The basis of this entire plan was that a gallon of gasoline, no matter where it might be obtained, was a gallon of gasoline from the Allies' supply of the precious fluid and must not only be accounted for but paid for, in whatever way payment might be required. The French Government preferred to be paid in the precious fluid itself, liter for liter, as the Red Cross purchased it from the American Army. If it so happened, as it often did happen, that the restitution was made at a French port, although the original supply was drawn at depots many miles inland, the French were further compensated by the payment of a sum to represent the freight charges from that port to the distribution centers which supplied the depots. But for all the gasoline drawn from the American Army stores cash payment was made by the Red Cross.
To insure the conservation of the gas, the greatest care was used in choosing the men and women—for when we come to consider in detail the peculiarly valuable services rendered by the women personnel of the Red Cross in France, we shall find that more than once they mounted the driver's seat of a camion or touring car and remained there for long hours at a time—for drivers. And woe betide the man or woman caught wasting "essence." For when a driver left any of the garages with a car or camion—even if he were going but a short four blocks—he carried with him a time-stamped ordre de mission indicating his destination. The quantity of gasoline either in the car's tanks or in the spare containers also was carefully registered. And if the driver should be discovered to have deviated from the shortest path between his garage and his destination he was called upon for an explanation. If this proved unsatisfactory he was warned for his first offense; for the next he went to a punitive period on the "wash rack" in the garage, which meant that from two or three days to two weeks or more he stepped down from the driver's seat and washed the dirty cars as they came in, and to the best of his ability, too. If discipline of this sort was found ineffectual, the culprit, being militarized as a member of the American Expeditionary Forces, was turned over to the provost marshal of the American Army in Paris for such punishment as he might see fit to impose. The latter might extend—and sometimes did extend—to deportation to America.
So far we have not even touched upon the dramatic phases of the work of the transportation function of our Red Cross. Yet do not for one moment imagine that it lacked these a-plenty. I said at the beginning of this chapter that the trucks and camionettes were not used for long hauls—ordinarily. It was far too wasteful and far too extravagant transportation. Yet, extraordinarily, these found their way the entire length and breadth of France. It might not be efficient or economical to ship beds and bedding in trucks; the food relief afforded by even a tightly packed five-ton camion was almost negligible save in a very great crisis. But think of the emergency possibilities of a truckload of surgical instruments rolling up to the battle line, or of five tons of ether finding its way to a field hospital all but overwhelmed by the inrush of wounded men. These were functions the transportation department could and did perform, and performed them so well as to merit the Croix de Guerre more than once for its men.
On one occasion, in particular, the drivers of a fleet of camions stood by the surgeons of a big field hospital as they performed operation after operation—each a trying mental strain, but performed apparently with no more effort than the simplest of mechanical processes. These boys—the most of them were hardly more than boys—in that long forty-eight-hour trick were surgeons' helpers. They held the arms and legs that the scalpel severed and in the passing of but two days of their lives ceased to be boys and became case-hardened men.
How shall one best describe the really magnificent work of the Red Cross's efficient Transportation Department in such supreme emergencies as the last great drive of the Germans upon the western front; or in emergencies slightly smaller in area yet vastly important in the rôle they played to the rest of the war—such as the fearful explosion in the hand-grenade depot at La Courneuve, just outside of Paris, early in 1918? Of the work of the Red Cross in detail during the drive we have yet to read in other chapters of this volume. For three days after the La Courneuve disaster the French newspapers printed accounts of the American Red Cross work there, and every editorial writer in Paris paid his tribute to the promptness and courage with which that aid was given.
This explosion shook Paris, and the country roundabout for many miles, at a little before two o'clock in the afternoon. The force of the shock may be the better understood when one knows that it broke windows more than six miles distant from the hand-grenade depot. The Parisians thought at first that the boches had dared a daylight raid upon their city, but a great yellowish-gray cloud rising like a mighty column of smoke to the north quickly dispelled that notion. Only a mighty explosion could send such a beacon toward the heavens.
Major Osborne chanced to be at luncheon at the moment of the explosion. He jumped from the table and speeded to the main garage of the Red Cross in Paris as quickly as the nearest taxicab could take him; there he ordered five ambulances to be equipped and manned and held for orders. The superintendent of the motor division of the service also had seen that beacon, and he, too, had driven at top speed to the garage. The two men, with the aid of that beacon and a good map of the environs of Paris together with their knowledge of the war activities around about it, decided instantly that it must be La Courneuve that was the scene of the disaster, and without hesitation ordered the ambulances to hurry there.
"Hurry" to an ambulance driver! It was part of his gospel and his creed. In fifteen minutes the squad was at the smoking ruin, and the Red Cross, as usual, was the first ready to render help. It was needed; for although the death list was comparatively small—and one can say "Thank God!" for that—owing to the fact that the first of three thundering detonations had given the workmen a chance to run for their lives, practically all the houses in the near by communities had been shattered, and a great many folk wounded in their homes by falling walls and ceilings. The depot was ablaze when the Red Cross ambulances arrived, and from the center of the conflagration came the incessant bursting of grenades. Although pieces of metal were flying through the air with every explosion, the Red Cross workers went to the very edge of the fire, crawling on hands and knees over piles of hand grenades in search of the wounded. It was courage, courage of the finest sort; courage—I may say—of the Red Cross type.