The French staff located the outfit immediately, in an ancient château at Jouy-sur-Morin near by, which immediately became A. R. C. Military Hospital Number 107—and in a single memorable day evacuated some 1,400 American wounded.
It took real work and lots of it to set up such a hospital as this; also an appreciable amount of actual equipment. First there came the tents and the cots—the most important parts of a mobile evacuation hospital—afterward, in orderly but quick sequence, the portable operating room, with four tables designed for the simultaneous work of four operating teams; each consisting of a chief surgeon, an assistant, two orderlies, and two women nurses. The tables were, of course, but the beginning of the operating-room equipment alone. There had to be huge quantities of instruments, anæsthetizing tools; and the like.
"Not merely half a dozen forceps," says Burlingame, "but dozens upon dozens of them."
"How could you get them all together?" I asked him.
"It was easy. We figured it all out—when we still had less than fifty thousand American soldiers in France. So that when we had a call for an operating-room outfit we did not have to stop and wonder what we should send out for a well-equipped one. All that was done well in advance, with the result that in the high-pressure months of May and June, 1918, we began to reap the benefits of all the dirty work and the drudgery of the fall of 1917."
I interrupted myself—purposely. I was talking of that first week in July when the word came that the First and Second Divisions—no longer brigaded with the French, but standing by themselves as integral factors of the United States Army—were going into action at Château-Thierry. The results of that action need no recounting here. They have passed into the pages of American history along with Saratoga and Yorktown and Gettysburg and Appomattox. They are not germane here and now to the telling of this story of our Red Cross in action. It is germane, however, to know that within fifteen minutes of the receipt of the news of the beginning of the Château-Thierry fight, Burlingame of the American Red Cross was in his swift automobile and on his way there.
Information already had reached him that our troops were to be pushed northward from Château-Thierry and the sectors about Rheims and southeastward from Montdidier. Acting upon this somewhat meager information he headed his machine straight toward Soissons. A wild ride it was, every mile of it; for Burlingame well knew that every moment counted in the crucial battle against the Germans.
From time to time he would meet motor cars or camions or little groups of soldiers who, in response to his signalings, would stop and frankly tell him what they knew about the position or the movement of our army. But all this information was also meager, and much of it was contradictory. Finally, however, at an obscure crossroads he stumbled upon a group of more than ordinary intelligent Yanks who gave him news which seemed so accurate and so vital that he halted his car and pulled out his road maps. He located himself quickly. And it was not a long guess that decided him then and there to establish a hospital.
Remember, if you will, that this man Burlingame is exceedingly long on common sense, quick thinking, and quick acting; short, if you please, on that abominable thing known as red tape. Sensing the situation with a keenness that, in the light of after events, was uncanny, he decided that, when the clash came, it would come midway between Soissons and Château-Thierry, a little to the east of the point where he had halted his car. And there it came. "It was bound to be a hard bump," said he, and so it was.