I wish that I might write of C. G. Osborne as some veteran American railroader or at least as a man experienced in motor truck or highway transportation of some sort. For when one comes to measure the size of the job and the way that he measured up to it, it seems incredible that he has not had large transportation experience of some sort. Yet when the truth is told it is known that Major Osborne is a college man, with an astounding record as an athlete, but with little more actual traffic experience than falls to the lot of any average business man. Perhaps, after all, that was just as well, for to his big new job he not only brought vigor and strength but a freshness of mind that made him see it in all the breadth of its possibilities.
There were eighteen men in that pioneer survey party of the American Red Cross to France. Before the ship had left her dock in New York, Osborne was on his big new job, wiring the American Relief Clearing House in Paris—which at that time was the unified agency for all the American relief work of every sort that had sprung up in France since the war began in August, 1914, to buy six touring cars and to have them at Paris to meet the party. The American Relief Clearing House moved quickly. It already possessed three Renaults—good cars of a sort well suited to the hard necessities of the war-scarred highroads of France. It purchased three more touring cars of the same general type, and in these six cars the American Red Cross took its first real look at the field into which it was to enter—the field in which it was destined to play the greatest rôle in all of its eventful career.
The Clearing House, it should be understood quite clearly, was not at any time a war-relief agency upon its own account. It was, as its name indicates, a real clearing house or central station for a number of American relief organizations who came to the aid of the French long before the United States had entered the war, and the American Red Cross was privileged legally to enter into the relief work in connection with it. It received goods—sweaters, socks, medicines, even food—from the states and from England and distributed them, although not even this work was undertaken directly, but was handled through transitaires, who made the direct distributions. Because of the rather limited nature of its work, therefore, it needed little actual equipment. In June, 1917, it only owned eight touring cars and three trucks; and all of these were pretty badly shot to pieces by hard service and by lack of repairs. But these it turned over to the Red Cross and they became the nucleus of the American Red Cross transportation organization in France.
"What we are going to need here," said Major Osborne to his fellows before he had been on the new job a fortnight, "is to create a real transportation service and to build it up from the bottom. What I really have in mind is the organization of something like one of our express companies back in the United States."
If you know anything at all about our inland transportation system in America you must realize that our express companies—one of our most distinctive forms of national transportation, by the way—although closely related to our railroads are in no real sense a part of them. For, while they have their largest functions upon railroad trains, particularly passenger trains, they also maintain in all the towns and cities that they serve great fleets or squadrons of horse-drawn or motor-drawn trucks. And in recent years they have increased their carrying functions from the small parcels for which they originally were designed into the heaviest types of freight. I have known a carload of steel girders to move from New York to Newark, eight miles distant, by express.
Osborne's idea of the Red Cross Express was fundamentally sound, and perhaps it is because it was so fundamentally sound that it has been so very successful, although working many times against tremendous odds. He recognized from the first that it would be foolish to use Red Cross motor trucks for long-distance hauls, such as from Havre to Paris, for instance, save in cases of great emergency. The railroad service of France, although greatly hampered and handicapped during the war, was at no time broken down. And it was not necessary, as in Great Britain and in the United States, to take it out of the hands of its private owners and place it under direct government control.
Osborne realized that he would be compelled to place his chief reliance upon the French railways. The United States Military Railroad, especially at the outset, was not to be compared in value with that of the main stems of the French systems, particularly those which radiate out from Paris. So he made immediate arrangements with the French Minister of Railways for the transport of Red Cross supplies from the various Atlantic ports to Paris and other distributing stations as well as right up to the railheads behind the lines themselves. And the French on their part generously and immediately gave free transportation to all Red Cross supplies, as well as to all persons bound to any part of France exclusively on Red Cross work. In addition arrangements were made by which the Red Cross personnel bound on vacation leaves or other personal errands through France might avail themselves of the very low passenger rates heretofore only granted to soldiers in uniform.
With his plan of utilization of the railroads for long-distance hauls firmly fixed, Osborne promptly went to work to organize his fleet of trucks and touring cars in the various cities of France where the American Red Cross has touched with its activities. That meant not alone the securing of sufficient motor cars of the various sorts necessary to the situation, but of garages and repair facilities of every sort; this last particularly difficult in a nation which for three years had been war-racked and hard put to it to meet her own necessities of motor transportation. But from a beginning of three trucks and eight touring cars from the American Relief Clearing House, whose activities were quickly absorbed by the Red Cross, a mighty fleet of trucks and camions and camionettes and touring cars slowly was assembled. Before Osborne had been in France a month he had purchased at Paris fifty-five sizable trucks, twenty-five of which had been unloaded at Havre and which had been destined originally for an American firm in France and another thirty which were turned over by the French Minister of Munitions. The entire fifty-five trucks were all at work by the end of July, 1917, when the first of the relief supplies from America began to roll, a mighty tidal wave into France.