Our Red Cross as well as our army officers, themselves, recognized almost from the beginning that an untroubled soldier always is the best soldier. It also appreciated—as this book already should have told you—that its primary object in Europe was to bring the utmost comfort and relief to America's fighting millions. That was why, in the early summer of 1918, it issued a small pamphlet telling the doughboy to "pack up his troubles in his old kit bag" and to hand them to the first Red Cross representative he met. He was assured that there was no worry of any kind, either on the one side of the ocean or the other, that the Red Cross could not or would not shoulder for him. These pamphlets were printed by the hundreds of thousands and distributed to every American soldier in France. And they were an evidence of the real desire of the great organization of the crimson cross to make itself invaluable, not alone in the comparatively few large ways of succor, but in an almost infinite number of smaller and individual ones. It was in this last sort of help, of course, that the Home Communication Service shone. It was its own particular sort of a job to take from the harassed minds of individual soldiers their individual problems—as varied and as complicated as the temperaments and the conditions of the doughboys, themselves. Take a single instance:
Here was a man who was owner of a small but growing business in the Mohawk Valley of New York State. When a unit was being recruited near Utica and a call for volunteers was being issued, he responded—with instant promptness. At the time he donned the khaki the two banks in the little town from which he came held notes against his business for a sum of a little more than a thousand dollars. They had been endorsed by his brother, a hard-working farmer of the valley.
Before this boy had been mobilized he arranged to have his young wife conduct the business—with the aid of his long-time assistant. The banks told him that the notes would, in no event, be called before his return from the service of his country. They were fairly perfervid in their expressions of their desires for patriotic service, and the young man left for France, his mind well at ease.
His first letters from home were full of optimistic comfort. A little later, however, they were not quite so serene. Finally this soldier received a letter from his wife stating quite frankly and without reserve that the two banks had called the loans, forced his brother to sell part of his farm stock, and then had sold out their little business.
The boy in khaki was furious. A week before he had stuffed into his musette the little American Red Cross booklet which told of that organization's sincere desire to help the individual American soldier who found himself in trouble. "I'll take them at their word," thought he and immediately sought out the Red Cross man with his unit, and to him spilled the entire story. The Red Cross man boiled. He was not a young man—being a bit too old for regular army service, he had taken the Red Cross way as being the best for him to serve his country—and he had heard stories of that sort before, and decided to take prompt action on this one.
It so happened that there were some pretty big American bankers on the American Red Cross staff over there in France. When this incident was rushed through to them—with vast promptness—they, too, took action. They did not even wait for the mails, but cabled the main facts of the story to the secretary of the American Bankers' Association, saying that the proofs were coming on by post, but requesting immediate action. A representative of the Association took the first train up into central New York and, through a personal investigation of the books of the two banks, quickly verified the incident—in every detail. After that he promptly returned to New York city and, placing the matter before the executive committee of the Bankers' Association, asked that justice be quickly done. It was. The two miserly and hypocritical banking institutions were forced to return the young soldier's business to his wife and to pay back the brother the money which they had taken from him. After which they were both kicked out of the national association.
Along with the pamphlet advising the doughboy to pack up his troubles in his old kit bag and then carry them to the nearest Red Cross man or woman, there was prepared a poster originated by a man out in the Middle West, who because of his understanding affection for boys was particularly well qualified to prepare it. It was used to placard Brest and some other port towns. As I recall it, it read something like this:
American Soldier and Sailor
Are you worried about anything back home; your wife, children, mother, insurance, allotments, taxes, business affairs, wills, powers of attorney, or any personal or family troubles of a private nature?