He had an aunt and a grandmother in Paris, he said, but he did not know his aunt’s married name. He knew the name of the street she lived on, though, and the next morning a Red Cross man went with the boy to the street, and by simple process of calling at every house in every block finally located the aunt.
But that wasn’t all. Eloi, his name was Eloi Beaussart, needed a job, and the Red Cross gave it to him. Now that game youngster wears a khaki uniform with A. R. C. on the collar, and works in a Red Cross canteen. When I came away Eloi’s family had not yet been found, but he was serene and hopeful. The American Red Cross, in his opinion, can do anything if you give it time.
Your money did not wait until the refugees got to Paris before it helped them. In front of the Red Cross headquarters in the Place de la Concorde crowds gathered daily to see the great motor-trucks being loaded with food to be sent up into the fringes of the war zone. Thousands of loaves of bread, tins of meat, condensed milk, chocolate, coffee, everything necessary and practical.
The Red Cross had a great many stations in the sections over which the Germans swept, and while the workers in those stations were helping to evacuate whole populations, the workers in Paris were rushing supplies to feed them. With guns roaring and shrapnel bursting around them, the Red Cross camions went steadily on taking hope and relief and life to thousands of civilians and wounded soldiers.
In one station yard, waiting for trains to carry them to base hospitals down the line, the Red Cross found and succored three thousand wounded French soldiers. In the town of Beauvais, almost the last habitable point near the war zone, a large number of sick civilians, mostly women and children, were found. There was no hospital left in the place, which had been shelled and largely evacuated, and to show you how promptly your money acts, I am going to tell you what the Red Cross workers did for the suffering population of Beauvais.
Some time in the early morning a hospital was established on paper. That is, it was decided to establish a hospital. At ten o’clock that same morning a partially furnished house was rented. At twelve o’clock the house was in order, a surgery with full supplies was installed, two doctors, four nurses and several helpers were at their posts, and before the afternoon was half over forty patients were in the beds and being treated and cared for.
Wouldn’t you rather feel that you had helped do a job like that than to have another summer hat?
In the quaint old city of Toul, through which the famous Rhine-Marne canal flows, and close to which our troops first held the line against the Germans, I saw another hospital, a children’s hospital established and supported by Red Cross money. The four hundred and sixty-six little children in this place came from towns and villages which have been bombarded with gas bombs, instruments of torture invented in hell especially for the German army.
Those bombs killed, suffocated to death, a large number of babies, but the Red Cross rescued many. There in that hospital on the hill above Toul four hundred and sixty-six children have had their tortured lungs cleared of the poisonous stuff, and their anguished little bodies have been brought back to ease.
Wouldn’t you be happier helping a gassed French child back to life than to buy a box of expensive cigars?