintain four such great institutions, even though
all of them were within stone's throw of one another, was
no child's play. The mere problem of providing those good
things to eat and drink was of itself a really huge job.

THE DOUGHBOY MOVES TOWARD THE FRONT 119

For by January,! 9 19, in the sandwich room of the enlisted
men's hotel across the street, 2,400 pounds of bread a day
were being cut into sandwiches. These sandwiches were
worthy of investigation. They were really worth-while —
the Red Cross kind. I have sampled them myself — all
the way from Havre to Coblenz and south as far as Bor-
deaux, and so truthfully can call them remarkable. For
fancy, if you can, corned beef — the miserable and de-
spised " corn willie " of the doughboy — being so cam-
ouflaged with pickles and onions and eggs as to make many
and many a traveling hungry soldier for the nonce quite
unaware that he was munching upon a foodstuff of un-
bridled army ridicule. And ham, with mustard, and more
of the palatable camouflage. Oh, boy, could you beat it ?
And, oh, boy, did you ever eat better doughnuts — out-
side of mother's, of course — than those of the Red Cross,
and the Salvation Army, too, gave you ?

In the big kitchen of the American Red Cross canteen
hotel at Toul they cooked three thousand of these last each
twenty-four hours, which would have been a sizable contract
for one of those white-fronted chains of dairy restaurants
whose habitat is New York and the other big cities of the
United States, while four thousand cups of coffee and
chocolate went daily to wash down these doughnuts —
and the sandwiches.

Figures are not always impressive. In this one instance,
however, I think that they are particularly so. Is it not
impressive to know that in a single day of September,
1918, when the tide of war had turned and the oncoming
hosts of Yanks were turning the flanks of the boche farther
and farther back, ground once lost never to be regained —
in the eight hours of that day, from five o'clock in the
morning until one o'clock in the afternoon, just 2,045 men
were served by the American Red . Cross there at the Toul
station, while in the month of January, 1919, just
128,637 hungry soldiers were fed and refreshed there ?

Figures do not, of course, tell the story of the resthouse

120 WITH THE DOUGHBOY IN FRANCE

— that apartment home first secured by Miss Andress —
but the expressions of gratefulness that come from the for-
tunate folk who have been sheltered beneath its hospitable
roof are more than ordinarily eloquent. It is not a large
building; a structure rather ugly than otherwise. But
it has spelled in every true sense of the word: "Rest."
Yet to my mind its really unique distinction lies in another
channel; it is the only army facility that I chanced to
see in all France which extended its hospitality under a
single roof to both officer and enlisted man, and so be-
spoke a democracy which, much vaunted at times, does
not always exist within the ranks of the United States
Army. For so far as I could discover, there was not the
slightest particle of difference in the cleanliness and com-
fort between the beds assigned to the enlisted men in the
upper floor of the house and those given to the officers in
its two lower floors. When they passed its threshold the
fine distinction of rank ceased. The Red Cross in its very
best phases does not recognize the so-called distinction of
rank.

Its hospitality at Toul did not cease when it had offered
food and drink and lodging to the man in khaki who came
to its doors. A very humble yet greatly appreciated
comfort to a man coming off a hot, overcrowded, and
very dirty troop train was nothing more nor less than a
good bath. The bathhouse was a hurried but well-adapted
one in the basement of the enlisted men's hotel. Two
Russian refugees ran the plant and did well at it —
for Russian refugees. A system was adopted, despite
Slavic traditions, by which at a single time sixteen men
might be undressing, sixteen taking a quarter-hour bath,
and a third sixteen dressing again — all at the same
time. In this way 250 men could bathe in a single
hour, while the daily average of the institution during
the busy months of the war ordinarily ran from eight
hundred to nine hundred. It has handled 1,200 in a

THE DOUGHBOY MOVES TOWARD THE FRONT 121

single working day, giving the men not only a bath, hot
or cold, as might be desired, but a complete change of
clean underclothing — all with the compliments of the
Red Cross. The discarded garments were gathered in
huge sacks, some twenty-five of these being forwarded
daily to the army laundries in the neighborhood.

" The Red Cross in Toul ? " said a young lieutenant of
engineers one day to Miss Gladys Harrison, who was
working there for the American Red Cross. " It saved my
life one forlorn night. Every hotel in town was full to the
doors, it was raining bullets outside and no place to sleep
but the banks of the canal, if — if the Red Cross hadn't
taken me in."

Let Miss Harrison continue the story; she was ex-
tremely conversant with the entire situation in Toul, and
so most capable to speak of it.

" It was the hour of tea when the young man came in.
In fresh white coif and apron of blue, a Red Cross girl
presided behind the altar of the sacred institution, where
the pot simmered and lemon and sugar graced the brew.
In a charmed circle around the attractively furnished room
which, among its other attractions, boasted a piano, a
pretty reading lamp, and a writing desk, sat some fifteen
other officers — most of them dusty and tired from long
traveling, some shy, some talkative, two gray-bearded, most
of them mere boys, all warming themselves in the civilizing
atmosphere of the subtle ceremony. On the table piled on
a generous dinner plate was the marvel on which the young
lieutenant's eyes rested — doughnuts.

" Forty-eight thousand, nine hundred and ninety-five
doughnuts. Not to be sure, all on that dinner plate —
the great number is that of the doughnuts officially stirred
up, dropped in deep fat, and distributed from the Red
Cross houses and station canteens during the month of
July, 1918. Other good things were served in a similar
abundance that same month ; 19,760 hot and cold drinks,

122 WITH THE DOUGHBOY IN FRANCE

13,546 sandwiches, and 19,574 tartines, not to mention
2,460 salads and 4,160 dishes of ice cream — these last, of
course, special hot-weather foods. But the doughnuts were
the pride and glory of the Toul establishment — the mas-
terpiece by which its praises were known and sung in the
long trenches that scarred the fair Lorraine hills. They
were the real American article — except also for the tradi-
tional rolling in the sugar barrel, now vanished like the
dodo — soft and golden and winningly round. They were
made by a Frenchwoman, but her instructor was a genuine
Yankee soldier cook, who learned the art from his mother
in the Connecticut Valley, where they cherish the secret
of why the doughnut has a hole. He was particularly
detailed to initiate the Frenchwoman into the mysteries
of the art by an army colonel who understood doughnuts
and men and who sat at tea with the directress one day
when the Red Cross outpost at Toul still was young."

The directress was, of course, Miss Andress, and it was
in those early days she still was the staff and the staff
was the directress; and never dreaming of the summer
nights when her commodious resthouse in the Eoute de
Paris, with its accommodations for eight men and twenty-
five officers, would be called upon in a single short month
to take care of 560 officers and 2,124 enlisted men — and
would take care of every blessed one of them to the fullest
extent.

Enough again of figures. At the best they tell only part
of the story. The boys who enjoyed the multifold hospi-
talities of the Red Cross in Toul — that quaint, walled,
and moated fortress town of old France, with its churches
and its exquistite cathedral rising above its low roofs —
could tell the rest of it ; and gladly did when the opportu-
nity was given them. For instance here is a human doc-
ument which came into my hands one day when I was at
the Toul canteen:

THE DOUGHBOY MOVES TOWARD THE FRONT 123

"Dear Red Cross Girls at the Canteen:

"I always wanted to tell you how I appreciated all the nice
things you have done for us since I have been over here and
would have, but perhaps you'd think I was making love to you
for I felt I wanted to get you in a great big bunch and give you
a great big hug. No, I wouldn't need any moonlight and
shivery music, for it isn't that kind of a hug — the kind of hug
I wanted to give is the kind a brother gives his sister; or a boy
gives his mother when he wants her to know that he loves her
and appreciates her. . . . You girls are for the boys of the fight-
ing power and you don't ask any questions and you don't bestow
any special favors and so we all love you.

" (A soldier) MR. BUCK PRIVATE."

Sometimes actions speak louder than words. There
came a time — in September, 1918 — when the troops
were moving pretty steadily through Toul and up toward
the Argonne. The Red Cross girls were hard put to it
to see that all the boys had all the food and drink and
lodgings and baths that they wanted; but they saw that
these were given and in generous measure, even though it
meant ten and twelve and fourteen and even sixteen hours
of work at a stretch. They had their full reward for their
strenuous endeavors, not always in letters, or even in words.
Sometimes the language of expression of the human face
is the most convincing thing in all the world.

It was a boy from Grand Island, Nebraska, who
slouched into the Toul canteen in the station yard on
one of the hottest of those September nights. He was
tired and dirty, and his seventy-five pounds of equipment
upon his back must almost have been more than mortal
might bear. But he did not complain — it was not the way
of the doughboy. He merely shoved his pack oif upon the
floor and inquired in a quiet, tired voice :

" Anything that you can spare me, missy ? "

He got it. Sandwiches, coffee, the promise of a bath;
finally the bath itself. . . . When the boy — he was
indeed hardly more than a boy despite his six feet of
stature — left the Red Cross colony he had been fairly

124: WITH THE DOUGHBOY IN FRANCE

transformed. He was cleaner, cooler, almost younger,
and seeping over with appreciation.

" It was wonderful," he blurted out. " I'd like to thank
you — in a practical way, sort of. Let me send you some-
thing down from the front - — a souvenir like.77

The Red Cross girl who had first taken him in tow and
to whom he was now talking did not fully comprehend his
remark. Another boy from another Grand Island already
was engrossing her attention. But the word " souvenir "
registered ever and ever so slightly.

" Get me a German/7 she said laughingly and lightly as
she gave him her name, and turned to the boy from the
other Grand Island.

In a few days it came; a sizable pastboard box by
Uncle Sam's own army parcel post over there in France.

The girl opened it quickly. There it all was — the
revolver, the helmet, the wallet, with all the German small
change, the cigarette case, all the small accouterments of a
private in an infantry regiment, even down to the buttons.
In the package was a roughly written little note.

" I was a-going to send you his ears, too,77 it read, " only
our top sergeant didn7t seem to think that ears was a nice
thing to send a lady.77

A chapter of this book could easily be confined to the
episodes — sometimes discouraging and at other times
highly amusing — in the personal histories of the canteen
workers, both men and women. There were many times
when girls rode eight miles in camions to their work,
and many of these girls who were well used to limousines
and who knew naught of trucks until they came to France.
Often those were the lucky times. For there were the
other ones, too, when there was a shortage of camions and
a woman must pull on her rubbers and be prepared to walk
eight or ten miles with a smile on her face, and after that
was done to be on her feet for eight long hours of service.
It was a hard test, but the American girls stood it.

THE DOUGHBOY MOVES TOWARD THE FRONT 125

There were the women in the little out-of-the-way can-
teens who struggled with coal which " acted like coagu-
lated granite," to quote the words of one of them, and re-
fused to ignite, save by patience and real toil. There were
long hours on station platforms feeding men by passing
food through car windows because there was not even time
for the men to alight and enter the canteens. Moreover,
the soldiers had a habit at times of leaving their savings
for a canteen girl to send to the folks at home, and although
this was not a recognized official part of their jobs, and,
in fact, involved a tremendous amount of work, the trust
was not refused. The women workers fussed with these
and many other errands while the coffee brewed and the
chocolate boiled.

In such canteens as those which at first catered to all
of the Allies, the menus were arranged in favor of the
heaviest patronage. For the visiting poilus there was
specialization in French dishes. When the Italians were
expected, macaroni was quite sure to become the piece de
resistance. But for the Yankee boy there has apparently
never been anything to excel or even to equal good white
bread, good ham, and good coffee. French coffee may be
good for the French — far be it from me to decide upon
its merits — but to the American doughboy give a
cup of Yankee coffee, cooked, if you please, in Yankee
style. On such a beverage he can live and work and fight.
And perhaps some of the marvelous quality of our Ameri-
can fighting has been due in no small measure to the good
quality of our American coffee.

Birds will sometimes revisit a country torn and swept
bare by war — even as Picardy and Flanders have been
torn — and so do the flowers creep back gently to cling to
the earth's torn wounds — the shell holes, the trenches, the
gaping walls, seeking to cover the hurts with their soft
camouflage of green and glowing color. The tenderest
sight I saw in bruised Peronne — Peronne which seemed

126 WITH THE DOUGHBOY IN FRANCE

so terribly hurt, even when one came to compare it with
Cambrai, or St. Quentin, or Noyon — was a little new vine
climbing up over the ruins of the parish church; and I
thought of the centuries that the vines had geen growing
over the gothic traceries of Melrose Abbey. Flowers
gathered by the American Army served to decorate the
waysides of France. The folk of that land have no
monopoly of sentiment. Indeed I have often wondered
if ours might not also have been called the sentimental
army as well as the amazing army.

" I know why I am here," said a doughboy who was
passing through Paris on his way toward leave in the
south of France, and when some one asked him the reason,
he replied:

" Because I am fighting for an idea. Our President
says so."

I have disgressed — purposely. We were speaking of
the flowers of France, which grow in such abundance in
her moist and gentle climate. The very flowers that the
boys of the A. E. F. picked when their trains were halted
at the stations — or sometimes between them — were
ofttimes given out by the Red Cross canteeners to other
A. E. F. boys in far greater need of them. For these
were the little costless, priceless tributes which were handed
to the wounded men in the hospital trains that came rolling
softly by the junction stations of the United States Mili-
tary Railroad. And great, hulking men, who perhaps
had given little thought at other times to the flowers under-
foot, then tucked them in their shirts. Men blinded by
gas held them to their faces.

"Wayside!"

The very word holds within its seven letters the sug-
gestion of great and little adventures. It really is the
traveler's own word. Is it not, after all, the special prop-
erty of the wanderer, who reckons the beauty of the world
not by beaten paths alone but by nooks and bypaths?

THE DOUGHBOY MOVES TOWARD THE FRONT 127

To the vocabularies of stay-at-homes or such routine folk
as commuters, for instance, it must remain unknown —
in its real significance. The troops which journeyed across
France from the ports where our gray ships put them
down — the laborers, the poets, the farmers, the business
men who found themselves welded into a great undertaking
and a supreme cause — will never forget the waysides of
France. I mean the waysides that bore over their hospi-
table doors the emblem of the Red Cross and the emblem
of the Stars and Stripes side by side. Sheltered in the
hustle and bustle of railroad stations, in the quiet of
chateau gardens beneath century-old trees and within
Roman walls, they offered rare adventures in friendliness,
in tenderness, in Americanism.

CHAPTER VII

THE RED CROSS ON THE FIELD OF HONOR

THE triage had been set up just outside of a small
church which placed its buttressed side alongside the
market place of the village. It was a busy place. And
just because you may not know what triage really is any
better than I did when I first heard the term, let me
hasten to explain that it is an emergency station set up
by the Army Medical Corps just back of the actual firing
line — that and something more ; for the triage generally
means a great center of Eed Cross activities as well. And
this particular one, in the little village of Noviant, close
behind the salient of Saint Mihiel — to which reference
was made in the preceding chapter — was the initiation
point of a Red Cross captain ; his name is John A. Kimball
and he comes from Boston.

Captain Kimball told it to me one day in Paris, and
I shall try to give much of it to you in his own words.
He was just a plain, regular business fellow who, well
outside of the immediate possibilities of army service,
had closed his desk in Boston and had offered himself to
the Eed Cross. And to work for the Eed Cross at the
front was to face death as an actuality.

" The wounded already were coming in, in good num-
bers, on that unforgetable morning of the twelfth of Sep-
tember, when they brought him in — the first dead man
that I had faced in the war," said he. " We had had our
experiences with handling iodine and antitoxin and dress-
ings, but this artillery captain was in need of none of these.
. . . His feet stuck out underneath the blanket that was
thrown over the stretcher and hid his body, his head, his

128

THE RED CROSS ON THE FIELD OF HONOR 129

arms, and his hands. I saw that his boots were new and
that they had been recently polished, too. Of course they
were muddy, but I remember beneath the caking of the
clay that they were of new leather. One does remember
details at such a time.

" I buried him. It was a new experience, and not a
pleasant one. But war is no holiday ; it is not filled with
pleasant experiences. And sooner or later it brings to a
man a test, which, if disagreeable, is all but supreme.
This was my test. I rose to it. I had to. I buried the
man, ran hastily through his papers first and then sealed
them into a packet to send to those who held him dearer
than life itself."

Because the Boston captain's experience was so typical
of so many other Red Cross men who risked their all in
the service at the front lines of battle, let us take time
to consider it a little in detail. He came to France at
the end of June, 1918. He stayed in Paris and chafed
at the delay in being held back from the fighting front.
In four weeks he received his reward. Having asked to
be made a searcher among killed, wounded, and missing
men, he was assigned to the Second Division at Nancy,
which had just come out of the hard fighting at Soissons
and was resting for a brief week before going into action
again.

The Second Division is one of the notable Divisions of
our fighting forces that entered France. Because one
wishes to avoid invidious comparisons and because, after
all, it is so really hard to decide whether this Division,
this regiment, or that is entitled to go down into history
ahead of its fellows, I should very much hesitate to say
that the Second or the First or the Third or the Twenty-
sixth or the Seventy-seventh or any other one Division was
the ranking Division of our Regular Army. But I shall
not hesitate to write that the Second stood in the front rank.
Out of some 2,800 Distinguished Service medals that had
been awarded in France up to the first of March, 1919,

130 WITH THE DOUGHBOY IN FRANCE

some 800 had gone to this Division. And yet it was but
one of eighty Divisions involved in the conflict over there.

In the Second Division were comprised two of the most
historic Regular Army regiments of other days — the
Ninth and the Twenty-third. The records of each of these
commands in Cuba and in the Philippines are among the
most enthralling of any in our military history. And the
Ninth was the regiment chosen to enter Peking at the close
of the Japanese-Chinese War and there to represent the
United States Government. These regiments before being
sent to the Great War in Europe were recruited up to the
new fighting strength — very largely of boys from the
central and western portions of New York State. In addi-
tion to these two regiments of the former Regular Army,
the Second Division held several of marines, which leaves
neither room nor excuse for comment. The marines too
long ago made their fighting reputation to need any more
whatsoever added by this book.

The Second Division in the earlier days of the fighting
of the American Army as a unit had already made a dis-
tinguished reputation at both Chateau-Thierry and at
Soissons. It was at the first point that Major General
Bundy, who then commanded it, was reputed to have re-
plied to a suggestion from a French commanding officer
that he had better retire his men from an exceptionally
heavy boche fire that they were then facing, that he knew
no way of making his men turn back ; literally they did not
know the command to retreat. Our amazing army was a
machine of many speeds forward, but apparently quite
without a reverse gear.

When Kimball of Boston joined the Second as a Red
Cross worker, General Bundy was just retiring from its
command, and was being succeeded by Brigadier General
John A. Le Jeune, who took charge on the second of August,
at Nancy; for the Division was spending a whole week
catching its breath before plunging into active fighting

THE RED CROSS ON THE FIELD OF HONOR 131

once again. On the ninth its opportunity began to show
itself. It moved to the Toul front in the vicinity of the
Moselle River, and was put into a position just behind the
Saint Mihiel sector — that funny little kink on the battle
front that the Germans had so long succeeded in keeping
a kink.

For a long time — in exact figures just a month, which
to restless fighting men is a near eternity — the sector was
quiet. There were practically no casualties; and this of
itself was almost a record for the Second, which in four
months of real fighting replaced itself with new men to
a number exceeding its original strength. In that month
the Division prepared itself for the strenuous service on the
fighting front. It went into camp for eleven days at
Colombes-la-Belles, within hiking distance of the actual
front, and there practiced hand-grenade work while it made
its final replacements. The work just ahead of it would
require full strength and full skill.

On the twenty-seventh of August it began slowly moving
into the front firing line. From the first day of Septem-
ber until the eighth it worked its way through the great
Bois de Sebastopol (Sebastopol Forest), marching by night
all the while, and covering from eight to nine miles a night.
And upon the night of the eleventh — the eve of one of
the most brilliant battles in American history — took over
a section of the trenches north of the little town of Limey.

" Your objective is Triacourt," the officers told the men
that evening as they were preparing for going over the top
at dawn, " and the Second is given two days in which to
take it"

Triacourt fell in six hours.

Count that, if you will, for an American fighting
Division.

The headquarters of the Second were at Mananville to
the south of the fighting lines. And halfway between
Limey of the trenches (they ran right through the streets

132 WITH THE DOUGHBOY IN FRANCE

of the little town) and Mananville was Noviant where, as
you already know, the triage was established beside the
walls of the church and the Red Cross functioned at the
front. Remember that the triage was nothing more nor
less than a sorting station, where wounded men, being sent
back in a steady stream from the front — three to six
miles distant — were divided between four field hospitals
of the Regular Army service; one handling gassed cases,
another badly wounded, and the other two the strictly sur-
gical cases. Each of these divisions consisted roughly of
from ten to fifteen doctors and about one hundred enlisted
men — no women workers were ever permitted so near
the front — and was equipped with from five to eight army
trucks of the largest size.

There has been sometimes an erroneous impression that
the Red Cross was prepared to assume the entire hospital
functions of the United States Army; I have even heard
it stated by apparently well-informed persons that such a
thing was fact. It is fact, however, that if the enormous
task had been thrust upon the shoulders of our Red Cross
it would have accepted it. It has never yet refused a work
from the government — no matter how onerous or how
disagreeable. As a matter of fact, the army, for many
very good and very sufficient reasons of its own, preferred
to retain direct charge of its own hospitals, both in the field
and back of the lines, and even took over the hospitals
which the Red Cross first established in France before the
final policy of the Surgeon General's office was definitely
settled, which hardly meant a lifting of responsibility from
the shoulders of the American Red Cross. Its task, as we
shall see in the chapters which immediately follow this, was
almost a superhuman one. It needed all its energies and
its great resources to follow the direct line of its traditional
activity — the furnishing of comfort to the sick, the
wounded, and the oppressed.

A wise man, one with canny understanding, if you will,
who found himself at the Saint Mihiel sector would have

THE RED CROSS ON THE FIELD OF HONOR 133

understood that a battle was brewing. There was a ter-
rific traffic on each of the roads leading up toward the
trenches from the railhead and supply depot at the rear —
big camions and little camionettes, two-man whippet tanks,
French seventy-fives (as what is apparently the best field
cannon yet devised will be known for a long time into the
future) , motor cars with important-looking officers, ambu-
lances, more big camions, more little camionettes — all a
seemingly unending procession. Fifth Avenue, New
York, or Michigan Avenue, Chicago, on a busy Saturday
afternoon could not have been more crowded, or the traffic
handled in a more orderly fashion.

The barrage which immediately preceded the actual
battle began at one o'clock on the morning of the twelfth.
It lasted for nearly four hours and not only was noisily in-
cessant but so terrific and so brilliant that one could
actually have read a newspaper from its continuous
flashes if that had been an hour for newspaper reading.

" It was like boiling water," says Kimball, " with each
bubble a death-dealing explosion."

At five o'clock in the morning the men went over the top,
and our Eed Cross man shook himself out of a short,
hard sleep of three hours in a damp shed near the triage
beside the church at Noviant, for it had been raining
steadily throughout the entire night, and went across to
that roughly improvised dressing station. His big day's
work was beginning. By six it was already in full swing.
The first wounded men were coming back from the fighting
lines up at Limey and were being sorted into the ambu-
lances before they were started for the three big evacuation
hospitals in the rear — each of them containing from three
hundred to five hundred beds. The Boston man saw each
wounded soldier as he was placed in the ambulance. Into
the hands of those men who asked for them or who were
able to smoke he gave cigarettes. And to those who were
far too weak for the exercise or strain that smoking
brought, gave a word of encouragement or perhaps a shake

134 WITH THE DOUGHBOY IN FRANCE

of the hand. And all in the name of the Red Cross.

He could have put in a busy day doing nothing else
whatsoever; but felt that there were other sections of the
battle front that needed the immediate presence of the
American Red Cross. So at about half after seven he
climbed in beside the driver of a khaki-colored army
camionette and headed straight for Limey, and the heart of
the trouble. There was another old and badly battered
church in the town square there, and there a new triage
already was being established ; for the Yanks were driving
forward — with fearful impetus and at a terrific rate. So
the hospital went on, the sorting stages, with their inde-
scribable scenes of human suffering — more stretchers and
still more in the hands of boche prisoners coming in with
their ghastly freight. Captain Kimball again passed out
his cigarettes and started forward. Now he was on the
scene of actual warfare. Dawn had broken. It had ceased
to rain and the sky was bright and blue with white, fluffy,
sun-touched clouds drifting lazily across it — just as the
Boston boy had seen them drift across the sky in peaceful
days on Cape Cod when he had had nothing to do but lie on
his back and gaze serenely up at them.

" I plunged forward over the broken field," he told me,
" and there I came across my artillery captain. I called
an aid and we took him back — he of the bright new boots
that had so recently been polished. ... I got back into
the game. All the time our boys shot ahead and the
racket was incessant. Once, when I bumped my way
across the German trenches, I paused long enough to
stick my nose down into -one of their dugouts. It was
easy to see that the'enemy had not anticipated the attack.
For in that dugout — it was wonderfully neat and nice,
with its concrete walls and floors and ceiling and its electric
lights — was the breakfast still upon the table ; the bread,
the sausages, and the beer. I could have stayed there an
hour and enjoyed it pretty well myself. But there were
other things to be done. I got out into the shell-plowed

THE RED CROSS ON THE FIELD OF HONOR 135

fields once again. Across that rough sea of mud an en-
gineer regiment was already building a road, which meant
that we could get a Red Cross ambulance right to the very
front. I walked back to Limey — or rather I stumbled
over the rough fields — and there found one which had
come through from Toul that morning, loaded to its very
roof with bandages and chocolates and cigarettes. And I
found that Triacourt had fallen. It still lacked some
minutes of noon. The job for which our Division had
been given two days had been accomplished in six hours —
but such hours.

" We drove without delay into Triacourt — a fearfully
slow business every foot of it, with every inch of the has-
tily constructed road crowded with traffic. But we got
through and in the early afternoon were in the main street
of the little town which the French had watched hungrily
for four years and seemingly had been unable to capture.
The women and children of the place came out into the
sun-lighted street and rubbed their eyes. Was it all a
dream; these men in tin helmets and uniforms of khaki
and of olive drab ? !No, it could not be a dream. These
were real men, fighting men. These were the Americans,
the Americans of whom rumors had even run back of the
enemy lines. They found their voices, these women, for
the Germans had taken the men of Triacourt as prisoners.

e 'Eons Americains!" they shrieked, almost in a single
cry. And we saluted gravely."

Over the heads of the two Red Cross men — the captain
and the driver of the little camionette — an aftermath of
the battle in the form of an air fight between boche planes
and American was in progress ; young Dave Putnam, one
of the most brilliant of our aces, was making the supreme
sacrifice for his country. To the north the Germans were
dragging up a battery and preparing to shell the little
town that they had just lost; but not for long. Batteries
of American .155's were appearing from the other direction
and were working effectively. And at dusk a report came

136 WITH THE DOUGHBOY IN FRANCE

into Division Headquarters that a company of one of the
old Kegular Army regiments had captured an entire Ger-
man hospital — patients, nurses, doctors, and even two
German Red Cross ambulances; while the tingling radio
and the omnipresent telephone began to bring into Division
Headquarters the story of one of the most remarkable
American victories of the entire war. And our Eed Cross
began the first of a four days' stay in a damp dugout in
the lee of a badly smashed barn.

Kimball's story is quite typical of many others. But
before I begin upon them — what the motion-picture
director would call the " close-ups " of what is perhaps
the most picturesque form of all the many, many pic-
turesque features of our Red Cross in action, consider for
a moment how it first got into action upon the field of
battle. I have referred several times already to the ex-
cessive strain which the great German offensives which
began in March, 1918, placed upon its facilities, while
they still were in a stage of development. When we read
of the work of the Transportation Department and of the
Bureau of Supplies, we saw how both of these great func-
tions had suddenly been confronted with a task that de-
manded the brains and brawn of supermen and how
gloriously and brave-heatedly1 they had arisen to the
task. The field service of our Red Cross — its first con-
tact with the men of our army in actual conflict — was
second to neither of these.

Remember, if you will, that it was but a mere nine
months after the American Red Cross Commission to
Europe landed in France that its organization was put to
its greatest test. The news of the long-expected and well-
advertised German offensive reached Paris on the very
evening of the day on which it started, March 21, 1918.
Paris caught the news with a choking heart. The coup,
which even her own military experts had frankly predicted
as the turning point of the entire war, actually had come

THE RED CROSS ON THE FIELD OF HONOR 137

to pass. No wonder that the once gay capital of the
French fairly held its breath in that unf orgetable hour —
that every other community of France, big or little, did
the same — and fairly fought for news of the day's opera-
tions. Yet news gave little comfort. It was bad news,
all of it; fearfully and unmistakably bad. Each succeed-
ing courier seemed to bring enlarged statements of the
enemy's immensity and seemingly irresistible force. It
was indeed a real crisis.

In that hour of alarm and even of some real panic, our
American Red Cross showed neither. It kept its cool
and thinking head. Major James H. Perkins, then rank-
ing as Red Cross Commissioner to Europe and a man whom
you have met in earlier pages of this book, called a con-
ference of his department heads on that very evening of
the twenty-first of March. He told them quietly that they
were to make known every resource at their command and
to have each and every one of their workers — men or
women — ready for call to any kind of service, night or
day.

" Let every worker feel that on him or her individually
may rest the fate of the allied cause/' was the keynote of
the simple orders that issued from this conference.

It was in the days that immediately followed that the
flexibility and the emergency values of the American Red
Cross organization — qualities that it had diligently set
forth to attain within itself — came to their fullest test.
The discipline and willingness of practically every worker
was also under test, while for the very first time in all its
history overseas it was given large opportunity to carry
to the men of the allied lines a great material message.

How well was that material message carried ?

Before I answer that point-blank question, let me carry
you back a little time before that night of the spring
equinox. Let me ask you to remember, if you will, that
the super-structure of Red Cross effort in that critical

138 WITH THE DOUGHBOY IN FRANCE

hour had been laid many weeks before ; in fact very soon
after its original unit of eighteen men under command of
Major Murphy had first arrived in France. It had experi-
mented with the French, in definite and successful efforts
to relieve the hard-pressed civilian population of that dis-
tressed country. It had worked, and worked hard, in the
broad valleys of the Somme and the Oise, which had been
devastated by the boche when he made his famous " strate-
gic " retreat to the Hindenburg Line in March, 1917 -
just one year before.

The Germans had left behind them an especial misery
in the form of a vast region of burned and blown-up homes,
broken vehicles and farm machinery, defiled wells, hacked
and broken orchards, and ruined soil. I have stood in
both of these valleys myself after German retreats and
so can bespeak as personal evidence the desolation which
they left behind. I, myself, have seen whole orchards of
young fruit trees wantonly ruined by cutting their trunks
a foot or more above the level of the ground. And this
was but a single form of their devilment.

Yet as the Germans retreated " strategically " there in
the spring weeks of 1917, there followed on their very
heels the heavy-hearted but indomitable refugees who in
yesteryear had known these hectares as their very own.
Returning, they found but little by which they might rec-
ognize their former habitats. Devastation ruled, life was
practically extinct. The farm animals, even the barnyard
fowls and the tiny rabbits — the joy of a French peasant's
heart — had been killed or carried away. Not even the
bobbins of the cast-out sewing machines or the cart wheels
were left behind by an enemy who prided himself on his
efficiency, but who had few other virtues for any decent
pride.

Seemingly stouter-hearted folk than the French might
have quailed at such wholesale destruction ; but the refugees
did not complain. Instead, they set patiently to work —
many of them still Within the range of the enemy's

THE RED CROSS OK THE FIELD OF HONOR 139

guns — to rehabilitate themselves. Their burdens and
their problems were staggeringly great; their resources
pitifully small. Thus our Red Cross found them, and
to give them effective aid — not only in the valleys of the
Somme and the Oise, but in the other devastated areas
of France — formed the Bureau of Reconstruction and
Relief under Edward Eyre Hunt. Of Mr. Hunt's work,
the record will be made at another time. In order, how-
ever, that you may gain the proper perspective on the be-
ginnings of the field service of our Red Cross with our
army in action, permit me to call attention in a few brief
sentences to some salient features of the Bureau of Recon-
struction and Relief.

It located warehouses at convenient places — Ham,
Noyon, Arras, and Soissons — all of them within gun-
shot of the Hindenburg Line. These were stocked with
food, clothing, furniture, kitchen utensils, building mate-
rials, seed, farm implements, even with rabbits, chickens,
goats, and other domesticated animals. A personnel of
several field workers was sent into the district to supervise
the distribution of these commodities, which was done
partly through authorized French committees and munici-
pal officers in the devastated towns. These cooperated
with devoted groups of British, French and American
workers, who established themselves in small groups and
who worked to inspire the liberated areas with faith and
courage and hope. Looming large among all these co-
ordinated agencies were the Smith College Unit — com-
posed of graduates of the Northampton institution —
and the group of workers from the Society of Friends —
both of whom, in the fall of 1917, became integral parts
of the Red Cross.

These two coordinated agencies, together with the
Secours d'Urgence, the Village Reconstitue, the Civil
Section of the American Fund for the French Wounded,
the Philadelphia Unit, and the Comite Americaine pour
les Regiones Devastees, had their various operations well

140 WITH THE DOUGHBOY IN FRANCE

under way by the early summer of 1917. When it entered
the field, our American Red Cross offered assistance in
every way to these organizations, thereby giving a new im-
petus to their work. Agricultural societies were organized
for the common rehabilitation of the areas, American
tractors and plows were furnished by the French Govern-
ment, while the Red Cross workers helped with and encour-
aged the planting, furnishing large quantities of seeds as
they did so, while small herds of live stock, also given by
the Red Cross, appeared here and there upon the French
landscape.

The workers did even more. They turned to and helped
patch up buildings that, with a minimum amount of labor,
could again be made habitable, erected small barracks in
some places, and assisted generally in renewing life and the
first bare evidences of civilization in the towns of the deso-
lated sections.

In March, 1918, these desecrated lands were just spring-
ing to life once again. God's sun was breaking through
the clouds of winter and gently coaxing the wheat up out
of the rough, brown lands, gardens again dotted the land-
scape — the Smith College Unit itself had supervised and
with its own hands helped in the planting of more than
four hundred and fifty of these — the little villages and the
bigger towns were showing increasing signs of life and
activity; then came the blow. The clouds gathered
together once again. And in the misty morning of the
twenty-first of March began a week of horror and devas-
tation — a single seven days in which all the patient,
loving labor of nearly a twelvemonth past was erased
completely. The Germans swept across the plains of
Picardy once again — the French and British armies and
the terror-stricken civilians along with the American war
workers were swept before them as flotsam and jetsam,
all in a mad onrush. Yet all was not lost. One field
worker, a stout-hearted little woman in uniform, sat in the

fe 2 »
O tg£

THE RED CROSS ON THE FIELD OF HONOR 141

seat of a swaying motor truck and as the thing rolled
and tossed over a road of unspeakable roughness wrote in
her red-bound diary, this:

" The best of all remains — the influence of neighbor-
liness, friendship, kindness, and sympathy — these are
made of the stuff which no chemistry of war can crush.
We face more than half a year's work torn to pieces.
But I do believe that the fact of this sacrifice will deepen
its effect."

