Such was the spirit of our Red Cross workers overseas.
They now had full need for such spirit. The monotony of working from daylight to dusk in lonely farms and villages, where patience was the virtue uppermost, was now to be replaced by a whirl of events which succeeded one another with kaleidoscopic rapidity, demanding service both night and day of a character as varied as the past had been colorless.
The headquarters of the American Red Cross for the Somme district on the morning of the twenty-first of March, 1918, were at Ham—the little village once made famous by the imprisonment and escape of Louis Philippe. They were in charge of Captain William B. Jackson, who afterwards became major in entire charge of the Army and Navy Field Service. Here at Ham was also the largest Red Cross warehouse in the entire district. Another warehouse stood at Nelse, a few miles distant, to the rear. To the north was Arras, with still another American Red Cross storehouse, while to the south was the Soissons warehouse.
On that same morning—one cannot easily efface it from any picture of any continued activity of the Great War—the Smith College Unit workers had gone from their headquarters at Grecourt, both on foot and in their four Ford cars, to their various tasks in the seventeen small villages in the immediate vicinity. Two or three of these young women journeyed to Pommiers, a little town in the area, whose school had been reopened by them, and which also served the children of several surrounding villages. And because so many of the children had to walk so far to their lessons the Red Cross served them each day with a substantial school lunch—of vermicelli, chocolate, and milk. A few others of the college graduates went a little farther afield—to supervise planting operations in near by towns—yet not one of these girls was one whit above turning to and working on the task with her own hands, while some helped the Red Cross workmen's gangs roofing houses and stables, repairing shops and fitting outbuildings, in some crude form, for human habitation.
Into the very heart of those varied activities that March morning marched the red-faced British Town Major of Ham with the blunt and crisp announcement to the Red Cross man that the town must be evacuated without delay; the retreat already was well under way, the vast hegira fairly begun.... The Red Cross force there at Ham did not hesitate. It first sent word to all the workers in the villages roundabout; then, having quickly mobilized in the town square its entire transportation outfit—three trucks, a camionette, and a small battered touring car—gave quiet, prompt attention to its own immediate problem of evacuation work.
It functioned fast and it functioned extremely well. Back and forth across the River Somme—over the rough bridges hurriedly builded by Americans for the British Army—it transported hundreds and hundreds of children and infirm refugees. All that day, all that night, and well into the next morning it worked, driving again and again into the bombarded towns in the region to bring out the last remaining families. The Germans were already on the edge of the town when one Red Cross driver made his last trip into Ham—on three flat tires and a broken spring! Yet despite these physical disabilities succeeded in carrying six wounded British soldiers out to safety.
To our Red Cross the Smith College girls reported, with great promptitude. And throughout the entire succeeding week—a deadly and fearfully depressing seven days of continued retirement before the advancing Germans—showed admirable courage and initiative; the sort of thing that the military expert of to-day classes as morale of the highest sort. These women worked night and day setting up, whenever the retreat halted even for a few hours, temporary canteens and dispensaries and evacuating civilians and carrying wounded soldiers through to safe points behind the lines. And because many of these last were American soldiers they formed the first point of field contact between our Red Cross and our army and so are fairly entitled to a post of high honor in the pages of this book.
"Send me another sixty of those Smith College girls," shouted an American brigadier general from his field headquarters in the fight at Château-Thierry. "This forty isn't half enough. I want a hundred."