In each of these hospitals—as in each and every one of the United States Army hospitals in France and the occupied areas of Germany—the Red Cross functioned. At Savenay it had not only erected recreation huts for the men of each of the individual hospitals, but a huge auditorium or amusement hall, permanently fabricated of brick and steel and glass, equipped with a complete theater stage, and capable of seating between 1,500 and 2,000 doughboys and their officers. This super-playhouse was in use every night of the week—for cinema, for drama, sung or spoken, for dances, and, from time to time, for meetings and for religious services.
To this entertainment phase of the American Red Cross in the hospitals we shall presently return. For the moment I shall ask you to consider the part it played in the essential job of supplying hospital supplies. It was not, of course, either practicable or possible for our Red Cross to supply all of these—or even any tremendously large part of them. But it could—and did—supply goodly quantities of all of them when they were most needed, and so worth ten times their value and quantity at any other time.
Time and time again it furnished materials, both for their regular and for their emergency necessities. Sometimes the army itself did not function properly—there were instances of red tape disgraceful and some, too, of red tape inevitable. And yet there were other times when all the tape cutters in the world could not have saved the situation, but the American Red Cross, with its emergency warehouses and its well-organized transportation system all the way across the face of France, did save it. A truckload, two, three; perhaps even four or five truckloads of beds or bedding—perhaps even a small camionette filled to the brim with dressings and drugs or surgical instruments could, and did, save precious lives—by the dozens and by the hundreds. Do you remember, in the preceding chapter, the several instances where our Red Cross played its part—and no small part at that—in the winning of the big fight at Château-Thierry? Those were not unusual instances; they were fairly typical.
There came one day when the commanding officers of the U. S. A. hospital center at Allerey—one of the largest in all France—sent for Captain James C. Ramage, the American Red Cross representative in the district. He told the Red Cross man that a tremendous convoy of wounded soldiers from the Soissons-Rheims district was expected within a few days and asked his help in securing a real bulk of medical supplies. Those were the days when the Surgeon General's department of the army was not always able to furnish even drugs and dressings when they were most needed.
Ramage lost no time in discussing the thing. He said that he would do his best and caught the first train into Paris; spent several days there in getting together the necessary supplies, personally supervised the loading of them into a freight car, and then performed the unheard-of feat of inducing the French railway authorities to attach the freight car to a fast passenger train bound down to Dijon. Camions were rushed from Allerey to Dijon, and two days later the necessary supplies were all at the hospital center—and well in advance of the coming of the wounded soldiers. On another night in that same summer of 1918, some 2,250 wounded Americans poured into that selfsame army hospital center of Allerey. The hospital warehouses were exhausted. The Red Cross's were not; do you remember what we said at the beginning—that the fullness of its job lay in its being forever ready to meet any emergency which might arise?
It was being ready that made it able that hot August night to turn into the crowded hospital in a space of time to be measured in minutes rather than in hours, 10,000 blankets, 10,000 sheets, 8,000 towels, 8,000 pairs of pajamas, 2,000 yards of Dakin tubing, 1,000 operating gowns, 1,000 helmets, and two whole carloads of surgical dressings.
Emergency work! How it always does count!
The securing of these supplies in the beginning was, of itself, a master problem. It involved not alone purchase but manufacturing—manufacturing upon a really enormous scale. We saw at the beginnings of the Red Cross work in France the various workrooms in Paris which devoted themselves to the making of dressings—of one sort or another and in tremendous quantities. Yet the actual beginnings of this work antedated even the establishment of the Paris workrooms; immediately on the outbreak of the European War, a special department was established at the National Headquarters of the American Red Cross in Washington for giving advice concerning hospital garments and supplies for European relief and furnishing patterns and samples for the same. A New York City committee, organized for the same purpose by Mrs. Mary Hatch Willard, began the sending of old linens to French hospitals. This work grew into a unit known as the Surgical Dressings Committee of the United States, for the making of dressings by volunteers in this country, and finally led to the establishment of the first of the Paris workrooms. By the time that Pershing had first arrived in France this work in America had grown to a point where it employed more than two thousand committees and subcommittees. Its output increased so rapidly that in the week ending August 27, 1917, ninety-two hospitals were supplied and 155,261 dressings were made in the Paris workroom alone. And that, of course, was long before there were any American wounded. In the summer of 1917 the National Surgical Dressings Committee entered into coöperation with the American Red Cross and from that date its efficient distribution service in France became the Surgical Dressings Service Department of the American Red Cross.
Then came the imminent necessity of standardizing these surgical dressings—which was accomplished by a special board which Pershing appointed at the end of August, 1917. Its standards were followed, but its energies only dimmed at the time when it was actually seen that they were quite exceeding the necessities of the situation. And the volume of those selfsame energies is perhaps the better understood when it is realized that from October, 1917, to January 22, 1919, 147,230,777 cases of surgical dressings alone, both donated and manufactured, were received at the Red Cross warehouses in Paris.