The cause of trench fever, thanks to our keen army and Red Cross surgeons, and to the courageous men who volunteered to help them, has definitely been established. The trench louse, once called a nuisance, is now known to be almost as dangerous as the stegomya mosquito.
The trench louse must be got rid of, and that, happily, is not a very difficult affair. Our American army authorities will take care of that. And our sons, we may be thankful to know, are going to be spared one of the most frequent and most painful afflictions of the war.
The scientists and physicians who took part in the experiment by which trench fever is to be abolished will receive honors and rewards at the hands of their colleagues and the public. What I would like to know, is what honors and rewards those simple soldiers are going to receive.
CHAPTER XVII
THE GREATEST MOTHER IN THE WORLD
John Smith, of Harlem, gave five dollars to the Red Cross during the last drive. It was a big sum for a man with his responsibilities and a small income to part with, but John gave the money, and all over the country men like him, women, too, and children gave what they could to help the wounded and the desolated across the seas.
I want to tell John and the others how their money was spent, and I shall ask them first to go with me to a huge basement room of the Gare du Nord, the big north station of Paris. The room was taken over by the American Red Cross at the beginning of the spring offensive, March twenty-first, and here for days and nights, terrible days, sinister nights, a stream of refugees from the invalid district poured in and out, coming by train from Soissons, Compiegne, Montdidier, Albert, and from dozens of little villages and farms between Laon and Amiens.
The Red Cross fed and clothed and refreshed these refugees in that basement, loaded them on big motor-trucks and took them across the city to the Orleans or the Quai d’Orsay stations and saw them off to the sheltered south.
All on your money, you fortunate, generous, tender hearted givers. We who were over there in those first desperate days of spring had the privilege only of helping the Red Cross take care of the stricken men, women and children who had fled before the German hordes for the second time since the war began.
Vividly before me I see that great basement room, the only kind of a place that is half-way safe in Paris these days. It is night, or, rather, it is early morning, nearly two o’clock, and I have spent every minute of the time since nine o’clock fitting shoes, your gift, to refugee children.
When I went on duty early in the evening there were five or six babies standing at the counter, over the edge of which their little white, dirty, tired faces were barely visible, and their round black eyes were fixed enviously on a huge pile of shoes waiting to be distributed.