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 Red 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 Red Cross. And to work for the Red Cross at the front was to face death as an actuality.
"The wounded already were coming in, in good numbers, on that unforgetable morning of the twelfth of September, 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 dressings, 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 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, 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 addition 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 distinguished reputation at both Château-Thierry and at Soissons. It was at the first point that Major General Bundy, who then commanded it, was reputed to have replied 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. LeJeune, 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 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-les-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 September 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 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 surgical 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 understood that a battle was brewing. There was a terrific 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, ambulances, 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 incessant 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 Red 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 ambulances 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 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 indescribable 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 fields once again. Across that rough sea of mud an engineer 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 hastily 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.
"'Bons Américains!' 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 into Division Headquarters that a company of one of the old Regular Army regiments had captured an entire German 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 Red 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 picturesque 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 excessive 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 functions had suddenly been confronted with a task that demanded the brains and brawn of supermen and how gloriously and brave-heartedly they had arisen to the task. The field service of our Red Cross—its first contact 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 to pass. No wonder that the once gay capital of the French fairly held its breath in that unforgetable hour—that every other community of France, big or little, did the same—and fairly fought for news of the day's operations. Yet news gave little comfort. It was bad news, all of it; fearfully and unmistakably bad. Each succeeding 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 ranking as Red Cross Commissioner to Europe and a man whom you have met in earlier pages of this book, called a conference 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 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 experimented with the French, in definite and successful efforts to relieve the hard-pressed civilian population of that distressed 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 "strategic" 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 recognize 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 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, however, that you may gain the proper perspective on the beginnings 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 Reconstruction and Relief.
It located warehouses at convenient places—Ham, Noyon, Arras, and Soissons—all of them within gunshot of the Hindenburg Line. These were stocked with food, clothing, furniture, kitchen utensils, building materials, 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 municipal officers in the devastated towns. These coöperated 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 coördinated agencies were the Smith College Unit—composed 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 coördinated 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 Comité Américaine pour les Régiones Dévastées, had their various operations well 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 impetus to their work. Agricultural societies were organized for the common rehabilitation of the areas, American tractors and plows were furnished by the French Government, while the Red Cross workers helped with and encouraged 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 desolated sections.
In March, 1918, these desecrated lands were just springing 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 landscape—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 devastation—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 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 neighborliness, 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 service 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. Another 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 the area, whose school had been reopened by them, and which also served the children of several surrounding villages. 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 outbuildings, 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 retreat 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 children 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 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, temporary canteens and dispensaries and evacuating civilians and carrying wounded soldiers through to safe points behind the lines. And because many of these last were American soldiers they formed the first point of field contact between our Red 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 Château-Thierry. "This forty isn't half enough. I want a hundred."
The college graduate in charge of the temporary canteen 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 Red Cross car through the tangle of war traffic at a crossroads near Roye, while the fighting waged thick around about that little town. She found her Fordette stalled and tangled in several different 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 New 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 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 combination 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 encouraged 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 emergency 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 Lassigny, 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 it Red Cross cars worked, both day and night, evacuating men and women and goods.
The line held across Montdidier, Noyon, 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 Compiègne, 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 Red Cross with our Yanks and their Allies were "digging 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, unshaven; men and animals and inanimate things, moving quickly, slowly, intermittently, moving not at all, but choking and halting all progress—with the deadly perversity 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 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 uniforms, 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," 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 boche's 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 Compiègne and Beauvais, it increased its attention to the soldiery. It set up a line of canteens and soup 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 Compiègne the Red 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-à-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 Compiègne, these workers stood at the curb opening up case after 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 Compiègne. 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 Red Cross had been abolished in order to meet the supreme emergency. Rank melted quickly away before the demand for manual labor. The Red Cross showed the flexibility of its organization, and Compiègne was, in itself, a superb test.
It was down at the railroad station in that same fascinating, mediæval city of old France that a portable 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 Compiègne 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 precious 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 together pretty closely at that time; it sought no fine distinctions—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 workers. And these worked until the retreating Allies had established a third line in the rear of them and the advancing Germans were but two hours away.
All this while the transformed hotel at Compiègne remained a huge center for these multifold forms of Red Cross relief. It, too, formed a clearing house for assistance. 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. Without a minute's delay a camionette was dispatched to the spot and it brought the weeping, grateful pair and most of their personal belongings to safety; while other cars were sent in various directions to seek out the opportunities 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 Red Cross workers forced themselves into an all-necessary sleep were all spent in the caves and abris of Compiègne; for the boche aviators had an unpleasant habit of making frequent nocturnal visits to it.
At Beauvais, simultaneous with the establishment of the headquarters at Compiègne, the American Red 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 Red Cross made some definite provision for their comfort. It secured 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 outgoing trains to the south and west. And with the barracks 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 unheated railroad station.
At Niort, 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 Péronne, 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 organized, 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 organization, 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 because I wanted you to see how and where that direct-service field was founded. From 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 November, 1918. That was the drive so brilliantly marked with those epoch-making tablets of the superb romance of our American adventure overseas—Château-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 volunteered 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 Red 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 further wrote:
"This has been another of those days spent most in quarters, busy with paper work. I find a thundering lot of letter writing necessary in connection with my Red 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 the field or at the battalion-aid post and they walk or are carried 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, 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 correspondence 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 passable 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 scrubbing 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 opportunity of a decent bath. Such is war. It is a known fact 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 Red 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 Château-Thierry drive nine of these portable showers were set up by our Red Cross, and in one week, seven thousand men were brought back from the firing line, bathed, given clean clothes, and sent back refreshed 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 bacteria 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.
