Under the second grouping one finds those great hospitals, in most cases established by the American Red Cross while the medical and surgical plans of our army were still forming and were in a most unsettled and confused state. These were known, even after the Surgeon General had taken them under his authority, as American Red Cross Military Hospitals. They were then operated jointly by the United States Army and our Red Cross; the army being usually responsible for the scientific care and discipline of the organization, while our Red Cross took upon its shoulders both the actual business management and the supplying of the necessary materials.
The third and fourth groupings are smaller, although, in their way, hardly less consequential. In the one were the American Red Cross Hospitals which were operated purely for military purposes and for which the American Red Cross assumed the full responsibility of operation, while in the other were the hospitals, infirmaries, and dispensaries which were operated by the Red Cross—in some few cases jointly with the other organizations—for the benefit of civilians, including several thousand American civilian war workers who found themselves in France during the past two years.
If I have bored you with these details of organization it has been to the direct purpose that you might the better understand how this important phase of Red Cross operation functioned. Now, for the moment, forget organization once again. Go back to the earlier days of our Red Cross in France—the days of Grayson M.-P. Murphy and James H. Perkins and their fellows.
None of these men either realized or fully understood either the importance or the overwhelming size to which the hospital function of the United States Army would attain before our boys had been in actual warfare a full year. The army itself did not realize that. Remember that for many weeks and even months after Pershing had arrived in Paris its hospital plans were in embryo. In this situation our Red Cross found one of its earliest opportunities, and rose to it. With Colonel Lambert—he then was Major Lambert—in charge of its Medical and Surgical Division it began casting about to see how it might function most rapidly and most efficiently.
To the nucleus of the army that began pouring into France in the early summer of 1917, it began the distribution of emergency stores—a task to which we already have referred and shall refer again. It hastily secured its own storerooms—in those days quite remote and distant from the American Relief Clearing House and the other general warehouses of the American Red Cross—and from these in July, 1917, sent to 1,116 hospitals, practically all of them French, exactly 2,826 bales of supplies. In December of that same year it sent to 1,653 hospitals—including by this time many American ones—4,740 bales of similar supplies. It was already gaining strength unto itself.
Surgical dressings formed an important portion of the contents of these packages. Our Red Cross did not wait upon America for these; the huge plan for standardizing and making and forwarding these from the United States was also still in process of formation. It went to work in Paris, and without delay, so that by the end of 1917 two impressive manufacturing plants were at work there—one at No. 118 Rue de la Faisandre, where 440 volunteer workers and a hundred paid workers were averaging some 183,770 dressings a week, and a smaller establishment at No. 25 Rue Pierre Charron, where a hundred volunteer and ninety paid workers were at similar tasks. Eventually a third workroom was added to these. And it is worth noting, perhaps, that immediately after the signing of the armistice these three workrooms were turned into manufactories for production of influenza masks, for which there was a great emergency demand. In three weeks they turned out more than 600,000 of them.
The hospitalization phases of the Medical and Surgical Department of our Red Cross over there were, of course, far more difficult than those of the mere production or storage of dressings and other medical supplies. And they involved a vast consideration of the human factors of the super-problem of the conflict.
"In this war there were two kinds of fellows," Colonel Burlingame told me one evening in Paris as we sat talking together, "the ones who went over the top and those who didn't. It was up to the second bunch to look out for the first—at every time and opportunity, which brings us squarely to the question of the French hospitals, and the American soldiers who woke up to find themselves in them. You see the Red Cross was just as responsible for those fellows as for the ones who went directly into our own hospitals over here. The French authorities told me not to worry about those boys. 'We will take very good care of them,' they said, and so they meant to do. 'Who will take care?' I asked them in return.