Now are we facing squarely the problem of the motor truck in Major Osborne's big department. I think that it was the part of the problem that has given him the greatest perplexity, and in the long run the greatest satisfaction. For, before we are arrived at the fullness of this phase of his service, please consider the difficulties under which his staff and himself labored from the beginning. France was at war for fifty-two months; not fighting a tedious and tiring war in some distant zone, but battling against the invasion of the strongest army the world ever has known and facing the almost immediate possibility of national collapse; which meant in turn, if not an industrial chaos, something at times dangerously near to it. It meant that trucks, which the Red Cross organization had purchased back in America and had fought to find cargo space for in the always overcrowded transports, sometimes were no more than unloaded before the army, with its prior rights and necessities, would commandeer them for its own purposes. It meant not only hard roads, with the dangers attendant upon worn-out highway surfaces and an overpress of terrific traffic, to say nothing of the real war-time danger of a bursting shell at any moment, but the lack of proper garage and repair facilities to undo the havoc that these wrought; which, further translated, meant added difficulties not only in getting repair parts but the men properly equipped to install them.
The American Red Cross in France had at all times enough expert organization genius to enable it to organize its motor transport service upon the most modern lines of standardization and efficiency. It lacked one thing, however—time. If it had had time it might easily have selected one, or at the most, two or three types of motor trucks or camionettes and one or two types of touring cars and so greatly cut down the stock of repair parts and tires necessary to keep on hand at all times. But time did not permit this sort of thing. Time pressed and so did the Germans, and it was necessary to purchase almost any sort of truck or car that was available and put it to work without delay.
The man problem was quite as acute as that of the material. Good drivers and good repair men were alike hard to find in a nation that was all but exhausting its man power in the desperate effort to hold back the invading host. As it was, many of the workers in the Red Cross's transportation department were discharged soldiers. A few of them were mutilés—men who had suffered permanent and terrible injuries in the defense of their country. And a wearer of the Croix de Guerre more than once drove an American Red Cross car or blew a forge at one of its repair garages. The man-power question was at all times a most perplexing one.
I have mentioned this phase of the problem of my own accord. Neither Major Osborne nor any of his staff have referred to it. Yet it is typical of the many difficult phases of the big transportation problem which was thrust upon them for immediate solution—and which was solved.
To get some real idea of the magnitude of this transportation problem, come back with me for a day into the Red Cross garages of Paris. We shall once again, as in war time, have to start in the early morning, not alone because of the many plants to be visited but also because we want to see the big four-ton and five-ton trucks come rolling out of the great Louis Blanc garage, close beside the Boulevard de la Villette at the easterly edge of the city. As its name might indicate it faces the ancient street of Louis Blanc, faces it and morning and night fills it with its energy and its enterprise. Fills it completely and never disorderly. For I have seen it in the early morning disgorge from 150 to 200 trucks from its stone-paved courtyard and receive them, or others, back at night with no more confusion than a well-drilled military company would show in leaving its barracks or an armory.
The stone-paved courtyard itself is interesting. It is a bit of old Paris—the yard of an ancient stable where carters coming into the city with their produce from the fat farms of the upper Seine Valley or the Marne might rest their steeds for a time. The old structures which look down upon the courtyard have done so for two or three or four centuries—perhaps even longer. The only outward evidence of modernity about the place is its steel-trussed roof, wide of span and set high aloft, like the great train shed of some huge railroad station, and the splendidly efficient great motor trucks themselves. How those old carters of the royalist days of France would have opened their eyes if they could have seen a five-ton truck of to-day, American built, in all probability the output of some machine shop upon or near the shores of Lake Erie. They are wonderful machines—alert, efficient, reliable. I do not wonder that when one of our motor-truck manufacturers from the central portion of the United States visited the Verdun citadel—just a few months before the ending of the war—the commandant of that triumphant fortress kissed him upon the cheeks and led him to decorations and a state banquet in his apartments sixty-five feet beneath the surface of the ground. There were several hundred of the manufacturer's three-ton camions in the outer courtyard of the fortress and it only took a slight brushing away of the dust and mud to show that they had been on the job, in faithfulness and strength, since 1914.
One does not, under ordinary circumstances at least, have to brush away much dust and mud to find the number plate of the Red Cross car; for the Red Cross follows the method of the American and the British armies in insisting upon absolute cleanliness for its equipment. One of the briskest departments in the huge Louis Blanc garage is the paint shop, and the evidences of its energy are constantly in sight about the streets of Paris.
The energy of some of the other workshop departments of the garage are perhaps less in evidence upon the streets, yet if these departments were not measuring constantly to the fullness of their possibilities their failure would be evident to any one—in constant breakdowns of equipment. The fact that the trucks and touring cars alike have had so few complete breakdowns, despite the terribly difficult operating conditions, shows that the Red Cross repair shops have been very much on the job at all times.
They are complete shops. In them it is possible to take a huge camion completely apart even to removing the engine and the body from the chassis and the frame, in order that cylinders may be bored anew, piston rings refitted, and bearings entirely renewed. All this work and more has been done under emergency in less than three days.