Such was the spirit of our Red Cross workers overseas.

They now had full need for such spirit. The monotony
of working from daylight to dusk in lonely farms and
villages, where patience was the virtue uppermost, was
now to be replaced by a whirl of events which succeeded
one another with kaleidoscopic rapidity, demanding serv-
ice both night and day of a character as varied as the
past had been colorless.

The headquarters of the American Red Cross for the
Somme district on the morning of the twenty-first of
March, 1918, were at Ham — the little village once made
famous by the imprisonment and escape of Louis Philippe.
They were in charge of Captain William B. Jackson, who
afterwards became major in entire charge of the Army
and Navy Field Service. Here at Ham was also the
largest Red Cross warehouse in the entire district. An-
other warehouse stood at !Nelse, a few miles distant, to
the rear. To the north was Arras, with still another
American Red Cross storehouse, while to the south was the
Soissons warehouse.

On that same morning — one cannot easily efface it
from any picture of any continued activity of the Great
War — the Smith College Unit workers had gone from
their headquarters at Grecourt, both on foot and in their
four Ford cars, to their various tasks in the seventeen
small villages in the immediate vicinity. Two or three of
these young women journeyed to Pommiers, a little town in

142 WITH THE DOUGHBOY IN FRANCE

the area, whose school had been reopened by them, and
which also served the children of several surrounding vil-
lages. And because so many of the children had to walk
so far to their lessons the Red Cross served them each day
with a substantial school lunch — of vermicelli, chocolate,
and milk. A few others of the college graduates went a
little farther afield — to supervise planting operations in
near by towns — yet not one of these girls was one whit
above turning to and working on the task with her own
hands, while some helped the Red Cross workmen's gangs
roofing houses and stables, repairing shops and fitting out-
buildings, in some crude form, for human habitation.

Into the very heart of those varied activities that March
morning marched the red-faced British Town Major of
Ham with the blunt and crisp announcement to the Red
Cross man that the town must be evacuated without delay ;
the reitreat already was well under way, the vast hegira
fairly begun. . . . The Red Cross force there at Ham did
not hesitate. It first sent word to all the workers in the
villages roundabout; then, having quickly mobilized in
the town square its entire transportation outfit — three
trucks, a camionette, and a small battered touring car —
gave quiet, prompt attention to its own immediate problem
of evacuation work.

It functioned fast and it functioned extremely well.
Back and forth across the River Somme — over the rough
bridges hurriedly builded by Americans for the British
Army — it transported hundreds and hundreds of chil-
dren and infirm refugees. All that day, all that night, and
well into the next morning it worked, driving again and
again into the bombarded towns in the region to bring out
the last remaining families. The Germans were already
on the edge of the town when one Red Cross driver made
his last trip into Ham — on three flat tires and a broken
spring! Yet despite these physical disabilities succeeded
in carrying six wounded British soldiers out to safety.

To our Red Cross the Smith College girls reported, with

THE RED CROSS ON THE FIELD OF HONOR 143

great promptitude. And throughout the entire succeeding
week — a deadly and fearfully depressing seven days of
continued retirement before the advancing Germans —
showed admirable courage and initiative ; the sort of thing
that the military expert of to-day classes as morale of the
highest sort. These women worked night and day setting
up, whenever the retreat halted even for a few hours, tem-
porary canteens and dispensaries and evacuating civilians
and carrying wounded soldiers through to safe points be-
hind the lines. And because many of these last were
American soldiers they formed the first point of field con-
tact between our Eed Cross and our army and so are fairly
entitled to a post of high honor in the pages of this book.

" Send me another sixty of those Smith College girls,"
shouted an American brigadier general from his field
headquarters in the fight at Chateau-Thierry. " This
forty isn't half enough. I want a hundred."

The college graduate in charge of the temporary can-
teen there who received this request laughed.

" Tell him," she said, " that there have been no more
than sixteen at any one time."

But sixteen human units of individual efficiency can
move mountains.

Take the Smith girl who drove a Bed Cross car through
the tangle of war traffic at a crossroads near Boye, while
the fighting waged thick around about that little town.
She found her Fordette stalled and tangled in several dif-
ferent lines of communication; between ammunition
trucks, supply camions, loads of soldiers, batteries —
all, like herself, stopped and standing idle and impotent.

The girl sensed the situation in an instant. She must
have been a JSTew Yorker and have remembered the jams
of traffic that she had seen on Forty-second Street; at
Broadway and again at Fifth Avenue. At any rate she
acted upon the instant. She descended from the seat of
her little car, and, standing there at the crossing of the

WITH THE DOUGHBOY IN FRANCE

roads with an American flag in her fingers, directed
traffic with the precision and good sense of the skilled
city traffic cop. She held up staff cars, directed whole
regiments of artillery, shouted orders to convoys, and for
several hours kept the important corner from becoming
another hopeless tangle of traffic. Her orders were not
disputed, either by private or general. All ranks smiled
at her, but all ranks saluted and obeyed her orders.

It was in situations such as this that the rare combina-
tion of military discipline, the flexibility to permit of
human initiative that the Red Cross sought to attain in
its inner self, showed itself. The plan of withdrawal
which had been carefully mapped out at headquarters was
implicitly followed — almost to its last details. Yet the
personnel of the organization was both permitted and en-
couraged to work at its highest efficiency both in evacuating
human beings and salvaging the precious supplies. For
instance, after that first day of the great retreat, when all
the Red Cross workers in the area had reported to their
chiefs at Nelse and at Roye — both well to the rear of
Ham — they were dispatched to work up and down
the entire constantly changing front. Geographically,
Soissons was the hub of the wheel on which these emer-
gency Red Cross activities turned so rapidly. They all
swung back in good order, each unit, by motor-courier
service, keeping in communication with its fellows. Roye
was the center of the secondary line of the Red Cross
front which for the moment stretched from Amiens in
the northwest to Soissons in the southeast. When it was
driven from this line the entire Red Cross force in the
vicinity retired, still in good order, to a brand-new one,
stretching across Amiens, Montdidier, and Noyon. From
the small American Red Cross warehouse at this last town,
a stock of valuable supplies was quickly evacuated to Las-
signy, a short distance still farther to the rear. Noyon
quickly became a center of feverish activity and the focus
of Red Cross efforts on the third day of the battle. From

THE RED CROSS ON THE FIELD OF HONOR 145

it Red Cross cars worked, both day and night, evacuating
men and women and goods.

The line held across Montdidier, RToyon, and even
Lassigny for a bare twenty-four hours more; for on the
fourth day of the retreat all three had to be abandoned,
and new quarters established on a line closer to Paris
than any of the others; it passed through both Beauvais
and Compiegne, where emergency Red Cross headquarters
were once again established; but for the last time. This
line was destined to be a permanent one. The retreat was
slowing down, slowly but very surely halting. And our
Eed Cross with our Yanks and their Allies were " dig-
ging in."

The impressions which the great German drive made
upon the minds of our workers who fell back before it
will remain with them as long as thought and memory
cling — the vast conglomeration of men, tired, dirty, un-
shaven; men and animals and inanimate things, moving
quickly, slowly, intermittently, moving not at all, but
choking and halting all progress — with the deadly per-
versity of inanimate things; men not merely tired, dirty
and unshaven, but sick and wounded almost unto death,
moaning and sobbing under the fearful onslaughts of pain
unbearable, sometimes death itself, a blessed relief, and
marked by a stop by the roadside, a hurriedly dug grave,
prayers, the closing earth, one other soul gone from the
millions in order that hundreds of millions of other souls
may live in peace and safety. Such traffic, such turmoil,
such variety, such blinding, choking dust. Army supply
trains, motor trucks, guns, soldiers, civilians, on foot and
mounted, of vehicles of every variety conceivable and
many unconceivable; motor cars upon which the genius
of a Renault or a Ford had been expended ; wheelbarrows,
baby carriages, sledges, more motor cars, ranging in age
from two weeks to fourteen years, dog carts, wagons
creaking and groaning behind badly scared mules and

146 WITH THE DOUGHBOY IN FRANCE

worse scared negroes who wondered why they had ever
left the corn brake — for this. Such traffic, such life.
And then — again and again death, more graves, more
prayers, more men's souls poured into the vague unknown.

And in the midst of death, life. Here in this wagon
is a haggard-looking woman. The babe which she clasps
to her breast is but four hours old; but the woman is a
hundred — seemingly. She stretches her long, bare arms
out from the flapping curtains at the rear of the Red Cross
camionette. A group of poilus, in extremely dirty uni-
forms, catches her eyes. She shrieks to them in her native
French.

" My poilus," she cries, " you shall return. God wills
it. You shall return — you and my little son/7 and falls,
sobbing incoherently, into the bottom of the bumping
ambulance.

An old woman with her one precious possession saved
— a bewhiskered goat — hears her, and crosses herself.
A three-ton motor truck falls into a deep ditch and is
abandoned, with all of its contents. This is no hour for
salvage. The dust from -all the traffic grows thicker and
thicker. Yet it is naught with the blinding white dust
which arises from this shell — which almost struck into the
heart of one of the main lines of traffic. The racket is
terrific; yet above it one catches the shrieking cry of the
young mother in the camionette. Her reason hangs in
the balance. And as the noise subsides a detachment of
poilus falls out beside the roadside and begins opening
more graves. The bodies aim was quite as good as he
might have hoped.

In and out of these streams — this fearful turmoil of
traffic, if you please, our Red Cross warped and woofed
its fabric of human godlike love and sympathy. With its
headquarters established with a fair degree of permanency
both at Compiegne and Beauvais, it increased its atten-
tion to the soldiery. It set up a line of canteens and soup-

THE RED CROSS ON THE FIELD OF HONOR 147

kitchens along the roadside all the way from Beauvais,
and these served as many as 30,000 men a day with hot
drinks, cigarettes, and food of a large variety, and showed
a democratic spirit of service in that they gave, without
question or without hesitation, to Frenchmen, to Britons,
to Italians, and to Americans alike. The men and the
girls in the canteens were blind to things, but their ears
were ever alert, and they heard only the voices of the
tired and the distressed asking for food and drink.

At Compiegne the Bed Cross took over the largest hotel,
which, like the rest of the town, had been evacuated so
hurriedly that parts of a well-cooked meal still remained
upon the tables of the great salle-a-manger. Instantly it
rubbed its magic lamp and transformed the hostelry into
a giant warehouse, infirmary, and, for its own workers, a
mess hall and barracks. And as the endless convoys rolled
by its doors and down into the narrow, twisting, stone-
paved streets of Compiegne, these workers stood at the
curb opening up case ofter case of canned foodstuffs and
tossed or thrust the cans into the waiting fingers of the
half-starved drivers of the trucks and camions.

Individual initiative — that precious asset of every
American — had its fullest opportunity those days at
Compiegne. It mattered not what a man had been or
what he might become; it was what he made of himself
that very hour that counted. A minister who had come
over from America to do chaplain service for the army
bruised his poor unskilled fingers time and time again as
he struggled, with the help of a clerk from the Paris offices,
with the stout packing cases. Departmental and bureau
lines everywhere within the Bed Cross had been abolished
in order to meet the supreme emergency. Bank melted
quickly away before the demand for manual labor. The
Bed Cross showed the flexibility of its organization, and
Compiegne was, in itself, a superb test.

It was down at the railroad station in that same fas-
cinating, mediaeval city of old France that a portable

148 WITH THE DOUGHBOY IN FRANCE

kitchen, hauled out on the great north road up from
Paris, with three American business men fresh from their
desks in New York, hanging perilously on to its side like
volunteer fire laddies of long ago going on old " Rough
and Ready " to a regular whale of a blaze, was set up
on the exact spot where one Jeanne d'Arc once had been
taken prisoner. Its mission of salvation was far more
prosaic ; yet, in its own humble way, it too functioned, and
functioned extremely well. It served food and hot drinks
to more than ten thousand soldiers each day.

The variety of opportunity, of service to be rendered,
was hardly less than stupendous. For instance, when word
came to Compiegne from Ressons that the French would
finally be compelled to evacuate their hospital there and
lacked the proper transportation facilities, our Red Cross
stepped promptly into the breach and moved out the pre-
cious supplies. It did not ask whether or not there were
American boys there in the wards of the French hospital
— there probably were, the two armies being brigaded to-
gether pretty closely at that time ; it sought no fine distinc-
tions — in that time, in that emergency, the French were
us, we were the French — and so sent its trucks hurrying
up to Ressons, equipped with a full complement of work-
ers. And these worked until the retreating Allies had
established a third line in the rear of them and the advanc-
ing Germans were but two hours away.

All this while the transformed hotel at Compiegne re-
mained a huge center for these multifold forms of Red
Cross relief. It, too, formed a clearing house for assist-
ance. Its ears were alert to the vast necessities of the
moment. They listened for opportunities of service.
There were many such. A refugee brought word that an
old couple in a farmhouse full ten miles distant had no
way of retreating before the onrushing Germans. With-
out a minute's delay a camionette was dispatched to the
spot and it brought the weeping, grateful pair and most of

THE RED CROSS ON THE FIELD OF HONOR 149

their personal belongings to safety; while other cars were
sent in various directions to seek out the opportunites of
performing similar services. ... As this situation eased
itself, this transportation equipment was turned toward
the carrying of supplies and tobacco to the weary men of
isolated batteries and units along the ever changing battle
front. It was an almost unceasing task, and the few
short hours that the Ked Cross workers forced themselves
into an all-necessary sleep were all spent in the caves and
dbris of Compiegne; for the boche aviators had an un-
pleasant habit of making frequent nocturnal visits to it.

At Beauvais, simultaneous with the establishment of
the headquarters at Compiegne, the American Eed Cross
opened both military and civilian hospitals, together with
a rest station of some three hundred beds for slightly
wounded soldiers and for casuals; as men detached from
their units are generally known. Over a bonfire in a
small hut the workers cooked food and served it hot to
the soldiers and the refugees. In fact this town had been
made a clearing station for these last. Each incoming
train brought more and more of these pitiful folk into
the town, where they were halted for a time before being
sent on other trains to the districts of France quite remote
from any immediate possibility of invasion. In the few
hours which refugees spent in Beauvais our Eed Cross
made some definite provision for their comfort. It se-
cured a huge building, obtained several tons of hay, and
after establishing a rough form of bus service with its
motor cars, transported them from the station to its hastily
transformed barracks for a night's rest, and then, on the
following morning, back to the railway station and the out-
going trains to the south and west. And with the bar-
racks and the hay cots went blankets and food, of course.
It was crude comfort; but it was infinitely better than
spending the night on the stone floor of a damp and un-
heated railroad station.

150 WITH THE DOUGHBOY IN FRANCE

At RTiort, where a small store of Red Cross supplies had
been sent to a designated delegate, the delegate on an
hour's notice fed four hundred refugees, while at Clermont
the American Red Cross supplied food to a nunnery that
had opened its doors to refugees. So it went. The variety
of services was indeed all but infinite; while through the
entire nightmare of activity, the workers were thrust upon
their own initiative — that precious American birthright,
— time and time again. Their only orders were short
ones; they were to help any one and every one in need
of assistance.

How the French viewed this aid and how they came to
rely upon it, is best illustrated, perhaps, by the testimony
of a hardware merchant of Soissons whose house had been
shelled. Without hesitation he came direct to the Red
Cross headquarters for help, saying:

" I come to you first because it has become natural for
us to go to the Americans first when we are in need."

And from a refugee station near Peronne, a Red Cross
worker reported:

" They are all looking to me, as a representative of the
American Red Cross, to act as a proper godfather."

As the days passed, the work in this vital area was
greatly expanded and increased. The refugees gradually
were evacuated through to Paris and beyond, while the
service in the valleys of the Somme and the Oise became
more strictly military in character. It became better or-
ganized, too. But I feel that this last is not the point.
We Americans are rather apt to place too great a stress
upon organization. And the fact remains that the Red
Cross in its first military emergency, with very little or-
ganization, indeed, attained a proficiency in service far
greater than even its most optimistic adherents had ever
dreamed it might attain.

I have turned the course of my book for a time away
from the direct service of our Red Cross to our own army

THE RED CROSS ON THE FIELD OF HONOR 151

because I wanted you to see how and where that direct-
service field was founded. Erom that beginning, at the
start of the German drive, it grew rapidly and steadily
and, as I have just said, with certain very definite benefits
of organization. The drive halted, became a thing of
memory, was supplanted by another drive — of a different
sort and in the opposite direction — a drive that did not
cease and hardly halted until the eleventh day of Novem-
ber, 1918. That was the drive so brilliantly marked with
those epoch-making tablets of the superb romance of our
American adventure overseas — Chateau-Thierry, Veaux,
Saint Mihiel, the Argonne — many other conflicts, too.

In all of these the American Red Cross played its part,
and seeks no greater testimony than that so generously vol-
unteered by the very men who received its benefits — the
doughboys at the front. They know, and have not been
hesitant to tell. My own sources of information are for
the most part a bit official — the records made by the Ked
Cross workers in the field. These tell more eloquently
than I can of the work that was done there and so I shall
quote quite freely from them.

" My billet has stout cement walls, a mighty husky
ceiling and a dirt floor," writes Lieutenant J. H. Gibson
of Caldwell, Idaho, who was attached to the Thirty-third
Division. " The furniture consists of my cot and sundry
goods boxes, camouflaged with blankets to make seats, and
I have frequent callers. Generally they are casuals -
men who have lost their organizations and don't know
where to go or what to do. I had three of them the first
day, footsore, weary, and homesick. I rustled them a
place to get mess, loaded them into my car, and drove them
to the nearest railroad railhead, where I found a truck
belonging to their Division, stopped it, and got them
aboard."

Under date of October 13, 1918, Lieutenant Gibson fur-
ther wrote:

" This has been another of those days spent most in

152 WITH THE DOUGHBOY IN FRANCE

quarters, busy with paper work. I find a thundering lot
of letter writing necessary in connection with my Eed
Cross duties. I am the Home Communication and Home
Service Representative for the Division in addition to being
division ' scrounger.' When any of the folks back home
want information about their soldier boys I am supposed
to furnish it and, vice versa, when any of the soldier boys
have home problems I am expected to help them. While I
am resting I act as Division shopper, for fighting men need
things just the same as ordinary mortals, and I take their
orders, have the goods bought through the Red Cross in
Paris, and distribute them, collecting the money. When
the Division is in action I administer comfort to the
wounded in addition to gathering data as to the deaths.
Between times I scout roads, carry dispatches, and help the
sanitary train generally. If the devil has work only for
idle hands he can pass me by.

" At dressing stations we endeavor to do two things ; to
re-dress the wounds and to administer some nourishment.
The men wounded have received first aid treatment on tho
field or at the battalion-aid post and they walk or are car-
ried on litters to the dressing station. There we put them
into ambulances or trucks and they go out to the evacuation
hospitals. My part of the job was the nourishment end,
and so I got a detail of men, improvised a fire, stole a water
bucket from another Division which had more than it
needed, opened up some rations, and soon was serving hot
coffee, bread, and jam to the wounded, endeavoring the
while to kid a grin into the face of each. The last was the
easiest job for our fellows were sure gritty. I think I
batted a thousand per cent on the smile end of the game."

Under date of October 24, 1918:

" Back from Paris. I rolled out fairly early and got
my boxes opened. The boys certainly appreciate the Red
Cross shopping service and fairly swarmed in after the
articles we had procured for them. There was everything
imaginable in the lot — watches, boots, cigars, cigarettes,

THE RED CROSS ON THE FIELD OF HONOR 153

and candy being the prime favorites. One buddy had a
mandolin and another some French grammars. I was
overwhelmed and had to get an assistant detailed, for in
addition to making deliveries I had to take orders.
Every one wanted to order something. About sixty-five
additional orders were placed to-day and I didn't even have
time to open my mail."

A week later :

" I spent the day at my billet, busy with the correspond-
ence which my position with the Red Cross necessitates and
which, by the way, is a little difficult to handle in view of
the fact that I am minus every convenience. Letter files,
index cards, guides, and cabinets are about as scarce as
hen's teeth. It is wonderful, however, just what a man
can do without. A small goods box will make a very pass-
able letter file, and a cigar box, the kind that fifty come in,
can be made into a reasonably useful card-index tray. I
was wise enough to bring a small typewriter from the
states and it has proven absolutely indispensable. . . .
The men are in rest billets and the delouser and shower
baths are busy cleaning them up. The men come in
squads to the building which houses the equipment, strip
off their clothing which goes to the delouser, where they
are dry-baked at a temperature sufficiently high to kill the
nits. While this is being done they are thoroughly scrub-
,bing themselves, and when they are through with the bath,
their clothes are finished and ready to be put on. The Red
Cross never did a better thing than when it furnished this
equipment to my division."

Permit me to interrupt Lieutenant Gibson's narrative to
explain in somewhat greater detail the operation of these
Red Cross portable cleansing plants which added so greatly
to the comfort of the doughboys, not only in the field, but,
in many cases, in rest billets or camps far back from it.
It so happened that many times the men in the front lines
would go weeks and even a full month without the oppor-
tunity of a decent bath. Such is war. It is a known fact

154 WITH THE DOUGHBOY IN FRANCE

that the boys of the Third Division once spent a full five
weeks in the trenches without even changing their clothes,
after which they were sent behind to a Ked Cross cleansing
station and bathed and refitted with clean clothing before
being sent back again — with what joy and refreshment
can easily be imagined.

The type of portable shower used in many cases was
generally known as the " eight-headshower " or field
douche. It consisted of a simply designed water tank
with fire box, in which might be burned coal or wood, a
pipe line with eight sprays, and flooring under the sprays.
The thing was easily adjusted. In a building with water
supply it was a simple matter indeed to connect the tank
with the water supply; while in the open field, where
there might be neither water pressure nor water connection,
the precious fluid could be poured into the tank with
buckets. The apparatus was durable and reasonably
" fool-proof."

During the Chateau-Thierry drive nine of these port-
able showers were set up by our Eed Cross, and in one
week, seven thousand men were brought back from the
firing line, bathed, given clean clothes, and sent back re-
freshed mentally and morally as well as physically. Sixty
men an hour could easily be bathed in one of these plants,
and two gallons of water were allowed to each man.

The delouser, as the army quickly came to know the
sterilizing plant, almost always accompanied the portable
shower upon its travels. It, too, was a simple contraption ;
a great cylinder, into which the dirty clothing was tightly
crammed until it could hold not one ounce more, and live
steam poured in, under a pressure of from sixty to one
hundred and fifteen pounds to the square inch. This was
sufficient to kill all the vermin ; and, in some cases, the bac-
teria as well, although this last was not guaranteed. The
delouser, with a capacity of fifty suits a day, could almost
keep pace with one of the shower baths, and both could be
set up or taken down in ten minutes.

THE RED CROSS ON THE FIELD OF HONOR 155

A shower bath mounted on a Ford was one of the best
friends of the Eighty-first Division as it played its big part
in the defeat of the Hun. It made its first appearance in
September, when the Division was stationed in the Vosges,
with headquarters at St. Die. After a few hard days in
the trenches the men would return to their headquarters,
well to the rear of the lines, and beg for some sort of bathing
facilities — and these, apparently, were not to be found.

Captain Richard A. Bullock was our Red Cross man
with the Eighty-first. It bothered him that the men of
his Division could not have so simple a comfort when they
asked for it and needed it so much. He determined to try
and solve the problem, and so found his way down to the big
American Red Cross warehouse and there acquired one of
the portable field equipments such as I have just described.
It was a comparatively easy trick to mount the device on a
Eord, after which Bullock paraded the entire outfit up and
down the lines of the Eighty-first and as close to the front-
line trenches as fires were ever permitted. In a mighty
short time he could get the bath in order and showering
merrily, and when all the men who wanted to bathe had
been accommodated the contraption would move on.

For the camps where larger numbers of men must be
bathed, the Red Cross, through its Mechanical Equipment
Service of its Army and Navy Department, provided even
larger facilities, although still of standardized size and
pattern. This was known as the pavilion bath and disin-
fecting plant and could easily take care of 150 an hour.
Where the sterilization of their clothing was not necessary
this number was very greatly increased. In fact at one
time a record was made in one of the large field camps of
bathing 608 men in two hours through a single one of these
plants. In another, which was in operation at the Third
Aviation Center, 3,626 men bathed in one week in a total
of twenty-eight operating hours and some 4,200 men in the
second week. It was estimated that the plants could, if

156 WITH THE DOUGHBOY IN FRANCE

necessary, be operated a full twenty-four hours a day ; but
even on the part-time basis it was an economical comfort.
It required the services of a sergeant and three privates —
whose time cost nothing whatsoever — to operate it, and,
based on fuel costs, each man bathed at an expense, to the
Red Cross, of less than one cent.

They were handled with military simplicity and expedi-
tion. The men, told off into details, entered the first room

— the entire outfit was housed in a standardized Red
Cross tent of khaki — where they removed their clothes
and placed them within the sterilizer, then went direct into
the bath. While they bathed their garments were cleansed,
sterilized, and dried, and the two functions were so syn-
chronized that the clothes were ready as quickly as the men

— and the entire process completed within the half hour.

Return, if you will, for a final minute with Gibson of
the Red Cross, up with the Thirty-third Division at the
front. I find a final entry in his diary record of his
activities nearly three weeks after the signing of the armis-
tice; to be ex«act, on November 29. It runs after this
fashion :

" A couple of days before Thanksgiving I accompanied
the Division Graves Registration Officer to the woods north
of Verdun where our Division had been heavily engaged
during the month of October and where we had quite a
list of missing. The fighting had been intense through
these woods, portions of them changing hands five or six
times in the course of three weeks, and naturally it was
impossible to keep careful track of all the brave fellows
who fell. Delving into the earth, uncovering rotten
corpses, and searching for proper marks of identity is as
gruesome and as horrible a job as could be imagined and I
must confess my nerve was a bit shattered at the close of
the second day. . . ."

Yet not all the work of the Division men of the Red Cross
was gruesome and horrible. The war had its humors as

THE RED CROSS ON THE FIELD OF HONOR 157

well as tragedies, major and minor. For instance, how
about the job of the Red Cross man with the Seventy-
seventh Division, when he found himself asked to become
stage manager for a troup of seventeen girls — real girls,
mind you, none of them the make-believe thing with bass
voices and flat feet. He, like many of his fellows, found
that the hardest part of his job came after the signing of
the armistice, when time hung heavy indeed upon the
hands of the doughboys and to keep them occupied was a
task worthy of the best thoughts of men — and angels.
The mere job of serving coffee and chocolate from the can-
teens, establishing reading rooms, and distributing cig-
arettes, magazines, and newspapers ceased to be sufficient.
The boys were fairly " fed up " with these things. And
with the continued rain and mud and damp of Manonville
getting upon the nerves of the Seventh, they demanded
something new and mighty good in the way of amusement.

Captain Biernatzki was the Red Cross man with the
Division. He quickly sensed the situation, and, taking his
little motor car, drove to Toul not far distant, and, as you
already know, a Red Cross center of no small importance.
He began at once signing up dramatic talent among the
American Red Cross girls there in the canteens and the hos-
pitals, and after securing motor transportation for the entire
troupe, bore it north to his own Division. The officers of
the Seventh were in on the plan and heartily supported it,
and as an earnest of their support had the visiting ladies of
the Red Cross Road Company No. 1 lunch at a special and
wonderful mess on the occasion of their Thespian debut.

" One of the girls was a wonderful singer," said Bier-
natzki afterward in describing the incident. " Another
proved a marvel in handling the men, making them sing
and keeping them laughing, and there were one or two
others, too, who did their bit in a most creditable manner.
One of our troupe had brought a clothes basket full of fudge
which was thrown out to a forest of waving palms, while
the remaining members of the party were sufficiently decor-

158 WITH THE DOUGHBOY IN FRANCE

ative and charming to put the finishing touches to the affair
by their mere presence."

It seems a far cry from the Red Cross extending succor
to a man wounded on the field of battle toward staging a
show in a big rest camp, yet I am not sure that the last,
in its way, did not do its part toward the winning of the
war quite as much as the first.

Of course our American Red Cross was not primarily
represented in canteen work in the actual zones of fighting ;
this function, by the ruling of the United States Army and
the War Department, you will perhaps remember, was
given almost entirely to the Young Men's Christian Asso-
ciation and to the Salvation Army. There were, however,
a few exceptions to this general rule. For instance, at
Colombes-les-Belles, an important aviation station, ten or
twelve miles south of Toul, I saw a very complete Red
Cross equipment at a field camp which at no time was far
removed from the front-line fighting. It consisted of a
canteen, which served as high as from two thousand to three
thousand men a day, and even as late as March, 1919, was
still serving from seven to eight hundred ; an officers' club,
to which was attached an officers' mess, feeding some sev-
enty men a day, and a billeting barracks for the nine Red
Cross women stationed at the place. There also was a
huge hangar which, with a good floor and appropriate
decorations, had been transformed into a corking amuse-
ment center. This last was not under the direct charge of
the American Red Cross, yet our Red Cross girls were the
chief factors in making it go. They danced there night
after night with our boys. In fact, in order to have suffi-
cient partners, it was necessary to scour the country for
twenty miles roundabout with motor cars and bring in all
the Red Cross and Y. M. C. A. girls that were available.
It seems that it really is part of a Red Cross girl's job to be
on her feet eight hours a day and then to dance full ten
miles each night.

This Colombes-les-Belles canteen originally had been

THE RED CROSS ON THE FIELD OF HONOR 159

established in the very heart of the grimy little village, but
when the Twenty-eighth (Pennsylvania) Division came to
the place on the thirteenth of January, 1919, it took the
old canteen structure for division headquarters, but squared
the account by building the Red Cross a newer and bigger
canteen group in the open field.

" I can't give too much praise to the Red Cross personnel
that have been assigned to this particularly isolated spot,"
the colonel in charge of the flying field told me on the occa-
sion of my visit to it. " I know that the women must have
been fearfully lonely out here; but they have never com-
plained. On the contrary, they have given generously and
unstintingly of their own time and energies in order that
time should not hang heavily upon the hands of the men.
The problem of amusement for the aviator is a peculiarly
difficult one. He has actually only two or three hours of
service each day, and the rest of his waking hours he must
be kept ready and fit, mentally as well as physically, for his
job, which requires all that a man may possess of nerve and
judgment and quick wit. The Red Cross women quickly
came to sense this portion of our problem and in helping in
its assistance they have been of infinite assistance."

Yet, while service in a field camp such as this at Col-
ombes-les-Belles represents a high degree of fidelity and
persistence and, in many, many cases, real courage as well,
the real test of high courage for the Red Cross man, as well
as for the soldier, came in the trenches or the open fighting,
which, in the case of our Yanks, was brought in the final
weeks and months of the war to supplant the intrenched
lines of the earlier months. Here was a man, a canteen
worker for the American Red Cross, who suddenly found it
his job to hold the hand of a boy private of a Pennsylvania
regiment while the surgeon amputated his arm at the shoul-
der. War is indeed a grim business. The Red Cross
workers in the field saw it in its grimmest phases; but
spared themselves many of its worst horrors by virtue of

160 WITH THE DOUGHBOY IN FRANCE

forgetting themselves and their nerves in the one possible
way — in hard and unrelenting work, night and day. They
found unlimited possibilities for service — now as canteen
workers and now as ambulance drivers, again as stretcher
bearers, as assistants to the over-burdened field surgeons, as
couriers or even as staff officers, and fulfilled these possibili-
ties with a quickness, a skill, and a desire that excited the
outspoken admiration of the army men who watched them.

I said a good deal at the beginning of this chapter about
the Second Division and the work of young Captain Kim-
ball, of Boston, with it. The Second — which was very
well known to the home nation across the seas — had an
earnest rival in the First, made up almost entirely of
seasoned troopers of the Regular Army. And Captain
George S. Karr, who was attached to the First, had some
real opportunities of seeing the work of the Red Cross in
the field, himself.

" It was when our Division was on the Montdidier front
and preparations were being made for the American offen-
sive against Cantigny," says Captain Karr. " One of the
commanding officers called at the outpost station where I
made my headquarters and asked if I could get him three
thousand packages of cigarettes, the same number of sticks
of chocolate, lemons, and tartar ic acid for the wounded who
would be coming in within the next few hours. It was
necessary to deliver these in Chrepoix, where the outpost
was located, within twenty-four hours.

" Lieutenant Bero of the outpost station and I went to
the Red Cross headquarters at Beauvais, but found that we
would have to get the things from Paris and that that would
be practically impossible within the time limit. However,
we decided to make a try for it, and so left Beauvais in a
small camion at 10 :30 o'clock in the evening. At a rail-
road station on the way we had a collision that did for our
camion completely. Fortunately there were no serious in-
juries. We left the disabled car by the roadside about

THE RED CROSS ON THE FIELD OF HONOR 161

halfway to Paris and begged a ride on a French truck that
happened along. We reached Paris at 4 :30 Sunday morn-
ing. Red Cross officers had to be aroused and tradesmen
routed out — no easy task on a Sunday morning — but
we had to have the supplies, and so did it. By 9 :30 we
had a new camion, already loaded with cigars and cig-
arettes from the Red Cross warehouse, and lemons and
tartaric-acid tablets from the shops of Paris.

" About a quarter of the way back we had trouble with
the new camion and had to call for help again. This un-
pleasant and delaying experience was twice repeated; so
that, in fact, the entire load was thrice transferred before
it was finally delivered. But — please notice this — the
entire camion load of supplies was delivered at Chrepoix
- two hours later than the allotted time, to be sure, but
still in plenty of time to serve the purpose. Several days
later I found two boys in one of the hospitals who told me
of their experiences in the Cantigny attack. They spoke
of the lemonade and said that they had never before known
that lemons and tartaric acid could taste so good to a
thirsty man. ... I think that our trip was worth while."

In July of that same year, 1918, while serving hot
drinks, cigarettes, and sandwiches to the American
wounded in the field hospital at Montfontain, Captain Karr
was severely wounded in the hip by the explosion of an
aerial bomb.

In the space of a single chapter — even of enlarged
length such as this — it would be quite impossible to trace
serially or chronologically the development of the vast field
service of our Red Cross. In fact I doubt whether that
could be done well within the confines of a book of any
ordinary length. So I have contented myself with showing
you the beginnings of this work, back there in the districts
of the Somme and the Oise at the beginning of the great
German drive and have let the men who knew of that serv-
ice the best — the men who, themselves, participated in it

162 WITH THE DOUGHBOY IN FRANCE

— tell you of it, largely in their very own words. And
so shall close the long chapter with the war-time story of a
man who, like Kimball of Boston, is fairly typical of our
Red Cross workers in the field.

