He at once got in touch with the American Red Cross warehouses at Beauvais and at Paris and ordered medical and surgical and hospital supplies in abundance forwarded to Chantilly—the point where he had so quickly decided he would locate the emergency evacuation hospital. He ordered eight surgeons, sixteen nurses, and twelve enlisted men, who were on duty at A. R. C. Hospital Number 104, at Beauvais, to proceed at once to Chantilly, where they were met by additional Red Cross personnel sent on direct from Paris. He made arrangements with the Ambulance St. Paul, which was then located at Chantilly, to establish the material and men and women being rushed from Paris and from Beauvais as an annex to its formation. Thus, in a mere twelve hours, was established an American hospital along the French lines of communication.
And none too quickly. On the following morning the big fighting set in to the north of Château-Thierry. And within a few hours the American wounded began pouring into the old French château town of Chantilly. In three weeks just 1,364 of our boys had been accommodated in our emergency Red Cross hospital there; after which there was a shifting of positions and of armies with a removal of the victorious Americans to other sectors, and only French were left in the neighborhood. Which, in turn, rendered it quite easy for our Red Cross to turn over the entire equipment to our French allies, who stood in great need of it.
Château-Thierry was in fact the first really great test of the American Red Cross. It was its first opportunity to perform its chief and most vital service—the succoring of the wounded men of the United States Army. It met that test. As a single example of the many ways in which it met the test consider the request for three thousand blankets, in addition to several thousand pillows, pajamas, dressings, surgical instruments, and medicines that poured in upon the Bureau of Hospital Administration at Paris at four o'clock on the afternoon of the eighteenth of July. Osborne's department was a little short of motor cars at that particular moment; the continued emergency at Château-Thierry, with the multifold demands that it brought upon every function of the Red Cross, had fairly exhausted his garages. There might be cars in, in a few hours, said the transportation dispatchers. But Burlingame's men took no such chances. They poured down from out of the Regina headquarters and, taking their places in the middle of the Rue de Rivoli, halted and commandeered taxicabs as they hove in sight.
With a half dozen of the Parisian "one lungers" screeching their very souls out in the second speeds, they visited four of the Paris warehouses in quick succession. A truck was brought up out of the offing. By eight o'clock it was loaded, and by midnight it was at the firing line and being unloaded of its precious supplies.
On another night during the same battle, a veteran army surgeon major arrived in Paris at one o'clock in the morning. He found the medical offices of the Red Cross open—there were no hours in those strenuous days when one found them closed—and demanded supplies. The man was faint from lack of sleep. He was put in bed for 120 minutes—not one minute less, not one minute more. When he was awakened, his supplies were at the door. They had been gathered in a motor truck from three warehouses immediately roundabout. Later this army man returned to Paris and reported that the work of our Red Cross that night had made it possible for every man in his Division to have a chance for recovery. Had it not been for the supplies, he added, sixty per cent of them might have died.
But it was in the quick establishment of hospitals that I think that Burlingame's function of the Red Cross attained its most satisfactory as well as its most dramatic results. Take Number 110 at Coincy, also no great distance from Château-Thierry. It, too, sprang up as a direct result of that famous battle. A radical change of location of our troops in that territory and increasing activities in the neighborhood of Fère-en-Tardenois made an American evacuation hospital at or near that point an immediate necessity. Burlingame, in the same trusty motor which carried him so many miles over the battle-scarred and shell-holed and traffic-worn highroads of France, went out with Colonel Stark, of the Regular Army force, to find a site for it. They decided on a little town of Coincy, on the direct main line of evacuation from the American sector.
The only things that stood in favor of Coincy were its location and the fact that it had water. There was little else left there; not a château or a ruined church or even a barn in which to locate, temporarily at least, a hospital. Moreover, there was no time for picking or choosing in that country through which the boche in the beginnings of his final retreat had just passed. In the center of some partly demolished buildings, Stark and Burlingame found a pump, still in working order. This, they decided, would make a splendid site for their new hospital. The road which ran close by the ruins was the main road to the front—not far away, as the constant booming of artillery attested—and the fact that the railroad also was fairly near simplified the problem of evacuations. These two factors, together with that of the water, which was both pure and abundant—the French already had marked the pump, "Eau potable"—decided the question.
So the two men staked a claim to the ruin. Before they returned to the car Burlingame picked up a piece of board. He fished a bit of charred wood out of the débris. It served as chalk. With it he began slowly marking the board: "A. R. C. Hospital No. ——." He hesitated for just a moment. What the deuce was the number of that last hospital? Well, no matter. Number 110 would do. And Number 110 it became and so remained even after the hospital was ancient—whole weeks ancient—and finally had been moved to Villers-Daucourt.
"And so with a little burned wood, a piece of busted wall, and a cow yard, the most advanced American hospital in the battle of the Vesle started in," says Burlingame. "We took our burned-wood sign, fastened over the pump—and, voilà, there was Red Cross Hospital Number 110. And then we hustled to the first military telephone and began phoning Paris and other Red Cross headquarters to hustle the stuff out to it. 'Send it up the road from Fère-en-Tardenois,' I told them, 'until you come to the cow yard with the sign. Only look out you don't miss the sign.'... And all the time it was raining like hell."