"Send them on!" was the answer.
"There are eight hundred, all hungry. Have you food for them?"
"No, but we'll find it—" which was the spirit of the S. O. S. that kept us supplied in the Meuse-Argonne battle. Another type of "Y" man might, however, have thrown up his hands in despair.
The "Y" was an enormous and mixed force, criticized, reasonably I think, for lack of organization to keep pace with its ambitions. Its home administration seemed disinclined to take the advice of men experienced at the front in the choice of personnel. A novelist, a college professor, a lawyer, or even a regular "Y" secretary is not as good at running a lunch counter or a hut as a man who regularly runs a lunch counter or a hotel. A young woman who stood high at college might not be as useful in the kind of work the "Y" had to do as a practical housewife who might not have heard of Euclid, but who did know how to bake, sew, and cook. The soldier judged personnel by the way they came down to earth, as he had a very earthly job in his fox-holes and charges. I have gone into this detail because it became the fashion to give the "Y" a bad name, which was hardly deserved considering the large contract it had undertaken to fill.
The Knights of Columbus also had huts and theaters, but did not attempt to cover the whole field. When K. of C. workers opened a counter or appeared with a truck at the front, the supplies while they lasted were free to all comers. The soldier who had no change was always looking for the K. of C. When he passed the "Y," which required money for the sweets or the tobacco he craved, the contrast in his mind was that between generosity and commercialism. He was allotting a large portion of his pay to his family in a time of war, when according to all he read everybody at home was subscribing liberally in order that the men who faced hardship and death might not go without comforts. As the K. of C. appeared in force with the army later than the "Y" and could profit by example, its workers were seemingly a little more practical than those of the "Y."
"Boys, we'll give you all we have. Never mind the money!" was their attitude. The Jewish Welfare Board seems to have been admirably forehanded and generous in its special attention to the soldiers of the Jewish race.
We must not overlook the American Library Association, which had a free library in Paris. It circulated books throughout the army zone by a system which enabled the reader, if he were traveling, to return a book to any "Y" hut. If a book were lost, no matter. The thing was that our fighters should be served.
The Red Cross, having elaborate headquarters in Paris, was an enormous organization, managed with able statecraft, which covered a broad field of various activity. Its duties with the army never seemed as specific as those of the other auxiliaries. The old established Samaritan of our modern world, with immense funds and resources ready to meet any emergency when the call came, it opened free dispensaries and succored refugees; assisted civil populations as well as soldiers; ran some auxiliary hospitals, convalescent hotels, and hotels for officers; never selling, always giving, supplied hot coffee and lunches to soldiers en route across France; and "filled in" on a huge scale in the same way as the Salvation Army on a smaller scale. More of its workers were well-to-do and unpaid than in the K. of C. and the Y. M. C. A. Some of these—for the A. R. C., too, had its difficulties with personnel—were far more expensive, the practical comrades said, than if they had received large salaries. The Red Cross doctors and nurses were ready to supplement the regular army forces when occasion demanded.
The popular idea that the Red Cross had anything to do with bringing in the wounded from the field, or with the dressing stations or ambulances, was quite erroneous. All the doctors and medical men in the front line, and all the stretcher-bearers who endured their share of gas, shells, and machine-gun blasts, of rains and mud, with heavy casualties; all the drivers of the ambulances along shell-infested roads; all the hospital corps men, on their feet twenty-four hours at a stretch at the triages; all the teams of surgeons and their helpers, whose skill and tireless endurance saved lives—these were of the army.
There is no heroism finer than that of the stretcher-bearer; or of the surgeon and medical corps man in the front line. Their blood is not hot in pursuit or combat. They see the red bandages and gaping wounds, and hear the gasps for breath of the dying. Your medical corps man "took on for the war"; he was of the army machine. The work of our doctors is attested by the record of how successfully they patched up the wounded to return to the battle; of how they kept the stream of wounded flowing back to the hospitals in amazing smoothness, considering the unexpected demands of the battle.