The name of this valedictorian is Robert B. Kellogg, and
he arrived in France — at Bordeaux, like so many of his
fellow workers — on the sixteenth day of July, 1918, re-
porting at Paris upon the following evening. He came at
a critical moment. The name of Chateau-Thierry was
again being flashed by cable all around the world ; only this
time and for the first time there was coupled with it the
almost synonymous phrases of " American Army " and
" victorious army." Kellogg — he soon after attained the
Red Cross rank of captain — was told of the great need of
additional help in handling the wounded which already
were coming into Paris in increasing numbers from both
Chateau-Thierry and Veaux, and asked if he could get to
work at once. There was but one answer to such a request.
That very night he went on duty at Dr. Blake's hospital,
out in the suburban district of Neuilly, which had been
taken over by the American Red Cross some months before,
but which now was being used as an emergency evacuation
hospital. For be it remembered that those very July days
were the crux of the German drive. In those bitter hours
it was not known whether Paris, itself, would be spared.
The men and women in the French capital hoped for the
best, but always feared and anticipated the worst.

For four fearful nights Captain Kellogg worked there
in the Neuilly hospital, carrying stretchers, undressing the
wounded, taking their histories, and at times even aiding
in dressing their wounds. It was a job without much
poetry to it. In fact it held many intensely disagreeable
phases. But it was, at that, a fairly typical Red Cross
job, filled with perplexities and anxieties and long, long
hours of hard and peculiarly distasteful labor. Yet of
such tasks is the real spirit of Red Cross service born.

Four to the ambulance came the wounded into that

THE EED CROSS ON THE FIELD OF HONOR 163

haven of Neuilly. Many of them were terribly wounded
indeed; and practically none of them had had more at-
tention than hurriedly applied first-aid dressing. But the
appalling factor was not alone the seriousness of the
wounds, but the mere numbers of the wounded. They
came in such numbers that at times during those four
eventful July evenings the floors of all the rooms of the
hospital — even the hallways and the garage — literally
were covered with stretchers. No wonder that the regular
personnel of the place, even though steadily increased for
some months past, was unable to cope with the crisis.
Without the help of Kellogg and eight or nine other emer-
gency helpers from other ranks of the American Red Cross
it is quite possible that it would have collapsed entirely.

Captain Kellogg' s emergency task at ^sTeuilly ended early
in the morning of the twenty-second ; but there was no rest
or respite in sight for him. That very day a Red Cross
captain stopped him at headquarters and asked him if he
was free.

" I guess so," grinned Kellogg.

" Then come out to Crepy and help us out," said the
other American Red Cross man. " We're in a good deal of
a mess there."

" All right," was the reply. " I'm ready whenever you

are."

He grinned again. He realized his own predicament.
He had not yet been assigned to any definite department ;
in fact, although he had given up his precious American
passport, he had not yet received the equally precious " Red
Cross Worker's Card," which was issued to all the war
workers in France and which was of infinite value to them
in getting about that sentry-infested land. He had no more
identification papers than a rabbit and realized that he
might easily find himself in a deal of trouble. Yet within
the half hour he had packed his small musette and grabbing
up two blankets was on his way in an automobile toward the

164 WITH THE DOUGHBOY IN FRANCE

front. He reached Crepy at about six o'clock that evening
and reported to Major Brown, of the Red Cross.

" He was called major," says Kellogg, as he describes the
incident, " but he wore nothing to indicate his rank and I
never did find out just what he was. He left for Paris
the following day to get supplies, but he never returned,
nor did I hear from him again. There was nothing for us
to do that night and absolutely no provision for us. We
obtained coffee from a French Army kitchen and slept in a
wheat field in the rain, with our sole shelter a bit of canvas
tied to the rear of our car."

There may be folk who imagine that war is all organ-
ization — certain historians seemingly have done their best
to create such an illusion. But the men who have been
upon the trench lines »and in the fields of open battle know
better. They know that even well-organized armies, to say
nothing of the Eed Cross and other equally well-organized
and disciplined auxiliaries, cannot function at the fullness
of their mechanical processes in the super-emergency of
battle. There it is that individual effort regains its ancient
prestige and men are men, rather than the mere human
units of a colossal organization. Yet brilliant as indi-
vidual effort becomes, all organization is rarely lost. And
so Kellogg, in the deadening rain of that July night, found
the situation at Crepy about as follows: Two American
evacuation hospitals — Numbers Five and Thirteen —
and a French one, located in the thick woods some four
miles distant from the town, which in turn was used as an
evacuating point for all of them — this meant that the
patients were brought in ambulances from these outlying
hospitals to Crepy and there placed on hospital trains,
bound for Paris and other base-hospital centers. The
theory of such operation is both obvious and good. But in
the super-emergency of the third week of July, 1918, theory
broke down under practice. The evacuation hospitals in
the woods received newly wounded men in such numbers
that they were obliged to clear those who had received their

THE RED CROSS ON THE FIELD OF HONOR 165

first aid dressings with an unprecedented rapidity. And
this rapidity was quite too fast for the limited facilities of
the hospital trains ; which meant congestion and much trou-
ble at the Crepy railhead — which was the precise place
where Captain Kellogg of our American Red Cross found
himself early in the morning of the twenty-third day of
July.

" There was I," continues Kellogg, as he relates the nar-
rative of his personal experiences, " with Brown gone to
Paris and no instructions whatsoever left for me. But I
didn't need any instructions — not after that first bunch
of wounded fellows came up there to the railhead — at just
a little before noon. There were perhaps three hundred
of them, and while they were waiting for the hospital trains
they lay there in the open — and it was raining — their
stretchers in long rows, resting on the cinders alongside
the railroad tracks. I had secured a supply of cigarettes,
sweet chocolate, cookies, and bouillon tubes from a stock
left by Brown. I made a soup for the men and, with the
help of some of the litter bearers, distributed it and did
what else I could for their comfort. When the train came
in and it was time to move the wounded upon it, we found
that we did not have nearly enough stretcher bearers. So
I went into the town and recruited a number of volunteers
among the soldiers — including several officers. That
night I left my supplies in the office of the French Railway
Transport officer in the station and, with a stretcher for a
bed, found a place to sleep in what had been left of a
bombed house."

Let Captain Kellogg continue to tell his own story. He
is doing pretty well with it :

" The next day, Field Hospital No. 120 arrived and
set up part of its tents — sufficient to give protection for
all patients thereafter who had to wait for the trains.
Medical and orderly attention was amply provided after
that, but the food supply, even for the officers and personnel
of the hospital company, was very limited and the soup

166 WITH THE DOUGHBOY IN FRANCE

that I was able to make from the bouillon cubes proved a
blessing.

" For several days the wounded passed through this point
at the rate of several hundred a day, and every man re-
ceived what he wanted from the Eed Cross stock available.
Hospital trains from other points sometimes stopped at
Crepy. When this happened I always boarded them and,
with the help of two enlisted men, distributed cigarettes
and cookies. On about my fifth day there the number of
wounded being evacuated through that railhead and the
officers and personnel of its field hospital company were
ordered to one of the neighboring evacuation hospitals.
Because of the greatly reduced number of workers, our
tasks were therefore rendered much harder, even though
the number of wounded had been somewhat decreased.
Our own comfort was not particularly increased. We
moved into a small tent which was fairly habitable, al-
though it was both cold and rainy nearly every day. I re-
member one night when it rained with such violence that
the tent floor became flooded. I awoke to find the stretcher
on which I was sleeping an island and myself lying in a
pool of water. On two occasions we were bombed at
night."

All these days Kellogg was trying to get Eed Cross head-
quarters at Paris on the long-distance telephone. But all
France was particularly demoralized those last days of
July ; and the telephone service, never too good under any
circumstances, was gloriously bad. So after several at-
tempts to talk with headquarters and get some sort of in-
structions and help, he decided that he would have to go
there; which was easier said than done. For remember
that this Red Cross man had no credentials; in fact, no
identification papers of any sort whatsoever. While travel
in France in those days, and for many, many days and
months thereafter, was rendered particularly difficult and
almost impossible by strict regulations which compelled not
only the constant display of identification papers but a

THE RED CROSS ON THE FIELD OF HONOR 167

separate and definite military travel order for each trip
upon a railroad train. Which in turn meant that it would
be fairly suicidal for Kellogg to attempt to go into Paris
by the only logical way open to him — by train. It was
more than doubtful if he would have been able to even
board one of them. For at every railroad station in
France stood blue-coated and unreasoning poilus whose
definite authority was backed by the constant display of a
grim looking rifle in perfect working condition.

So .Kellogg walked to Paris, not every step of the way,
for there were times when friendly drivers of camions gave
him the bumping pleasure of a short lift. But even these
were not frequent. Travel from Crepy to Paris at that
particular time happened to be light. Still, after a night
at Senlis, in which he slept stretched across a table in a
cafe, he did manage to clamber aboard a truck filled with
French soldiers and bound straight for their capital.

One might reasonably have expected an ordinary sort
of man to have been discouraged by such an experience,
but a good many of our Red Cross men over there were
quite far removed from being ordinary men. And so
Kellogg, after a few days of routine office work at head-
quarters, insisted upon his being given an outpost job once
again. And soon after was dispatched to the little town
of La Ferte upon the Marne, not many miles distant from
Chateau-Thierry. This time he had his working papers;
to say nothing of the neat document which told " all men
by these presents " that he was a regular second lieutenant
of the American Red Cross. His upward progress had
begun.

He waited several days at the American Red Cross ware-
house at La Ferte, during which time he had the oppor-
tunity of studying boche aerial bombardments — at ex-
tremely short range. Then he was forwarded to the outpost
at Cohan, conducted by Lieutenants Powell and Leighton
as partners. I may be pardoned if I interrupt Kellogg' s

168 WITH THE DOUGHBOY IN FRANCE

narrative long enough to insert a sentence or two about
Powell. In some ways he was the most remarkable of Red
Cross men. Handicapped by a deformity, he stood less
than four feet and a half high, yet he was absolutely without
fear. Hard test showed that. The officers and men of the
Twenty-eighth Division with whom he had stood during the
acid-test days on the drive at Chateau-Thierry called him,
pertinently and affectionately, " General Suicide."

Cohan stood about five miles back from the front-line
trenches and so was under frequent artillery fire. The
Red Cross outpost there was in a partly demolished struc-
ture, one of the rooms of which had been used as a stall
and contained the body of a dead horse which could not be
gotten out through the door. It served that same Twenty-
eighth Division with whom Powell made so enviable a
reputation.

The confusion that had prevailed at Crepy was, happily,
missing at Cohan. Powell and Leighton not only had an
excellent stock of Red Cross supplies, which were replen-
ished twice a week from the La Ferte warehouse, and a
camionette in good order, but they had a systematic and
orderly method of distribution. As Kellogg worked with
them he studied their methods — it was a schooling of the
very best sort for him. And he, seemingly, was an apt
scholar. On the twenty-first of August a Red Cross man
named Fuller, with supplies bound for the neighboring out-
posts of Dravigny and Chery, stopped at Cohan and asked
Kellogg to ride on with him. The course of study of " the
game " was about completed. Kellogg had been in actual
Red Cross service for a full month — which in those days
made him a regular veteran. Fuller held a note from his
commanding officer which stated that if a driver could be
assured the camionette upon which he rode would be as-
signed to Chery and Dravigny.

Thus was Red Cross Kellogg's next job set out for him.
He had never driven a Ford. But other folks have mas-
tered such a handicap and Kellogg had driven many real

THE RED CROSS ON THE FIELD OF HONOR 169

automobiles, and so went easily to the new job, with such
rapidity and skill that before the next night he was in
sole charge of the little camionette and driving it with pro-
fessional speed over the steel-torn battlefields and roads of
the entire Chateau-Thierry district.

Dravigny and Chery shocked and fascinated him. At
the first of these two towns our Red Cross men in charge
were quite comfortably situated. They occupied a house
in very fair preservation which was situated in a lovely
garden and had large and bright rooms for living and for
working. But Kellogg remembers Chery Chartreuve as a
" hell hole."

" I can think of no better words with which to describe
it," he says. " Not a building with all four walls and a
roof remained in all the town. The debris of fallen walls
and discarded military equipment clogged the streets.
Refuse and filth were everywhere. The sanitary arrange-
ments — well, there hadn't been any. The odor of dead
horses filled the air. Plies ? There are no words to de-
scribe the awfulness of the flies. Our own artillery —
,75's and .155's — surrounded the town in addition to oc-
cupying positions at each end of it and in its center. The
roar of these gims was continuous, the concussion tremen-
dously nerve-racking, while the presence of this artillery
made the village a target for the enemy guns. It was
shelled day and night. And during the nights the boche
seemed to take an especial delight in filling the town with
gas.

" Sleep was almost impossible. We had in one night
five gas alarms, in each case the concentration being suffi-
ciently strong to necessitate the gas masks. The dressing
station was next to our sleeping quarters. It was covered
with gassed and exhausted doughboys who had crept in
there in search of shelter. At frequent intervals the am-
bulances would arrive with fresh loads of wounded. The
whistle and explosion of shells was constant. A battery of
,155's in our back yard nearly lifted us from our cots each

170 WITH THE DOUGHBOY IN FRANCE

time it was fired. Once I got a dose of gas sufficient to
cause the almost complete loss of my voice and a throat
trouble that lasted for weeks."

Yet under conditions such as these, if not even worse,
Kellogg and his fellows worked — all day and usually until
ten or eleven o'clock at night. Their supplies went to the
boys in the lines. This was not only ordinarily true, but
at Chery, particularly so. The Seventy-seventh Division
had moved in close to the town, and on the twenty-ninth of
August, while the Red Cross workers were pausing for a
few minutes to catch up a snack of lunch, a shell landed
plumb in front of their outpost building. Its fragments
entered the doors and windows and perforated several of
their food containers. Sugar, coffee, cocoa — all spilled
upon the floor.

The room was filled with men — soldiers as well as Red
Cross — at the moment. None was hurt. With little
interval a second shell came. This time two men who had
taken refuge in a shed that formed a portion of the building
were killed. There was seemingly better shelter across the
street. To it the doughboys began running. Before they
were well across the narrow way, the third boclie visitor
descended. It was a deadly thing indeed. Thirty-eight
American lives were its toll. Eleven lay dead where they
dropped. The others died before they could reach the
hospital, while the escape of the Red Cross men was little
short of providential.

The station had to be abandoned at once. The Red
Cross moved back to Dravigny in good order, and what
was left of miserable Chery Chartreuve was speedily oblit-
erated by the Germans.

The record of Captain Kellogg's experiences with our
Red Cross in France reads like a modern Pilgrim's
Progress. Our Christian who found himself in khaki was
quickly moved across the great checkerboard of war. On
one day he was reestablishing the Chery outpost at the

THE RED CROSS ON THE FIELD OF HONOR 171

little town of Mareieul, from which point the Seventy-
seventh could still be served, but with far less danger ; on
the next he was far away from the Seventy-seventh and at
the little French town of Breny, at the service, if you
please, of the Thirty-second Division, United States Army.
The Seventy-seventh had been chiefly composed of New
York State boys; they wore the Statue of Liberty as an
army insignia upon their uniforms. The Thirty-second
came from the Middle West — from Wisconsin and Mich-
igan chiefly. It had been in the lines northwest of Soissons
-the only American Division in the sector — and there
had cooperated most efficiently with the French. Its regi-
ments were being used there as shock troops to capture the
town of Juvigny and territory beyond which seemingly the
tired French Army was quite unable to take. They were
accomplishing their huge task with typical American bril-
liancy, but also in the American war fashion of a heavy
loss of precious life. Because of the isolation of the
Thirty-second from the usual American bases of supply it
became peculiarly dependent upon our Red Cross for its
tobacco and other creature comforts, responsibility which
our Red Cross regarded as real opportunity. In addition
to the ordinary comforts it ordered some four thousand
newspapers each day from Paris, which were enthusiasti-
cally received by the doughboys. And you may be assured
that these were not French newspapers. They were those
typically Parisian sheets in the English language, the New
York Herald, the Chicago Tribune, and the London Mail.
Thereafter and until long weeks after the signing of the
armistice Kellogg remained with the Thirty-second, but did
not cease his Pilgrim's Progress. For the Division moved ;
here and there and everywhere. For several weeks it was
at Vic-sur-Aisne, while Red Cross Kellogg — who by this
time was a real Ford expert — was making hot chocolate
in a huge cave that once had been an American division
headquarters. Then it moved to a new sector, not far from
Bar-le-Duc, and Kellogg moved with it. In the meantime

172 WITH THE DOUGHBOY IN FRANCE

he had performed temporary work at ISTeufchateau — al-
ways an important division headquarters of the A -men' can
Eed Cross — at Bar-le-Duc and at Eosnes; but these jobs
were merely stop-gaps — the real task was forever at the
front lines. And when, on the twenty-fourth of September,
Kellogg came up with his Division at Wally, he was ready
for hard fighting once again. So was the Thirty-second.
It was moving forward a little each day and in fact was
already considered " in reserve " on September 26 — the
day of the beginning of the great Argonne offensive. Two
days later, with a borrowed army truck and an American
Red Cross camionette — both filled with supplies to their
limit — Kellogg and two of his Red Cross associates moved
forward nine miles to the Avecourt Wood and there joined
the Sixty-fourth Brigade of the Division. The brigade
commander furnished them with an old dugout — which
for nearly four years past had formed a part of the French
trench system. After their supplies had been dumped into
the place there was just room left for the bedding rolls of
the Red Cross men, and even these overlapped one another.
It rained steadily for several days and the mud upon the
floor of the dugout became entirely liquefied. At night
water came in through the doorway and trickled in innum-
erable sprays down from the roof. The men lived in mud
knee-deep. Oh, it was some fun being a Red Cross man at
the front in those days of actual fighting! But the fun
was some distance removed from those popular reports of
" the Battle of Paris " which used to come trickling back
to America for the edification and joy of the folk who
stayed behind. It was prunes and preserves being a Red
Cross worker in France in those autumn days of 1918.
Only the trouble was that no one ever could find the prunes
or the preserves.

On the thirtieth day of September, the Thirty-second
moved from the Avecourt Woods to those of Montfaucon
and assumed a military position of " support."

" The intervening country had been No Man's Land for

THE RED CROSS ON THE FIELD OF HONOR 173

four years and the condition of the roads can only be
imagined,'7 says Captain Kellogg. " We followed the
troops, who left at about eleven o'clock that morning, but
were soon caught in that tremendous congestion that existed
on all the roads during the first days of the drive. By
dark we were still on the road, having progressed less than
'two miles. We finally became hopelessly stuck, being
stalled, and were obliged to remain stuck throughout the
night. During the day we had given out many packages
of cookies to the tired and hungry men along the road.
Many times since the soldiers have spoken to me in appre-
ciation of those cookies. That night was one of the most
uncomfortable experiences that I had in France. It was
so cold that we could not keep warm. This, coupled with
the occasional whine of incoming shells, prevented sleep,
although frequently we threw down our bedding rolls at the
side of the road and attempted it.

" In the morning we found a number of ambulances
among the other stalled vehicles. For more than forty-
eight hours they had been on the road with their wounded
and neither drivers nor patients had been able to obtain
much of anything to eat or drink. We supplied them with
cookies and gave them what water we had in our canteens.
Two of the wounded had died during the night. Two
others were unconscious and another was delirious. The
congestion ahead of us on the road that morning seemed as
bad as ever. Finally we managed to get out of that road
entirely, making a fresh start by a longer but less crowded
way. At dusk that first day of October found us still quite
a distance from our Division. We spent that night with
some Signal Corps men in the cellar of a shell-shocked
building in Varennes. The following morning we suc-
ceeded in reaching our destination and located ourselves
with several enlisted men of the Forty-third Balloon Com-
pany in a dugout which until a few days before had been
occupied by German officers.

" This place was interesting. Reached by a steep flight

174 WITH THE DOUGHBOY IN FRANCE

of steps, it was sunk fully fifty feet below the surface. It
consisted of three rooms and a kitchen, the walls of each
nicely boarded and the whole comfortably, if roughly,
finished.

" The combat regiments and battalions of our army were
all around us in the woods. We continued serving them.
On the morning of the third I drove back to Froidos for
fresh supplies. Upon my return I found that the troops
of our Sixty-fourth Brigade were already on the road, mov-
ing toward the town of Very. We knew what this meant
— that in the morning they were going into the front lines
and probably over the top. We quickly unloaded cookies
and cigarettes from the car and, standing by the roadside
in the dark, handed a supply of each to every soldier who
passed by.

" The troops went into the lines at Epinonville before
daybreak on the morning of the fourth of October. Lieu-
tenant McGinnis of the Red Cross and I arrived there
about noon. Never shall I forget it. The battle lines lay
just a little way ahead of us. Machine guns still occupied
the town which then was under violent bombardment. In
fact during the entire three weeks that we made our head-
quarters at Epinonville there was not a single day or night
that the town was not subjected to shell fire.

" Our boys had made a first attack early in the morning
of the fourth. All that morning the wounded had been
returning — in large numbers. Some of them were
brought to regimental dressing stations of the 128th In-
fantry, but the majority were handled at that of the 127th.
It was here that we did most of our work during the next
few days. The station was in a sort of dugout, made of
boards and builded into a sidehill. In the ditch beside it
a sizable salvage pile had materialized already, clothing and
bandages — both blood-soaked, rifles, shoes, helmets, mess
kits, here and there a hand or a foot. On the ground,
lying on stretchers, were a number of wounded men waiting
for the ambulances that would take them to the field hos-

THE RED CROSS ON THE FIELD OF HONOR 175

pitals. All about were soldiers ; slightly wounded, gassed,
shell-shocked, or just plain sick or exhausted. Down the
road could be seen a bunch of prisoners just captured that
morning. On its opposite side lay the bodies of several of
our fellows who had just died, while across the fields beyond
stretched slow-moving, irregular processions of litter bear-
ers, bringing in their burdens of wounded men.

" Such were the scenes and conditions that greeted us in
Epinonville. There was work a-plenty awaiting us, and
we lost no time in taking possession of a shack for our out-
post of the American Red Cross. We quickly unpacked
our supplies and moved into it. McGinnis had a rather
formidable job of making some twenty gallons of cocoa,
while I, equipped with cookies, cigarettes, and canteens
filled with water, did what I could for the wounded in and
around the dressing station.

" Late in the afternoon it became necessary for me to
return to our dugout in the woods for supplies which we
had been unable to bring in on the first trip. So, leaving
McGinnis to take care of the dressing stations, I started
back, taking with me a load of wounded men for whom no
ambulance was available. Our route took us over a dilap-
idated plank road through the narrow valley between Epin-
onville and Very. We had covered perhaps half of this
road when Fritz began a bombardment of the valley which
lasted fully fifteen minutes. A French artillery outfit was
moving ahead of us at a snail's pace and we could not pass
it because of the narrowness of the road. Some of the
shells were breaking close at hand, showering the car with
shrapnel and fragments, but there was no way I could re-
move the wounded to a place of safety. There was nothing
to do but pray for luck and keep going as fast as the slow-
moving artillery ahead would permit. Several men within
our sight were hit during those fifteen minutes, but fortune
favored us. Not one of our men was even scratched and
I delivered my load safely at the triage at Very.

" Arriving at Epinonville late that evening I worked at

1T6 WITH THE DOUGHBOY IN FRANCE

the dressing station most of the night, serving hot cocoa,
cookies, and cigarettes to the wounded and the men who
were working for their comfort. During these first days
there was hardly any food, and the doctors worked contin-
uously day and night with only such sleep as they could
snatch for a few minutes at a time.

" During the sixteen days that the Division was in the
front line after we went into Epinonville, our first atten-
tion was given to the dressing stations and the wounded.
As fast as new stations were opened at farther advanced
points, we reached them with our cocoa and cookies. The
ordinarily simple task of making cocoa became, under the
conditions which we faced, a huge job. We usually made
enough at a time to fill our four five-gallon thermos con-
tainers and almost always we had to do the work ourselves.
Water was always scarce and to get enough of it was a
problem. Wood had to be cut and fires made and handled
with the utmost caution so that no smoke would show.

" Other conditions aside from the danger that constantly
threatened were equally difficult. The weather was awful
— cold and rainy, with deep mud everywhere. Eating
was an uncertain and precarious proposition. The shack
that we called home was — well, you would hesitate to put
a dog in it in normal times.

" Our most interesting work generally was done under
the cover of darkness. For instance, there came a night
when we particularly wanted to reach Company K of our
128th Infantry. One of its cooks offered to go with us as
guide, and so, with our car loaded with hot cocoa, cookies,
cigarettes, sweet chocolate, and chewing tobacco, we left
Epinonville shortly after dusk. A mile or so out we
diverged from the road, our route then taking us across the
shell-torn fields, with only a faint footpath to follow. Of
course no light was possible and a blacker night there never
was. Tommy — the company cook — and McGinnis
walked immediately in front of the car indicating the
course I should take. We continued thus until we had

THE RED CROSS ON THE FIELD OF HONOR 177

penetrated beyond some of our machine-gun positions.
Ahead of us and back of us and all around us shells were
bursting. The sing of machine-gun bullets was in the air.
Our mission seemed hopeless, but we knew that those boys
of Company K had been lying in the shell holes and the
shallow dugouts for two long days with little to eat, drink,
or smoke. We determined to reach them. Star shells
were lighting the fields ahead of us, and finally we dared
not proceed farther with the car for fear it would be seen
and draw fire. Figuring that we could get a detail of boys
to come back for the cans of cocoa and other things, we left
the car in the lee of a hill and went ahead on foot, taking
with us what we could carry in our pockets and sacks. K
Company had shifted its position, however, and we could
not locate it. We distributed the stuff we had with us to
the soldiers we passed and then returned to the car. Here
we sought out the officers of the outfits lying nearest us and
gained their permission to let the men — a few at a time —
come to the car, where we served them until our stock was
exhausted. Most of these men were from the 127th.
Some were from a machine-gun battalion. These boys for
several days had been dependent upon their ' iron rations.'
Mere words cannot express their appreciation of our hot
cocoa and other things. I recall that our chewing tobacco
made a great hit with them. They could not smoke after
dark and welcomed something that would take the place
of smoking."

Enough of the incidental detail of the Red Cross worker.
I think that you have now gained a fair idea of what his
job really was ; of not alone the danger that it held for him
at all times, but the manifold discomforts, the exposure,
the almost unending hours of hard, hard work. Multiply
Red Cross Kellogg by Eed Cross Jones and Smith and
Brown and Robinson — to the extent of several hundreds
— and you will begin to have only a faint impression of
the magnitude of concerted work done by the men of our
American Red Cross in the battlefields of France in those

178 WITH THE DOUGHBOY IN FRANCE

fall and summer months of 1918. A good deal has been
written about the Red Cross woman — before you are done
with this book I shall have some more things to say about
them, myself. A word of praise at least is the due of the
Eed Cross man. They are not the shirkers or the slackers
that some thoughtless folk imagined them — decidedly not.
They were men — generally well above, the army age of
acceptance, even as volunteers — who found that they
could not keep out of the immortal fight for the freeing of
the liberty of the world.

Take the case of Lieutenant Kellogg' s right-hand man —
now Captain McGinnis. He was a Coloradian and nearly
fifty years of age when the United States entered the World
War. He is not a particularly robust man, and yet when
we finally did slip into the great conflict, it was this Eed
Cross McGinnis who recruited an entire company of in-
fantry for the Colorado National Guard and was commis-
sioned a first lieutenant in it. When the National Guard
was made a part of the Federal Army, McGinnis was dis-
charged. He was too old, they said.

The man was nearly broken-hearted ; but his determina-
tion never wavered. He was bound to get into the big
fight. If the army would not have him there might per-
haps be some other militant organization that would.
There was. It was the Red Cross — our own Amer-
ican Red Cross if you please. And what McGinnis, of
Colorado, meant to our Red Cross you already have
seen.

Multiply the McGinnises as well as the Kelloggs and you
begin once again to get the great spirit and power of the
Red Cross man. Danger, personal danger? What mat-
tered that to these ? They consecrated soul and spirit, and
faced danger with a smile or a jest, and forever with the
sublime optimism of a youth that will not die, even though
hair becomes gray and thin lines seam the countenance.
And now and then and again they, too, made the supreme

THE RED CROSS ON THE FIELD OF HONOR 179

sacrifice. The American Eed Cross has its own high-set
honor roll.

After the signing of the armistice, Kellogg's beloved
Thirty-second Division was one of those chosen for the
advance into the Rhineland countries. It had fairly
earned this honor. For in those not-to-be-forgotten twenty
days of October that it had held a front-line sector, it had
gained every objective set for it. Therefore it was re-
lieved from active duty on the twentieth and sent back to
the Very Woods in reserve. But Kellogg and his fellows
were not placed " in reserve " — not at that moment, at any
rate.

They found " their boys " tired and miserable, liv-
ing in the mud in " pup tents/7 and greatly in need of Red
Cross attention and assistance. Finally, on the twenty-
eighth and under the insistence of their commanding of-
ficers, Kellogg and McGinnis went back to Bar-le-Duc for
five days of rest. They needed it. There was a Red Cross
bathing outfit at Bar-le-Duc, and the two men needed that
also. It had been more than six weeks since they had
even had an opportunity to bathe.

Armistice Day found the Thirty-second in actual fight-
ing once again and Kellogg and McGinnis with it — by
this time one might almost say " of course." It was
located in and about Ecurey and kept up the fighting until
the fateful eleven o'clock in the morning set for the cessa-
tion of hostilities. The Division remained at Ecurey for
just a week after the signing of the armistice. Then it
began its long hike toward the east, passing through Luxem-
bourg and down to the Moselle at the little village of Was-
serbillig, where it arrived on the twenty-ninth day of No-
vember.

Kellogg, McGinnis, and some other of our Red
Cross men — to say nothing of a big Red Cross truck —
kept with it. While it had been assumed by the Paris
headquarters of the American Red Cross that it would be

180 WITH THE DOUGHBOY IN FRANCE

impossible to serve the boys on their long march into the
occupied area and so no provision was made for the for-
warding of comfort supplies, as a matter of actual fact
there was a good deal that could be done — and was
done.

In such a situation was Red Cross opportunity, time and
time and time again. And if Paris for a little was neglect-
ful of the fullness of all of it, our R,ed Cross men who
were at the Rhine were not — not for one single moment.
They were on the job, and, with the limited facilities at
hand, more than made good with it. One single final inci-
dent will show :

On the morning that the Thirty-second swung down into
Wasserbillig from the pleasant, war-spared Luxembourg
country and first entered Prussian Germany, the Red Cross
men with it found that two of their fellows — Lieutenants
R. S. Gillespie and Robert Wildes — were already
handling the situation. These men had previously been
engaged in similar work at Longwy, and had been sent for-
ward with a five-ton truck, loaded with f oodstuffs, for such
returning prisoners — and there were many of them — as
the Thirty-second might encounter on its eastward march.
Under Lieutenant Gillespie' s direction a canteen already
was in operation at the railroad station there in Wasser-
billig. Equipped with a small supply of tin cups, plates,
and the like — to say nothing of several stoves — it was
serving soup, bread, jam, beans, J>acon, corned beef, and
coffee. The prisoners (soldiers and civilians — men,
women, and children, and many of them in a pitiable con-
dition) came through from Germany on the trains up the
valley of the Moselle. They had a long wait, generally
overnight, in Wasserbillig. And there the American Red
Cross fed them by the hundreds, and in every possible way
ministered to their comfort.

It saw opportunity, and reached to it. It saw a chance
of service, and welcomed it. The record of its welcome is

THE RED CROSS ON THE FIELD OF HONOR 181

written in the hearts and minds and memories of the boys
who marched down the valley of the Moselle, through
Treves and Cochem, to Coblenz. From those hearts and
minds and memories they cannot easily be erased.

CHAPTER VIII

OUR BED CROSS PERFORMS ITS SUPREME MISSION

AFTER all is said and done, what is the supreme pur-
pose of the Red Cross ?

I think that any one who has made even a cursory study
of the organization — its ideals and history — should have
but little hesitancy in finding an answer for that question.
Despite its genuine achievement in such grave crises as the
San Francisco earthquake and fire, for instance, its real
triumphs have almost always been wrought upon the field
of war. And there its original mission was definite — the
succoring of the wounded. That mission was quite as
definite in this Great War so lately ended as in the days of
Florence Nightingale and Clara Barton. The canteen
work of our Red Cross in the past two years for our boys
who came and went across France and Germany was inter-
esting and important; its field work, which you have just
seen, even more so. Yet its great touch — almost, I should
say, its touch divine — came not merely when the boys
traveled or when they went upon the field of battle, but
rather when the iron hand of war cruelly smote them down.
Then it was that our Red Cross was indeed the Greatest
Mother in the World — the symbolic spirit of its superb
poster most amply realized, in fact.

The hospital work of the American Red Cross in France,
particularly in its medical phases as distinct from those
more purely of entertainment, was, in the several suc-
cessive forms of organization of the institution over there,
known as the Medical and Surgical Division or Depart-
ment, although finally as the Bureau of Hospital Adminis-
tration. In fact it was almost the only department of our
Red Cross in France which did not, for one reason or an-
other, undergo reorganization after reorganization. This,

182

SUPREME MISSION 183

in turn, has accounted for much of its efficiency. It was
builded on a plan which foresaw every emergency and
from which finally the more permanent scheme for the
entire Red Cross was drawn.

" We divided our job into three great steps," the man
who headed it most successfully told me one day in Paris.
" The first was to meet the emergency that arose, no matter
where it was or what it was ; the second was to perfect the
organization, and the third and final step was to tell about
it — to make our necessary reports and the like."

A program which, rigidly set down, was rigidly adhered
to. Remember, if you will once again, that under the
original organization of the American Red Cross in France
there were two great operating departments side by side;
one for military affairs, the other for civil. In those early
days the Department of Military Affairs grouped its work
chiefly under the Medical and Surgical Division which was
headed by Colonel Alexander Lambert, a distinguished
New York physician who then bore the title of Chief Sur-
geon of the American Red Cross. It was this early divi-
sion which planned the first of the great American Red
Cross hospitals in France, of which very much more in
good time.

In January, 1918, this Medical and Surgical Division
became known as the Medical and Surgical Section of the
Department of Military Affairs, while Captain C. C. Bur-
lingame, a young and energetic doctor who had met with
much success in the New England manufacturing village
of South Manchester, Connecticut, became its guiding
head. Of Captain Burlingame — he attained the United
States Army rank of lieutenant colonel before the conclu-
sion of the war — you also shall hear much more. It
would be quite difficult, in fact, to keep him out of the
pages of this book, if such were the desire. One of the
most energetic, the most tireless, the most efficient execu-
tives of our Red Cross in France, he accomplished results
of great brilliancy through the constant use of these very

184 WITH THE DOUGHBOY IN FRANCE

attributes. Within six months after his arrival in France
he had risen from first lieutenant to the army rank of cap-
tain, while his real achievements were afterward recog-
nized in decorations hy the French of their Medaille
d'Honneur and by the new Polish Government of its
precious Eagle.

