There was a single disturbing element in the bustling hurry of getting under way. At this late moment the woman who had been chosen as chief of the supply unit was deterred from sailing. Serious illness in her family forced her to resign her position and remain to nurse those at home. It was quite a blow to the unit and to the Commissioner himself.
The question, Who will take her place? became the most important thought in the minds of the members of the unit. Ruth fully understood that to find a person as capable as the woman already selected would not be an easy matter.
Until the hour the party left New York for Philadelphia, the port of sail for the Red Cross ship, no candidate had been settled on by the Commissioner to head the supply unit.
“We shall find somebody. I have one person in mind right now who may be the very one. If so, this person will be shipped by a faster vessel and by another convoy than yours,” and he laughed. “You may find your chief in Paris when you get there.”
Ruth wondered to herself if they really would get there. At this time the German submarines were sinking even the steamships taking Red Cross workers and supplies across. The Huns had thrown over their last vestige of humanity.
The ship which carried the Red Cross units joined a squadron of other supply ships outside Cape May. The guard ships were a number of busy and fast sailing torpedo boat destroyers. They darted around the slower flotilla of merchant steamships like “lucky-bugs” on a millpond.
Ruth shared her outside cabin with a girl from Topeka, Kansas—an exceedingly blithe and boisterous young person.
“I never imagined there was so much water in the ocean!” declared this young woman, Clare Biggars. “Look at it! Such a perfectly awful waste of it. If the ocean is just a means of communication between countries, it needn’t be any wider than the Missouri River, need it?”
“I am glad the Atlantic is a good deal wider than that,” Ruth said seriously. “The Kaiser and his armies would have been over in our country before this in that case.”
Clare chuckled. “Lots of the farming people in my section are Germans, and three months ago they noised it abroad that New York had been attacked by submarines and flying machines and that a big army of their fellow-countrymen were landing in this country at a place called Montauk Point——”