“These laid the world away; poured out the red
Sweet wine of youth; gave up the years to be
Of work and joy, and that unhoped serene
That men call age; and those who would have been
Their sons, they gave—their immortality.”
CHAPTER V
Other Fields
The work which the American girls were to do for the French Croix de Rouge (Red Cross) was to be accomplished under entirely different circumstances.
They traveled southeast nearly an entire day and toward evening were driven through a thickly wooded country to the edge of the Forest of Le Prêtre.
An American field hospital, an exact duplicate of those used in America, had recently been presented to the French Government by three Americans who desired that their identity be kept a secret. The hospital was made up of twenty tents; six of them large enough to take care of two hundred wounded men. And these hospital tents could be put up in fifteen minutes and taken down in six by the American ambulance volunteers, many of them students from Columbia, Harvard, Williams and other American universities.