In these weeks and months of the first half of 1918,
Burlingame found much of his work divided into several
of the functions of the Department of Civil Affairs — par-
ticularly among such sectors as the Children's Bureau, the
Bureau of Tuberculosis, and the Bureau of Refugees.
This was organization business. It took strength from
that very arm of the Ked Cross which soon was to be called
upon to accomplish so very much indeed. And when, on
the twenty-fourth of August, 1918, the Gibson reorgan-
ization plan divorced the Medical and Surgical Section
entirely from the work of the Department of Civil Affairs
and combined its entire activities into a Medical and Sur-
gical Department, Burlingame and his fellows had a free
hand for the first time, a full opportunity to put their tri-
partite policy into execution.

For a time Colonel Fred T. Murphy was director of this
newly created department. On January 6, 1919, however,
he was succeeded by Colonel Burlingame, who had been so
instrumental in framing both the policies and carrying out
the actual operations of the department. On that same
day the former Medical and Surgical Section of the De-
partment of Military Affairs became the Bureau of Hos-
pital Administration. The Bureau of Tuberculosis was
transferred as such to this new department, as was also
the Children's Bureau. The Women's Bureau of Hospital
Administration which, under the old organization, was
reporting to the general manager, became the Bureau of
Nurses, while the work for the mutiles, which was being
conducted by both the departments of Military Affairs and
Civil Affairs, was relegated to a new bureau.

I have given these changes in some detail not because

SUPREME MISSION 185

they were in themselves so vastly important, as because
they tend to show.how firm a grasp Burlingame gained not
only on the operations hut upon the very organization of
his work. He did not reorganize ; he perfected, and finally
was able to perfect even the Gibson general plan of or-
ganization for our Red Cross in France which was recog-
nized as the most complete thing of its sort that had been
accomplished.

For the purpose of better understanding the activities of
this bureau, it may be well to divide its activities into four
great classes. The first of these would group those activi-
ties conducted directly by the Surgeon General's office of
the United States Army, but to which our Red Cross gave
frequent aid in the line of supplies, supplementing those
normally furnished through the usual army channels.
Sometimes not only supplies but personnel was furnished.
Such aid was given upon request of army officers.

Under the second grouping one finds those great hospi-
tals, in most cases established by the American Red Cross
while the medical and surgical plans of our army were still
forming and were in a most unsettled and confused state.
These were known, even after the Surgeon General had
taken them under his authority, as American Red Cross
Military Hospitals. They were then operated jointly by
the United States Army and our Red Cross; the army
being usually responsible for the scientific care and disci-
pline of the organization, while our Red Cross took upon
its shoulders both the actual business management and the
supplying of the necessary materials.

The third and fourth groupings are smaller, although, in
their way, hardly less consequential. In the one were the
American Red Cross Hospitals which were operated purely
for military purposes and for which the American Red
Cross assumed the full responsibility of operation, while in
the other were the hospitals, infirmaries, and dispensaries
which were operated by the Red Cross — in some few cases
jointly with the other organizations — for the benefit of

186 WITH THE DOUGHBOY IN FRANCE

civilians, including several thousand American civilian war
workers who found themselves in France during the past
two years.

If I have bored you with these details of organization it
has been to the direct purpose that you might the better
understand how this important phase of Red Cross opera-
tion functioned. Now, for the moment, forget organiza-
tion once again. Go back to the earlier days of our Red
Cross in France — the days of Grayson M.-P. Murphy and
James H. Perkins and their fellows.

None of these men either realized or fully understood
either the importance or the overwhelming size to which
the hospital function of the United States Army would
attain before our boys had been in actual warfare a full
year. The army itself did not realize that. Remember
that for many weeks and even months after Pershing had
arrived in Paris its hospital plans were in embryo. In
this situation our Red Cross found one of its earliest op-
portunities, and rose to it. With Colonel Lambert — he
then was Major Lambert — in charge of its Medical and
Surgical Division it began casting about to see how it might
function most rapidly and most efficiently.

To the nucleus of the army that began pouring into
France in the early summer of 1917, it began the distribu-
tion of emergency stores — a task to which we already have
referred and shall refer again. It hastily secured its own
storerooms — in those days quite remote and distant from
the American Relief Clearing House and the other general
warehouses of the American Red Cross — and from these
in July, 1917, sent to 1,116 hospitals, practically all of
them French, exactly 2,826 bales of supplies. In Decem-
ber of that same year it sent to 1,653 hospitals — including
by this time many American ones — 4,740 bales of similar
supplies. It was already gaining strength unto itself.

Surgical dressings formed an important portion of the
contents of these packages Our Red Cross did not wait

SUPREME MISSION 187

upon America for these ; the huge plan for standardizing
and making and forwarding these from the United States
was also still in process of formation. It went to work in
Paris, and without delay, so that by the end of 1917 two
impressive manufacturing plants were at work there — one
at No. 118 Eue de la Faisandre, where 440 volunteer
workers and a hundred paid workers were averaging some
183,770 dressings a week, and a smaller establishment at
No. 25 Hue Pierre Charron, where a hundred volunteer
and ninety paid workers were at similar tasks. Eventually
a third workroom was added to these. And it is worth
noting, perhaps, that immediately after the signing of the
armistice these three workrooms were turned into manu-
factories for production of influenza masks, for which
there was a great emergency demand. In three weeks
they turned out more than 600,000 of them.

The hospitalization phases of the Medical and Surgical
Department of our Red Cross over there were, of course,
far more difficult than those of the mere production or
storage of dressings and other medical supplies. And they
involved a vast consideration of the human factors of the
super-problem of the conflict.

" In this war there were two kinds of fellows," Colonel
Burlingame told me one evening in Paris as we sat talking
together, " the ones who went over the top and those who
didn't. It was up to the second bunch to look out for the
first — at every time and opportunity, which brings us
squarely to the question of the French hospitals, and the
American soldiers who woke up to find themselves in them.
You see the Red Cross was just as responsible for those
fellows as for the ones who went directly into our own hos-
pitals over here. The French authorities told me not to
worry about those boys. ' We will take very good care of
them/ they said, and so they meant to do. ' Who will take
care ? ' I asked them in return.

" I went straight to one of the chief surgeons of their

188 WITH THE DOUGHBOY IN FRANCE

army. I put the matter to him as plainly as I could.
' You are the best ever/ I said to him, ' but — don't you
see ? — you are tired out. We want to help you. Can't
we ? Won't you let us loan you nurses and other American
personnel as you need them ? '

" Would they ? Say, the French fell for that suggestion
like ducks, and we sent them thirty or forty girls, just as
a beginning.. Can you think of what it would mean for
one of our Yankee boys wounded in a French hospital and
perhaps ready to go on an operating table to lose an arm
or a leg and then finding no one who could speak his kind
of language? And what it would mean if a nice girl
should come along — his own sort of a nice girl — ready to
let him spill his own troubles out to her — in his own sort
of jargon? "

I felt, myself, what it would mean. I had heard before
of what the Red Cross Bureau of Hospital Administration
was accomplishing under the technical designation of the
Service of Professional Aid to the Service de Sante — this
last the medical division of the French Army establish-
ments. The first opportunity for this service came when
General Pershing told Marshal Foch that the American
Army was there to be used as the French high commander
in chief saw fit to use it. Whereupon Foch moved quickly
and brigaded our men with his between Montdidier and
Soissons, which meant, of course, the evacuating of the
casualties through the French hospitals. The helpless con-
dition of our American boys who did not speak French —
and very few of them did — can therefore easily be imag-
ined. They could not tell their wishes nor be advised as to
what was going to be done with them. It was then that
Burlingame sensed the situation in its fullness; that, with
much diplomacy, he first approached Dr. Vernet Kleber,
the commander of the French-American section of the
French Service de Saute, saying that he realized that its
service had been taxed to the uttermost and proffering the

SUPREME MISSION 189

use of American Ked Cross personnel. And Dr. Kleber
accepted.

The thirty or forty nurses did not come at one time.
But within twenty-four hours, four of them — two nurses
and two nurses' aids, and all of them speaking French —
were dispatched to the French hospital at Soissons where
the first American patients were being received. The
movement of the First and Second Divisions in the Beau-
vais and Montdidier sectors right after increased very
greatly this flow of Yankee doughboys into French hospi-
tals — and the American nurses were thrown into them in
far greater numbers. Soon a still more definite plan was
adopted, which resulted in American nurses, speaking
French, being installed in each and every French military
hospital which received American wounded. Under this
arrangement our nurses were given French military papers
for free travel — at the very outset, one of the many time-
saving arrangements in a situation which all too frequently
was a race between time and death. Another time-saving
scheme provided for the reassignment of nurses used by the
French Service de Sante without the necessity of approval
in advance by Paris headquarters. This very flexible and
sensible plan relieved the situation of much red tape and
made for immediate results. And not the least of its ad-
vantages was the fact that it actually did much to enhance
the entente cordiale of the fighting forces of the two allied
nations.

The first call for nurses under this new arrangement
came in May, 1918, when a nurse and an aid were sent to
the French Military Hospital at Besangon.in the extreme
east of France and south of the fighting zones. The second
came from La Bochelle, down on the Atlantic coast. After
that the calls were almost continuous, until our American
nurses had been sent to all corners of France ; the service
covering thirty-one departments and eighty-eight cities.

Sometimes, when the calls were particularly urgent and

190 WITH THE DOUGHBOY IN FRANCE

the distances not so great, the nurses were sent in camion-
ettes, for time always was an important factor. But more
often the nurse and her aid rode by rail, armed with the
military permits that were so necessary a feature of travel
in France during the days of the actual conflict. One of
these girls wrote quite graphically of one of these journeys.

" It was quite dark ; there wasn't a light in the car or in
the countryside/' she said. " Off on the horizon we could
see the guns flashing. A very nervous man sat opposite
me, pulled out his flashlight about every five minutes, con-
sulted his time-table and announced the next station. Fi-
nally he alighted and the only way that we knew when we
had reached our station was because heads appeared at
every window when we stopped, asking the name of the
stopping place. After the information was given the pas-
sengers would pile out for that particular place and step
into the inky darkness. After which they might resign
themselves to spending the rest of the night curled up on
one of the uninviting small benches in the station."

The diet of the average doughboy and the average poilu
— sick or well — was almost always different. To accom-
plish this each Red Cross nurse, upon being sent to her as-
signment, was given small sums of money to spend for the
comfort of her patients. In this way she was often able to
obtain such things as milk, eggs, or a chop for a Yankee
boy who wearied of the diet constantly given to the poilu.

These nurses, like those which were held by the Red
Cross in reserve for the emergency needs of our army in
France, were in direct charge of the Nurses' Bureau of
Colonel Burlingame's department. Incidentally, this
bureau furnished some ten thousand nurses in France, of
whom eight thousand were army reserves.

The great need of this service in the French hospitals was
shown in the extensions of the plan. In several instances
where a United States Army hospital unit was stationed

SUPREME MISSION 191

near a French one, the American patients were gradually
evacuated to it, our Red Cross nurses being retained on
duty as long as was necessary. There were, of course,
many of these American hospitals — some of which you
shall come to see before you are finished with the pages of
this book. In all of these our Red Cross functioned, both
in the furnishing of many of their supplies as well as in the
giving of entertainment to their patients. Of all these
things, more in good time. Consider now, if you please,
the distinctive Red Cross hospitals themselves — some of
which long preceded in France the coming of the larger
regulation hospitals of the United Sates Army.

The first of these great institutions of our own Red
Cross to be secured over there — it bore the distinctive
serial title of Number One — was located in the Neuilly
suburban district of Paris. It was a handsome modern
structure of brick — a building which had been erected for
use as a boarding school or college. It was barely com-
pleted at the time of the first outbreak of the Great War,
and so was easily secured by a group of patriotic Ameri-
cans in Paris and, — then designated as the American
Ambulance Hospital, — placed at the service of the French,
who then were in grievous need of such assistance.
When we came into the war, this hospital, which contained
between five and six hundred beds, was put under the
United States Army and the American Red Cross and
turned over to the Red Cross for actual operation.

American Red Cross Hospital Number Two — a private
institution of the highest class — was formerly well known
to the American colony in Paris as Dr. Blake's. Like the
Number One, it was one of the chief means by which the
Stars and Stripes was kept flying in Europe throughout the
early years of the war. It not only contained three hun-
dred beds, but a huge Red Cross research laboratory, where
a corps of bacteriologists was quickly put to work under the
general control of the Surgeon General's office of the army

192 WITH THE DOUGHBOY IN FRANCE

and making valuable investigations, records, and sum-
maries for the American medical profession for many years
to come.

Number Three, on the left bank of the Seine, was for a
time known as the Reid Hospital. It was at one time a
home or dormitory for girl art students in Paris. Later it
was transformed into a hospital by Mrs. Whitelaw Reid of
New York, who gave it, furnished and equipped, to the
American Red Cross and arranged to pay practically all
its running expenses. It was a comparatively small es-
tablishment of eighty beds, which were reserved almost en-
tirely for officers, and personnel of our Red Cross.

From this most modest nucleus there was both steady
and rapid growth until, at the time of the signing of the
armistice, there were not three but eight of the Ajnerican
Red Cross Military Hospitals : the three of which you have
just read; Number One in Neuilly; Number Two (Dr.
Blake's) in Rue Piccini; Number Three (the Reid Hos-
pital) in the Rue de Chevreuse ; Number Five, the tent in-
stitution which sprang up on the famous Bois de Boulogne
race course at Auteuil ; Number Six at Bellevue ; Number
Seven at Juilly; Number Eight at Malabry (these last
three in the suburbs of Paris), and Number Nine in the
Boulevard des Batignoles, within the limits of the city
itself.

The so-called American Red Cross hospitals were gener-
ally somewhat smaller. They were Number 100 at Beau-
caillou, St. Julien in the Gironde, Number 101 at Neuilly,
Number 102 at Neuf chateau, Number 103 also at Neuilly,
Number 104 at Beauvais, with an annex at Chantilly, Num-
ber 105 at Juilly, Number 109 at Evreux, and Number 113,
the Czecho-Slovak Hospital, at Cognac. In addition to
these there was a further group of smaller hospitals, which
were operated in the same way as the American Red Cross
military hospitals. These included Number 107 at Jouy-
sur-Morin, Number 110 at Villers-Daucourt, Number 111

SUPREME MISSION 193

at Chateau-Thierry, Number 112 in the Rue Boileau, Paris,
Evacuation Hospital Number 114 at Fleury-sur-Aire in
the Vosges, Base Hospital Number 41 at St. Denis, and
Base Hospital No. 82 at Toul. While outside of all of
these lists were three small institutions in Paris, operated
in cooperation with the French, but far too unimportant to
be listed here.

There were twenty-six of these American Red Cross
hospitals of one form or another established in France
through the war. Yet, impressive as this list might seem
to be at a first glance, it, of course, falls far short of the
great total of the regular base and evacuation hospitals set
up by the Medical Corps of our army throughout France
and the occupied districts of Germany. Yet even these, as
we shall see presently, were constantly dependent upon the
functioning of our Red Cross. And, after all, it was
chiefly a question of the mere form of organization.

" Form ? " said Colonel Burlingame to me that same
evening as we sat together in Paris. " What do you mean
by form? There is no such thing — not in war, at any
event. When they used to come to me with their red tape
tangles I would bring them up with a quick turn, saying :
e See here, the Red Cross is not engaged in winning the
war for the Allies, or even for the good old U. S. A. We
are here to help the United States win the war.7 '

Not such a fine distinction as it might first seem to be.

" That was our principle and we stuck by it/' continued
Burlingame. " And any one who deviated from it got
bumped, and bumped hard."

You could trust the young military surgeon for that, just
as his own superior officers could trust him to produce re-
sults, time and time again. For instance there was that
week in July when the news came to him — through an
entirely unofficial but highly authentic channel — that the
First and Second Divisions of the United States Army
were going to be used somewhere near Chateau-Thierry as
shock troops against the continued German drive. For

194 WITH THE DOUGHBOY IN FRANCE

weeks past he had been carefully watching the big war map
of France that hung upon the wall of his office, indicating
upon it with tiny pin flags the steady oncoming of the
enemy. And in all those weeks he had been making pretty
steady and definite plans against the hour when he would
be called upon to act, and to act quickly.

Already he had formed that habit of quick action.
Once, it was the seventeenth of June, I think, he had had
good opportunity to use it. The First and Second were
already in action along the Marne, brigaded with the
French, and Burlingame was driving along the rear of their
positions. But he supposed that the Divisions were in re-
serve ; he did not realize that it was in actual fighting, not
at least until he espied a dust-covered and wounded Amer-
ican quartermaster sergeant staggering down the road.
The Red Cross man stopped his car and put the wounded
man into it.

" What are you doing here ? " he demanded.

" I got hit — with a machine gun," stated the sergeant.
" That is, I was with the machine gun. I'd never seen

one of the d d things before, but we were fighting. I

got a squad around me and we tackled it. We were making
the old bus hum when — well, they tickled me with a lot
of shrapnel."

Burlingame waited for no further explanations. He
headed his car around and at top speed raced back to Paris.
As he rode he studied a pocket map that he always had with
him. Montmirial! That was the place he had set out
in his mental plans for this sort of emergency; in just this
sort of an emergency.

The stop at Paris was short; just long enough to load
some fifteen tons of hospital supplies in the swiftest trucks
Major Osborne's Transportation Department could supply,
to pick up the highly capable Miss Julia Stimson — then
chief nurse of the American Red Cross — then off to the
front once again. Beyond the fact that the emergency

SUPREME MISSION 195

hospital would be somewhere in the neighborhood of Mont-
mirial, the destination of the swift-moving caravan was
quite uncertain. Burlingame and Miss Stimson were both
route makers and pace makers. They led the way right
up behind the front-line positions, to the chief surgeon of
that portion of the French Army with which the First Divi-
sion was then brigaded. An American colonel was talking
to a Frenchman at the moment

" We're here/' reported Burlingame.

" Who's we ? " asked the Yankee officer.

" The emergency hospital of the American Red Cross,"
was the instant reply.

The French staff located the outfit immediately, in an
ancient chateau at Jouy-sur-Morin near by, which imme-
diately became A. R. O. Military Hospital lumber 107 -
and in a single memorable day evacuated some 1,400 Amer-
ican wounded.

It took real work and lots of it to set up such a hospital
as this ; also an appreciable amount of actual equipment.
First there came the tents and the cots — the most import-
ant parts of a mobile evacuation hospital — afterward, in
orderly but quick sequence, the portable operating room,
with four tables designed for the simultaneous work of four
operating teams; each consisting of a chief surgeon, an
assistant, two orderlies, and two women nurses. The
tables were, of course, but the beginning of the operating-
room equipment alone. There had to be huge quantities
of instruments, anaesthetizing tools, and the like.

" Not merely half a dozen forceps," says Burlingame,
" but dozens upon dozens of them."

" How could you get them all together ? " I asked him.

" It was easy. We figured it all out — when we still
had less than fifty thousand American soldiers in France.
So that when we had a call for an operating-room outfit
we did not have to stop and wonder what we should send
out for a well-equipped one. All that was done well in

196 WITH THE DOUGHBOY IN FRANCE

advance, with the result that in the high-pressure months
of May and June, 1918, we began to reap the benefits
of all the dirty work and the drudgery of the fall of
1917."

I interrupted myself — purposely. I was talking of
that first week in July when the word came that the First
and Second Divisions — no longer brigaded with the
French, but standing by themselves as integral factors of
the United States Army — were going into action at
Chateau-Thierry. The results of that action need no re-
counting here. They have passed into the pages of Amer-
ican history along with Saratoga and Yorktown and Gettys-
burg and Appomattox. They are not germane here and
now to the telling of this story of our Ked Cross in action.
It is germane, however, to know that within fifteen minutes
of the receipt of the news of the beginning of the Chateau-
Thierry fight, Burlingame of the Ajnerican Eed Cross was
in his swift automobile and on his way there.

Information already had reached him that our troops
were to be pushed northward from Chateau-Thierry and
the sectors about Rheims and southeastward from Mont-
didier. Acting upon this somewhat meager information
he headed his machine straight toward Soissons. A wild
ride it was, every mile of it; for Burlingame well knew
that every moment counted in the crucial battle against
the Germans.

From time to time he would meet motor cars or camions
or little groups of soldiers who, in response to his signal-
ings, would stop and frankly tell him what they knew about
the position or the movement of our army. But all this
information was also meager, and much of it was contra-
dictory. Finally, however, at an obscure crossroads he
stumbled upon a group of more than ordinary intelligent
Yanks who gave him news which seemed so accurate and
so vital that he halted his car and pulled out his road
maps. He located himself quickly. And it was not a

SUPREME MISSION 197

long guess that decided him then and there to establish a
hospital.

Remember, if you will, that this man Burlingame is
exceedingly long on common sense, quick thinking, and
quick acting ; short, if you please, on that abominable thing
known as red tape. Sensing the situation with a keenness
that, in the light of after events, was uncanny, he decided
that, when the clash came, it would come midway between
Soissons and Chateau-Thierry, a little to the east of the
point where he had halted his car. And there it came.
" It was bound to be a hard bump/' said he, and so it was.

He at once got in touch with the American Red Cross
warehouses at Beauvais and at Paris and ordered medical
and surgical and hospital supplies in abundance forwarded
to Chantilly — the point where he had so quickly decided
he would locate the emergency evacuation hospital. He
ordered eight surgeons, sixteen nurses, and twelve enlisted
men, who were on duty at A. R. C. Hospital Number 104,
at Beauvais, to proceed at once to Chantilly, where they
were met by additional Red Cross personnel sent on direct
from Paris. He made arrangements with the Ambulance
St. Paul, which was then located at Chantilly, to establish
the material and men and women being rushed from Paris
and from Beauvais as an annex to its formation. Thus,
in a mere twelve hours, was established an American hos-
pital along the French lines of communication.

And none too quickly. On the following morning the
big fighting set in to the north of Chateau-Thierry. And
within a few hours the American wounded began pouring
into the old French chateau town of Chantilly. In three
weeks just 1,364 of our boys had been accommodated in our
emergency Red Cross hospital there ; after which there was
a shifting of positions and of armies with a removal of the
victorious Americans to other sectors, and only French
were left in the neighborhood. Which, in turn, rendered it
quite easy for our Red Cross to turn over the entire equip-
ment to our French allies, who stood in great need of it.

198 WITH THE DOUGHBOY IN FRANCE

Chateau-Thierry was in fact the first really great test of
the American Bed Cross. It was its first opportunity to
perform its chief and most vital service — the succoring of
the wounded men of the United States Army. It met that
test. As a single example of the many ways in which it
met the test consider the request for three thousand
blankets, in addition to several thousand pillows, pajamas,
dressings, surgical instruments, and medicines that poured
in upon the Bureau of Hospital Administration at Baris
at four o'clock on the afternoon of the eighteenth of July.
Osborne's department was a little short of motor cars at
that particular moment; the continued emergency at
Chateau-Thierry, with the multifold demands that it
brought upon every function of the Bed Cross, had fairly
exhausted his garages. There might be cars in, in a
few hours, said the transportation dispatchers. But Bur-
lingame's men took no such chances. They poured down
from out of the Begina headquarters and, taking their
places in the middle of the Bue de Bivoli, halted and
commandeered taxicabs as they hove in sight.

With a half dozen of the Barisian " one lungers "
screeching their very souls out in the second speeds, they
visited four of the Baris warehouses in quick succession.
A truck was brought up out of the offing. By eight o'clock
it was loaded, and by midnight it was at the firing line
and being unloaded of its precious supplies.

On another night during the same battle, a veteran
army surgeon major arrived in Baris at one o'clock in
the morning. He found the medical offices of the Bed
Cross open — there were no hours in those strenuous
days when one found them closed — and demanded sup-
plies. The man was faint from lack of sleep. He was
put in bed for 120 minutes — not one minute less, not
one minute more. When he was awakened, his supplies
were at the door. They had been gathered in a motor
truck from three warehouses immediately roundabout.

SUPREME MISSION 199

Later this army man returned to Paris and reported that
the work of our Ked Cross that night had made it possible
for every man in his Division to have a chance for recovery.
H!ad it not been for the supplies, he added, sixty per
cent of them might have died.

But it was in the quick establishment of hospitals that
I think that Burlingame's function of the Red Cross at-
tained its most satisfactory as well as its most dramatic
results. Take Number 110 at Coincy, also no great dis-
tance from Chateau-Thierry. It, too, sprang up as a direct
result of that famous battle. A radical change of loca-
tion of our troops in that territory and increasing activities
in the neighborhood of Fere-en-Tardenois made an Ameri-
can evacuation hospital at or near that point an immediate
necessity. Burlingame, in the same trusty motor which
carried him so many miles over the battle-scarred and
shell-holed and traffic-worn highroads of France, went out
with Colonel Stark, of the Regular Army force, to find a
site for it. They decided on a little town of Coincy, on
the direct main line of evacuation from the American
sector.

The only things that stood in favor of Coincy were its
location and the fact that it had water. There was little
else left there ; not a chateau or a ruined church or even a
barn in which to locate, temporarily at least, a hospital.
Moreover, there was no time for picking or choosing in
that country through which the boche in the beginnings
of his final retreat had just passed. In the center of some
partly demolished buildings, Stark and Burlingame found
a pump, still in working order. This, they decided, would
make a splendid site for their new hospital. The road
which ran close by the ruins was the main road to the front
— not far away, as the constant booming of artillery at-
tested — and the fact that the railroad also was fairly near
simplified the problem of evacuations. These two factors,

200 WITH THE DOUGHBOY IN FRANCE

together with that of the water, which was both pure
and abundant — the French already had marked the
pump, " Eau potable " - decided the question.

So the two men staked a claim to the ruin. Before they
returned to the car Burlingame picked up a piece of
board. He fished a bit of charred wood out of the debris.
It served as chalk. With it he began slowly marking the
board: "A. E. C. Hospital No. - — ." He hesitated for
just a moment. What the deuce was the number of that
last hospital? Well, no matter. Number 110 would do.
And Number 110 it became and so remained even after
the hospital was ancient — whole weeks ancient — and
finally had been moved to Villers-Daucourt.

" And so with a little burned wood, a piece of busted
wall, and a cow yard, the most advanced American hos-
pital in the battle of the Vesle started in," says Burlin-
game. " We took our burned-wood sign, fastened over
the pump — and, voila, there was Eed Cross Hospital
Number 110. And then we hustled to the first military
telephone and began phoning Paris and other Eed Cross
headquarters to hustle the stuff out to it. c Send it up the
road from Fere-en-Tardenois/ I told them, ' until you come
to the cow yard with the sign. Only look out you don't
miss the sign.' . . . And all the time it was raining like
hell."

One other of these Red Cross hospitals deserves especial
mention in the pages of this book — the tented institu-
tion upon the race course at Auteuil just outside the forti-
fications of Paris. This institution, situated within the
confines of the lovely Bois-de-Boulogne, also was estab-
lished to meet the hospital necessities arising at the crux
of the German drive of 1918. It was first planned to take
cases far advanced toward recovery and so to relieve the
badly overcrowded Eed Cross hospitals at Neuilly and
other points in the metropolitan district of Paris. And
because of this type of cases, and the fact that summer

SUPREME MISSION 201

was close at hand, it was felt that tent structures properly
builded and floored could be used, and so much time saved.

That at least was the plan in May when the race course
was commandeered through the French authorities and
work begun. In twenty-one days the hospital was com-
pleted with six hundred beds, while draughtsmen were
preparing to increase its capacity to twenty-four hundred
beds.

But as the ~boche came closer and closer to Paris, that
original plan was quickly swept aside, and even the Ked
Cross made quick plans to transfer its general head-
quarters to Tours or some other city well to the south of
France. Auteuil became, not a convalescent resort, but
a military emergency hospital of the first class — Ameri-
can Bed Cross Hospital Number Five, if you please. It
soon reached great proportions. In the five months that
marked its career — from May 30 until the end of October,
1918 — it received 8,315 patients who had a total of
183,733 days of hospital treatment and 2,101 operations.
Nearly five per cent of all the surgical cases of our army
in France passed through its portals. And when under
the sudden and almost unexpected pressure that was
placed upon it, it found itself seriously short of personnel
— the men and women already working it fatigued al-
most to the point of exhaustion — nurses and other workers
were drawn from the Children's Bureau, the Tuberculosis
Bureau, and other functions of the American Red Cross.
They were not registered nurses, to be sure, with neat little
engraved diplomas in their trunks, but they were both will-
ing and efficient. And that, at that time, was all that was
necessary. I think that I have already referred to our Red
Cross in France as a mobile institution.

When the Auteuil plan was first brought to the atten-
tion of the officers of the Medical Corps of our army they
were inclined to scoff at it. To them it seemed vast,
visionary, impracticable. And as Burlingame went stead-
ily ahead with his plan — in those days, remember, it

202 WITH THE DOUGHBOY IN FRANCE

was to be chiefly a rest camp — there were folk even in
the ranks of the Red Cross who criticized it. Then
it was that Burlingame answered criticism, not by draw-
ing in on his plans, but by greatly extending them, by
planning to build a full surgical evacuation hospital out
there on the race course in the park. The criticisms grew,
and finally Perkins, whom you already know as the head
of the Red Cross organization in France, called the young-
doctor to him.

" They say that we already have two excellent Red
Cross surgical hospitals here in Paris and that they are
quite enough," suggested Perkins.

" We shall need more," insisted the hospital expert of
his organization.

" The medical sharps in the army don't think that it is
necessary," added the Commissioner.

" Then they are wrong," said Burlingame. " We are
going to need Auteuil — and we are going to need it
mighty badly."

" Then go to it, Major," said Perkins.

And Burlingame went to it, with the results that we
have just seen, while those very army men who came to
scoff at Auteuil remained to praise it — in unmeasured
terms.

" It was a godsend," said Colonel Samuel Wadhams,
medical officer on General Pershing's staff. " I don't know
what we would have done without it."

Done without it ? I sometimes wonder what the Ameri-
can Army really would have done without the hospitals
of the American Red Cross. Although far fewer in num-
ner than its own, they performed a valorous service indeed.
In the six great eventful months from the first of June to
the first of December, 1918, these Red Cross hospitals
together furnished an excess of 1,110,000 days of hospital
care to our troops, which was approximately the same as
giving to every battle casualty in the A. E. F. five days of
care. It admitted to its hospitals a total of 89,539 sick

SUPREME MISSION 203

and wounded men, and cared for them — not merely ade-
quately, but with a real degree of comfort — at a total cost
of 9.57 francs (a fraction less than two dollars) a day.

Back of, and closely allied to, these distinctive Red
Cross hospitals were several groups of auxiliary institu-
tions, which also had been financed and equipped and were
under the care of our American Red Cross. The first of
these groups was that of the military dispensaries, the
value of whose work can be roughly estimated by the fact
that Number Two, down at Brest, cared for 1,751 cases in
the first month of its existence. The others of the so-
called permanent dispensaries were at Bordeaux, Lorient,
Nantes, Neuilly, Paris, and St. Nazaire, while temporary
ones were operated from time to time and as the emer-
gency demanded at Dijon, Senlis, Verberie, Compiegne,
and La Rochelle.

Nine American Red Cross infirmaries were operated
at base ports and along the lines of communication for
our doughboys. These served — and served efficiently —
men taken ill on trains, or casuals passing through. Dur-
ing October, 1918, one of them treated 659 cases, while
another in three weeks had 850 cases, while with the in-
crease of deportation of our sick and wounded the work
of our Red Cross infirmaries was greatly increased. In
November, 567- cases passed through the one at Brest and
in the following month 6,549 cases through the Bordeaux
infirmary. In addition to these two most important base
ports, infirmaries were also operated at Dijon, Bourges,
Angers, Nantes, Tours, Limoges and St. Nazaire.

A still more interesting line of Red Cross work closely
allied to its hospitals was in the convalescent homes which
it established at various places in Erance, almost invariably
at points which had especial charm of scenery or climate
to recommend them. There were eleven of these; at St.
Julien, at Biarritz, at Morgat, at St. Cloud, at Vetau, at
Le Croisdc, at Rochefort-en-Terre, at Villegenic-le-Buis-

204: WITH THE DOUGHBOY IN FRANCE

son, at Hisseau-sur-Cosson, at Avignac, and at Antibes.
In some cases, these were established in resort hotels, tem-
porarily commandeered for the purpose and in others in
some of the loveliest of the chateaux of France. It so hap-
pened, however, that our convalescent home at Antibes,
at the very point where the Alps come down to meet the
sea, was in a hostelry — the Hotel du Cap d' Antibes,
Through the courtesy of a young Eed Cross woman who
was housed there for a time as a patient I am able to pre-
sent a picture of the life there — a picture which seems
to have been fairly typical of all those immensely valuable
homes.

"It is a quiet place," she writes, "truly peace after
war — and there the tired nurses and workers find the
rest they need. Those who want to be really gay must go
to Nice, Cannes, or Monte Carlo. In the morning nearly
every one goes out on the rocks with a rug and a book for
a sun bath. But if you had as fascinating a perch as
my favorite one it would have to be an absorbing tale that
could hold your attention. For, from the warm wave-
worn rock that made a comfortable seat, I could look out
across a broad sweep of blue water to a ragged range of
dark-blue mountains against the paler blue sky. To the
left is a little point of rocks where some one had built a
villa in the shape of a Moslem mosque, which raised
crescent-tipped domes and towers from among a grove of
dark-green firs and gray-green cactus. To the right, where
the mountain peninsula joins the mainland, the coast
sweeps toward me in long, tawny curves. Villas make
tiny dots among the green of the hills and along the shore,
while at a distance, but I know that near by one finds in
them a variety of shades of cream and buff, yellow and
pink, and above the last bit of coast to the extreme right
rise snow-capped Alps.

" If one is restless there are rocks to climb and fasci-
nating paths to explore. One leads over the rocks, around

SUPREME MISSION 205

a wall, and tip through a jungle-like tangle of neglected
gardens and walks into the estate belonging to the King of
the Belgians. The villa, begun before the war, is un-
finished now, but a truly adventurous spirit will go on past
it and be well rewarded. In what was once a formal gar-
den, hyacinths and many colored anemones are blooming in
the long grass ; roses nod gayly from the walls, and almond
blossoms lift their delicate pink flowers against that glo-
rious sky. In a grove of olive trees near by, narcissus
and daffodils are scattered in thick clumps here and there.
There is a fragrance in the air that is like spring at home.

" Noon at Cap d'Antibes brings every one together
for lunch and after that some go back to the rocks, others
to their rooms, and still more take the afternoon bus to
Cannes. You can shop there and get your films developed
and your hair washed, but of course there are far greater
attractions. From three until four an American band
plays in the pavilion and all the world walks down the
promenade to hear — ' Smiles,' ' The Long, Long Trail/
and ' Over There.' Just such a band played just such
tunes last summer at lunch time on the White House lot
in Washington — only there the audience was composed
of hundreds and hundreds of women and girls — war
workers — with a few men in uniform, while at Cannes
it is the other way about. The place simply swarms with
American boys on leave or convalescence, officers and men,
and besides their familiar khaki there is plenty of horizon
blue and the mustard-colored coats of Moroccans, with
red fezzes atop. There are French women, of course, and
then a handful of Red Cross and ' Y ' girls, nurses, and
foreign sisters.

