The Bureau of Home and Hospital Service was divided into three sections—great sections because of the vastness of the work that it might be called upon to perform for an army of two million, or perhaps even four million men. These were the Home Communication Section, the Home Service Section, and the Section of General Service at Military Hospitals. The task of the first of these sections—which presently we shall see amplified—was to obtain and transmit to the United States or to authorized army and navy officials in France and also to relatives in the United States, such information as might possibly be obtained in regard to dead, wounded, missing, or prisoner American soldiers or sailors. It was to be supplemental to and not in duplication of the service of the quartermaster of the United States Army. As a part of its work the section was to render aid in registering and photographing the graves of our soldiers and sailors.
At headquarters in Paris the work of the Home Communication Section was to be concerned with general executive direction, the determination of policies, the issuance of instructions, and the actual transcribing and forwarding of the reports to America. In the zones its activities were brought under the zone Army and Navy Bureau. Its actual work was planned to be conducted through searchers in the field, in camps, and in hospitals.
The Home Service work, while in a sense similar to that of the Home Communication Section, in another sense was quite the reverse. For while the first of these two services concerned itself with supplying the anxious mother back home with information regarding the boy from whom she had not heard for so long a time, it was the task of the Home Service also, through its representatives in the field, camps, or in hospitals (in many instances the selfsame representatives as those of the Home Communication) so far as possible to relieve the anxieties of soldiers regarding affairs at home.
The third section of the Home and Hospital Service bore the rather imposing title of Section of General Service at Military Hospitals. Its task was to assist in furnishing medical and surgical supplies to army and navy hospitals in accordance with the plans of the Medical and Surgical Department, to distribute general comforts to our sick and wounded, to erect and operate recreation huts at the hospitals, and even to develop gardens at the hospitals for furnishing fresh vegetables to patients—a part of the program which, because of the sudden ending of the war, was never quite realized. Furthermore, the work of this Section contemplated the operation of nurses' homes and huts. All of these activities were to be under the chief representative at the hospital whose task it was to correlate and direct all the operations.
Alongside of Home and Hospital Service in the army and navy stood the Bureaus of Outpost Service and of Army Field Service. In the plan for the first of these, the American Red Cross would endeavor to maintain at as many points as was consistently possible outposts at which supplies would be kept and comforts and necessities distributed to men in the line. From these points, as well as from points even in advance of their locations, emergency sustenance and comforts were to be given men at advanced dressing stations and at every other point along the front where our troops might actually be reached.
In the Army Field Service, the American Red Cross was to have, with each army division, a representative to coöperate with the Army Medical Corps to furnish supplementary medical and surgical supplies, to distribute supplies and comforts to troops, to perform such canteen service as was possible in emergencies, and for a general coöperation with the men working in the Home Communication and the Home services.
If I have taken much of your time with the rather lengthy details of this final war-time plan of organization of the American Red Cross in France, it is because one cannot well understand the results of a great machine such as it became—with more than six thousand uniformed workers in the field, the hospitals, the canteens, and the headquarters of France—without looking a little bit beneath its hoodings and its coverings and seeing something of the actual working of its mechanism.
I like, myself, to think first of the Red Cross in its vast humanitarian aspects; and yet the business side of the great organization, so far as I have had the opportunity of seeing into it, has fascinated me. To go behind the scenes of the greatest helping hand of all time and there see system, precision, and order, is a mighty privilege. The Headquarters building of the American Red Cross in the city of Washington is a monumental structure—an architectural triumph in white marble, planned as a great and enduring memorial long before the coming of the war. Even in the busiest days of 1918 its beautiful and restful exterior gave little evidence of the whirl of industry within and behind, for far to the rear of the main Headquarters building, designed, as I have just said, with no immediate thought of war, stretched great, plain emergency buildings, each a hive of offices and each peopled with hundreds of clerks, with desks and typewriters and telephones—all in coördination and all a part of the paraphernalia that goes to the making of the cogs and wheels and shafts and cylinders of the great modern machine of business of to-day.
Behind this building there were many other such headquarters structures—buildings here and there across the face of the United States and in some of the great capitals of Europe—Paris, London, Rome, Geneva, for instance. Of these, none more important, none busier than the headquarters of the American Red Cross in France, in the six-storied Hotel Regina, Paris, in its turn a veritable hive of offices and peopled with more clerks, more desks, more typewriters, more telephones, and all this paraphernalia coördinated as we have just seen, by modern and detailed business system.