"It's too dirty for the trip home," he said. "Can't the Red Cross get me a new one?"
No, the Red Cross could not duplicate the work of the army's quartermasters, but it could, and would, help the boy out. So it gave him a cake of soap and showed him how he could clean his greasy cap quite thoroughly and then dry it on the office stove before starting on the march across the park.
The difficulties of keeping up a full stock of Red Cross supplies of every sort in a land and in times when shipping space of all kinds was at a great premium should be obvious. Of necessity surgical supplies took precedence over luxuries of every sort. Then it was that such places as Vichy and Savenay and all the rest of them had to depend, not alone upon their normal receipts, but upon the resourcefulness of individual workers and the fruitfulness of the surrounding country. That was the reason why in one instance when Red Cross bags could not be shipped into Vichy, they were manufactured there by the thousands by French needlewomen. Indeed no doughboy should leave "empty-handed." Near by districts for a considerable number of miles roundabout were invaded by automobiles seeking the bright-colored cretonnes, which make the bags so very gay and, in turn, so much the more welcome.
On at least two other occasions the vicinage was similarly combed for emergency supplies—for the American celebrations of both Thanksgiving Day and Christmas, 1918. Much was made of both these glorious Yankee holidays. The time was propitious for real celebration. Peace was not only in the air, but at last actually accomplished. The hearts of men were softened. One could sing of "peace on earth" and not choke as the words came to his lips.
So it was that Christmas Day at Vichy was a particularly gay one—gay, despite even the pain and suffering that remained in all the great hospital wards there. For men—American men, if you please, could, and did, hide for the nonce their fearful suffering. Pain begone! The carols were in the air. The hundreds of gayly decorated electric-light bulbs were flashing on at dusk. And you might go from ward to ward and there count all of fifty Christmas trees—these, too, brilliantly decorated. And the decorators in all these instances had been Red Cross women and men—and wounded soldiers lying ill at ease in their hospital cots. They made a great job of all of it—a merry job as well. And when the supplies of such conventional raw materials as tinsel and popcorn fell short they seemed to find something else that did quite as well.
For that hospital celebration among our wounded men at Vichy just 13,657 socks were filled, which bespeaks the exact number of doughboys that participated in the celebration. If they could have spoken, each of these humble articles of clothing might easily have told a double story—the tale of its own origin and the romance that came to it after that memorable Christmas Day; for they were American knit socks, and no factory—no inanimate, impersonal place, peopled with machines rather than with humans—had turned them forth. Each and every one of them were hand-knitted. And some of them had come from my lady's parlor, situated in an upper floor, perhaps, of a great and gaudy apartment house, and some had come from the prairie ranch, and some had come from cabins upon the steep and desolate mountainsides of the Alleghenies or the Rockies or the Sierras. From East and West and North and South they had come—but all had come from the United States; and I am perfectly willing to predict that every blessed one returned forthwith to the land of its birth.
The mate of each one of these 13,657 socks was rolled and placed in its toe. Then followed other things—shaving soap, cigarettes, tobacco, nuts, candy, handkerchiefs—by this time you ought to know the Red Cross list as well as I. While, by connivance with the head nurse of each of the wards, each blessed sock was individually tagged and addressed to its recipient. There is nothing, you know, like personal quality in a Christmas gift.
If, after the perusal of all these pages, you still insist upon being one of those folk who regard the triumph of our Red Cross in France as one of American organization, rather than of American individualism, and American generosity, permit me to explain to you that in the paragraphs of this chapter you have slipped from the work of the Bureau of Hospital Administration to that of the Home and Hospital Bureau of the Army and Navy Department. The distinctly medical and surgical phases of the Red Cross work in the A. E. F. hospitals across France was a major portion of the burden of Colonel Burlingame's job; the more purely recreative and comfort-giving phases came under Majors J. B. A. Fosburgh and Horace M. Swope, both of whom served as directors of the Army and Navy Departments during the Gibson régime. But the distinction between these two departments was almost entirely one of name. Each, after all, was American Red Cross and as American Red Cross worked—to a common and unselfish and entirely humanitarian end.