On November 11, 1918, the day that the armistice was signed and another great milestone in the progress of the world erected, the transport department of the American Red Cross in France possessed a mighty fleet of 1,285 trucks and touring cars, moving some 5,000 tons of supplies each week. The greater part of these were in actual and constant service, the rest being held in its great garages and shops for painting and repairs. To these shops we shall come in good time.
I would not have you think of the transport problem too largely as a problem of the motor truck, however. I should prefer to have you see another picture; this one a perspective—France rolled flat before your eyes, the blue Atlantic upon one side and the mountainous German frontier upon the other. Across this great perspective—call it a map, if you will—are furrowed many fine lines. The spider web once again! Here are the railways radiating out, like spokes of the wheel, from Paris. Here are the mass of connecting and cross-country lines. And here the one of these that must remain impressed upon the minds of Americans—the double main stem of the United States Military Railroad in France reaching chiefly from the ports of Bordeaux and of St. Nazaire with fainter but clear defined tendrils from La Rochelle and Brest as well. And if the eye be good or the glass half strong enough one can see the steady line of American transports coming to these four harbors—the "bridge across the Atlantic" of which our magazine writers used to prate so glibly but a little time ago.
As I write, the list of the French ports at which the transport department of the Red Cross conducts its chief activities is before me. In addition to the four which have just been mentioned, one finds Toulon and Marseilles, upon the Mediterranean: Bassens, La Pallice, Nantes, Havre, Rouen, Dunkirk and Calais. Not all of these were American ports. Some of them were reserved exclusively for the British. But they were all ports for the American Red Cross, which frequently found it necessary or advisable to buy supplies, raw or manufactured, in England.
The bulk of our materials came, however, to the American ports; and at some of them our Red Cross maintained more than a merely sizable organization. At least at six, it had a captain, thirty or forty French or American helpers, and perhaps from seventy-five to a hundred boche prisoners who performed the hardest of the actual work upon the piers and within the warehouses. There was much work to be done. The plants were huge. In St. Nazaire, for instance, the Red Cross warehouse alone could hold more than eight thousand cases of supplies beneath its roof, and in course of the busiest days of the war, just before the signing of the armistice, it was no uncommon thing for this great warehouse to be completely emptied and refilled within seven days. At the one port of St. Nazaire it was necessary to assign six large trucks, and yet the movement of Red Cross supplies from this great port was exclusively upon the trains of the United States Military Railroad.
As fast as the freight came pouring out from the holds of the ships it was carted into the warehouses, where it was carefully checked and a receipt sent back to America, noting any shortages or overages. Then it found its way to the trains. If it was to an American train the process was simple enough; merely the waybill transaction which is so familiar to every American business man who ever has had freight dealings with our Yankee railroads. If it went upon the French railways, however, either in carload or less than carload lots, it rode upon the ordre de transport which, although issued and personally signed by Major Osborne, was the free gift of the French Minister of Railways. These ordres de transport differed from waybills chiefly in the fact that they give gross weights but no listing of the contents of the cases. This last was accomplished by the bordereaux, which was purely a Red Cross document.
The work of the port manager of the American Red Cross at one of these important water gates of France was no sinecure, indeed. Here is the testimony of one of the ablest of them, Mr. J. M. Erwin, who was in charge of its terminal transportation work, first at Le Havre and then at Nantes. He writes:
"In my branch of the activities I have performed no heroisms. I have not rushed out in the middle of the night to carry food or dressings to the front while dodging bombs or bullets, but I have crawled out of bed at five o'clock and six o'clock in the morning to wade through snow and mud in the quays, trying to boss the unloading of Red Cross goods from a ship and their transshipment to warehouse, car, or canal boat. I am like my confrères of other seaports in France—I haven't had a chance to expose my person to battle dangers—nothing more than the hazards of abnormal movement and traffic, tumbling cranes and falling bales, automobile eccentricities, climatic exposures, and a few similar trifles.
"I have had my trials of dealing with the formalities of war departments, likewise with their machine-made exactions, and with all the types of Monsieur Le Bureau, with the general and the corporal, with the teamsters who arrive late—or not at all—with the auto truck which breaks down, with the boche prisoner gang which reports to the wrong place two miles away, with the vermin that steals things out of cracked cases, with the flivver that I can't start, with the navigation colonel who before the war was a plain clerk who wore store clothes, with the railway station master who can't give me any cars, with 119 cases of jam that are 'busted' and must be repaired, at once, and atop of all this the rain which has been raining for seven weeks and won't stop."