"I am constantly on duty here," she says, "and visit your brother Harry almost daily. He has been unfortunate enough to have been wounded in the right leg, which the doctors found necessary to amputate just below the knee. I know this will be a great shock to you, but let me hasten to add that Harry is in the best of condition otherwise. The wound is healing marvelously clean and quickly. He is in the healthiest and happiest frame of mind and exceptionally cheerful. Harry wants me to tell you that the last dressing of the wound was yesterday. He expects to be up and trying his crutches within ten days. He received your September money order of ten dollars for which he thanks you very much. I have just cashed it for him.... I am sorry to be the bearer of this sad news, but am happy that I can assure you of his early recovery and his splendid courage."
Men who were able to write for themselves were supplied with paper and encouraged to do so. Others who were far too ill or confined prone in surgical apparatus—their very hands caught and held taut in a cruel network of pulleys and weights and drain tubes—dictated their letters home—and invariably lied as to their condition. All was "going well." The patient sufferer had but one report to pass his lips. "Tell them that I'm feeling fine," was the message that he ordered home.
Sometimes by piecing together information culled from a variety of sources, the searcher was enabled to reconstruct the picture of the last hour of some soldier's life. Comrades would recount the story of his death at the front or describe the moment of his capture by the enemy. In fact persistent questioning revealed such facts as finally cleared up the doubt as to the fate of a certain Yankee corporal. It happened that the boy had disappeared in April, 1918. It was a number of months afterward that a patient was discovered at a port of embarkation who said:
"Yes, he was killed when the Germans were attacking and a heavy barrage was coming over. They came around back of us and threw hand grenades from the rear. Corporal —— pulled his pistol and yelled: 'Here they come, boys! Give it to them!' He was awfully generous. He used to get a lot of scrapbooks and pass them around to the boys. When he got a box from home he shared it. He was a mighty generous fellow about lending money, too."
The women who made those scrapbooks and packed those boxes of "goodies" can have no memento from his grave over there, but here was the sweet memory of his courage and his generosity. Think of the comfort that her woman's soul must have found in that frank, outspoken boyish tribute and the relief at finally having had at least the definite information of the truth! So it was that our Red Cross searchers gave constant and almost invaluable aid in revising and verifying the casualty lists of the army; and many who were accounted missing—that dread term that means nothing and yet can mean so much—could, because of their work, be accurately enrolled as dead or as prisoners.
As far back as the summer of 1917 five women had been definitely assigned to this activity—not at Vichy then, but at the American army hospitals which already were beginning to multiply in France. By December of the following year this staff numbered nearly two hundred women, who worked either in the hospitals or in the American Red Cross headquarters in Paris. And while these worked in the hospitals, the Red Cross officers in the field—men serving as searchers, chaplains, or Home Communication representatives—were working in close coöperation with the statistical officers of the army. These were stationed in training camps and concentration camps and with various combat divisions. Ten men were assigned direct by the Red Cross to the Central Records Office of the Adjutant General's Department of the A. E. F.
Understand very clearly, if you will, please, once again, that while in very rare cases our Red Cross did announce casualties, that, after all, was not its real province. To engage in that would have been a mere duplication of the army's own work. Mortality letters were not sent direct to the nearest of kin; they were forwarded to the A. E. F. Central Records Office in France for final disposition, so that their release through the mails would not anticipate the official announcement from the War Department; while the other information, in most instances, was reported to the Paris headquarters of the American Red Cross and was later disseminated here in the United States from the American Red Cross headquarters in Washington.
The lists of the missing soldiers were furnished by the army. Duplicates of these were then immediately distributed to the Red Cross searchers and representatives, who at once sought clues to the individual stories to be builded about the name of each man. Sometimes through arrangements with the army authorities the boche prisoners were interviewed, and these occasionally furnished facts with reference to American prisoners in Germany and gave definite information about aviators who had apparently disappeared within the enemy lines.
Incorporated in these lists of the missing were also the names of all soldiers and sailors concerning whom inquiries had been made of our Red Cross either here in America or over there in France. In the one case these inquiries and in the other through the Paris headquarters in the Hotel Regina. In one month 1,955 cables were sent across the Atlantic from the United States requiring immediate information regarding wounded or missing men. In December, just following the armistice, the Paris office received more than a thousand individual requests for news of the doughboys. Almost literally these came in floodtides; but none was ignored or forgotten. It made little difference, either, as to whether any of them was addressed. The Red Cross cleared its mail with a good deal of efficiency and promptness. Its huge central post-office in Paris was a marvel of precision—and it had at all times a difficult job. Yet it so happened that it was in charge of a man without any previous experience in such a task—Senator Henry Brevoort Kane, of Rhode Island. It chanced that Senator Kane displayed an immediate adaptability for the job—and with this, combined with great patience and persistence, he made a real success of it.
Perhaps the most satisfactory part of the searcher's job was in many ways the search for missing men—by interviewing the boys in the hospitals about their friends and intimates, getting tremendously tiny details about these in camp or in battle, or even in the hospitals themselves, and from these details evolving the web of evidence—Conan Doyle or E. Phillips Oppenheim could hardly have had a more fascinating time of it than did some of our Red Cross women in unraveling the tangle of confusion which they found wound about this boy or that, or the other fellow. Many an agonizing situation, indeed, was cleared up through the efforts of these women. And such times were almost the sole relief from a task that frequently was dreary and almost always distressing.