" There are a variety of places to go for tea — from the
conventional, cosmopolitan rooms of the Carlton or Kum-
plemeyer's to the ' Y ' canteen where one can get good hot
chocolate and bread and jam for forty-five centimes. This
' Y/ by the way, is considered their star establishment.
There are reading and billiard rooms, movies and dancing ;

206 WITH THE DOUGHBOY IN FRANCE

and on Sundays, services are held where one used to play
roulette.

" There is also a Y. M. C. A. club for officers, and here
there is dancing to be had as well as tea. But at five
o'clock the girls for the Cap must run, or they will miss
the bus going back No one wants to do that, and miss,
too, the pleasant ride along the coast with the sunset glow-
ing back of the Esperal Mountains and shimmering in a
thousand colors across the ripples of the quiet sea; espe-
cially when the alternative to missing the bus is an hour's
ride on a French i tram.' So, singing as a rule, the bus-
load swings along the smooth white road with twenty-five
or thirty girls, as like as not, in the places where fifteen
are supposed to be.

" That same big bus is used several times a week to
take parties for the long ride along the Riviera, to Nice,
Monte Carlo, and Menton — one of the supremely beau-
tiful drives of the world. There is an hour's stop in
Nice, another in Monte Carlo for lunch, and then, after a
glimpse of the Italian border, the party turns back. The
Hotel Cap d'Antibes, with its many lights, looks very
pleasant after the long, cold ride — it is always cold on
the Riviera after the sun goes down — and dinner, always
good, tastes especially so to the hungry tourists.

" The Cap is too isolated to be gay in the evening ; but,
after all, most of the women there have come to rest and
recuperate, so they are glad of a quiet game of bridge, a
book before the open fire, or a short walk in the magic of
southern moonlight. The energetic younger ones usually
pull back the rugs and dance — a hen party, to be sure ;
fun just the same, if one judges by the faces of the girls.
There is generally singing, too. One nurse while I was
there had a very lovely voice (you kept thinking how much
pleasure she must have been able to give the men in her
ward) and after she had sung the verse of some popular
song, every one joined the chorus. And it was at one
of these singsongs, in the big white-paneled drawing-room,

SUPREME MISSION 207

with the yellow light falling on many faces about the piano,
that I had a glimpse of a gray hospital ward and one of
those tragic commonplaces that make up the life of a
nurse in times of war.

" The singer had been singing a favorite song of the
British Tommies with a strong cockney accent:

" ' Oi want go 'ome,

Oi want to go 'ome,

Now that Belgium is Belgium again,

Now that France has got Alsace-Lorraine,

Carry me over the sea,

Where the Allymand cannot get me,

Oh my, I'm too young to die,

I want to go 'ome/

when a girl near me, who had been rather silent, spoke
for the first time:

" ' That song reminds me of a boy I used to have in
my ward. He had a broken back and it was just a ques-
tion of time, but he didn't know that. He sang that song
until I thought I couldn't stand it.?

" The singing was still to be heard as I slipped into my
coat a few minutes later and went out of doors. Down
on the rocks the water slipped against them softly, over-
head were a million stars in the dark sky.

" And so, war — hideous and relentless — intrudes
even on the peace of beautiful places, as it always will for
most of us as long as we live. But even if the memories
of what lay behind them came back to the nurses who had
their leave at Cap d'Antibes, the days there were mostly
happy ones. Nothing that the Red Cross has done has
been more worth while than this place that they have had
for the nurses who needed rest and recuperation. There
were the creature comforts of hot water, good food, and
soft beds; there was sunshine after an eternity of rain;
peace after war."

CHAPTER IX

THE KED CROSS 1ST THE HOSPITALS OF THE A. E. F.

AT no time was it either the object or the ambition
of the American Red Cross to build or equip or oper-
ate all the. hospitals of the United States Army in France.
For a more or less privately organized institution to have
taken upon its shoulders, no matter how broad they might
be, the entire hospitalization of an army of more than
2,000,000 men would have been suicidal. So our Red
Cross in its wisdom did not even make the attempt; it
was quite content to build and equip hospitals in the early
days before the American Expeditionary Forces had com-
pleted their organization and so were themselves unable to
work out their hospital problem as they were forced to do at
a later time. The Red Cross did more ; it conducted hos-
pitals during the entire period of war — • as you have just
seen — and attempted to make these models, experiment
stations, if you please", from which the medical experts of
the army might derive inspiration and real assistance.
But at no time did it seek to usurp any of the functions of
the Surgeon-General's office of the army — on the contrary.
" When the army was ready to tackle the hospital prob-
lem in fine theory we should have gotten out," Colonel
Burlingame told me ; " but we did not We were follow-
ing out the first clause of our creed, which was to meet
emergency whenever or wherever it arose and no matter
at what cost. And at all times during the progress of the
war the emergency compelled the Red Cross to at least
maintain its hospitals. And so it did, with a total capacity
up to the time of the signing of the armistice of some
14,000 beds. After that we dropped off pretty rapidly.
Our pay-roll lists of personnel show that. On November

208

IN THE HOSPITALS OF THE A. E. F. 209

11, 1918, these contained the names of 1,771 men and
women ; by the first of the following March this total had
dropped to a mere 2»70."

So it was that upon the heels of the first established Red
Cross hospitals in France there came the huge hospitals of
the United States Army in great size and profusion.
Sometimes these were gathered in groups — as at Savenay
or Allerey or Dijon or around about Brest or Bordeaux —
and at other times they stood alone and at comparatively
isolated points. Even these last were sizable institutions,
huge even according to the hospital standards of our larg-
est metropolitan cities in America ; while, when you came
to a point like Savenay — halfway between Nantes and
St. Nazaire — you beheld a group of seven individual
hospitals which, shortly after Armistice Bay, attained a
total capacity of 11,000 beds and were- planned, in fact,
for some 9,000 more, with a further capacity of another
10,000 feasible and remotely planned. Into this great
group of institutions there came* between August, 1917,
and May, 1919, some 85,000 wounded American boys.
Its maximum staff consisted of 500 officers, 500 nurses,
and a general staff of 4,000 enlisted men.

When I visited the place — at the end of April, 1919 —
it still had some 6,500 patients, the most of whom were
well out of danger and were enjoying the warm sun-
shine of a rarely perfect day in France I found the
headquarters staff ensconced in a group of permanent stone
buildings which, in the days before the war, were part of
a normal school standing alongside the highroad to Nantes.
This, itself, formed a hospital for general cases. Some of
those that were grouped with it in the open fields around
about specialized in serious bed surgical cases, in con-
tagious diseases, in tuberculosis, in mental cases. This
last had handled 7,500 cases in the progress- of the war.

In each of these hospitals — as in each and every one
of the United States Army hospitals in France and the

210 WITH THE DOUGHBOY IN FRANCE

occupied areas of Germany — the Red Cross functioned.
At Savenay it had not only erected recreation huts for the
men of each of the individual hospitals, but a huge audi-
torium or amusement hall, permanently fabricated of brick
and steel and glass, equipped with a complete theater
stage, and capable of seating between 1,500 and 2,000
doughboys and their officers. This super-playhouse was
in use every night of the week — for cinema, for drama,
sung or spoken, for dances, and, from time to time, for
meetings and for religious services.

To this entertainment phase of the American Red Cross
in the hospitals we shall presently return. For the mo-
ment I shall ask you to consider the part it played in the
essential job of supplying hospital supplies. It was not,
of course, either practicable or possible for our Red Cross
to supply all of these — or even any tremendously large
part of them. But it could — and did — supply goodly
quantities of all of them when they were most needed,
and so worth ten times their value and quantity at any
other time.

Time and time again it furnished materials, both for
their regular and for their emergency necessities. Some-
times the army itself did not function properly — there
were instances of red tape disgraceful and some, too, of red
tape inevitable. And yet there were other times when all
the tape cutters in the world could not have saved the situ-
ation, but the American Red Cross, with its emergency
warehouses and its well-organized transportation system
all the way across the face of France, did save it. A truck-
load, two, three; perhaps even four or five truckloads of
beds or bedding — perhaps even a small camionette filled
to the brim with dressings and drugs or surgical instru-
ments could, and did, save precious lives — by the dozens
and by the hundreds. Do you remember, in the preceding
chapter, the several instances where our Red Cross played
its part — and no small part at that — in the winning of

IN THE HOSPITALS OF THE A. E. F. 211

the big fight at Chateau-Thierry ? Those were not unusual
instances; they were fairly typical.

There came one day when the commanding officers of
the U. S. A. hospital center at Allerey — one of the larg-
est in all France — sent for Captain James C. Ramage,
the American Red Cross representative in the district. He
told the Red Cross man that a tremendous convoy of
wounded soldiers from the Soissons-Rheims district was
expected within a few days and asked his help in securing
a real bulk of medical supplies. Those were the days when
the Surgeon General's department of the army was not
always able to furnish even drugs and dressings when they
were most needed.

Ramage lost no time in discussing the thing. He said
that he would do his best and caught the first train into
Paris ; spent several days there in getting together the nec-
essary supplies, personally supervised the loading of them
into a freight car, and then performed the unheard-of feat
of inducing the French railway authorities to attach the
freight car to a fast passenger train bound down to Dijon.
Camions were rushed from Allerey to Dijon, and two days
later the necessary supplies were all at the hospital center
— and well in advance of the coming of the wounded
soldiers. On another night in that same summer of 1918,
some 2,250 wounded Americans poured into that selfsame
army hospital center of Allerey. The hospital ware-
houses were exhausted. The Red Cross's were not; do
you remember what we said at the beginning — that the
fullness of its job lay in its being forever ready to meet any
emergency which might arise ?

It was being ready that made it able that hot August
night to turn into the crowded hospital in a space of time
to be measured in minutes rather than in hours, 10,000
blankets, 10,000 sheets, 8,000 towels, 8,000 pairs of pa-
jamas, 2,000 yards of Dakin tubing, 1,000 operating gowns,
1,000 helmets, and two whole carloads of surgical dressings.

Emergency work! How it always does count!

212 WITH THE DOUGHBOY IN FRANCE

The securing of these supplies in the beginning was,
of itself, a master problem. It involved not alone pur-
chase but manufacturing — manufacturing upon a really
enormous scale. We saw at the beginnings of the Red
Cross work in France the various workrooms in Paris
which devoted themselves to the making of dressings —
of one sort or another and in tremendous quantities. Yet
the actual beginnings of this work antedated even the
establishment of the Paris workrooms ; immediately on the
outbreak of the European War, a special department was
established at the National Headquarters of the American
Red Cross in Washington for giving advice concerning hos-
pital garments and supplies for European relief and fur-
nishing patterns and samples for the same. A New York
City committee, organized for the same purpose by Mrs.
Mary Hatch Willard, began the sending of old linens
to French hospitals. This work grew into a unit known
as the Surgical Dressings Committee of the United States,
for the making of dressings by volunteers in this country,
and finally led to the establishment of the first of the Paris
workrooms. By the time that Pershing had first arrived in
France this work in America had grown to a point where it
employed more than two thousand committees and subcom-
mittees. Its output increased so rapidly that in the week
ending August 27, 1917, ninety-two hospitals were sup-
plied and 155,261 dressings were made in the Paris work-
room alone. And that, of course, was long before there
were any American wounded. In the summer of 1917 the
National Surgical Dressings Committee entered into co-
operation with the American Red Cross and from that date
its efficient distribution service in France became the Sur-
gical Dressings Service Department of the American Red
Cross.

Then came the imminent necessity of standardizing these
surgical dressings — which was accomplished by a special
board which Pershing appointed at the end of August,
1917. Its standards were followed, but its energies only

IN THE HOSPITALS OF THE A. E. F. 213

dimmed at the time when it was actually seen that they
were quite exceeding the necessities of the situation. And
the volume of those selfsame energies is perhaps the better
understood when it is realized that from October, 1917,
to January 22, 1919, 147,230,777 cases of surgical dress-
ings alone, both donated and manufactured, were received
at the Red Cross warehouses in Paris.

Splints, of which an immense number were necessary
even for the very short period in which we were actually
engaged in the conduct of the war, formed a real Red Cross
specialty. Our army hospitals were entirely dependent
upon the American Red Cross for these necessities — the
total orders for which in July and August of 1918, totaled
some 15,000 to 20,000 weekly. For that entire year the
output was 94,583 splints, the factories often working from
eighteen to twenty hours a day to keep pace with the requi-
sitions upon them. Our Red Cross also supplied all the
nitrous oxide used in American hospitals of every type in
France. The use of this ultra-modern anesthetic, to the
increasing exclusion of ether and of chloroform, forms one
of the fascinating chapters of the medical conduct of the
war. Although it had been employed as an anesthetic in
the United States for a number of years before the begin-
ning of the war, its first use in Europe was when Colonel
George W. Crile — the distinguished surgeon from Cleve-
land, Ohio — introduced it into operations in the then
American Ambulance Hospital at Neuilly — afterward
the American Red Cross Military Hospital Number One.
That was in 1915. Nitrous oxide as an anaesthetic imme-
diately attracted the attention of a number of eminent
British surgeons.

" It is good," said Colonel Crile, tersely.

And so it is — good. It is so good that Colonel Alexan-
der Lambert, at that time chief surgeon of our American
Red Cross, immediately made it the standard anaesthetic of
its medical service. For, like so many other American sur-
geons, he quickly concurred in the opinion that nitrous

214: WITH THE DOUGHBOY IN FRANCE

acid, used in combination with oxygen, three parts to one,
is the least dangerous as well as the best adapted for use
when operating upon cases of chest surgery, abdomen
wounds, or of shock. Under this anaesthetic the percentage
of recovery is seventy-two per cent, as compared with
fifty per cent for either chloroform or ether. More-
over, it has none of the disagreeable after effects which
come almost invariably with the use of chloroform or ether.
To quote Colonel Lambert:

" The use of nitrous-oxide anaesthetic to the exclusion
of ether or chloroform in case of at least the seriously
wounded seems to me not only advisable but beyond the
advisability of discussion."

Its official use, therefore, was predicated. It was first
supplied to the casualty-clearing stations; American and
British cooperating for the sake of an exchange of ideas
as to its best use. Our Red Cross supplied an apparatus
of special design that had gradually been evolved from those
already devised. This allowed the separate administration
of the nitrous oxide, of oxygen, or of ether — which at
times was used in small quantities — or of the three in
various combinations. And all our American nurses
were trained as anaesthetists in its use.

The making of the nitrous-oxide gas itself was one of
many similar tasks assigned to the Manufacturing De-
partment of our Eed Cross, of which Major Arthur W.
Kelly was department chief. He ordered a huge gas-
making plant from America which, after some considerable
delay, finally was set up at Montreau, fifty miles distant
from Paris. In the meantime the Red Cross had dis-
covered a man in the French Army who had had some
experience in the making of nitrous oxide. He was re-
leased from active army service and at once started to
work making an emergency supply, the limited quantities
carried to France by Colonel Crile having become com-
pletely exhausted. This small plant had a daily capacity

IN THE HOSPITALS OF THE A. E. F. 215

of about 4,000 gallons. But when the bigger machinery
from America had finally been set up — in the midsum-
mer of 1918 — this output was increased to 75,000 gallons
a day. This could easily have been doubled, had it not
been for a single limiting factor — the extreme difficulty
of securing 3,280 gallon cans in which the gas was trans-
ported. Finally the Red Cross secured some hydrogen
tanks that had been captured from the Germans in their
first July defeats. It was then and not until then that
the nitrous-oxide plant began running at anything like
its real capacity. And with the definite result that from
September, 1917, to October 23, 1918, our Red Cross was
able to supply our army with 699,420 gallons of this
precious anaesthetic, its own hospitals with 405,620 gal-
lons, and some miscellaneous institutions with an addi-
tional 251,110 gallons, while it saw Great Britain for-
mally acknowledge nitrous oxide as an anesthetic par
excellence and even conservative France making the first
steps toward its adoption.

A few of the medical and surgical requisitions of a
typical American Army Division — the Second • — upon
our Red Cross -are before me as I write. They are indica-
tive of the overwhelming demands that were made upon it,
not only from every corner of the front, but from every
corner of France that was occupied by our fighting men —
and what corner was not ?

It was at the request of the chief surgeon of this Division
that one of its field hospitals — originally supplied direct
from the army's own sources of supply — was amplified
by the American Red Cross, by the use of Bessoneau tents
and other equipment so as to become practically a mobile
unit, capable of handling far heavier cases. The supply-
ing of the equipment shown by these requisitions began
while the division was still in the vicinity of Montdidier
and continued until after it had moved to Meaux and was
in active preparation for its great role at Chateau-Thierry.

216 WITH THE DOUGHBOY IN FRANCE

In addition to the Bessoneau tents, the following were the
requisitions which were delivered to this single formation
while it was under heavy pressure:

June 1 : 1 tortoise tent and 100 collapsible cots.

June 8: 12 antitoxin syringes for anti-tetanus serum, 200
packages of absorbent cotton, 30 feet of glass tubing, and
25 operating gowns and caps.

June 4- 250 single blankets, 100 litters, 5,000 anti -tetanus
serum, 2 autoclaves, 4 thermometers for autoclaves, 50
wash cloths, 1,000 pairs of socks, 50 towels, and 200 com-
fort kits.

June 6: 50 clinical thermometers, 2,000 temperature charts,
1 gallon of green soap, 36 bottles of ammonia, 5,000 Greeley
units, 20 syringes, 15 liters of Lysol, 20 chart holders, 100
rubber sheets, 2 small instrument sterilizers, 500 night-
shirts, 500 blankets, 1,000 sheets, 500 forks and spoons, 100
bedside tables, 100 folding chairs, 50 hot-water bottles, 36
maps, 50 hand basins, 20 bolts of gauze, 10 bolts of muslin,
100 beds, and 100 mattresses.

June 7: 200 litters, 250 blankets, 100 rolls of cotton, 200
rolls of gauze, 144 rubber gloves, 100 operating gowns and
caps, 96 tubes of catgut, 500 Carrel pads, 100 gowns for
nurses, 20 sterile water containers, 5,000 folded gauze com-
presses, and 5,000 small sponges.

I rather feel that this record of a single week of the
demands of one Division upon our Red Cross will show
quite enough the burden which it was forced to bear ; and
bore most joyously as a part of the opportunity for serv-
ice which was given unto it in France. In a single day
and night during that same great offensive of 1918, 128
different requisitions — each comprising from one to fifty
items — were started out on the road from Paris ; while
on the twentieth of August of that same summer — the
day which marked the beginning of the St. Mihiel drive —
120,000 front-line emergency parcels and more than fifteen
carloads of surgical dressings were shipped to the scene of
activity. From the Paris headquarters of the Red Cross
alone, supplies were shipped that summer to sixty-six
base hospitals, two naval-base hospitals, fifty-four camp

IN THE HOSPITALS OF THE A. E. F. 217

hospitals, twenty-one convalescent hospitals, twenty army
divisions, seven evacuation hospitals, nine field hospitals,
eight hospital centers, nine mobile hospitals, six medical
supply depots, and the central medical department labora-
tory — all of the United States Army in France. This
great record does not, of course, include the supplies sent
to the Red Cross's own hospitals or those sent to the
A. E. F. hospitals from the nine zone headquarters of the
American Red Cross ; nor even emergency supplies sent to
eighteen detached American Army units, far away from
their bases of supplies. In a single month and from one
warehouse, our Red Cross made the following shipments to
formations operated entirely by our army: 77,101 surgical
instruments, 2,820 beds and cots, 24,733,126 surgical dress-
ings, and 15,300 pounds of drugs.

It also supplied specialties, and all for the comfort of
our wounded boys over there. Take ice — that simple
product of our modern civilization — so indispensable to
the American. It is second nature with us to-day and
yet little used by the French. Ice is as much an essential
to our up-to-date hospitals as drugs or nurses or the beds
themselves. Properly packed, it cools the fever and so
greatly eases the sufferings of wounded men as they toss
upon their cots. Its beverage use is too universal to even
need comment here.

" My, that's good ! " more than one sick boy murmured,
as the nurse held a spoonful of it to his hot lips. " It's
just like home."

Yet, while our government planned ice-making machin-
ery for each of its hospitals, large or small, they were not
always ready as quickly as the rest of the plant. There
again our Red Cross stepped into the breach, supplying
small portable ice-making plants not only to the field
hospitals for which they were originally designed, but
even for larger installations. Each of these portable
plants consisted of a gasoline engine of fifteen horse power,
water-cooled and attached to a compressor, which in turn

218 WITH THE DOUGHBOY IN FRANCE

was connected to the water piping in the brine tanks. The
capacity of each of these was about two tons and a half
each twenty-four hours. And each was accompanied by
two Ford camionettes — builded with special ice boxes —
to carry its product to the wards roundabout.

Second only to ice in importance as a hospital auxiliary
was light. In the early years of the war, the surgeons of
the allied nations worked under great difficulties at night
and undoubtedly many lives were sacrificed because of
the lack of proper lighting facilities. I have heard of the
doctors ripping off a wounded man's clothing by the light
of one star shell and waiting for the next to give them
enough brilliancy to examine his injuries.

For at least ten or a dozen years past our larger Ameri-
can circuses have used portable electric-lighting plants on
their various itinerant trips across the land — with a fair
degree of success. Those circuses gave our Eed Cross in
France an inspiration. Lieutenant Harry C. Hand, a
director in its Central Department of Requirements, in
studying the markets for the proper sort of equipment,
used them as models and so evolved, as a plant most
practical for Red Cross needs, a three-and-a-half kilowatt
outfit consisting of a gasoline engine, an electric generator,
and a switchboard. This outfit, mounted upon a stout
camion, would light 135 incandescent lamps of twenty-five
watts each. On its travels it carried in its lockers the
lamps, extension cords, sockets, and the like to make them
available for almost instant service. And the Red Cross
in the heart of the war emergency had five of these outfits
at its service in France.

One other allied factor in this hospital supply service
deserves attention before we finally turn away from it. I
have referred from time to time to the vast quantities of
drugs which our Red Cross distributed to both its own and
other hospital centers. It was obvious that this distribu-
tion had to be centralized, and because of the delicate

IN THE HOSPITALS OF THE A. E. F. 219

and extremely valuable nature of this particular form
of supplies be kept quite separate and distinct from
the others. So " The Red Cross Pharmacy/' as it
was generally called, came into existence, at a former
apartment building at No. 10 Rue de Tilsitt, Paris, and
quickly came to such importance that it was made the
headquarters of the Section of Hospital Supplies, which
in turn was a division of the larger Bureau of Hospital
Administration.

Throughout all of the hard months of the war this sec-
tion boasted that each night found the requisitions for that
day filled. There were no left-overs; not even when a
single day's work meant fifty-six huge orders entirely com-
pleted, and little rest for a staff which averaged forty-one
men and women.

The pharmacy was well systematized. In its basement
were the receiving, the packing, and the shipping depart-
ments, while upon its broad main floor the drugs and anti-
septics were actually stored, the second floor being given
to dental supplies, surgical instruments, rubber goods,
sutures, serums, laboratory equipment, and the like. Each
of these various departments was in charge of a specialist,
a man of many years' experience in the line which he
headed.

By June, 1918, the pharmacy in the Rue de Tilsitt had
become of such importance that it was re-created into a
Section of Supplies, with Major George L. Burroughs, of
the Massachusetts College of Pharmacy in Boston, as its
sectional chief. Within a month he had found the demands
upon his department so much increased that he was forced
in turn to increase its facilities — by the addition of two
warehouses. In another six weeks a new burden was
placed upon his shoulders — the distribution of all alcohol,
ether, oxygen, and nitrous acid issued by our Red Cross,
which meant, of course, more space needed — so the un-
used powder magazine at Fort D'lvry and the riding acad-
emy at No. 12 Rue Duphot — both loaned by the French

220 WITH THE DOUGHBOY IN FRANCE

Government authorities — were added to the quarters of
the pharmacy.

Some idea of the amount of work undertaken and ac-
complished by this Red Cross pharmacy may be gained
when it is understood that in the six months ending Jan-
uary, 1919, 75,016 pounds of drugs were issued from it.
There were in that time 3,954,178 tablets, 21,566 phials of
serum, 271 surgical units, 15,108 pairs of rubber gloves,
and 22,059 feet of adhesive plaster, in addition to many
hundreds of packets of other drug supplies.

Seemingly we have drifted away from our American
boys, sick or wounded and in hospitals. In reality, of
course, we have not Every one of these provisions, large
or small, was aimed directly at their comfort, while each
deserved to be rated as a necessity rather than comfort —
comfort, at least, as the average luxury-loving American
knows it. It was comfort rather than luxury that I found
our boys enjoying there at Savenay — long, comfortable
huts, builded hurriedly but furnished with great care,
great taste, and great atrractiveness. Savenay, itself, was
a good deal of a mud-hole, a fearfully wretched place un-
derfoot. The Eed Cross huts shone brilliantly in contrast.
Here, as in the canteens all over France, the boys might
congregate — practically at all hours — and amuse them-
selves as their fancies dictated; or, if fancy grew a bit
bored, it was part of the job of the directress — one of
whose essential qualifications was resourcefulness and an-
other versatility — to find some new form of amusement.
It was not enough to hand out the cigarettes — one or two
packs a week — or the pipes and the playing cards and the
tobacco, pretty much as requested — there had to be shows.
The American passion for play-acting is something to be
reckoned with.

Perhaps you do not quickly understand how versatile
those very shows might readily become. Let me quote
from Toot Sweet — the little fortnightly newspaper which

*

C .

«

IN THE HOSPITALS OF THE A. E. F. 221

our American Red Cross printed for the boys convalescing
there at Savenay. That is, the Red Cross furnished the
printing press, the type, and the rest of the paraphernalia
for the making of the publication ; the boys, themselves,
supplied the brains that made it so very readable at all
times.

" ' Stunt Night/ advertised in Base 69 Hut for March
13, brought a lot of inquiries," says Toot Sweet, in its
issue dated April 1, 1919. " ' Whadaye mean — stunts ? '
Probably the announcement of pies and doughnuts for
prizes was responsible for the crowd that appeared that
evening when a large part of the floor space was cleared
and a couple of Red Cross hut workers started the stunts.
The first stunt — with a large slice of apple pie as prizes
- was to sit upon a piece of iron pipe, diameter six inches,
place the heel of one shoe on the toe of another, and while
thus insecurely balanced, light in one hand from a lighted
candle in the other a cigarette. Shrieks and howls from
the delighted mob who began betting on results encouraged
a number of aspirants and the pie was finally won. Stunt
after stunt followed in quick succession, all sorts of queer
and absurd contortions varying from picking up folded
newspaper from the floor with your teeth while holding
one foot in the air with one hand to a ( puttee race,' when
the contestants raced from one end of the hall, took off their
puttees, and then put them on again, then raced back, with
various obstacles in the way. Finally the boys began
challenging each other to their favorite stunts, so that Pri-
vate California might have been showing Private North
Carolina a pet trick, while Sergeant Oklahoma and Cor-
poral Louisiana gravely discussed the merits of their ideas
on stunts. The winning team was presented with a large,
juicy apple pie, vamped from the mess sergeant by a Red
Cross girl.

" ( Aonateur night ' was announced for the same hut
two nights later by a stunning poster done in colors by one
of the 309th Engineers. A box of homemade fudge was

222 WITH THE DOUGHBOY IN FRANCE

the prize for the best act. Seven of the best vaudeville
acts ever seen in the huts appeared. The sergeant major
of Base Hospital Number 69 was the master of ceremonies.
A l dummy ' act, a i wop mechanic ' in song and mono-
logue, a ballad singer, a ' song and minstrel man/ a man-
dolin and guitar player, who gave remarkable imitations
of Hawaiian instruments, a ' tramp monologuist/ and a
clog dancer composed the bill. Harry Henly, the ' song
and minstrel man/ won the box of fudge which was dis-
played in all its glory and pink ribbons during the contest."
Sometimes there was not quite so much fun in the situa-
tion. The girls who ran the Red Cross hut in the tuber-
culosis hospital of the Savenay group, almost directly
across the highroad from Number 69, had a far weightier
problem upon their shoulders. To amuse there, was a
vastly more difficult task. For they knew — as most of
its patients knew — that the man who entered the portals
of that particular hospital was foredoomed. If he had a
fighting chance of conquering the " T. B." he was packed
into the hospital ward of a transport and rushed home. If
he did not have that fighting chance — well, why waste
precious transport space? To Savenay with him. And
to Savenay he went to spend his days — and end them —
in a cheery, camplike place where there were croquet and
less strenuous games and broad piazzas that looked down
across the valley toward the embrochure of the Loire, while
Red Cross girls came and went and did their womanly
best to comfort and amuse a fellow — and make him for-
get ; forget the back door of the little hospital where, night
after night, four or five fellows went out — in pine boxes,
never to return, and the rows of wooden crosses down in
the American cemetery at the foot of the hill steadily grew.

Turn back with me, if you will, inland from Savenay
to the curved streets of Vichy — little Vichy situated in
the very foothills of the high Alps. It is January now,
not April. We have turned backward in full earnest, and

IN THE HOSPITALS OF THE A. E. F. 223

are breathing the air of those hard weeks and months lhat
followed immediately upon the signing of the armistice.

Vichy, in its very compactness, with the flat yellows of
its curious old buildings and its equally curious modern
hotels, with the fifteenth-century tower in the background
and the quiet Eiver Allier slipping by, has the fascinating
unreality of a stage setting — one of those marvelous ef-
fects with which the genius of a Belasco or a Joseph Urban
from time to time delights in dazzling us. In spring or in
summer we might find it prepared for carnival — with
green'-painted chairs and tables underneath the still
greener foliage of its small park. But this is January and
the park is deeply blanketed in snow. In such a serene
midwinter setting it seems far more ready for silent drama
than for the blare of carnival — the figures in olive drab
are indeed quite the figures of pantomime — brown against
the whiteness of the snow. The only touches of color in
the picture — tiny splotches of green or blue or purple or
yellow — are supplied by the tiny cloth bags that the men
carry with them. They are preparing to entrain — the
first step of many on the way back to the homeland — and
the vari-colored bags, each marked with a crimson cross,
are the comfort kits they genuinely cherish.

Before war was come upon Prance, Vichy was a resort
to be reckoned with in the comings and goings of her elect.
It was a watering place — and much more besides. There
men and women ate as well as drank, bands played, beau-
ties intrigued, wheels, flat-set, spun merrily, and entire
fortunes were flicked away at the gaming tables; but war
changed these things — as many, many others. It took
the viciousness out of Vichy and brought back to it all of
the gentleness which it must have possessed in the begin-
ning. The small city, where formerly the ill and the
bored made pilgrimages in search of health (health bub-
bling up to the lips in the faint concealments of a glass of
sparkling water), became a city of wounded; all too often
a city of death.

224: WITH THE DOUGHBOY IN FRANCE

The French Army moved in ; and, commandeering hotel
after hotel, transformed them into its hospitals. On its
heels came the American Army; it alone took more than
eighty hotels for its own hospital purposes. That was the
signal that our Red Cross would be needed, and without
further urge it moved in. Wherefore the comfort bags in
the hands of the doughboys as they moved across the park
toward their waiting trains.

If memories were half as tangible things as war " sou-
venirs/' those tiny bags of the crimson cross would have
held other things than soap and razor blades and tooth paste
and playing cards and tobacco and the like. They would
have held definite memories of Vichy and all that it had
meant to the wounded men of our a-rmy. Some of them
would have carried the pictures of lights shining out
through opened doors into the darkness of the night and
litters coming in through those opened doors — litters
bearing American men, when they were not American
boys — -men clad only in hospital robes, but whose first
bandages were drenched with blood and spattered with the
mud of ~No Man's Land. There would have been a mul-
tiplicity of pictures of this sort, for Vichy in the days of
actual fighting never was an idle place. There were times
there when, within a cycle of twenty-four hours, as many
as six thousand men would be sent away from it — to make
room for an equal number of incoming freshly wounded
soldiers. In the early days of November that many came
to it direct from the dressing stations, and the problem of
our Red Cross there became a little bit more complex.

There might also have been pictures in those selfsame
comfort bags of the Red Cross girls on the stone platforms
of the railroad station — young women who in warm days
served iced lemonade there and in cold, hot chocolate, or,
when it was requested, hot lemonade ; for the fact remains
that lemonade was the only food or drink that many of the
gassed cases could endure. And it was ready for them
there — at all hours of the day or night, and at all days ;

IN THE HOSPITALS OF THE A. E. F. 225

even though to make that possible the girl workers would
sometimes stay on duty for thirty-six hours at a stretch:
without having the opportunity of divesting themselves of
their clothing and so gaining a little real rest.

A final picture of Vichy might have well been a mental
photograph of the " hut." This formerly had been the
Elysee Palace — a gaming and amusement center of none
too savory a reputation ; yet with its central location on the
main street, its ample lounging space, and its small theater,
self-contained, it was ideal for the purposes of our Red
Cross and so became a living heart of Vichy. It was the
canteen or club in which some five thousand doughboys
were wont to congregate each day — to write letters home,
to play games, or the tireless piano, to read the newspapers
or the magazines, to visit, to gossip — in every way possible
to shorten days that passed none to quickly for any of
them.

During the first months of its organization this Eed
Cross superhut did not include the entire " Palace."
Gradually it spread, however, until the entire two floors
of the place were busy with American Eed Cross activities.
And the doughboy passing from the comfortable clubrooms
on the main floor — wherein, for the comfort of the con-
valescents, a full-fledged army commissary had been set up
— upstairs found a " first-aid " room of a new sort. It
was, in fact, an operating room, where expert surgery might
be applied to torn and ripped and otherwise wounded uni-
forms. And the head surgeon was a woman — a smart,
black-eyed French seamstress who could perform wonders
not alone with torn buttonholes but who also possessed a
facility with a hot sadiron that made her tremendously
popular upon the eve of certain festal occasions.

" How would a dish of Yankee ice cream taste to-day ?
You know, the same sort that Blink & Smith serve down
there in the Universal, at the corner of Main and First
streets ? "

226 WITH THE DOUGHBOY IN FRANCE

Imagine something like that coming out of the blue,
and to a boy who has been " fed up " on army cookery
and who even has lost his taste for the delicacy of French
cookery. You may take it direct from me that the hut
there at Vichy held a kitchen and that it was a good
kitchen. Can you imagine any first-rate American club
that ever would fail in such an essential ? And from that
modest cuisine there in the pulsing heart of the bubbly
town came truly vast quantities of the trivial foodstuffs
that are forever dear to the stomach of the doughboy. Ice
cream — of course — and small meat pies, each in its
own little coat of oiled paper — and creamy custards —
and, of course, once again — coffee and all manner of sand-
wiches, imaginable and unimaginable. And, because there
were many of the doughboys who could not possibly make
their way to the hut, even on crutches or in wheel chairs,
a camionette drove away from its kitchen each day with
seventeen gallons of ice cream tucked in it — all for the
benefit of bedridden American soldier boys.

