There is not room enough in one chapter or in a dozen of them, to tell half of what the Red Cross has done and is doing in France alone in this war.
Twenty-three hundred people, doctors, nurses, canteen workers, business men, social workers and others are enrolled in France. Twenty hospitals, seventy-six dispensaries and several sanitariums are in operation. For wounded soldiers of the allies the Red Cross supplies nearly four thousand hospitals. It has a model hospital train; it has innumerable dressing stations, canteens, health stations, sewing rooms for the destitute. Nearly three million soldiers a month are served in Red Cross canteens alone.
In Paris there are thirteen canteens always busy serving French soldiers on leave. In Bourg there is a canteen where thousands of our soldiers going to Aix-les-Bains and Chambéry for their vacations got a real American home breakfast. I heard many soldiers speak enthusiastically of that breakfast, served by the Red Cross women, but purchased by mothers, fathers and friends of American soldiers right here in the United States.
Those sons of ours who are being rapidly transported to France to join the more than a million already there soon will be training behind the battle lines in Lorraine, Picardy, the Aisne. Soon after that they will be fighting, the fight to death if need be, to clear the world of that evil thing, war.
Between them and such suffering as no one who has not seen it can even faintly imagine stands that cross of mercy and devotion. To support it is to support and protect our own children. “Give till it hurts,” I read on one of the Red Cross posters. Give, if you have hearts, until your hearts stop hurting.
CHAPTER XVIII
FRANCE APPROVES THE EGREC EM SAY AH
The Y. M. C. A. has started a new drive both for money and for workers. John R. Mott, general secretary of the National War Work Council of the Association, has announced that they must recruit four thousand new workers for France and Italy, and of course they must have money to support the work already going and that to be started soon.
The exact sum has not yet been announced, but whatever it is the people of this country will give it. To give to the Y. M. C. A. is to contribute directly to the comfort, happiness, and, to a very great extent, the safety of our own enlisted men in France. I have been in dozens of Y. M. C. A. huts and canteens, and I say emphatically that our army could hardly maintain its highest efficiency without these places. They are the nearest substitutes for homes that were ever devised for any army.
When troops are quartered in an interesting old French city, as some of our troops are, there are many things in which the soldier off duty can interest himself. But the vast majority of American soldiers are not quartered in cities or even in towns. They are in camps differing very little from the training camps at home. Or else they are billeted in villages. In that case they sleep in barns or in peasant cottages. When they are off duty there is not a blessed thing for them to do except walk up and down the muddy streets and talk.
Those French villages of the north, especially in winter, are picturesque in the extreme when viewed from a motor-car, but as a place of residence they leave much to be desired. A stranger might have some difficulty in distinguishing between the houses and the barns, the huge manure heaps, which are the chief wealth of the owners, being about equally distributed before all the buildings. I have seen scores of these little hamlets, with their signs on each door, giving the number of officers, men or horses billeted within, and I have sometimes wondered by what process the authorities decided which buildings were for hommes and which for chevaux. Those are the first two French words our soldiers learn over there.