The American Red Cross Home Service Men
will help you by cable, telegraph, letter—assisted by forty million members of the Red Cross at home. Information Free.
Troubles? The American doughboy seemed to have all the troubles that the poster catalogued—and then some more. The response to the poster and the pamphlet was immediate. Soldiers sought out the American Red Cross Home Communication people all over France. At Brest the first office was in a tent near Camp Pontanzen. Later two offices were established. One, for the sailors, was located in Brest itself, and fairly accessible to the landing stages. Another was located in a stone barracks that had been builded by the great Napoleon. This office not having an outside door available to passers-by, wooden steps were built up the wall to a French window. Another set of steps was affixed to the inner wall and led right down to the desk of the Red Cross representative. Eventually this work at just this one point became so great in volume that four of these offices were pressed into service.
"What does Home Service really do for a man?" asked a magazine woman who was "doing" France for her publication at one of these offices. The answer to her inquiry was definite.
"It does everything," they told her, "from giving a soldier a needle and thread to letting our tears mingle with his between sobs when he tells us of his home troubles."
Upon the request of our men, wills in proper form were drawn up by Red Cross attorneys and forwarded to the men's families in this country. There were men with wives not only in the United States, but in every corner of the world—in Russia, in Assyria, in Italy, for instance—who wished to be assured that their allotments from the government were being delivered. During the influenza epidemic here and at a time when the flames of a forest fire were winging their way across great spaces in our West, the American Red Cross offices in Paris were besieged with tragic appeals for immediate information from home.
In some of the army divisions the movements of troops were so sudden and so uncertain that mail was badly delayed. Then the doughboys begged our Red Cross for reports from home and our Red Cross furnished them—through its service here.
"Our visitor found daddy and your wife and baby at luncheon," read one of these reports from America. "They had roast chicken, stewed tomatoes, mashed potatoes, hot bread, and jam.... Your wife is teaching school.... The B—— family has moved.... Your mother has one boarder and the crops are fine.... Willie and Carrie are going to move away in the spring."
Can you imagine what such a report might mean to a man who had not heard from home in over five months? There were many such. There were times when men—American fighting men—"went over the top" with aching hearts for some one who faced a particularly difficult problem of life back here at home. Then it was that the Red Cross did not hesitate to use the cable. It is hardly necessary to emphasize the relief which the following exchange of messages must have meant to some one fighting man in our khaki:
Paris, August 6, 1918.