Remember, if you will, that this once disreputable Elysee
Palace — in the glory of war aid becoming not only
reputable but almost sanctified — held a theater; small,
but completely equipped. Our Red Cross workers did not
lose sight of that when they chose the place as a headquar-
ters for their endeavors. Four days a week this became
a moving-picture house — just like the Bijou or the Or-
pheum back home. On Wednesday French wounded —
for whom comfort provisions were never too ample —
were guests there of the American Red Cross, and each
poilu carried away a little gift of American cigarettes —
to any Frenchman the very greatest of all treasures Sat-
urdays were set aside for " competitive vaudeville " or an
" amateur night " — very much as we saw it at Savenay.
Gradually a stock company — capable at least of one-act
plays — was evolved from the dramatic material imme-
diately at hand •- — : soldiers and Red Cross and hospital men

IN THE HOSPITALS OF THE A. E. F. 227

and women workers — with the result that by Thanksgiv-
ing Day, 1918, a very creditable production entitled " The
Battle of Vichy " was produced there in the hut, after
which the company moved on toward the conquest of the
neighboring " metropolitan " towns of Moulins and Chatel-
Guyon.

Some one is going to come along some day and write the
analysis of the innate desire of the American to dabble with
play-acting. The plethora of war-time musical shows that
became epidemic among the divisions of the A. E. F. and
spread not merely to Paris — where one of these enter-
tainments followed upon the heels of another — but event-
ually to New York and other cities of the country, affords
interesting possibilities for the psychologist. It was a
huge by-product of the war and one not entirely expected.

When the resources of the amateur Thespians of Vichy
had become well-nigh exhausted, a New York professional
actress — Miss Ida Phinney — who not only had real
dramatic ability but considerable experience in staging and
producing, was enlisted in the Red Cross service there.
With her aid, the attractive little cinema theater — with its
blue upholstery, its tiny boxes, and its complete and up-to-
date stage equipment, even to the scenery — became a full-
fledged playhouse. Stage hands and property men were
assigned from the army, and Vichy began seriously to
stage, costume, and produce and criticize plays. Soldiers
with a knack for design took keen delight in advising as
to " creations " for the wardrobes of the cast and them-
selves watched the garments grow into reality from inex-
pensive stuffs in the sewing room. A clever artist wrought
a full set of stage jewelry — even to the heavy bracelets
and the inevitable snake rings of the Oriental dancers —
from stray scraps of shells and other metals that came to
his hungry fingers, while the Red Cross sent a full comple-
ment of musical instruments down from Paris. And so

228 WITH THE DOUGHBOY IN FRANCE

the Vichy A. E. F.-A. E. C. Playhouse came into the full-
ness of its existence — and night after night hung out the
S. K. 0. sign.

After all, what is the doughboy's idea of a good time?
That is the very question our Red Cross asked itself -
again and again. And because the correct answer could
not be evolved in a moment, established not only after it
had arrived in France a Bureau of Recreation and Wel-
fare whose real job was, after plenty of practical experi-
mentation, to establish the correct solution of the problem.
For a long time this Bureau consisted of a small desk at the
Paris headquarters, a Ford camionette, and Major Harold
Ober. The camionette and Ober went from village to
village along the lines from Bar-le-Duc to Gondrecourt
with books, magazines, tobacco, writing material, and a
small moving-picture show. These efforts many times fur-
nished the only amusement to our early troops, billeted in
quiet villages, where the quaintness of French pastoral
life soon lost its novelty.

From that small beginning, Ober's work grew steadily.
And because the Red Cross specialized more and more in
that phase of army life which was its original purpose —
hospitalization — Ober's task became in turn more and
more devoted to the hospital centers, large and small — un-
til the time came in practically every hospital ward in
France — where the men were not so desperately ill as to
make even music an irritant — that the " rag/' and " jazz,"
or the latest musical comedy hit direct from Broadway were
constant and welcome visitors to long rows of bedridden
boys. In most cases these were phonographs, and because
whenever I wish to be really convincing in the pages of
this book, I fall back upon figures, permit me to mention
that 1,243 phonographs, calling for 300,000 needles and
29,000 records, helped relieve the tedium of the American
convalescents in the hospitals of France.

And, while we are still in figures, remember that there
were times — unbelievable as it may seem to some folk

IN THE HOSPITALS OF THE A. E. F. 229

who were frequent visitors to our hospital wards over there
— that the doughboy tired of music, canned or fresh, and
turned gratefully to the printed page. To anticipate his
needs in that regard, American residents in Paris and in
London gave generously of their private libraries — a
nucleus which soon was greatly increased by purchase.
The books were sent around in portable boxes, a service
which steadily grew until a library of from 1,000 to 10,-
000 books was maintained by the American Red Cross in
each hospital — a total of some 100,000 all told, and of
which a goodly proportion were histories, French gram-
mars, dictionaries and technical works.

The demand for periodical literature was tremendous.
In the months of December, 1918, alone, our Eed Cross
distributed nearly four million magazines and newspapers
among our doughboys. Prominent among these last was
the Stars and Stripes, the clever and ingenious publication
of the enlisted men themselves. A special " gift edition "
of this remarkable weekly was obtained from the publishers
for distribution in hospitals alone, and this ran into the
hundreds of thousands each month — a high limitation
which was reached only when the stock of print paper be-
gan to run low. The demand upon writing paper was
hardly less than that upon print. The doughboy was a
regular and prolific correspondent, and before January,
1919, our Red Cross had furnished him with seven million
illustrated post cards, seven and a half million envelopes,
and fourteen million sheets of writing paper.

But his eternal joy was in " shows." These might be
two come-uppish lads, with gloves, going it in a roped
arena, a flickering lantern displaying the well-known and
untiring antics of Mr. Charles Chaplin or Mr. Douglas
Fairbanks, the exquisite artistes of one of the opera houses
in Paris in a composition that brought unforgetable joy to
the ears and memories of the many, many lovers of music in
our khaki — or a homemade production of the doughboy

230 WITH THE DOUGHBOY IN FRANCE

himself. Of these the " movie" was, of course, the
simplest to handle, and therefore by far the most universal.
It began its A. E. F. career in France as a true " barn-
stormer." As early as July, 1917, a Red Cross man with
a French motion-picture operator as an assistant had hied
himself out from Paris, riding in one of the universal
Ford camionettes, upon which had been mounted a genera-
tor and a projector. Upon arriving at an army camp, the
show would be " put on " — with little fuss OT delay. The
smooth, whitewashed side of a stone building would make
a bully screen and there was never even doubts of an audi-
ence or of its enthusiasms. For from wonderments at this
additional strange contraption from the Etats Unis, the
peasants and the poilus> who were its very first admirers,
grew rapidly into Mary Pickford and Charlie Chaplin and
Billie Burke fans. This taste followed closely that all-
conquering admiration for our chewing gum which over-
came the French and left them quite helpless.

Eventually this " movie " institution of the Red Cross
overseas grew to sizable proportions, under the direction of
Lawrence Arnold, of New York. At least five and some-
times fourteen performances a week were given at each
of our American hospitals in France — and with a com-
plete change of program each week even to the Pathe
weekly news, which was purchased and sent overseas by the
Westchester County (N. Y.) Chapter of the American Red
Cross as its own special contribution. But I think that
the most interesting feature of this entire work — and the
most human — was the ingenious scheme by which the pro-
jectors were so adapted as to throw the pictures upon the
ceilings of the wards and so give an untold pleasure and
diversion to the tedious hours of our boys who were so
completely bedridden as not to be able to even sit erect.
And there were many such.

We have drifted for the moment quite away from Vichy
and the lovely blue and white and gold theater of our Red

IN THE HOSPITALS OF THE A. E. F. 231

Cross in the heart of that ancient town. While it was
headquarters, it was, after all, but part of the American
Red Cross show there ; because while our Red Cross recog-
nized that the biggest part of its job was taking care of the
enlisted man it was by no means blind to the necessities of
his officers. Which led to the regeneration — moral and
otherwise — of still another well-known gambling place in
the town — the smart casino in the center of the park.
This became, quite quickly and easily, an officers7 club for
the A. E. F. One room was reserved ordinarily for the
French, while at least once a week the entire place was
given over to a dance.

Dancing ! Neither the enlisted man nor the officer ever
seemed to tire of it. Each week also the enlisted men
piled up the tables and the chairs in their hut and conducted
a dance of their own, of which one of the chief features was
ice cream — not fox-trotting. As in the huts and canteens
elsewhere across France there were never nearly enough
girls to serve as partners for the men. But there were no
" wallflowers." The floor manager always carried a
whistle. A number of times during the progress of each
number he blew it — as a signal that the men lined along
the walls were privileged to " cut in " on those already
dancing. And on the occasions when some restless, impet-
uous boy blew a whistle of his own and seized the first
partner available there was ever a delightful confusion.

Yet with all these things it could not be said that life in
the hospital center was exactly an even round of social
events; yet it rarely ever ceased for long to be dramatic.
Take that November evening when twenty-seven hundred
of our boys who had been prisoners of the boche came slip-
ping into Vichy. Their uniforms were filthy and ragged.
Slung from their shoulders were the Red Cross boxes such
as had sustained them not only during their incarceration
in Germany but on their long journey out of that miserable
place.

232 WITH THE DOUGHBOY IN FRANCE

The limited capacity of these Red Cross boxes for our
imprisoned men had precluded their containing much more
than mere food necessities. And the boys in the ragged
uniforms were hungry, not only for food of the " home-
cooked " varieties, but for everyday human associations.
They had both; even though the hut and the casino each
worked steadily and for long hours six wonderful nights
in succession. Nearly four thousand miles away from
home, every effort was made to make this home-coming into
Vichy from the neutral gateways of Switzerland a real one.

These prisoners, as well as the greater numbers of the
wounded, arrived with practically no personal possessions.
The army promptly re-equipped them with uniforms, but
the job of the Home and Hospital Bureau of the Army and
Navy Department, which had this particular part of the
big Bed Cross job as its very own province, was to antici-
pate and look after all of their personal necessities. This
thing it did, and its representatives cooperated with the
army officers in studying the most urgent requirements and
finding the very gifts which would provide the greatest
proportion of real comfort.

Come back, if you will, once again to statistics. I
make no apologies for introducing the flavor of the official
report into this narrative from time to time. Reports oft-
times are indeed dull things ; but the reports of almost any
department of the Red Cross have a real human interest —
even when they seemingly deal with mere percentages and
rows of figures. Take a hospital which solemnly reports
that 175,872 hospital days have been given to the army in
the short space of four months. That fact can hardly be
dismissed as a dull statement. It carries with it pictures
of white wards, of the capable hands of nurses, of the faces
of brave boys in long lines along the ways of an institution
which modestly confesses that it holds but a mere fifteen
hundred beds.

Because the following excerpt from the report of a Red

IN THE HOSPITALS OF THE A. E. F. 233

Cross captain at Vichy carries with it a picture of the boys
who straggled into the local headquarters asking for every-
thing from socks to chewing gum, it is set down here :

" During the month of October (1918), 78,278 packages
of tobacco, 7,480 tubes of tooth paste, 7,650 toothbrushes,
3,650 combs, 3,460 Eed Cross bags, 2,850 packages of gum,
1,650 cakes of soap, 1,250 pipes, 1,560 handkerchiefs, 1,245
cakes of chocolate, 1,200 packages of shaving soap, 950
pencils, 1,000 boxes of matches, 900 shaving brushes, 500
packages of playing cards, 450 washcloths, 400 sweaters,
350 razors, 350 boxes of talcum powder, and various
smaller amounts of pens, ink, malted milk, razor blades,
checkers, thread, games, pipe cleaners, scissors, and drink-
ing cups were distributed free ; chiefly, so far as we know,
to penniless boys. As this is written, this office is having
a thousand applicants a day and, while all their wants
cannot be met, no one leaves empty-handed. . . ."

" No one leaves empty-handed. . . ."

The boys who marched across the snow-blanketed park
at Vichy that January morning with their crimson-crossed
bags in their hands, were, after all, only typical of many
thousands who had gone before. For three days they had
anticipated their evacuation by asking for writing paper,
for souvenir postals, for pocket song books, for gloves,
sweaters, and the rest of the usual output of the Eed Cross
— the variety of whose resources would put a modern
city department store to the blush. One youngster came
to the headquarters on the last day holding his trench cap
in his hand.

" It's too dirty for the trip home," he said. " Can't the
Red Cross get me a new one ? "

No, the Red Cross could not duplicate the work of the
army's quartermasters, but it could, and would, help the
boy out. So it gave him a cake of soap and showed him
how he could clean his greasy cap quite thoroughly and
then dry it on the office stove before starting on the march
across the park.

234: WITH THE DOUGHBOY IN FRANCE

The difficulties of keeping up a full stock of Ked Cross
supplies of every sort in a land and in times when shipping
space of all kinds was at a great premium should be obvi-
ous. Of necessity surgical supplies took precedence over
luxuries of every sort. Then it was that such places as
Vichy and Savenay and all the rest of them had to depend,
not alone upon their normal receipts, but upon the resource-
fulness of individual workers and the fruitfulness of the
surrounding country. That was the reason why in one
instance when Red Cross bags could not be shipped into
Vichy, they were manufactured there by the thousands by
French needlewomen. Indeed no doughboy should leave
" empty-handed." Near by districts for a considerable
number of miles roundabout were invaded by automobiles
seeking the bright-colored cretonnes, which make the bags
so very gay and, in turn, so much the more welcome.

On at least two other occasions the vicinage was similarly
combed for emergency supplies — for the American cele-
brations of both Thanksgiving Day and Christmas, 1918.
Much was made of both these glorious Yankee holidays.
The time was propitious for real celebration. Peace was
not only in the air, but at last actually accomplished. The
hearts of men were softened. One could sing of " peace
on earth " and not choke as the words came to his lips.

So it was that Christmas Day at Vichy was a particu-
larly gay one — gay, despite even the pain and suffering
that remained in all the great hospital wards there. For
men — American men, if you please, could, and did, hide
for the nonce their fearful suffering. Pain begone ! The
carols were in the air. The hundreds of gayly decorated
electric-light bulbs were flashing on at dusk. And you
might go from ward to ward and there count all of fifty
Christmas trees — these, too, brilliantly decorated. And
the decorators in all these instances had been Ked Cross
women and men — and wounded soldiers lying ill at ease
in their hospital cots. They made a great job of all of it
— a merry job as well. And when the supplies of such

IN THE HOSPITALS OF THE A. E. F. 235

conventional raw materials as tinsel and popcorn fell short
they seemed to find something else that did quite as well.

For that hospital celebration among our wounded men
at Vichy just 13,657 socks were filled, which bespeaks
the exact number of doughboys that participated in the
celebration. If they could have spoken, each of these
humble articles of clothing might easily have told a double
story — the tale of its own origin and the romance that
came to it after that memorable Christmas Day ; for they
were American knit socks, and no factory — no inanimate,
impersonal place, peopled with machines rather than with
humans — had turned them forth. Each and every one of
them were hand-knitted. And some of them had come
from my lady's parlor, situated in an upper floor, perhaps,
of a great and gaudy apartment house, and some had come
from the prairie ranch, and some had come from cabins
upon the steep and desolate mountainsides of the Alle-
ghenies or the Eockies or the Sierras. From East and
West and North and South they had come — but all had
come from the United States ; and I am perfectly willing
to predict that every blessed one returned forthwith to the
land of its birth.

The mate of each one of these 13,657 socks was rolled
and placed in its toe. Then followed other things — shav-
ing soap, cigarettes, tobacco, nuts, candy, handkerchiefs
— by this time you ought to know the Red Cross list as
well as I. While, by connivance with the head nurse of
each of the wards, each blessed sock was individually tagged
and addressed to its recipient. There is nothing, you
know, like personal quality in a Christmas gift.

If, after the perusal of all these pages, you still insist
upon being one of those folk who regard the triumph of our
Red Cross in France as one of American organization,
rather than of American individualism, and American
generosity, permit me to explain to you that in the para-
graphs of this chapter you have slipped from the work of

236 WITH THE DOUGHBOY IN FRANCE

the Bureau of Hospital Administration to that of the Home
and Hospital Bureau of the Army and Navy Department.
The distinctly medical and surgical phases of the Eed
Cross work in the A. E. F. hospitals across France was a
major portion of the burden of Colonel Burlingame's job;
the more purely recreative and comfort-giving phases came
under Majors J. B. A. Fosburgh and Horace M. Swope,
both of whom served as directors of the Army and Navy
Departments during the Gibson regime. But the distinc-
tion between these two departments was almost entirely one
of name. Each, after all, was American Red Cross and
as American Red Cross worked — to a common and un-
selfish and entirely humanitarian end.

If I have lingered upon Vichy it has been because its
story was so nearly the story of the Red Cross work in other
A. E. F. hospitals across France. The narrative of each
differs as a rule only in the most minor details. Some-
times, of course, the unexpected happened, as at leaves,
where our Red Cross under emergency served a double pur-
pose. During the October, 1918, drive, when the Amer-
ican Army was functioning to its highest efficiency and in
so functioning was, of necessity, making a fearful sacrifice
of its human units, this hut was taken over by the Medical
Corps of the army and fitted out as an emergency ward,
with ninety-five cots. For six weeks it so served as a
direct hospital function.

In the great Base Hospital "No. 114 at Beau Deserte-
just outside the embarkation ports of Bordeaux and
Bassens — our Red Cross not only served from 1,200 to
1,500 cups of coffee a day in its huge hut, but actually
maintained an athletic field, in addition to the billiard
tables which were an almost universal feature of every
Red Cross hut. And at another base hospital in that same
Bordeaux district, several companies of evacuated men
were being told off into groups of a hundred each — and
each in charge of a top sergeant — ready to sail on the fol-

IN THE HOSPITALS OF THE A. E. F. 237

lowing day. Then, just as the men were about to march
to the gangplank of the waiting steamer, one of their num-
ber fell ill of the scarlet fever and the entire group had to
be quarantined. It was one of the many jobs of the Ked
Cross force there to keep these restless and disappointed
men amused and as happy as possible, and in turn neces-
sary to use a little philosophy.

Philosophy ?

One Red Cross girl down there at that particular time
told me how she had experimented with it in that trying
instance. Her eyes sparkled as she announced the results
of the experiments.

" It worked, it really worked," she said. " I found a
group of colored men, and upon that group used all the
scientific new thought that I might possibly bring to my
aid, and with real success. The men were mollified and a
bit contented, so that one of them — I think that back in
the Middle West he had been a Pullman porter — finally
came to me and said :

" ' Missy, I's a-found our hoodoo. Sure what could we
expect when we've got a cross-eyed nigger preacher in our
squad? '"

CHAPTER X

" PACK UP YOUR TROUBLES IN YOUR OLD KIT BAG "

< i\T\T OTOTDED yesterday; feeling fine to-day."

V V How many times that message — varying some-
times in its exact phrasing, but never in its intent — was
flashed from France to the United States during the
progress of the war never will be known. It was a lie -
of course. Would any sane mother believe it, even for a
minute ? But it was the lie glorified — the lie idealized,
if you will permit me to use such an expression. And it
was the only lie that I have ever known to be not only sanc-
tioned, but officially urged, by a great humanitarian organ-
ization. For the Red Cross searchers in the American hos-
pitals in France were not allowed to write to the folks at
home in any other tenor. Little scraps of messages mut-
tered, perhaps, between groans and prayers, were hastily
taken down by the Red Cross women in the hospitals, and
by them quickly translated into a message of good cheer
for the cable overseas. Any other sort was unthinkable.

Here was a typical one of these :

" Wounded yesterday in stomach — feeling fine. Tell
mother will be up in a day or two."

Would you like to look behind the scenes in the case of
this particular message? Then come with me. We are
" behind the scenes " now — in the dressing room which
closely adjoins the operating room in a big American evac-
uation hospital not far from Verdun. They had done with
him on the operating table — for the moment. One oper-
ation had been performed, but another was to follow
quickly. In the meantime, the soldier boy — he really
was not much more than a boy — sat straight upward on

238

" PACK UP YOUR TROUBLES " 239

his cot and watched them as they pulled the tight, clinging
gauze from his raw and tender flesh. All he said during
the process was :

" Do you think that I could rest a minute, doc, before
you do the second one ? "

He got his momentary rest. And as he got it, sat, with
a cigarette between his tightly clinched teeth, and dictated
the letter home which you have just read.

Another Eed Cross girl walking through one of the
wards of that same hospital near Verdun stopped at the
signal of a wounded man who lay abed. He was a very
sick-looking man; his face had the very pallor of death.
And his voice was very low and weak as he told the Red
Cross woman that he wanted her to write a letter for him
to his wife back in a little Indiana town.

" Tell that I'm wounded — just a little wounded, you
understand. Got a little shrapnel in my legs, but that I'll
be home by Christmas. Did you get all of that ? "

The girl nodded yes. She took the notes on a bit of
scrap paper mechanically; for all the time her eyes were
on the face of the man. All the time save once — when
they fell upon the smooth counterpane of his bed, then re-
turned to the man's face once again. She knew that he
was lying, and because she was new, just come over from
America — she did not know that the Red Cross held one
particular lie to be both glorified and sanctified — she
folded up the memorandum, told the wounded man that she
would write the letter — and went out.

She went straight to the records room of the place.
Yes, it was true. Her suspicions as to the unnatural
smoothness of that counterpane were confirmed there. The
man had had shrapnel in both legs, but that was not all.
Both had been amputated — well above the knees.

The Red Cross girl went back to him, her eyes blazing
with anger. Her anger all but overcame her natural ten-
derness.

240 WITH THE DOUGHBOY IN FRANCE

" I can't, I can't," she expostulated. " I can't send
that letter."

" Why can't you ? " he coolly replied.

She faced him with the truth.

" Well, what of it ? " said he. " If I do get home, I'll
get home by Christmas — and that will be time enough for
her to know the truth. She'll be ready for it, then.
But — " he lowered his voice almost to a whisper — " I'm
not going to get home. The doctor's told me that, but he
don't have to tell me; I know it. And if I don't get home

she'll never be the wiser You write that letter, just as

I told it to you."

Here was by far the saddest phase of the Red Cross
work for our soldier boys — and almost the most import-
ant. It was one thing for the girl in the steel-gray uni-
form, with the little crimson crosses affixed to her shoulders,
to play and make merry with the wounded men who were
getting well ; but it was a different and vastly more diffi-
cult part of the job to play fair, let alone make merry, with
those who were not going to get well; who, at the best,
were to shuffle through the rest of their lives maimed or
crippled or blind. Yet what an essential part of the big
job all that was ! And how our girls — moved by those
great fountains of human love and sympathy and tender-
ness that seemingly spring forever in women's hearts, rose
to this supreme test over there! And after they had so
arisen how trivial seemed the mere handing out of sand-
wiches or coffee or cigarettes ! This was the real touch of
war — the touch supreme. After it, all others seemed
almost as nothing.

Early in the progress of the conflict our Red Cross fore-
saw the great necessity that would be coming for its acting
as a medium of communication between the doughboy and
his folks — three thousand miles or more away. The
United States Army had made little or no provision to meet

"PACK UP YOUR TROUBLES" 241

this need ; it had far larger and far more immediate prob-
lems ahead of it. And so about the best that it could be
expected to do would be to notify the folks at home that
their boy had made sacrifice — supreme or very great -
for his country ; at the best, a sort of emotionless proceed-
ing upon its part. In the meantime there was hardly a
waking hour that those selfsame folks were not thinking
of the boy in khaki. While if anything happened to him
— serious even, but not quite serious enough to justify
the setting of the somewhat cumbersome machinery of the
army's elaborate system of notification into motion — both
he and the folks were helpless. France is indeed a long,
long distance away from the United States. Three thou-
sand miles is a gap not easily spanned.

But it was the job of the American Ked Cross to span
that gap; not only to bring news of the boy to the home
folks, but, in many, many instances, to bring news of them
to him. The one thing was nearly as valuable as the other.
And while in the elaborate organization of the American
Red Cross they were operated as separate functions and
bureaus, their work in reality was so interwoven that in the
pages of this book we shall consider them virtually as one,
and shall begin a serious consideration of this important
phase of Eed Cross work by calling attention to a very few
of the ramifications of a hospital searcher's job. First and
foremost her task was to tell those same home folks all that
she could pen, or typewrite, about their own particular
soldier — exactly where he was at that time and just how he
progressed. The ordinary method of handling the vast
volume of these messages was in the form of short, concise,
personal reports which passed through the Paris headquar-
ters of the American Eed Cross and were forwarded by it to
the National Headquarters at Washington, where they were
made up into letters and forwarded to the families. There
were, of course, many variations in this method; for in-
stance, when it was advisable for Paris to write direct to the
boy's parents, and in those other cases, which you have al-

242 WITH THE DOUGHBOY IN FRANCE

ready seen, where the letter to America went direct from the
Red Cross worker's room at the hospital. The choice be-
tween these methods was left quite largely to the individual
worker who, in turn, weighed each situation and its neces-
sities, individually and separately.

It was only in these last instances that the lie was sanc-
tioned and even permitted, and even then only upon the
absolute demand of the wounded man, himself. He had
all the rights in such a situation, and the Red Cross bowed
to and respected those rights — in every case.

The Red Cross reports through headquarters were ac-
curate — invariably, and, at first sight, generally unemo-
tional. Here is one of them that is quite typical :

" Private Edward Jones — 20th Regiment, Company
H — has been wounded in both legs. Wounds painful,
but amputation not necessary. In excellent spirits —
sends love to family."

Short, to be sure. But to a newsless family three thou-
sand — perhaps six thousand — miles away, with its neces-
sary detail, tremendously satisfying.

Return with me if you will for a final visit to Vichy.
'No group of Red Cross workers anywhere held a more
sacred responsibility than the women who were stationed
there. Day in and day out they passed through the white
lanes of wards in the military hospitals and each day looked

— and looked deeply — into the hearts of the American
boys that lined them. Heart and soul these women of the
steel-gray uniforms were at the service of our wounded
soldier men — at their very beck and call, if you please.
And when of a morning a bed here or a bed there was
empty, the searchers understood, and prepared to write a
letter — a scant matter of sympathetic record at the best

— that somewhere back in America would at least relieve
the tension of waiting.

Some of the messages that these searchers sent were —
as you already know — full of gladness ; thank God for

"PACK UP YOUR TROUBLES" 243

them ! Others warned gently — the boy was coming home
with his face forever scarred or his limbs or his eyes gone.
Still others told — and told again and again — of the
brave and the battling sonl that finally had slipped away
into the eternal mystery of the Valley. Each of these last
held between its tiny pages a single flower — plucked at
the last moment from the funeral wreath.

Let me quote from one of these letters of a Red Cross
searcher.

" I am constantly on duty here," she says, " and visit
your brother Harry almost daily. He has been unfortu-
nate enough to have been wounded in the right leg, which
the doctors found necessary to amputate just below the
knee. I know this will be a great shock to you, but let me
hasten to add that Harry is in the best of condition other-
wise. The wound is healing marvelously clean and
quickly. He is in the healthiest and happiest frame of
mind and exceptionally cheerful. Harry wants me to
tell you that the last dressing of the wound was yesterday.
He expects to be up and trying his crutches within ten days.
He received your September money order of ten dollars for
which he thanks you very much. I have just cashed it for
him. ... I am sorry to be the bearer of this sad news, but
am happy that I can assure you of his early recovery and
his splendid courage."

Men who were able to write for themselves were supplied
with paper and encouraged to do so. Others who were far
too ill or confined prone in surgical apparatus — their very
hands caught and held taut in a cruel network of pulleys
and weights and drain tubes — dictated their letters home
— and invariably lied as to their condition. All was
" going well." The patient sufferer had but one report to
pass his lips. " Tell them that I'm feeling fine," was the
message that he ordered home.

Sometimes by piecing together information culled from
a variety of sources, the searcher was enabled to reconstruct
the picture of the last hour of some soldier's life. Com-

244 WITH THE DOUGHBOY IN FRANCE

rades would recount the story of his death at the front or
describe the moment of his capture by the enemy. In fact
persistent questioning revealed such facts as finally cleared
up the doubt as to the fate of a certain Yankee corporal.
It happened that the boy had disappeared in April, 1918.
It was a number of months afterward that a patient was
discovered at a port of embarkation who said :

" Yes, he was killed when the Germans were attacking
and a heavy barrage was coming over. They came around
back of us and threw hand grenades from the rear. Cor-
poral pulled his pistol and yelled : ' Here they come,

boys ! Give it to them ! ' He was awfully generous. He
used to get a lot of scrapbooks and pass them around to the
boys. When he got a box from home he shared it. He
was a mighty generous fellow about lending money, too."

The women who made those scrapbooks and packed those
boxes of " goodies " can have no memento from his grave
over there, but here was the sweet memory of his courage
and his generosity. Think of the comfort that her
woman's soul must have found in that frank, outspoken
boyish tribute and the relief at finally having had at least
the definite information of the truth ! So it was that our
Red Cross searchers gave constant and almost invaluable
aid in revising and verifying the casualty lists of the army ;
and many who were accounted missing — that dread term
that means nothing and yet can mean so much — could,
because of their work, be accurately enrolled as dead or
as prisoners.

As far back as the summer of 1917 five women had been
definitely assigned to this activity — not at Vichy then,
but at the American army hospitals which already were
beginning to multiply in France. By December of the
following year this staff numbered nearly two hundred
women, who worked either in the hospitals or in the Ameri-
can Red Cross headquarters in Paris. And while these
worked in the hospitals, the Red Cross officers in the field -
men serving as searchers, chaplains, or Home Communica-

" PACK UP YOUE TROUBLES " 245

tion representatives — were working in close cooperation
with the statistical officers of the army. These were sta-
tioned in training camps and concentration camps and with
various combat divisions. Ten men were assigned direct
by the Ked Cross to the Central Kecords Office of the
Adjutant General's Department of the A. E. E.

Understand very clearly, if you will, please, once again,
that while in very rare cases our Red Cross did announce
casualties, that, after all, was not its real province. To
engage in that would have been a mere duplication of the
army's own work. Mortality letters were not sent direct
to the nearest of kin ; they were forwarded to the A. E. E.
Central Records Office in Erance for final disposition, so
that their release through the mails would not anticipate the
official announcement from the War Department; while
the other information, in most instances, was reported to
the Paris headquarters of the American Red Cross and was
later disseminated here in the United States from the
American Red Cross headquarters in Washington.

The lists of the missing soldiers were furnished by the
army. Duplicates of these were then immediately dis-
tributed to the Red Cross searchers and representatives,
who at once sought clues to the individual stories to be
builded about the name of each man. Sometimes through
arrangements with the army authorities the boche prisoners
were interviewed, and these occasionally furnished facts
with reference to American prisoners in Germany and gave
definite information about aviators who had apparently dis-
appeared within the enemy lines.

Incorporated in these lists of the missing were also the
names of all soldiers and sailors concerning whom inquiries
had been made of our Red Cross either here in America or
over there in Erance. In the one case these inquiries and
in the other through the Paris headquarters in the Hotel
Regina. In one month 1,955 cables were sent across the
Atlantic from the United States requiring immediate in-
formation regarding wounded or missing men. In Decem-

246 WITH THE DOUGHBOY IN FRANCE

ber, just following the armistice, the Paris office received
more than a thousand individual requests for news of the
doughboys. Almost literally these came in floodtides ; but
none was ignored or forgotten. It made little difference,
either, as to whether any of them was addressed. The Red
Cross cleared its mail with a good deal of efficiency and
promptness. Its huge central postoffice in Paris was a
marvel of precision — and it had at all times a difficult job.
Yet it so happened that it was in charge of a man without
any previous experience in such a task — Senator Henry
Brevoort Kane, of Rhode Island. It chanced that Senator
Kane displayed an immediate adaptability for the job —
and with this, combined with great patience and persist-
ence, he made a real success of it.

Perhaps the most satisfactory part of the searcher's job
was in many ways the search for missing men — by inter-
viewing the boys in the hospitals about their friends and in-
timates, getting tremendously tiny details about these in
camp or in battle, or even in the hospitals themselves, and
from these details evolving the web of evidence — Conan
Doyle or E. Phillips Oppenheim could hardly have had a
more fascinating time of it than did some of our Red Cross
women in unraveling the tangle of confusion which they
found wound about this boy or that, or the other fellow.
Many an agonizing situation, indeed, was cleared up
through the efforts of these men. And such times were al-
most the sole relief from a task that- frequently was dreary
and almost always distressing.

If you would the better understand the real task that
these women faced, permit me to quote from a letter written
by one of them :

" The most entertaining part of my work is writing let-
ters home for the wounded boys. In answer to my letters
the replies that come back are more than adequate reward.
The letters come from farmhouses in Vermont, from fac-
tory towns in Connecticut, from busy Massachusetts cities,
and from lonely Western ranches. They are pathetic, sad,

" PACK UP YOUR TROUBLES " 247

funny ; but all of them are overflowing with surprises and
gratitude for the person in the mysterious ' over there '
who had taken the trouble to visit and write home for her
' particular boy ' after he was wounded. These letters for
the boys were usually written to a woman — mothers, sis-
ters, or t girls ' the favorites first, of course, although oc-
casionally ' aunty ' or t teacher ' came in for a message of
reassurance.

" The first letter I had to write was for a boy who had
lost his right eye. He wanted me to write his girl, whose
photographs I had seen several times. She had very fluffy
hair and usually seemed to stand in an apple orchard. Af-
ter this he made a rather staggering suggestion : Would I
please read all of Alice's letters so that I should know what
kind of a girl she was and so answer her letters better!
Realizing that a Bed Cross worker should flinch at nothing
and trying not to think of Alice's feelings in the matter, I
took the letters out of a bag at the head of his bed and
plunged into the first one.

" To my intense relief they all began ' Dear Bill/ and
ended ' Your true friend, Alice/ Her only reference to
matters of the heart was the hope that he would not fall in
love with any of those pretty Red Cross nurses over there.
For the most part Alice seemed to prefer impersonal topics,
such as the potato crop, the new class, and the party at
the grange Saturday night. Bill thought she was a mighty
fine writer and, I think, was a little worried lest I be un-
able to compose a letter worthy of her. He was worried,
too, about the best way to tell her that he had lost an eye.
' You know, I don't care. The left one is working better
than it ever did and I know it won't make no difference in
the way she thinks of me, but she'll feel pretty bad for me,
I know that, and I want you to please tell her about it real
gentle.' We finally decided to tell her in this letter
that he had been seriously injured in his right eye and
then, in the next letter, which he would write himself, he
would tell her it was gone.

