The tone of the port manager's letter suddenly changes from sarcasm to the romance of his big job.
"If a bale or a case of goods could talk," he writes, "and tell you all about its trip from Spokane, Washington, to the emergency hospital near Château-Thierry, its narrative would form a chain story of freight cars and docks and stevedores, somber seclusion in a deep hold, tempests and submarines alert, the clanking of chains and the creaking of slings, shouts, orders, and oaths, bangings about in rain and snow, nails and cords yielding under the tension of rush and brutality, voices and hands of inimitable über alles prisoner teams, lonesome sleeps in dark warehouses, gnawings of nocturnal rats, more trips to the unknown, petite vitesse which averages five miles an hour, and—finally—destination, arrival, identification, application, and appreciation. The voyage and itinerary of a case of goods for the Red Cross compose an odyssey and very few human packages ever perform displacements so replete with incidents and interest."
Such indeed was the day's work of the port manager's job. He was master of transportation, and at a very vital point in transportation. No matter how much he might be assailed by questions or criticisms, until he wondered whether he really is a bureau of information or one of complaint, he never forgot that transportation was his real job, which brought to the A, B, C, of human endeavor, meant that he must see that the Red Cross supplies received at his port were properly checked and without delay shipped to their destinations. Paris was most generally this last.
Put yourself back into those stirring days. Suppose, if you will, that a certain definite shipment of Red Cross supplies comes into the headquarters city of Paris, either from Rouen or Le Havre or Brest or St. Nazaire. It comes through without great delay on the small but seemingly entirely efficient goods cars of a French railway to a great freight "quai" or warehouse, set aside for the exclusive use of our American Red Cross, not far from the busy passenger terminal of St. Lazaire. This huge raised platform, some six hundred feet long and fifty feet wide, handles some eighty per cent of all the Red Cross supplies that come into Paris in the course of the average month. All of the goods that come to this Parisian freight station are import and "in bond," and so at the great exit gates there is a squad of customs guards to inspect all outbound loads. But, again through the courtesy of the French Government, all Red Cross supplies are permitted to pass without inspection. Thus a great deal of time is saved and efficiency gained.
The little railway goods cars with the Red Cross supplies pull up along one side of the quai platform, while upon the other side stand the camions or trucks to carry the supplies down into Paris. Occasionally these are not destined for the French capital; in which case they are quickly transferred and reloaded to other little railway goods cars, and destined for other points in France. For the normal handling of freight upon this particular Red Cross quai—when, for instance, two or more ships arrive within a day of one another—the number of handlers and checkers may rise quickly to eighty-five or a hundred and then there may be as many as 15,000 cases of supplies upon the platform at a single time. The men employed are mainly French soldiers on leave or already demobilized, and are strong and dexterous workers. And upon one occasion they unloaded ninety-two closely packed freight cars in thirty-two hours.
In the course of an average war-time month this Paris receiving station for American Red Cross supplies would handle anywhere from 800 to 5,000 tons of cases a week, and despite the great weight of many of these cases—there is nothing light, for instance, in either medicines or surgical instruments—counts even the higher record as no extraordinary feat.
In addition to being a receiving station, this quai performed steady service as a sorting station or clearing house. From it some fifteen warehouses or stores depots in and about Paris received their supplies. And care must be taken that the goods for each of these warehouses must go forward promptly and correctly. The need for this care was obvious. It would be as senseless to send surgical dressing to one distribution center as stoves to another.
When any of these incoming supplies had been transferred from the railway quai to the distribution stations and a receipt taken for them, they were at once stricken from the records of the transportation department until, in response to a subsequent call, they were transferred out for delivery, either to the consumer or to another storage point in an outlying region, which is where the big fleet of Red Cross trucks in the streets of Paris began to fully function. The central control bureau, to which was delegated the routine but important work of the control of this great squadron of trucks, also had charge of the reception of merchandise arriving at the Seine landings on barges from the seaports of Rouen or Le Havre. For one must not forget that in France the inland waterway continues to play a large part of her internal transport. Not only are her canals and her canalized rivers splendidly maintained, but also owing quite largely to her comparatively mild winters, they render both cheap and efficient transportation. And the Seine, itself, sometimes brought a thousand tons a week into the Red Cross at Paris.