The more distinctly American ports, however, were Brest, St. Nazaire, La Rochelle, and Bordeaux, as well as the rapidly created emergency port at Bassens, just across the Gironde from Bordeaux. All of these harbors are on the west coast of France and give more or less directly in the Atlantic Ocean itself. With the possible exception of Bordeaux, in recent years they have been rather sadly neglected ports. That no longer can be said, however, for within a space of time to be measured by weeks and months rather than by years, they have become worthy of rank with the most efficient harbors of the world. It was necessity that made them so—the supreme necessity of the greatest war in history. So does the black cloud of war sometimes have its silver lining of permanent achievement.
These were the ports that became the starting points of the two main stems of the United States Military Railroad in France. Upon the great docks and within the huge warehouses that sprang up seemingly overnight were placed the constantly incoming loads of men and mules and horses and food and guns and camionettes and tents and five-ton trucks—all the seemingly endless paraphernalia of war. And from those docks and from those warehouses moved at all hours of the day and night long trains emptying them of all that same endless paraphernalia of war and in the same good order as that in which it arrived. And these trains were for the greater part of American-builded cars, hauled by locomotives from the engine-building shops of Philadelphia or Schenectady or Dunkirk and all operated by 75,000 expert railroaders, picked and culled from every state of the Union.
I shall not attempt here to go into further detail of the operation of our military railroad in France, although there is hardly a detail of it that is not fascinating in the extreme. It is enough here and now to say that it functioned; that our "contemptible army" wiped out the Saint Mihiel salient in one day, and, what is perhaps far more important, there were comparatively few instances where an American soldier went for a day without his three good meals. If I were an artist I would like to paint a picture for the beginning of this chapter. And because it was for a book of Red Cross activities primarily, the painting would show the operations of the United States Army Transport on land and water as a huge motley of ships and trains and warehouses and cranes in a gray monotone in the background; while in the foreground in gay array one would find the motor trucks, the camionettes, and the touring cars of the Red Cross's own transportation department.
To that department we now have come fairly and squarely. And, lest you should be tempted to dismiss it with a wave of the hand and a shoulder shrug, let me ask if you have been a woman worker for the Red Cross somewhere in our own beloved country, if you ever have given more than a passing thought to the future of that gauze bandage that you made so deftly and so quickly and so many, many times? Did you ever wonder what became of the sweater, the helmet, or the wristlets which you knitted with such patient care and patriotic fervor? Or that warm and woolen gown which you took down from the closet hook with such a real sigh of self-denial—it still was so pretty and so new? How was it to reach some downhearted refugee of France?
It is comparatively easy to visualize the movement of the munitions of war across the three thousand miles of Atlantic and six hundred miles of France between our northeastern seaports and our front lines of battle—powder and food and uniforms and even aëroplanes and locomotives in giant crates. It perhaps is not quite as easy to trace, even in the mind's eye, the vast passage of the steady output of the 20,000,000 pairs of patriotic hands from America to the boys at the front. It is a vast picture; a huge canvas upon which is etched at first many fine streams of traffic, gradually converging; forming rivulets, then rivers, and finally a single mighty river which, if I may continue the allegory without becoming too mixed in my metaphor, is carried overseas and across the entire width of the French republic. Sometimes the swift course of the river is checked for a time; the little still-water pools and eddies are the concentration stations and warehouses in America; and the other pools and eddies in France are where the precious relief supplies are held for careful and equitable distribution.
To the streams that have poured out of the homes and the Chapter workrooms that have supported the Red Cross so loyally and so royally, must be added the great floods of traffic, of purchased raw materials and supplies of every sort. Some of these last, like the output of the home workshops, will go to the boys at the front practically unchanged. But a considerable quantity will be filtered through huge Red Cross workshops in Paris and other European cities, yet also goes forward to the front-line trenches.
It is well enough to look for a time at this huge problem as a great allegory or as a great picture; perhaps as one looks upon a great pageant. It has been a good deal more than that to the men who have had to be responsible for the successful working out of the problem. Come back behind the scenes and I shall try to show you the project as it appears to these men—a thing of hard realities and seemingly all but endless labor.
When Grayson M.-P. Murphy and his Commission made the preliminary survey trip to France in the interests of the American Red Cross in June, 1917, they took the man who was to solve their transportation problem right along with them. He was and still is Major Osborne. There have been changes in the Red Cross personnel since first the American organization took up its big part of the international job at Paris. Men have come and men have gone. Big executives—five, ten, twenty-thousand-dollar-a-year men a plenty—have slammed down their desks in New York or Pittsburgh or Chicago or San Francisco and have given six months or a year willingly and gladly to the service of the Red Cross. For many of them well past the army age it seemingly was the only way that they could keep pace with their boys or their nephews in khaki. But Osborne did not measure his service by months. He came with the first and remained on the job until long months after the signing of the armistice.