"Can you afford to miss even one day?" it said to her.
"I'm all in. I just can't get up," she replied to the S. S. V.
"Can you afford to miss—even one day?" it repeated.
She got up and dressed and made her way down in the rain to the waiting train. As she went into the long hospital car a wounded doughboy raised himself on one elbow and shouted to all his fellows:
"Hi, fellows, I told you that a Red Cross girl would be here, and here she is. I told you she'd come."
"Just think if I hadn't," says Miss Bliss in telling of this incident.
When life back of the front was not dangerous or dramatic, it was apt to be plain dreary. There is not usually much drama just in hard work. Take once again the case of Miss Mary Vail Andress, whom we found in charge of the canteen at Toul. Miss Andress came to France on the twenty-fourth of August, 1917, one of a group of seven Red Cross women, the first of the American Red Cross women to be sent over. The other members of the party were Mrs. Dickens, Mrs. Lawrence, Miss Frances Mitchell (who was sent to the newly opened canteen at Épernay), Miss Rogers, Miss Andrews, and Miss Frances Andrews, and were immediately dispatched to Châlons. For a short time Miss Andress was the assistant of Henry Wise Miller, who was then in charge of canteen work in France. She, however, enlisted for canteen work and so asked Mr. Miller to be allowed to go into the field and was sent to Épernay. From there she went back to Paris and on to Chantilly, where she prepared a home for girls in canteen work. She came to Toul in January, 1918, and, as you already know, was the first woman worker to reach that important American Army headquarters.
"For a while it seemed as if I could never quite get down to the real job," she says, "it seemed so often that something new broke loose and always just at the wrong time. While we were working to get the first canteen established here at Toul—we had a nurses' club in mind at the time—word came from the hospital over there back of the hill that the Red Cross was needed there to help prepare for the comfort of the nurses in that big place. I went there at once—of course. Within fifteen minutes after I got there I was hanging curtains in the girls' barracks—couldn't you trust a woman to do a job like that? I did not get very many hung. Captain Hugh Pritchitt, my chief, came bursting in upon me. 'They're here,' he shouted.
"I knew what that meant. 'They' were the first of our American wounded, and they must have comfort and help and immediate attention. They got it. It was part of our job, you know. And after that part was organized there was nothing to it but to come back to Toul and set up our chain of canteens there."