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. Dié. 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 Ford, 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 disinfecting 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 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 expedition. 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 synchronized 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 armistice; to be exact, 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 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 troupe 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 canteens, establishing reading rooms, and distributing cigarettes, 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 hospitals, 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 début.
"One of the girls was a wonderful singer," said Biernatzki 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 decorative 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 Association 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 seventy 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 amusement 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 sufficient 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 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 occasion of my visit to it. "I know that the women must have been fearfully lonely out here; but they have never complained. 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 Colombes-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 shoulder. 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 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 overburdened field surgeons, as couriers or even as staff officers, and fulfilled these possibilities 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 Kimball, 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 offensive 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 tartaric 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 railroad station on the way we had a collision that did for our camion completely. Fortunately there were no serious injuries. We left the disabled car by the roadside about halfway to Paris and begged a ride on a French truck that happened along. We reached Paris at 4:30 Sunday morning. 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 cigarettes 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 unpleasant 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 aërial 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 service the best—the men who, themselves, participated in it—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, reporting at Paris upon the following evening. He came at a critical moment. The name of Château-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 Château-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 haven of Neuilly. Many of them were terribly wounded indeed; and practically none of them had had more attention 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 emergency 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 Neuilly 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 Crépy 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 front. He reached Crépy 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 organization—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 Red 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 individual effort becomes, all organization is rarely lost. And so Kellogg, in the deadening rain of that July night, found the situation at Crépy 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 Crépy 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 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 trouble at the Crépy 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 narrative 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 cubes 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 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 received what he wanted from the Red Cross stock available. Hospital trains from other points sometimes stopped at Crépy. 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, although it was both cold and rainy nearly every day. I remember 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 Red Cross headquarters 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 attempts to talk with headquarters and get some sort of instructions 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 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 Crépy 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 café, 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 headquarters, 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 Château-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 warehouse at La Ferte, during which time he had the opportunity of studying boche aërial bombardments—at extremely 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 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 Château-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 structure, 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 Crépy was, happily, missing at Cohan. Powell and Leighton not only had an excellent stock of Red Cross supplies, which were replenished 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 outposts of Dravigny and Chéry, 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 assigned to Chéry and Dravigny.
Thus was Red Cross Kellogg's next job set out for him. He had never driven a Ford. But other folks have mastered such a handicap and Kellogg had driven many real 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 professional speed over the steel-torn battlefields and roads of the entire Château-Thierry district.
Dravigny and Chéry 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 Chéry 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 débris of fallen walls and discarded military equipment clogged the streets. Refuse and filth were everywhere. The sanitary arrangements—well, there hadn't been any. The odor of dead horses filled the air. Flies? There are no words to describe the awfulness of the flies. Our own artillery—.75's and .155's—surrounded the town in addition to occupying positions at each end of it and in its center. The roar of these guns was continuous, the concussion tremendously 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 sufficiently 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 ambulances 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 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 Chéry, 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 boche 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 Chéry Chartreuve was speedily obliterated 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 reëstablishing the Chéry outpost at the little town of Mareuil, 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 Michigan chiefly. It had been in the lines northwest of Soissons—the only American Division in the sector—and there had coöperated most efficiently with the French. Its regiments 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 brilliancy, 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 enthusiastically 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 he had performed temporary work at Neufchâteau—always an important division headquarters of the American Red Cross—at Bar-le-Duc and at Rosnes; 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 innumerable 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 four years and the condition of the roads can only be imagined," 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 appreciation 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 succeeded in reaching our destination and located ourselves with several enlisted men of the Forty-third Balloon Company in a dugout which until a few days before had been occupied by German officers.
"This place was interesting. Reached by a steep flight 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, moving toward the town of Véry. 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. Lieutenant 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 headquarters 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 Infantry, 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 hospitals. 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 bearers, 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 outpost 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 dilapidated plank road through the narrow valley between Epinonville and Véry. 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 remove 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 Véry.
"Arriving at Epinonville late that evening I worked at 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 continuously 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 attention 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 containers 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 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 Red 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 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 Red 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 Red Cross McGinnis who recruited an entire company of infantry for the Colorado National Guard and was commissioned a first lieutenant in it. When the National Guard was made a part of the Federal Army, McGinnis was discharged. He was too old, they said.
The man was nearly broken-hearted; but his determination never wavered. He was bound to get into the big fight. If the army would not have him there might perhaps be some other militant organization that would. There was. It was the Red Cross—our own American 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 mattered 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 sacrifice. The American Red 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 relieved from active duty on the twentieth and sent back to the Véry 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, living in the mud in "pup tents" and greatly in need of Red Cross attention and assistance. Finally, on the twenty-eighth and under the insistence of their commanding officers, 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 fighting 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 cessation 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 Luxembourg and down to the Moselle at the little village of Wasserbillig, where it arrived on the twenty-ninth day of November.
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 impossible to serve the boys on their long march into the occupied area and so no provision was made for the forwarding 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 neglectful of the fullness of all of it, our Red 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 incident 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 forward with a five-ton truck, loaded with foodstuffs, 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 Wasserbillig. 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, bacon, corned beef, and coffee. The prisoners (soldiers and civilians—men, women, and children, and many of them in a pitiable condition) 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 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.