248 WITH THE DOUGHBOY IN FRANCE

" In due time I received a grateful note from Alice in a
very long, elegant, and exceedingly narrow envelope inclos-
ing a correspondence card covered with high-schoolish-
girlish writing. ' Thank you so much/ she wrote, ' for
your letter giving me news of Bill, who I was getting so
anxious about, as I had not heard from him for so long.
I am glad he is getting better and that he really is not
suffering.'

" Another grateful letter came from the mother of
Michael Holihan. Mike had been badly wounded and at
first no one thought he could possibly pull through, for
he had a piece of shrapnel in the liver. He survived the
operation, however, and became very anxious to write his
mother. ' Now you just please write her what I tell you/
he said. ' Mother is pretty old now and she is always
worrying, but I got it all thought out just what I am going
to say to make her stop.' This is what he dictated :

"'Dear Mother:

" ' I was hurt the other day but not enough to keep me down
very long and I am as well as ever now. They certainly do use
me fine in this hospital. I am having a great time. Gee, I
am a happy boy, and don't you worry none about me, mother.

" l Your son,

" < MIKE.' "

" After making this effort he lay back on the pillow and
shut his eyes for a moment, tired out, only to open them
anxiously to ask : ' That'll fix her, won't it ? 7 Apparently
it did not entirely ' fix her/ for her answer came back to
me — an anxious scrawl — i I received your letter and,
dear Red Cross lady, it was so kind of you to write when
you must be so busy and let me know how my son was get-
ting along, as I was waiting day after day for a letter from
him and I didn't know what could be the matter as he
always writes regularly like the good son he is. I am
worrying day and night and even if Mike did say I
shouldn't because what do boys know about it if they are

"PACK UP YOUR TROUBLES" 249

sick or well and my Mike would say that lie was well if he
could only lay flat on his back and look at the ceiling he
would. As this is all I have to say, I will bring this letter
to a close. Tell Mike, I and all the family have wrote
him!5

Our Red Cross as well as our army officers, themselves,
recognized almost from the beginning that an untroubled
soldier always is the best soldier. It also appreciated — as
this book already should have told you — that its primary
object in Europe was to bring the utmost comfort and relief
to America's fighting millions. That was why, in the early
summer of 1918, it issued a small pamphlet telling the
doughboy to " pack up his troubles in his old kit bag " and
to hand them to the first Red Cross representative he met.
He was assured that there was no worry of any kind,
either on the one side of the ocean or the other, that the
Red Cross could not or would not shoulder for him. These
pamphlets were printed by the hundreds of thousands and
distributed to every American soldier in France. And
they were an evidence of the real desire of the great organ-
ization of the crimson cross to make itself invaluable, not
alone in the comparatively few large ways of succor, but in
an almost infinite number of smaller and individual ones.
It was in this last sort of help, of course, that the Home
Communication Service shone. It was its own particular
sort of a job to take from the harassed minds of individual
soldiers their individual problems — as varied and as com-
plicated as the temperaments and the conditions of the
doughboys, themselves. Take a single instance :

Here was a man who was owner of a small but growing
business in the Mohawk Valley of New York State. When
a unit was being recruited near Utica and a call for volun-
teers was being issued, he responded — with instant
promptness. At the time he donned the khaki the two
banks in the little town from which he came held notes
against his business for a sum of a little more than a thou-

250 WITH THE DOUGHBOY IN FRANCE

sand dollars. They had been indorsed by his brother, a
hard-working farmer of the valley.

Before this boy had been mobilized he arranged to have
his voung wife conduct the business — with the aid of his
long-time assistant. The banks told him that the notes
would, in no event, be called before his return from the
service of his country. They were fairly perfervid in their
expressions of their desires for patriotic service, and the
young man left for France, his mind well at ease.

His first letters from home were full of optimistic com-
fort. A little later, however, they were not quite so serene.
Finally this soldier received a letter from his wife stating
quite frankly and without reserve that the two banks had
called the loans, forced his brother to sell part of his farm
stock, and then had sold out their little business.

The boy in khaki was furious. A week before he had
stuffed into his musette the little American Eed Cross book-
let which told of that organization's sincere desire to help
the individual American soldier who found himself in
trouble. " I'll take them at their word," thought he and
immediately sought out the Eed Cross man with his unit,
and to him spilled the entire story. The Eed Cross man
boiled. He was not a young man — being a bit too old for
regular army service, he had taken the Eed Cross way as
being the best for him to serve his country — and he had
heard stories of that sort before, and decided to take prompt
action on this one.

It so happened that there were some pretty big American
bankers on the American Eed Cross staff over there in
France. When this incident was rushed through to them
— with vast promptness — they, too, took action. They
did not even wait for the mails, but cabled the main facts
of the story to the secretary of the American Bankers' As-
sociation, saying that the proofs were coming on by post, but
requesting immediate action. A representative of the As-
sociation took the first train up into central New York and,
through a personal investigation of the books of the two

"PACK UP YOUR TROUBLES" 251

banks, quickly verified the incident — in every detail.
After that he promptly returned to New York city and,
placing the matter before the executive committee of the
Bankers' Association, asked that justice be quickly done.
It was. The two miserly and hypocritical banking insti-
tutions were forced to return the young soldier's business to
his wife and to pay back the brother the money which they
had taken from him. After which they were both kicked
out of the national association.

Along with the pamphlet advising the doughboy to pack
up his troubles in his old kit bag and then carry them to
the nearest Red Cross man or woman, there was prepared
a poster originated by a man out in the Middle West, who
because of his understanding affection for boys was par-
ticularly well qualified to prepare it. It was used to pla-
card Brest and some other port towns. As I recall it, it
read something like this :

AMERICAN SOLDIER AND SAILOR

Are you worried about anything back home; your wife,
children, mother, insurance, allotments, taxes, business affairs,
wills, powers of attorney, or any personal or family troubles of
a private nature?

THE AMERICAN RED CROSS HOME SERVICE MEN

will help you by cable, telegraph, letter — assisted by forty
million members of the Red Cross at home. Information Free.

Troubles ? The American doughboy seemed to have all
the troubles that the poster catalogued — and then some
more. The response to the poster and the pamphlet was
immediate. Soldiers sought out the American Red Cross
Home Communication people all over France. At Brest
the first office was in a tent near Camp Pontanzen. Later
two offices were established. One, for the sailors, was lo-
cated in Brest itself, and fairly accessible to the landing
stages. Another was located in a stone barracks that had
been builded by the great Napoleon. This office not having

252, WITH THE DOUGHBOY IN FRANCE

an outside door available to passers-by, wooden steps were
built up the wall to a French window. Another set of
steps was affixed to the inner wall and led right down to
the desk of the Red Cross representative. Eventually this
work at just this one point became so great in volume that
four of these offices were pressed into service.

" What does Home Service really do for a man ? " asked
a magazine woman who was " doing " France for her pub-
lication at one of these offices. The answer to her inquiry
was definite.

" It does everything," they told her, " from giving a sol-
dier a needle and thread to letting our tears mingle with
his between sobs when he tells us of his home troubles."

Upon the request of our men, wills in proper form were
drawn up by Red Cross attorneys and forwarded to the
men's families in this country. There were men with
wives not only in the United States, but in every corner
of the world — in Russia, in Assyria, in Italy, for in-
stance — who wished to be assured that their allotments
from the government were being delivered. During the
influenza epidemic here and at a time when the flames of
a forest fire were winging their way across great spaces in
our West, the American Red Cross offices in Paris were
besieged with tragic appeals for immediate information
from home.

In some of the army divisions the movements of troops
were so sudden and so uncertain that mail was badly de-
layed. Then the doughboys begged our Red Cross for re-
ports from home and our Red Cross furnished them —
through its service here.

" Our visitor found daddy and your wife and baby at
luncheon," read one of these reports from America.
" They had roast chicken, stewed tomatoes, mashed pota-
toes, hot bread, and jam. . . . Your wife is teaching

school. . . . The B family has moved. . . . Your

mother has one boarder and the crops are fine. . . . Willie
and Carrie are going to move away in the spring."

"PACK UP YOUR TROUBLES" 253

Can you imagine what such a report might mean to a
man who had not heard from home in over five months ?
There were many such. There were times when men —
American fighting men — " went over the top " with ach-
ing hearts for some one who faced a particularly difficult
problem of life back here at home. Then it was that the
Ked Cross did not hesitate to use the cable. It is hardly
necessary to emphasize the relief which the following ex-
change of messages must have meant to some one fighting
man in our khaki :

PARIS, August 6, 1918.
To AMCROSS, Washington:

Report concerning confinement, Mrs. Harold W , Rural

Free Delivery Five, H , Penn.

WASHINGTON, August 14, 1918.
To AMCROSS, Paris:

Answering Inquiry No. : Mother and baby son three

months old well and happy.

In this instance the worried fighter was an officer — a
captain of infantry. During the time which elapsed be-
tween the two cablegrams he was wounded and the answer
found him in a hospital, side by side with a French blesse.
A Red Cross searcher acted as interpreter for their felici-
tations and in her official report of the incident included
this notation :

" Captain W was much improved as a result of the

good news. He is sitting up and eating roast chicken to-
day. He says the American Red Cross has cured him."

The Red Cross representatives here in America could not
enter a home unless they were welcome ; neither could they
force their way into the hearts of men. They were com-
pelled to wait until their help was sought. The growing
mental depression of a certain major of a fighting division
during those tense months of the midsummer of 1918 did
not escape the attention of the Ajnerican Red Cross man at-
tached to that division. Suddenly the man, who had been
marked because of his poise, became taciturn — isolated

254 WITH THE DOUGHBOY IN FRANCE

himself. A reference to the Ried Cross Home Service which
its division worker tactfully introduced into the table talk
at the mess at which both sat, however, did elicit some
trivial rejoinder from the man with the golden oakleaf upon
his shoulder ; while the following day that same major wrote
a letter to the Red Cross man — and bared the reason for
his most obvious melancholy.

It seemed that back here in the United States he had a
little son, from whom he had received no word whatsoever
in more than six months. The child was with the major's
divorced wife, and his father was more than anxious to
know if he was regularly playing out of doors, if he was
receiving his father's allotment, and if he was buying the
promised Thrift Stamp each week. The army man already
had his second golden service stripe and greatly feared that
his little son might be beginning to forget him.

Under conditions such as these, visiting the boy was a
diplomatic mission indeed. Finally it was intrusted to
the wife of an army officer. And because army officers'
wives are usually achieved diplomats if not born ones, the
ultimate result came in weekly letters from the boy, which
not only greatly relieved his father's mind but greatly in-
creased the bonds of affection between the two. The
Greatest Mother in the World is never above diplomacy —
which is, perhaps, just another way of expressing tact and
gentleness.

There were many, many occasions, too, when the rela-
tives at home depended upon that selfsame diplomacy of
hers to tell the disagreeable stories of losses or perhaps to
prepare the boys overseas to face an empty chair in the
family circle. There was one particularly fearful mo-
ment when a brilliant young officer had to be told that the
reason why his young wife had ceased to write was because
she had gone insane and specialists believed that she could
not recover. Boys were driven to Eed Cross offices by
hidden affairs that flayed them hideously and of which
they wished to purge themselves. Some wanted to set old

"PACK UP YOUR TROUBLES" 255

wrongs right. Others had fallen blindly into the hands of
the unscrupulous and had only fully awakened to see their
folly after they actually were upon the battlefields of
France. Then there were the softer phases of life — the
shy letters and the blushing visitors who wished to have a
marriage arranged with Therese or Jeanne of the black
eyes and the delicate oval face. I remember one of our
boys who had fallen in love with a girl in Nancy. Theirs
was a courtship of unspoken love, unless soft glances and
gentle caresses do indeed speak more loudly than mere
words; for they had no easy bond of a common tongue.
His French was doughboy French, which was hardly
French at all, and her English was limited. So that after
he had gone on to the Rhine and the letter came from her
to him in the delicate hand that the sisters at the convent
had taught, he needs must seek out Red Cross Home Com-
munication and intrust to it the task of uncommon delicacy,
which it fulfilled to the complete delight and satisfaction
of both of them. For how could any mother, let alone the
Greatest Mother in the World, blind her eyes entirely to
love?

She apparently had no intention of doing any such thing.
For how about that good-looking doughboy from down in
the Ozark country somewhere, who arrived in Paris on a
day in the autumn of 1918 with the express intention of
matrimony, if only he knew where he could get the license ?
French laws are rather fussy and explicit in such matters.
Some one suggested the Home Service Bureau of the Amer-
ican Red Cross to the boy. He found his way quickly to it
— with little Marie, or whatever her name really was, hang-
ing on his arm. A Red Cross man prayerfully guided the
pair through the legal mazes of the situation. First they
went to a law office in the Avenue de V Opera where the
necessary papers were made out ; then the procession
solemnly moved to the office of the United States Vice Con-
sul at ISTo. 1 Rue des Italiens, where the signature of the
American official representative was duly affixed to each of

256 WITH THE DOUGHBOY IN FRANCE

the papers; after which to the foreign office, where the
French went through all the elaborate processes of sealings
and signatures which they seem to love so dearly, and then
— the work of Mother Red Cross was finished. They were
quite ready for the offices of the Church.

With the signing of the armistice all this work was
greatly increased — was, in fact, doubled and nearly
trebled. When a man was fighting his physical needs
seemingly were paramount ; but once off the field, the wor-
ries that lurked in his subconscious mind seemed to rise
quickly to the surface. He then recalled that long inter-
val since last he heard from home. That troubled him, and
he turned to the Eed Cross — those pamphlets and posters
did have a tremendous effect. And if he had no definite
troubles over here, such as those we have just seen, he was
apt to be just plain hungry for a sight of the home — and
the loved ones that it held.

It was in answer to a demand such as this last that a
Red Cross representative right here in the United States
took her motor car and drove for a half day out to see a
family of whose very existence she had never before even
heard ; and, as a result of her call, wrote back a letter from
which the following excerpts are taken :

" I want to tell you about a never-to-be-forgotten trip that
I took the other day out to see a one hundred per cent
patriot; an American mother who has three sons in the
service. The home is one of the coziest, homiest, friend-
liest places you can imagine; one story, with that cool
spacious plan of construction that makes you want to get a
book, capture a chair on the wide, comfortable porch, and
forget the world and its dizzy rush ; a great sweep of lawn
and with some handsome Hereford calves browsing in one
direction and a cluster of shade trees nearer the house.

" The hills surrounding the house make a lovely view and
all were covered with grazing stock, also the fine Hereford
cattle for which the place is known. But the best part of
the home is the dear little woman who hung a service flag

"PACK UP YOUR TROUBLES" 257

in the window with the name of a boy under each of the
three stars. She is the type of mother that draws every
one to her; tender, sensible, capable, broad-minded, and
with a shrewd sense of humor that keeps things going and
makes life worth living for the entire household.

" She took us to a roomy side porch where her sewing
unit of the Eed Cross meets each Tuesday. A marvelous
amount of work has been turned out in that side porch, and
I'll wager a dollar to a doughnut that I know the moving
spirit of the workers. Off in a big, cool parlor bedroom
there were stacked up several perfectly enchanting ' crazy
quilts ? made by these same busy women at odd moments.
These are ready to be sent to Serbia or they may be sold
at auction for the benefit of the Red Cross.

" We saw pictures of each boy in the service — one in
the navy, one in the heavy artillery, and Milton, whom we
all hope is not in the hospital by now. Each boy had in
his eyes the same intrepid look that the mother has — one
can tell that they made good soldiers. Knowing how busy
farm folk are, we reluctantly took our leave after seeing all
these interesting things and, as we swung out into the coun-
try lane, we looked back and there stood the mother waving
and smiling — the very best soldier of them all."

Can you not see how very simple it all was — how very
human, too? As you saw in one of the earlier chapters
of this book, a fairly formal and elaborate plan of organ-
ization had been laid out for all this work; but, perhaps
because war after all, is hardly more than a series of vast
emergencies, the American Red Cross searchers, either in
the field or in the hospitals, could hardly confine them-
selves to any mere routine of clerical organization or work
in the great task that was thrust upon them. The unex-
pected was forever upon them.

As a single instance of this take the time when, in the
Verdun sector and in the hottest days of fighting that the
American Army found there, so many demands were made

258 WITH THE DOUGHBOY IN FRANCE

upon our Red Cross by the officers and men of the A. E. ~F.
for the purchase of necessities in Paris that a definite shop-
ping service quite naturally evolved itself out of the situa-
tion. The man who initiated that service raced a motor
car from Verdun to the Paris headquarters in order to
secure the materials necessary for its inauguration. For
when the American Red Cross made up its mind to do a
thing, it did it — and pretty quickly too.

So it went — a service complicatedly simple, if I may
so express it. For, despite its own batteries of
typewriters and card indexes, there was, at almost all times,
that modicum of human sympathy that tempered the cold-
ness of mere system and glorified what might otherwise
have been a mere job of mechanical routine into a tremen-
dously human and tender thing. The men and girls of the
Home Communication Service had a task of real worth.
Of a truth it was social service — of the most delicate
nature. It included at all times not only the study of the
physical needs of the soldier or sailor, but also at many
times that of his mental needs as well. In reality, it be-
came a large part of the scheme of preserving and enlarging
the morale of the A. E. F. Every time a soldier was freed
of endless, nagging worry, he became a better soldier and
so just that much more strength was added to the growing
certainty of victory.

CHAPTEE XI

WHEN JOHNNY CAME MARCHING HOME

ON November 11, 1918, the armistice was signed and
the fighting of the Great War ceased — almost as
abruptly as it had begun. And the ebb tide of American
roops from Europe back to the United States began ; almost
at once. For a time it was an almost imperceptible tide;
in the following month but 75,000 soldiers all told —
officers and enlisted men — were received through the port
of New York, at all times the nation's chief war gateway ;
yet this was but the beginning. Each month of the early
half of 1919 registered an increase of this human tide
inflowing as against the preceding months, until May, with
311,830 troops received home, finally beat, by some 5,000
men, the record outgoing month of July, 1918, when under
the terrific pressure induced by the continued German
drive, 306,731 officers and men had been dispatched from
these shores. Yet June, 1919, overtopped May. In that
month 342,686 troops passed not only under the shadow
of the beloved statue of Liberty, but also into the friendly
and welcoming ports of Boston, Newport News, and
Charleston, while the Secretary of War promised that the
midsummer months that were immediately to follow would
break the June record. A promise which was fulfilled.

Long before the signing of the armistice, Pershing had
ruled that the work of the American Eed Cross with the
well men of the A. E. E. was specifically to be limited to
them while they were en route from one point to another —
along the lines of communication, as you already have seen
in an earlier chapter. To the Young Men's Christian
Association was intrusted the chief burden of caring for

them in their more or less permanent camps. This meant

259

260 WITH THE DOUGHBOY IN FRANCE

for our Eed Cross in the final months of the war — before
peace was actually signed and declared — a task almost
exactly like that which had confronted it in its very first
months of war experience in France. The stations along
the railroad lines of eastern France, Luxembourg, and the
Moselle Valley — the lines of communication between our
French base ports and the occupied districts of the German
states — offered to the American Eed Cross the very same
canteen problems as had once faced it at Chalons-sur-Marne
and fipernay. Treves and Coblenz were hardly different
from either of these — save perhaps in their increased size.

Because Coblenz is rather more closely connected in the
mind of the average American with our Army of Occupa-
tion, let us begin with it, here and now. It was, in fact,
the easternmost outpost of the work of our Red Cross with
our army over there. There the lines of communication
officially began, and ran up the railway which ascends the
beautiful but extremely tortuous valley of the Moselle.
And where the lines of communication began — in the
great railroad station of Coblenz — the American Red
Cross also began. It had two canteens in that station ; one
just off the main waiting room, and the other, for the con-
venience of troops who were merely halted in the train
shed of the station while going to and from the other
American mobilization centers in that Rhine bridgehead,
right on the biggest and the longest of the train platforms.
Both were busy canteens ; never more so, however, than just
before 10 :30 o'clock in the morning, which was the stated
hour for the departure of the daily leave-train toward the
border lines of France. Then it was the Red Cross coffee
and sandwiches, tobacco and chewing gum were in greatest
demand ; for the long leave-train boasted no such luxury as
dining cars, and there was scarce enough time at the noon-
day stop at Treves for one to avail oneself of the lunch-
room facilities in the station there.

Yet Treves for the American Red Cross was a far, far
more important point than Coblenz. It was the head-

WHEN JOHNNY CAME MARCHING HOME 261

quarters of all its work in Germany, and boasted in addi-
tion to the large American Eed Cross canteens in each of the
two railroad stations, on either bank of the Moselle, and the
recreation huts at the base hospitals — for that matter,
there were also recreation huts at the base hospitals in and
about Coblenz — well-equipped clubs for both enlisted men
and officers. Of these the club for the enlisted men — for
the rank and file of doughboy — quite properly was the best
equipped.

In the beginning it had been one of those large combina-
tion beer gardens and music halls that always have been
so very dear to the heart of the German. It was the very
sort of plant that could be, and was, quickly adapted to the
uses of a really 'big group of men. Its main bierhalle made
a corking dining room for the doughboys. The meals kept
pace with the apartment. Three times a day they ap-
peared — feeding daily from 600 to 1,600 boys — and they
were American meals — in fact, for the most part com-
posed of American food products — meats from Chicago,
butter and cheese from New York State, flour from Minne-
sota, and the like. For each of these a flat charge of two
marks — at the rate of exchange then prevailing, about
eighteen cents — was made. But if a doughboy could not
or would not pay, no questions were asked. The Treves
Enlisted Men's Club which the American Red Cross gave
the A. E. F. was not a commercial enterprise. It was run
by an organization whose funds were the gift of the Ameri-
can people — given and given freely in order that their boys
in khaki might have every comfort that money might
provide.

The great high-ceilinged Jialle held more than a restau-
rant. It was a reading room as well, stocked with many
hundreds of books and magazines. In fact a branch of the
American Library Association operated — and operated
very successfully — a small traveling loan library in one
of the smaller rooms of the club. Upon the walls of the
vast room were pictures and many maps — maps of the

262 WITH THE DOUGHBOY IN FRANCE

valley of the Moselle, of that of the Rhine, of the Saar
basin, of the operations in France. These last held much
fascination for the doughboys. The most of them were of
divisions which had led in the active and hard fighting, and
the tiny flags and the blue-chalk marks on the operation
maps were in reality placed there by their own efforts -
but a few weeks and months before. It was real fun to
fight the old actions over and over again — this time with
talk and a pointing stick.

There were, of course, such fundamental conveniences
for roaming doughboys as baths, a bootblack and a barber
shop — this last equipped with chairs which the boys them-
selves invented and constructed ; a plain stout wooden arm-
chair, into the back of which a board — not unlike an old-
fashioned ironing board — was thrust at an angle. When
turned one way this board formed just the proper headrest
for a shave; in the other direction it was at exactly the
right angle for haircutting.

For the Officers' Club of our Red Cross at Treves, the
Casino in the Kornmarkt, the heart of the city, was taken
'over. The fact that this was in the beginning a well-
equipped club made the problem of its adaption a very
slight one indeed. And the added fact that officers require,
as a rule, far less entertainment than the enlisted men also
simplified its operation. As it was, however, the officers
were usually given a dance or a show each week — in the
comfortable, large hall of the Casino. In the Enlisted
Men's Club there was hardly a night, however, without
some sort of an entertainment in its Jialle', and the vast
placed packed to the very doors.

The next stop after Treves in the eastbound journey
from the Rhine of the man in khaki was usually Nancy.
And here there were not only canteen facilities at the rail-
road station, but a regular Red Cross hotel — situated in
the Place Stanislas, in the very heart of the town. In
other days this had been the Grand Hotel, and the open

If

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WHEN JOHNNY CAME MARCHING HOME 26S

square that it faced has long been known as one of the
handsomest in all France. In fact, Nancy itself is one of
the loveliest of all French towns; and despite the almost
constant aerial bombardments that were visited upon it,
escaped with comparatively minor damage.

The Red Cross hotel there was opened on September 30,
1918, and closed on the tenth of April of the following
spring — had eighty-eight rooms, capable of accommodat-
ing one hundred guests, and two dormitories capable of
providing for some forty more. The room charges were
invariably five francs for a room — with the exception of
one, usually reserved for generals or other big wigs —
which rented at eight francs a night. For the dormitory
beds an even charge of two francs (forty cents) nightly
was made, while in the frequent event of all these regular
accommodations of the hotel being engaged and the neces-
sity arising of placing cots in its broad hallways, no charge
whatsoever was made for these emergency accommodations.

For the excellent meals — served with the fullness of a
good old-fashioned Yankee tavern — a progressive charge
of four francs for breakfast, five francs for lunch, and six
francs for dinner was made. Surely no one could fairly
object to the restaurant prices, which, even in France in
war-time stress, ranged from eighty cents to a dollar and
twenty ! In fact it was a bonanza for the American officers
who formed the chief patrons of the place — although a
bit of thoughtfulness on the part of some one had provided
this particular hostelry with a dormitory of twelve beds
and a single room with three which was held reserved for
American women war workers ; an attention which was tre-
mendously appreciated by them.

Eleven miles distant from !Nancy was Toul ; but Toul we
have already visited in the pages of this book. We know
already the comfortable accommodations that the traveler
in khaki found in the group of hotels and canteens which
our Red Cross operated there. There were many of these,

264 WITH THE DOUGHBOY IN FRANCE

even outside of Paris ; one of the largest the tavern at the
badly overcrowded city of Bordeaux. That tavern had
heen little to boast of, in the beginning. It was an ancient
inn indeed ; but good taste — the purchase of some few
dozen yards of cretonne, and cleanliness — the unrelenting
use of mop and broom and soap — had accomplished won-
ders with it. There were others of these American Red
Cross hotels in France during the fighting period — the
ones at Dijon, Is-sur-Tille, and Marseilles were particularly
popular. But it was in Paris itself that the Red Cross ac-
commodations for the itinerant doughboy in the final
months of the war, as in the long and difficult half year that
intervened between the signing of the armistice and the
signing of peace, reached their highest development. In
the beginning these had taken form in canteens which were
operated night and day at each of the important railroad
stations. These were all right — so far as they went.
Their one-franc or seventy-five centime meals were wonder-
ful indeed. I have eaten in these canteens many times my-
self — and always eaten well. I have been seated between
a doughboy from North Carolina and one from North Da-
kota and been served by a society woman in steel-gray uni-
form — a woman whose very name was a thing to be em-
blazoned in the biggest headline type of the New York
newspapers, but who was working week in and week out
harder than the girls in busy restaurants back home are
usually wont to work.

If you would see these canteens as they really worked,
gaze upon them through the eyes of a brilliant newspaper
woman from San Francisco, who took the time and the
trouble to make a thorough study of them. She wrote

" A brown puddle of coffee was spreading over the white
oilcloth. The girl from home sopped it up with her dish
towel. She brushed away messy fragments of food and
bread crumbs. Again there were few vacant places for
American soldiers on the benches at the long table in the
canteen at the Gare St. Lazare.

WHEN JOHNNY CAME MARCHING HOME 265

" The canteen, one of a circuit of thirteen maintained by
the Red Cross in Paris, had formerly been the corner of a
baggage room in one of the most important Paris terminals.
The concrete floor bruised her feet. She was as conscious
of them as Alice in Wonderland who discovered her own
directly beneath her chin after she nibbled the magic toad-
stool. The girl was tired, but she smiled.

" It was really a smile within a smile. There was one
on her lips which seemed to sparkle and glance, waking re-
sponsive smiles on the faces of the men. At once the gob
who was born down in Virginia and had trained at Nor-
folk, decided that she was from his own South. The six-
foot doughboy from California knew that she came from
some small town in the Sierras. To each of the men she
suddenly represented home.

" That smile stays in place each day until she reaches her
room in a pension across the Seine on the Rue Beaux Arts.
There, closing the door upon the world with its constant
pageant of uniformed men who seem forever hungry and
thirsty, she lets her smile fade away for the first time that
day.

" The smile within is tucked away in her heart with the
memory of agonizing moments aboard an ocean liner when
she felt her exalted desire for service ebbing away because
she feared she would not be needed. Needed ! Now she
wonders who else could have managed so tactfully the boy
who had been at sea for one year and discovered that he had
forgotten how to talk to an American woman. His diffi-
dence was undermined with another dish of rice pudding
and an extra doughnut. He became a regular boarder at
the canteen where breakfast costs nine cents and any other
man's size meal may be had for thirteen cents. His leave
ended in a half day of excited shopping for which his
younger sister will always be grateful.

" The girl from home had been one of those solemn
creatures who was called to the Overseas Club in New York
for service abroad. She was one of hundreds who had

266 WITH THE DOUGHBOY IN FRANCE

clinched their own faith in their ideals by pledging such
service. It had heen a wrench, saying good-bye at the sta-
tion in the Middle West. There were no boys in the
family, and her father had made a funny little joke which
betrayed his pride about ' hanging out a service flag now.'
Armed with interminable lists which called for supplies
for twelve months, she bought her equipment. All the
time she was saying to herself

" i I am ready to give all of my youth and my strength
to the cause and to hasten victory/

" Then the armistice was signed. The wireless in-
strument sang with the message. There was a celebration.
The ship remained dark, still sliding through the nights
warily, but her next trip would be made with decks ablaze
and portholes open. The war was ended. It seemed to
the girl that in the silence of the aftermath she could hear
once more the wings of freedom throbbing above the
world. She was glad and she was sorry. Her fear was
that after all the Eed Cross would not need her because she
came too late.

" Canteen service — she pictured the work minus the
tonic of danger as a social job. Dressed in a blue smock
and white coif she would bid a graceful farewell to the A.
E. F. as it filtered out of Europe. JSTow she smiles.
Needed ? Her fingers are scarred and she wonders if she
ever will be able to pour one thousand bowls of coffee from
the gigantic white procelain pitcher without blistering her
hands.

" Each day she looks at the line of men jostling one an-
other at the door. She listens to their interminable ques-
tions and comes to the full realization that she is one of the
most important people in Paris, one of two hundred girls
feeding thirty-five thousand soldiers daily.

" As some workers leaving for home after more than a
year of service tell of making sandwiches under shell fire,
of sleeping by the roadside in the woods to fool the boche
flyers who bombed the Red Cross buildings, she still feels

WHEN JOHNNY CAME MARCHING HOME 267

the sly nip of envy. But soldiers do not cease to be soldiers
and heroes when the war is done.

" Other puddles formed on the table and she mopped
them up. She had used three towels during her eight-
hour shift. A soldier, one of the thousands passing daily
through the six Paris stations on their way home, journey-
ing to leave areas, going to join the Army of Occupation or
assigned to duty in the city, called to her.

" ' Sister, I want to show you something,7 he said, and
unwrapped a highly decorative circlet of aluminum. It
was a napkin ring which he had bought from a poilu who
made it of scraps from the battlefield. There was an elab-
orate monogram engraved on a small copper shield.

" ' For my mother/ he explained. ' If you don't think
it is good enough I will get something else.'

" At once fifty rival souvenirs were produced. Men
came from other tables to exhibit their own. There was
the real collector who bemoaned the theft of a * belt made
by a Russian prisoner in Germany and decorated with the
buttons of every army in the world including the fire de-
partment of Holland.'

" One of the new arrivals had hands stiffened from re-
cently healed wounds. She brought his plate of baked
beans, roast meat, potatoes, a bowl of coffee, and pudding.
A young Canadian with flaming, rosy cheeks divided the
last doughnut with his friend, the Anzac. Crullers are the
greatest influence in canteen for the general friendliness
among soldiers of different armies. A League of Nations
could be founded upon them if negotiations were left to
the privates about the oilcloth-covered tables.

" The boy with the crippled hands protested that he did
not want to accept a dinner for which there was so little
charge.

" ' Say, Miss,' he said, ' I can pay more. I don't have
to be sponging.'

" ' You have folks in the states ? ' she asked. He had.

" ' Then,' she explained, ' they are the ones who sup-

268 WITH THE DOUGHBOY IN FRANCE

port the American Red Cross. When you come here it is
because the folks asked you in to dinner.'

" ' But I haven't any folks/ announced a sailor.

" e I'm from the States, so I am your folks/ she retorted,
' and the Red Cross is your folks. We invite you to three
meals a day as long as you stay in Paris.'

" ( You are my folks/ said the boy who was only a
youngster, ' and you sure look like home to me.'

" The soldier with the crippled hands wanted to describe
his wounds. Like hundreds of others he began with the
sensations in the field, ' when he got his.' Deftly as she
had learned to do during hundreds of such recitals, she
cleaned up the table and stacked the plates without seeming
to interrupt. It was three o'clock, the end of her day.
She had reported at seven in the morning. The following
week she would report with the other members of the staff
at eleven at night because the doors of a canteen must
never be closed.

" The boy talked on. He was explaining homesickness,
the sort which drives men from cafes where the food is
unfamiliar and the names on the menus cannot be trans-
lated into ' doughboy French ' to such places as the little
room in the Gare St. Lazare.

" She discovered that her habitual posture was with arms
akimbo and hands spread out over her hips. This position
seemed to rest the ache in her shoulders. Through her
memory flashed pictures of waitresses in station eating
houses who stood that way while tourists fought for twenty
minutes' worth of ham and eggs between trains.

" Red Cross after-war canteens were a social center for
pretty idlers in smart blue smocks?

" The smile on her lips never faltered and the hidden
smile in her heart became a little song of laughter.

" She was i helping' — helping in an ' eating joint/
some of the boys called it. But it was an eating joint with
a soul."

What more could one ask of an eating-house ?

WHEN JOHNNY CAME MARCHING HOME 269

.From the canteen at the railroad terminals — which
were all right so far as they went — it was an easy step of
transition to the establishment of hotels for the enlisted
men in the accessible parts of Paris — until there was a
total of six of these last, in addition to the five railway
station canteens — at Gare St. Lazare, Gare du Nord, Gare
d'Orsay, Gare d'Orleans, and Gare Montparnasse. The
winter-time hotels were in the Avenue Victor Emanuel,
Rue Traversiere, Rue la Victoire, Rue St. Hyacinthe, and
the Rue du Bac. These were all, in the beginning, small
Parisian taverns of the pension type, which were rather
quickly and easily adapted to their war-time uses.

The great difficulty with the first five of these American
Red Cross doughboy hotels was their extreme popularity.
They could hardly keep pace with the demands made upon
them — in the last weeks that preceded and immediately
following the signing of the armistice ; while, with the com-
ing of springtime and the granting of wholesale leaves of ab-
sence by the army, an immediate and most pressing problem
confronted the American Red Cross in Paris. The boys
were coming into the town — almost literally in whole regi-
ments, and the provisions for their housing and entertain-
ment there were woefully inadequate — to say the least.
Not only were these accommodations, as furnished by the
French, inadequate and poor, but the charges for them
often were outrageous.

