On the morning of the twenty-second day of March, 1918, Parisians read in the newspapers that came with their matutinal coffee that the long-heralded and much-advertised German drive was actually beginning. Major Osborne and his fellows saw those startling headlines. Instead of wasting time upon speculating as to what their final significance was to be, they interpreted them as a direct and personal call to duty. Within the hour they were at the big garage in the Rue Louis Blanc, realizing that the Transportation Department once again had an opportunity to demonstrate its real efficiency.
The drive was on; the pathetic and tragic seeming defeat of the allied forces begun. Retreat meant that refugees would soon be fleeing from the newly created danger areas, that there would be necessity for increased medical supplies for the rearward hospitals, and a vast amount of incidental work for both camions and men. The work of a transportation function in war is by no means limited to armies that are advancing or even stationary.
At Louis Blanc orders were given to make ready a battery of trucks at once to take on emergency supplies. Even while this was being done, a mud-spattered car came in from the danger zone with the news that important outlying towns were threatened and must be evacuated at once, that thousands of refugees already were falling back, and that the Red Cross warehouses must be stripped in order to prevent the precious stores from falling into the enemy's hands. Ten minutes later the telephone brought even more sinister news. In several villages close to the changing front, folk had been without food for twenty-four hours. Rations must go forward at once. Delay was not to be tolerated, not for a single instant.
Steadily the telephone jangled. Messengers by motor car or motor cycle came in to the transportation headquarters. Major Osborne made up his mind quickly. He is not of the sort that often hesitates. Within a half hour he was on his way toward the front in a car loaded with as many spare tires and tubes and gasoline as it could possibly carry, and headed straight for the little village of Roye. At first it was possible to make a fair degree of speed; but as the front was neared the roads became congested with a vast traffic, so fearfully congested that the men in the relief car counted it as speed that they were able to make the seventy-five miles between Paris and Roye in an even three hours. Between Montdidier and Roye the highroads were all but impassable because of the press of the traffic—fleeing townsfolk and the movement of troops and artillery.
At an advanced Red Cross post, Osborne began to get glimmerings of definite information. With them he set his course toward Noyon, eleven miles to the southeast. There was another Red Cross post there where he obtained full enough information to cause him to turn his car squarely around and begin a race against time to Paris. In less than two hours he was in his biggest garage there, drawing out trucks, giving definite orders, and beginning an actual and well-thought-out plan of relief. The story of the execution of that plan is best told in the words of the man who carefully supervised its details. Said he:
"There were six big trucks in the convoy that I took up to the front. We left Paris at midnight, the trucks loaded down with food and medical supplies and blankets. Although there was a great deal of movement on the roads, we plugged along all night without many delays and at five o'clock in the morning had to come to a dead stop. Artillery, transport camions, soldiers, and refugees blocked the way. We couldn't go a yard farther. Our orders were to go to N—— with the supply stuff, but we couldn't have done it without an aëroplane. The army was moving, and the little space that it left in the roadway was occupied by the refugees. They came streaming back in every sort of conveyance or on foot, pushing their belongings in barrows and handcarts. Up ahead somewhere the guns were drumming in a long, ceaseless roll.
"As it was impossible to carry out the original orders, the trucks were sent by crossroads to A——, the nearest important point, and I went on in a little, light car to N——, squeezing my way down the long, hurrying line of troops and transport. When I reached there, the railway station was under shell fire and all about it were British machine guns and gunners awaiting the Germans, who were even then on the outskirts of the town. The attack was being made in force and it was only a matter of a few more hours that the defenders could hope to hold out. They had mined all the bridges over the Oise and were ready to blow them up as they retreated.
"There was one Red Cross warehouse in N—— and when I ran around to it I found that, very properly, the British and French troops had helped themselves from its stores. It was lucky they did, because the town fell into German hands that evening.
"With N—— off the map, as it were, I speeded back to A——, where there was a hospital in an old château. In this were sixty wounded American soldiers and about two hundred French. There were two American Army surgeons and a few French and English nurses. That afternoon we evacuated the Americans from the hospital, and made them all comfortable in their new lodgment at C——. After that we drove back to A—— and turned in, because we looked forward to a hard day. But at two o'clock in the morning a French general waked me up with the announcement that the Germans were advancing and that the hospital had to be completely evacuated in ten minutes. He made it very clear that it would have to be done in ten minutes, otherwise we'd find ourselves in No Man's Land. So I turned the men out and we went to work in the dark. As a matter of fact those ten minutes stretched from two o'clock until a little after six, when we carried out the last of the wounded. Some of them were in a bad way and had to be handled very slowly. We put them in our camions and took them ten kilometers to the Oise Canal, there transferred them to barges and thus they were conveyed to Paris.
"That left the hospital with only two American Army surgeons, the Red Cross personnel, and a French Army chaplain. The American surgeons looked about the place rather lonesomely, but one of them said he felt that something was going to happen and that before long there would be plenty of work for everybody. The guns thundering all around us seemed to bear him out.