Yet to furnish hotel accommodations in the big town,
even of the crudest sort, for a thousand — perhaps two
thousand — doughboys a night was no small problem.
There were no more hotels, large or small, available for
commandeering in Paris ; the various allied peace commis-
sions had completely exhausted the supply. Yet our Red
Cross, accustomed by this time to tackling big problems —
and the solution of this was, after all, but part of the day's
work, and because there were no more hotels or apartment
houses or dormitories or barracks of any sort whatsoever
available in the city of more than two million folks — our

270 WITH THE DOUGHBOY IN FRANCE

Eed Cross decided to build a hotel. And so did — almost
overnight.

It was a summer hotel, that super-tavern for our dough-
boys, and it stood squarely in the center of that famous
Parisian playground, the Champs de Mars — and almost
within stone throw of the Eiffel Tower and the Ecole
Militaire. To create it several dozen long barracks — like
American Red Cross standard khaki tents — were erected
in a carefully planned pattern. Underneath these were
builded wooden floors and they were furnished with electric
lights and running water. A summer hotel could not have
been more comfortable ; at least few of them are.

The Tent City, as it quickly became known, was opened
about March 4, 1919, with bed accommodations for 1,400
men, while preparations were quickly made to increase this
capacity by another five hundred, for the latest and the
biggest of American Red Cross hotels in Paris had leaped
into instant popularity. Between six and nine-thirty in
the morning and ten-thirty and midnight in the evening,
the boys would come streaming in to the registry desk, like
commercial travelers into a popular hostelry in New York
or Philadelphia or Chicago. They would sleep — perhaps
for the first time in many, many months — in muslin sheets.
And these were as immaculate as those of any first-class
hotel in the States.

There was no charge whatsoever for these dormitory ac-
commodations. For the meals — simple but good and
plentiful — the normal price of fifty centimes (nine or ten
cents) was asked, but never demanded; while merely for
the asking any of our boys in khaki could have at any hour
the famous Red Cross sandwiches of ham or salmon or
beef mixture or jam — chocolate or coffee or lemonade
a-plenty to wash it down.

Definite provision was made for their amusement ; there
were " rubberneck wagons " to take them afield to the won-
derful and enduring tourist sights of Paris and her en-
virons — and at the Tent City itself a plenitude of shows

WHEN JOHNNY CAME MARCHING HOME 271

and dances as well as the more quiet comfort of books or
magazines, or the privilege and opportunity of writing a
letter home.

" Of what use these last in Paris ? " you ask.

Your point is well taken. I would have taken it my-
self — before I first went to the Tent City. When I did
it was a glorious April day, the sun shone with an unaccus-
tomed springtime brilliancy over Paris, and yet the air was
bracing and fit for endeavor of every sort. Yet the big
reading room tent of the Red Cross hotel in the Champs de
Mars was completely filled — with sailor boys or boys in
khaki reading the books or paper most liked by them. The
sight astonished me. Could these boys — each on a leave
of but three short days — be blind to the wonders of Paris 1
Or was their favorite author particularly alluring that
week ? I decided to ask one of them about it,

" I saw Paris yesterday — Notre Dame, the Pantheon,
Napoleon's Tomb, the Opera House, the Louvre, the
Follies — the whole blame business. It's some hike. But
I did it. An' to-day I'm perfectly satisfied to sit here and
read these guys a-telling of how they would have fought the
war."

Of such was the nature of the American doughboy.

Just as it was necessary at Treves and Bordeaux and
elsewhere — because of the very volume of the problem —
to separate his entertainment from that of his officers, so it
became necessary to effect a similar solution in Paris ; for
the officer is quite as much a ward of our Red Cross as the
doughboy, himself. And so early in the solution of this en-
tire great problem a superb home in the very heart of Paris
— the town residence of the Prince of Monaco at No. 4
Avenue Gabriel and just a step from the Place de la Con-
corde — was secured and set aside as an American Red
Cross Officers' Club. Lovely as this was, and seemingly
more than generous in its accommodations, these were soon
overwhelmed by the demands placed upon them, and steps

272 WITH THE DOUGHBOY IN FRANCE

were taken toward finding a real officers' hotel for the men
of the A. E. F. when they should come to Paris.

These led to the leasing of the Hotel Louvre, at the head
of the Avenue de 1' Opera and almost adjoining the Com-
edie Franchise, the American University Union, and the
Louvre. After being rapidly redecorated and otherwise
transformed to meet the necessities of the A. E. F. it was
reopened on the sixth of January, 1919, as the American
Officers' Hotel in charge of Mr. L. M. Boomer, the direct-
ing genius of several large New York hotels. Mr. Boomer
brought to the Eed Cross a great practical hotel experience,
and the house under his management quickly attained an
overwhelming success. It had, in the first instance, been
charmingly adapted to its new uses. Its rather stiff and
old-fashioned interior had been completely transformed;
there was all through the building an indefinable but en-
tirely unmistakable home atmosphere. Our American of-
ficers fairly reveled in it.

Into this setting was placed good operation — a high-
grade American-operated hotel, if you please, in the very
heart of Paris and all her stout traditions. Petit dejeuners
begone! They are indeed starvation diet for a hungry
Yank. The breakfast in the American Officers' Hotel,
which our Red Cross set up and operated, cost a uniform
five francs (one dollar) and had the substantial quality of
a regular up-and-doing tavern on this side of the Atlantic.

Before we rest, here are three typical bills of fare of a
single ordinary day in this A. E. C.-A. E. F. establish-
ment. The day was the nineteenth of April, 1919, and
the three meals were as follows:

BREAKFAST Five Francs — ($1.00).

Bananas

Quaker Oats

Eggs and Bacon

Griddle Cakes with Sirup

Confiture
Coffee, Cocoa, or Chocolate

WHEN JOHNNY CAME MARCHING HOME 273

LUNCHEON Eight Francs — ($1.60).
Oyster Soup, with Okra
Scollops of Veal, Dewey

Nouilles, Milanaise
Cold Meats, with Jelly

Russian Salad

Assorted Eclairs Raspberry Ice Cream
Coffee

DINNER Ten Francs —($2.00) .

Creme St. Cloud

Rouget Portugaise

Roasted Filet of Beet, Cresson

Pommes Chateau Endive Flamandes

Salade de Saison

Candied Fruits Coffee Ice Cream

Coffee

Yet the charm of the American Officers7 Hotel in Paris
rested not alone in the real excellence of its cuisine, nor
in the comfort of its cleanly sleeping rooms. It carried its
ideals of genuine service far beyond these mere fundamen-
tals. It recognized the almost universal Yankee desire
to have one's shoes shined in a shop and so set up a regular
American boot-blacking stand in one of its side corridors,
a thing which every other Parisian hotel would have told
you was quite impossible of accomplishment. It recog-
nized the inconvenience of tedious waiting and long queues
at the box office of the Paris theaters by setting up a theater
ticket office in its lobby, which made no extra charge for the
distinct service rendered. Nor was there a charge for the
services of Miss Curtis, the charming little Red Cross
girl, who went shopping with a fellow or for him, and who
had a knack of getting right into those perplexing Paris
shops and getting just what a fellow wanted at an aston-
ishingly low price — for Paris in war times, anyway.
Her range of experience was large; from the man with a
silver star on each shoulder who wanted to buy a modish
evening gown for his wife at a price not to exceed forty
dollars, to the chunky Nevada lieutenant who had won

274 WITH THE DOUGHBOY IN FRANCE

three thousand francs at " redeye " on the preceding even-
ing and was anxious to blow it all in the next morning in
buying souvenirs for mother. With both she did her best.
Her motto was that of the successful shop keeper : " We
aim to please."

When Mr. Boomer had this hotel set up and running and
turned his attention to some other housing problems of our
Red Cross, the management fell to Major H. C. Eberhart,
who had been his assistant in Paris and before that had
been affiliated in a managerial capacity with several large
American houses. He carried forward the job so well
begun.

With the slow but very sure movement of our doughboys
back from eastern France and Germany toward the base
ports along the westerly rim of France, where they were
embarking in increasing numbers for the blessed homeland,
it became necessary for General Pershing to establish con-
centration areas, or reservoir camps, well back from the
Atlantic Coast but convenient to it. By far the largest
and most important of these was in the neighborhood of
the city of Le Mans, some one hundred and fifty miles
southwest of Paris, which meant in turn that what was
finally destined to be the largest of the canteens of our
American Eed Cross in France outside of Paris was the
final one established. It was known as the American Red
Cross Casual Canteen and, situated within three blocks to
the east of the railroad station at Le Mans, was a genuine
headquarters for all the American soldiers for ten or fif-
teen or twenty miles roundabout. And in the bare chance
that there might not be a doughboy who had chanced to
hear of it, it was well indicated — by day, by a huge
sign of the crimson cross, and by night that emblem blazing
forth in all the radiance of electricity.

When the doors were finally opened — about the middle
of March, 1919 — there were sleeping quarters under its
hospitable roof for 250 enlisted men and forty officers.

WHEN JOHNNY CAME MARCHING HOME 275

In the canteen portion of the establishment, 200 men could
be served at a single sitting; in all 500 at each of the three
meals a day. The comforts of this place almost approxi-
mated those of a hotel. When the men rose from their
beds in the morning — clean sheets and towels and pillow-
cases, of course, even though it did mean that the Red
Cross had to establish its own laundry in the establish-
ment — they could step, quickly and easily, into a com-
modious washroom and indulge, if they so chose, in a
shower bath. Eighteen showers were installed — for their
convenience. It represented the acme of Red Cross
service.

Finally the beginning of the end for the average dough-
boy in France — that long anticipated and seemingly
never-arriving day of departure in the troopship for home.

Our Red Cross was down to see him off when he sailed.
It might have been from Brest or Bordeaux or St. Nazaire
that he took his departure — or from some one of the lesser
ports that were used to a greater or less extent. That made
no difference to the American Red Cross. It was part of
its job to be on hand whenever and wherever the boy of the
A. E. F. sailed for home — whether it was Brest or
Vladivostok or Southampton or Marseilles.

As a matter of real and actual fact, Brest was the
most used of all the embarkation ports for the journey
home. It boasted what was sometimes called " the most
beautiful canteen in France " which had been builded by
our Red Cross, with the generous help of the army engi-
neers. It immediately adjoined the embarkation sheds,
and night and day in the months that followed the sign-
ing of the armistice, it was supremely busy — serving the
inevitable cigarettes, doughnuts, chocolate, and other hot
drinks. An interesting and extremely valuable adjunct to
the place was a bakery, with a capacity of twenty thousand
buns a day.

The enlisted men's rest room, with its bright hangings

276 WITH THE DOUGHBOY IN FRANCE

and draperies, its cartoons of army life painted upon its
wall panels, its big fireplace, its comfortable settees,
lounging chairs, and tables supplied with games, maga-
zines, and writing material, held especial attraction for
the doughboys. In all the mud and grime of the dirty
Port du Commerce it was the one cheery and homelike
place.

I told in an earlier chapter of the American Red Cross
canteen at Bassens, just across the Gironde from Bordeaux.
It is enough to add here and now that this American-builded
port with its mile-long Yankee timber pier at which seven
great ships might be berthed simultaneously, discharging
or loading cargoes, never justified its worth half so much
as in the days after the armistice. Thomas Kane's coffee
attained a new perfection while Miss Susanne Wills, the
Chicago woman who was directress of the canteen on the
pier, and her fellow workers made renewed efforts to see
that the boys that passed through the canteen had every
conceivable comfort — and then some others. I, myself,
spent a half day questioning them as to these. The verdict
to the questionings was unanimous. It generally came in
the form of a grin or a nod of the head, sometimes merely
in a pointing gesture to the crimson-crossed comfort bag,
that the big and blushing doughboy carried hung upon
his wrist.

For the sick boy, going homeward bound from all the
ports, very special comfort provisions were made — and
rightly so. All of these last passed through the Red Cross
infirmaries on the embarkation docks. As each went over
the gangway he was questioned as to his equipment. If
he was short a mess kit or a cup, a fork, a knife, a spoon
or a blanket, the deficiency was promptly met ; in addition
to which each boy was given a pair of flannel pajamas and
the inevitable comfort bag, with its toothbrush, tooth
paste, wash cloth, bar of soap, and two packages of cig-

WHEN JOHNNY CAME MARCHING HOME 277

arettes. Books and magazines also went upon each troop-
ship, while Red Cross nurses accompanied the boys on to
the ships and saw them safely settled in the hospital wards.
~No mere cataloging of the work of our Eed Cross in the
embarkation ports can ever really begin to tell the story
of the fullness of its service there. Charts of organiza-
tion, details of operations, pictures of the surroundings
go just so far, but never quite far enough to tell of the
heart interest that really makes service anywhere and
everywhere. Such service the American Eed Cross ren-
dered all across the face of France — and nowhere with
more strength and enthusiasm than in those final moments
of the doughboy which awaited him before his start home.
Have I not already told you that our Eed Cross over there
was not a triumph of organization — or anything like it ?
It was a big job — and with big mistakes. But the big-
ness of the things accomplished so far outweighed the mis-
takes that they can well be forgotten ; the tremendous net
result of real achievement set down immutably and indis-
putably as a real triumph of our American individualism.

CHAPTER XII

THE GIRL WHO WENT TO WAS

ON" the ship that bore me from New York to Europe in
the first week of December, 1918, there were many
war workers — and of many sorts and varieties. We had
men and women of the Y. M. C. A., of the Y. W. C. A.,
of the Jewish Welfare Board, of the Knights of Columbus
— and twenty-five women of the American Red Cross.
And so, in the close-thrown intimacy of shipboard, one
had abundant opportunity to study this personnel at rather
short range, and the fact that our ship, which had been
builded for South African traffic rather than for that of
the North Atlantic, nearly foundered in mid ocean only
served to increase the opportunity.

There were women war workers of nearly every age and
variety in that motley ship's company. There were
school-teachers — one from Portland, Maine, and another
from Portland, Oregon — stenographers, clerks, women of
real social distinction, professional women, including a
well-known actress or two, and girls so recently out of
finishing school or college that they had not yet attained
their full places in the sun. Few of them had known one
another before they had embarked upon the ship; there
was a certain haziness of understanding in many of their
minds as to the exact work that was to be allotted to them
overseas. A large percentage of the women, in fact, had
never before crossed the Atlantic; a goodly number had
not even seen salt water before this voyage. Yet with all
this uncertainty there was no timidity — no, not even
when the great December storm arose, and with the full-
ness of its fury lashed itself into a hurricane the like of

278

THE GIRL WHO WENT TO WAR 279

which our captain, who had crossed the ocean a hundred
times or more, had not seen. And when the fury of this
storm had crashed in the cabin windows, had torn the
wheelhouse away, had set the stout ship awash and the pas-
sengers to bailing, the courage and serenity of these Ameri-
can women remained undisturbed. They suffered great
personal discomforts, yet complained not. And with our
national felicity for an emergency organization — that
sort of organization really is part and parcel of our indi-
vidualism — relieved the steward's crew at night and
cooked and served the Sabbath supper.

There were women in uniform on our ship whose mouths
were tightly shut in the grim determination of service —
one could fairly see " Z-E-A-L " written in unmistakable
letters upon their high foreheads — and there were girls
who fretted about the appearance of the curls under the
edges of their small service caps and who coquetted with
the young British aviators returning home after service as
instructors on the flying fields here in the United States.
Between these extremes there was vast range and variety.
But the marvelous part of it all was that all of them -
each after her own creed or fashion, for the dominating
quality of our individualism multiplies geometrically in
the case of our American womanhood — ranged true to
any test that might be put upon them. The storm showed
that. I did not have the personal opportunity of seeing
the Red Cross girls in battle service; but I did see them
in the canteens in the hard, hard months that followed the
signing of the armistice, saw them in the wards and the
recreation huts of hospital after hospital, saw them, too, in
Paris headquarters, working under very difficult conditions
of light and ventilation — living of every sort — and at
manual or office work or humdrum dreariness. The girl
in uniform who sat all day in a poorly lighted and aired
room at a typewriter or a filing case had a far less dram-
atic or poetic job than the traditional Red Cross girl who
stands at a battlefield canteen or in a hospital ward holding

280 WITH THE DOUGHBOY IN FRANCE

the hand of some good-looking — and perhaps marriage-
able — young captain or colonel. Yet her service was as
real as uncomplaining and — for the reasons we have just
seen — vastly more difficult.

None of the women's work over there was easy — the
romantic girl who went to France lured on by the dream
pictures of some artist-illustrator as to the dramatic phases
of canteen or hospital work was quickly disillusionized.
The real thing was vastly different from the picture. A
dirty and unshaven doughboy in bed or standing in a long
queue waiting for his cigarettes or chocolate, and speaking
Polish or Yiddish when he came to them, was a far, far
different creature from the young wounded officer of the
picture who must have been an F. F. V. or at least from
one of the first families of Baltimore or Philadelphia.
And the hours! They were fearfully hard — to put it
lightly. Eight, ten, or twelve hours at a stretch was a
pretty good and exhausting test of a girl's vitality. Nor
was this all of the job, either. Many and many a woman
worker of the Red Cross or, for that matter, the Y. M.
C. A., too, has stood eight or ten or twelve hours on
her feet in a canteen and then has ridden twenty or thirty
miles in a truck or camionette to an army dance, has danced
three or four or five more hours with soldier boys who,
even if they do not happen to be born dancers, do covet
the attention and interest of decent girls, and has returned
to only a few hours of sleep, before the long turn in the
canteen once again. And has repeated this performance
four or five times a week. For what ? Because she was
crazy for dancing ? Not a bit of it. For of a truth they
became sick of dancing — " fed up " is the phrase they
frequently used when they spoke of it at all.

" I feel as if I never wanted to hear an orchestra
again," one of them told me one day as I stopped at
her canteen — in a French town close to the occupied ter-
ritory. "But I have four dates already for next week
and three for the week after. Another month of this

THE GIRL WHO WENT TO WAR 281

sort of thing and I shall be a fit candidate for a rolling
chair."

" Why do you do it ? " I ventured.

" Why do I do it ? " she repeated. " The boys need
us. Have you noticed the kind of girls that drift up
here from Paris ? If you have, you will understand why
my job is unending, why it only pauses for a very little
while indeed at night, when I jump into my bed for six
or seven hours of well-earned sleep."

I understood. I had spent an evening in the grand
boulevards of Paris and had watched a " Y " girl, under
the escort of a member of the American Military Police,
save foolish doughboys and their still more foolish officers
— from themselves. In a few minutes after ten o'clock
that evening an overcrowded hotel of one of our largest
American war-relief organizations had regretfully turned
away sixteen of our soldiers and in this time there were
fifteen French girls waiting to give the hospitality that
the sadly overburdened hotel had been compelled to refuse
them. No wonder that our Red Cross was forced into
the building of the great Tent City there on the Champs de
Mars. As these French girls of the Paris streets came up
to the doughboys the job of the " Y " girl began. In a
few more minutes she had convinced the boys that it was
not too late to give up hope of securing lodgings in over-
crowded Paris; and was quick with her suggestions as to
where they might be found. It was not a pleasant job. I
hardly can imagine one more unpleasant. But the girl
had her reward, in the looks of gratitude which the dough-
boys gave her. One or two of them cried like babies.

This was an unusual job to be sure. But our American
Eed Cross also was filled with unusual jobs for women
as well as for men; jobs that took not merely endurance
and courage, but in many, many cases rare wit and tact
and diplomacy, and these were rarely lacking, and some-
times came where they were least expected.

"282 WITH THE DOUGHBOY IN FRANCE

I am not all anxious to over-glorify these women. It
would hardly be fair; for, after all/ they were very
human indeed — witness one young widow on our ship
to Europe who not merely confessed but actually boasted
that she had received three proposals of marriage upon
that stormy voyage. And one little secretary girl from the
Middle West, who was of our ship's company, wanted to
be a canteen worker, although she was specifically enrolled
for the office work for which she was particularly qualified,
but when she found that the canteen to which she was to
be assigned was located in a lonely railroad junction town
in the middle of France, demanded that she be sent to
Coblenz, where the Army of Occupation had its head-
quarters; she said quite frankly that she did not want to
be robbed of all her opportunities of meeting the nice
young officers of the army. She was very human, that
.young secretary, and eventually she got to Coblenz. In-
sistence counts. And she was both insistent and consistent.

But at the Rhine her lot, oddly enough, was not thrown
in with officers but with the doughboys — the enlisted
men of our most amazing army. She fed them, walked
with them, danced with them, wrote their letters, and finally
began to understand. And so slowly but surely came to
the fullness of her real value to the country that she
served.

One evening she dined in the Y. W. 0. A. hostess
house at Coblenz with two of these boys. Left alone, she
would have dined by herself. She was tired, very tired.
There comes the hour when a woman worker wearies a
bit at sight of a ceaseless file of chattering and khaki-clad
men. And so when she seated herself in one of the little
dining booths of the " Y. W." restaurant, it was with a
silent prayer that she might be left alone — just that
evening. Her prayer was not granted. A big doughboy
came and sat down beside her, another across the narrow
table from her. The second vouched for the first.

THE GIRL WHO WENT TO WAR 283

"You will like Hank," said he. "He's one of the
livest in the whole First Division. He's from Waco,
Texas, and say, he's the best gambler in the whole army."

At which Hank grinned and produced a huge wad of
ten and twenty and fifty and hundred franc notes from his
hip pocket.

" Don't you let him string you, Miss Tippitoes," said
he, " but if ever you get where you need a little spare
change you know where your Uncle Hank is to be found."

He called her " Miss Tippitoes " because he could not
remember her real name even if ever it had been given to
him. But he had danced with her and watched her dance,
and marveled. And well might he have marveled. For
if I were to give you Miss Tippitoes' real name you might
know it as the name of the most graceful and popular
dancer in a fashionable suburb of Chicago.

Hank edged closer to her. It was in the crowded
restaurant, so he took off his coat and unbuttoned his
blouse, as well as the upper buttons of his undershirt.
And Tippitoes stood for it — it was a part of her job
and she knew it — while Hank leaned closer to her and
confided some of his troubles — they were troubles com-
mon to so many of the doughboys.

" It's a dump that we're billeted in, miss," said he," and
it's all the fault of our colonel — him and that Red Cross
girl he's stuck on. Just because he's got a mash on her

he had the regiment moved in to G . But I've got his

number. And as for her — why, that girl comes from
my home town. I've got hers, too."

Tippitoes' eyes blazed. She could have lost her temper
so easily. It is not difficult when one is fagged and nerves
begin to get on edge, but she kept her patience.

" Don't be foolish, young man," said she, " otherwise
somebody will have to take the trouble to tell you that a
colonel does not locate his regiment. He has no more to
say about where you shall all be billeted than you your-

284: WITH THE DOUGHBOY IN FRANCE

selves. And as for the Red Cross girl, she is in the same
position. Moreover, your remark is not worthy of an
American soldier — and a gentleman."

There was something in the way she said these things
- no type may ever put in upon paper — that, in the
language of the motion-picture world, " registered." In
a little time Hank was ashamed of himself, and with <the
innate generosity of his big, uncouth heart, apologized —
like a gentleman and an American soldier.

Ofttimes, even though with the American Army
women were not permitted to go very close to the front
line, the joh the Red Cross girl was fraught with much
real danger. The air raid was too frequent and too deadly
a visitor not to have earned an awsome respect for itself.
The tooth marks of Big Bertha still show all too plainly
as horrid scars across the lovely face of Paris — the beauty
of the world. The boche, as we all very well know, did
not stop his long-distance warfare from the air even at
the sight of the roofs which bore crimson crosses and so
signified that they were hospitals and, under every condi-
tion of civilization and humanity, exempt from attack.
The story of these hospital raids, with their casualty lists,
not merely of American boys already sick and wounded,
but of the wounding and killing of the men and women who
were laboring to give them life and comfort, is already a
well-known fact of record ; yet even this was not all. Death
never seemed far away in those hard months of 19 IT and
1918, and Death was no respector, either of persons or of
uniforms or of sex. Upon the honor roll of our Red Cross
there are the names of twenty-three American women,
other than nurses, who made the supreme sacrifice for their
country.

The experiences of the Red Cross girls in the air raids
were as many and varied as the girls themselves. That of
a canteen worker at Toul was fairly typical. She had been
over at the neighboring city of Nancy to aid in one of the

THE GIRL WHO WENT TO WAR 285

innumerable soldiers7 dances which had heen given there.
In the middle of the dance it had suddenly occurred to
her chum and herself that neither had eaten since morning.
A young lieutenant had taken them to a very good little
restaurant in the great Place Stanislas that all through the
hard days of the war held to a long-time reputation of real
excellence, and had insisted that they order a dinner of
generous proportions.

Yet before their soup had been fairly served an air
raid was upon them. The roar of the planes and the rattle
of cannonading were continuous. Every light in the place
went out instantly, and because the proprietor insisted
even then in keeping his shades and shutters tightly drawn
the place was inky black.

" What did you do ? " I asked her.

" What did we do ? We went ahead and ate our din-
ner. It was the best thing we could do. I realized for the
first time in my life the real handicaps of the blind. I
don't see how they ever learn to eat fried chicken
gracefully."

.In an earlier chapter I told of the remarkable work done
by the Smith College girls at the crux of the great Ger-
man drive. It was impossible in that chapter to tell
all of the sacrifice and the devotion shown by these women
— the most of them from five to fifteen years out of
college, although one of the best of them was from the
class of 1882 and still another from that of 1917. " We
were an unbaked crew/' one of them admitted quite
frankly to me.

Miss Elizabeth Bliss was typical of these college girls.
A long time after Chateau-Thierry they were all working
behind the lines in the Argonne, Miss Bliss herself in
charge of a sanitary train for the Bed Cross from the rail-
head back to the base hospital. It was part of her job to
work up to midnight and then be called at three o'clock
in the morning to see the four o'clock train start off

286 WITH THE DOUGHBOY IN FRANCE

with its wounded. On one of those October mornings,
when the weather was a little worse than usual, if that
could be possible, she exerted a perfectly human privilege
and decided not to get up.

But no sooner had this decision been made than the
still, small voice spoke to her.

" Can you afford to miss even one day ? " it said to her.

" I'm all in. I just can't get up," she replied to the
S. S. V.

" Can you afford to miss — even one day ? " it repeated.

She got up and dressed and made her way down in the
rain to the waiting train. As she went into the long hos-
pital car a wounded doughboy raised himself on one elbow
and shouted to all his fellows:

" Hi, fellows, I told you that a Red Cross girl would be
here, and here she is. I told you she'd come."

" Just think if I hadn't," says Miss Bliss in telling of
this incident.

When life back of the front was not dangerous or dra-
matic, it was apt to be plain dreary. There is not usually
much drama just in hard wark. Take once again the
case of Miss Mary Vail Andress, whom we found in charge
of the canteen at Toul. Miss Andress came to France
on the twenty-fourth of August, 1917, one of a group of
seven Red Cross women, the first of the American Red Cross
women to be sent over. The other members of the party
were Mrs. Dickens, Mrs. Lawrence, Miss Frances Mitchell
(who was sent to the newly opened canteen at fipernay),
Miss Rogers, Miss Andrews-, and Miss Frances Andrews,
and were immediately dispatched to Chalons. For a short
time Miss Andress was the assistant of Henry Wise Miller,
who was then in charge of canteen work in France. She,
however, enlisted for canteen work and so asked Mr. Miller
to be allowed to go into the field and was sent to fipernay.
From there she went back to Paris and on to Chantilly,

THE GIRL WHO WENT TO WAR 287

where she prepared a home for girls in canteen work.
She came to Toul in January, 1918, and, as you already
know, was the first woman worker to reach that important
American Army headquarters.

" For a while it seemed as if I could never quite get
down to the real job," she says " it seemed so often that
something new broke loose and always just at the wrong
time. While we were working to get the first canteen es-
tablished here at Toul — we had a nurses' club in mind
at the time — word came from the hospital over there back
of the hill that the Red Cross was needed there to help
prepare for the comfort of the nurses in that big place.
I went there at once — of course. Within fifteen minutes
after I got there I was hanging curtains in the girls' bar-
racks — couldn't you trust a woman to do a job like that ?
I did not get very many hung. Captain Hugh Pritchitt,
my chief, came bursting in upon me. ' They're here.' he
shouted.

" I knew what that meant. e They ' were the first of
our American wounded, and they must have comfort and
help and immediate attention. They got it. It was part
of our job, you know. And after that part was organized
there was nothing to it but to come back to Toul and set
up our chain of canteens there."

And you already know how very well that particular war
job was done. And doing it involved much devotion and
endurance and self-sacrifice, not only on the part of the
directress, but on that of her staff of capable assistants.

Talk about devotion and endurance and self-sacrifice !
Into the desolate ruin of the war-racked city of Kheims
there walked last October two American Eed Cross women
on a sight-seeing trip. They had had months of hard
canteen work and were well tired out, and were about to
return home. In a week or so of leave they went to Rheims
because that once busy city with its dominating cathedral
has become the world's new Pompeii. And the man or

288 WITH THE DOUGHBOY IN FRANCE

woman who visits France without seeing it has missed
seeing the one thing of almost supreme horror and interest
in the world to-day.

The two Red Cross women had but a single day to see
Eheims. That was last October. They still are there;
for back of the ruins, back of the gaunt, scarred hulk of
that vast church which was once the pride of France, and
to day the symbol of Calvary through which she had just
passed, there rose the question in their minds: what has
become of the folk of this town? It was the sort of
question that does not down. Nor were the two women

— one is Miss Emily Bennet of the faculty of a fashionable
girls' school in New York and the other Miss Catherine
Biddle Porter of Philadelphia — the sort that close their
souls to questions such as these.

They found the answer. It was in the basement of the
commercial high school — a dreary, high-ceil inged place,
but because of its comparatively modern construction of
steel and brick a sort of abri or bombproof refuge for the
three or four hundred citizens that stuck it out through the
four years of horror. In that basement place of safety an
aged school-teacher of the town, Mademoiselle Fourreaux,
month in and month out, prepared two meals a day-
bread and soup — for the group of refugees that gathered
round about her and literally kept the heart of Rheims
abeat. The Red Cross women found this aged heroine

— she confesses to having turned seventy — working un-
aided, and within the hour were working with her, sending
word back to Paris to send up a few necessary articles
of comfort and of clothing. That night they slept in
Rheims, and were billeted in a house whose windows had
been crudely replaced with oiled paper and whose roof was
half gone.

In a short time relief came to them. The American
Red Cross sent in other supplies and workers and estab-
lished a much larger and finer canteen relief in another
section of the town. Other organizations — French and

THE GIRL WHO WENT TO WAE 289

>ritish and American — poured in relief ; but Miss Ben-
nett and Miss Porter stuck it out, and soon began to reap
the fruit of their great endeavors.

I have cited here a few instances of women who have
gone overseas — frequently at great personal sacrifices —
to help bear the burden of the war. If space had permitted
I might easily have given five hundred, and each of them
would have had its own personal little dramatic story.
I might simply tell of some of the women whom I have
met on the job; of Miss Lucy Duhring of Philadelphia,
setting up the women's work of the Y. M. C. A. in the
leave areas of the occupied territory; of a girl superin-
tendent of schools from Kansas, working in the hospital
records for the Red Cross at Toul; of another girl from
Kingston-on-Hudson running a big Y. W. C. A. hotel
for army girls in Paris and running it mighty well; of
still another woman — this one a welfare worker from a
big industrial plant in Kansas City — as the guiding
spirit in the hostess house at Coblenz. The list quickly
spins to great lengths. It is a tremendously embracing
one, and when one gazes at it, he begins to realize what
effect this great adventure overseas is going to have upon
the lives of the women who participated in it; how it is
going to change the conventions of life, or its amenities,
or its opportunities. How will the weeks and months of
camaraderie with khaki-clad men, under all conditions
and all circumstances affect them? Many of the silly
conventionalities of ordinary life and under ordinary con-
ditions of peace, have, of necessity, been thrown away over
there. Men and women have made long trips together,
in train or in motor car, and have thought or made nothing
of it whatever. On the night train up from Aix les-Bains
to Paris on one of those never-to-be-forgotten nights the
autumn the conflict still raged, two girls of the A. E. F.
found it quite impossible to obtain seats of any sort.
Four or five marines, back from a short leave in a little

290 WITH THE DOUGHBOY IN FRANCE

town near there, did the best they could for them and with
their blankets and dunny rolls rigged crude beds for them
in the aisle of a first-class car, and there the girls rode all
night to Paris while the marines stood guard over them.

The gray-uniformed woman war-worker knows that she
may trust the American soldier. Her experience with the
doughboy has been large and so her tribute to the high
qualities of his manhood is of very real value. Moreover,
she too, has seen real service, both in canteen work and in
the still more important leave area work which has followed
— this last the great problem of keeping the idle soldier
healthily amused.

" I have known our girls," she will tell you, " to go
into a miserable little French or German town filled with
a thousand or twelve hundred American boys in khaki
and in a day change the entire spirit of that community.
There has been a dance one night, for instance, with the
boys restless and trying stupidly to dance with one another,
or in some cases, even bringing in the rough little village
girls from the streets outside. But the next dance has
seen a transformation. The girls of the A. E. F. have
come, they are dancing with the men ; there is cheer and
decency in the very air, there are neither French nor Ger-
man present — the place is American.

" You have told of what the American girl has been to
the men of our army ; let me tell, in a word, what the army
has been to the American woman who has worked with it :
We have trusted our enlisted men in khaki and not once
found that trust misplaced. Night and day have we
placed our honor in their hands and never have trusted
in vain."

" The reason why ? " we venture.

" The mothers of America," is the quick reply.

I know what she means. I have read letter after letter
written by the doughboys to the mothers back here, and
the mass of them still stay in my mind as a tribute
that all but surpasses description. Some of them mis-

THE GIRL WHO WENT TO WAR 291

spelled ; many of them ungrammatical — where have our
schools been these last few years ? — a few of them humor-
ous, a few pathetic, but all of them breathing a sentiment
and a tenderness that makes me willing to call ours the
sentimental as well as the amazing army. Add to these
letters the verbal testimony of the boys to the women of
their army.

" We're not doing much," one after another has said.
" but say, you ought to see my mother on the job back
home. She's the one that's turning the trick."

It was a large experiment sending women with our army
overseas — in the minds of many a most dubious experi-
ment. In no other war had an army ever had women en-
rolled with it, save possibly a few nurses. It is an experi-
ment which, so far as the United States is concerned, has
more than justified itself. Our women have been tried in
France — in other European lands as well — and have
not been found wanting ; which is a very faint way, indeed,
of trying to tell, of a great accomplishment. For if the
American soldier, through many months of test and trial
— and test and trial that by no means were confined to
the battlefield — has kept his body clean and his soul pure
through the virtue of woman which has been spread about
him through the guarded years of his home life, how about
the virtue of the women that, clad in the uniform of our
Eed Cross and the other war-relief organizations, guarded
him successfully when he was far away from home?
There is but one answer to such a question, but one ques-
tion to follow after that. Here it is : Is it fair to longer
consider such a real accomplishment a mere experiment ? I
think not.) I think that it is rather to be regarded as a
real triumph of our Americanism.

THE

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