"PACK UP YOUR TROUBLES IN YOUR OLD KIT BAG"
"Wounded yesterday; feeling fine to-day."
How many times that message--varying sometimes in its exact phrasing,
but never in its intent--was flashed from France to the United States
during the progress of the war never will be known. It was a lie--of
course. Would any sane mother believe it, even for a minute? But it was
the lie glorified--the lie idealized, if you will permit me to use such
an expression. And it was the only lie that I have ever known to be not
only sanctioned, but officially urged, by a great humanitarian
organization. For the Red Cross searchers in the American hospitals in
France were not allowed to write to the folks at home in any other
tenor. Little scraps of messages muttered, perhaps, between groans and
prayers, were hastily taken down by the Red Cross women in the
hospitals, and by them quickly translated into a message of good cheer
for the cable overseas. Any other sort was unthinkable.
Here was a typical one of these:
"Wounded yesterday in stomach--feeling fine. Tell mother will be up in a
day or two."
Would you like to look behind the scenes in the case of this particular
message? Then come with me. We are "behind the scenes" now--in the
dressing room which closely adjoins the operating room in a big American
evacuation hospital not far from Verdun. They had done with him on the
operating table--for the moment. One operation had been performed, but
another was to follow quickly. In the meantime, the soldier boy--he
really was not much more than a boy--sat straight upward on his cot and
watched them as they pulled the tight, clinging gauze from his raw and
tender flesh. All he said during the process was:
"Do you think that I could rest a minute, doc, before you do the second
one?"
He got his momentary rest. And as he got it, sat, with a cigarette
between his tightly clinched teeth, and dictated the letter home which
you have just read.
* * * * *
Another Red Cross girl walking through one of the wards of that same
hospital near Verdun stopped at the signal of a wounded man who lay
abed. He was a very sick-looking man; his face had the very pallor of
death. And his voice was very low and weak as he told the Red Cross
woman that he wanted her to write a letter for him to his wife back in a
little Indiana town.
"Tell that I'm wounded--just a little wounded, you understand. Got a
little shrapnel in my legs, but that I'll be home by Christmas. Did you
get all of that?"
The girl nodded yes. She took the notes on a bit of scrap paper
mechanically; for all the time her eyes were on the face of the man. All
the time save once--when they fell upon the smooth counterpane of his
bed, then returned to the man's face once again. She knew that he was
lying, and because she was new, just come over from America--she did not
know that the Red Cross held one particular lie to be both glorified and
sanctified--she folded up the memorandum, told the wounded man that she
would write the letter--and went out.
She went straight to the records room of the place. Yes, it was true.
Her suspicions as to the unnatural smoothness of that counterpane were
confirmed there. The man had had shrapnel in both legs, but that was not
all. Both had been amputated--well above the knees.
The Red Cross girl went back to him, her eyes blazing with anger. Her
anger all but overcame her natural tenderness.
"I can't, I can't," she expostulated. "I can't send that letter."
"Why can't you?" he coolly replied.
She faced him with the truth.
"Well, what of it?" said he. "If I do get home, I'll get home by
Christmas--and that will be time enough for her to know the truth.
She'll be ready for it, then. But--" he lowered his voice almost to a
whisper--"I'm not going to get home. The doctor's told me that, but he
don't have to tell me; I know it. And if I _don't_ get home she'll never
be the wiser----. You write that letter, just as I told it to you."
* * * * *
Here was by far the saddest phase of the Red Cross work for our soldier
boys--and almost the most important. It was one thing for the girl in
the steel-gray uniform, with the little crimson crosses affixed to her
shoulders, to play and make merry with the wounded men who were getting
well; but it was a different and vastly more difficult part of the job
to play fair, let alone make merry, with those who were not going to get
well; who, at the best, were to shuffle through the rest of their lives
maimed or crippled or blind. Yet what an essential part of the big job
all that was! And how our girls--moved by those great fountains of human
love and sympathy and tenderness that seemingly spring forever in
women's hearts, rose to this supreme test over there! And after they had
so arisen how trivial seemed the mere handing out of sandwiches or
coffee or cigarettes! This was the real touch of war--the touch supreme.
After it, all others seemed almost as nothing.
* * * * *
Early in the progress of the conflict our Red Cross foresaw the great
necessity that would be coming for its acting as a medium of
communication between the doughboy and his folks--three thousand miles
or more away. The United States Army had made little or no provision to
meet this need; it had far larger and far more immediate problems ahead
of it. And so about the best that it could be expected to do would be to
notify the folks at home that their boy had made sacrifice--supreme or
very great--for his country; at the best, a sort of emotionless
proceeding upon its part. In the meantime there was hardly a waking hour
that those selfsame folks were not thinking of the boy in khaki. While
if anything happened to him--serious even, but not quite serious enough
to justify the setting of the somewhat cumbersome machinery of the
army's elaborate system of notification into motion--both he and the
folks were helpless. France is indeed a long, long distance away from
the United States. Three thousand miles is a gap not easily spanned.
But it was the job of the American Red Cross to span that gap; not only
to bring news of the boy to the home folks, but, in many, many
instances, to bring news of them to him. The one thing was nearly as
valuable as the other. And while in the elaborate organization of the
American Red Cross they were operated as separate functions and bureaus,
their work in reality was so interwoven that in the pages of this book
we shall consider them virtually as one, and shall begin a serious
consideration of this important phase of Red Cross work by calling
attention to a very few of the ramifications of a hospital searcher's
job. First and foremost her task was to tell those same home folks all
that she could pen, or typewrite, about their own particular
soldier--exactly where he was at that time and just how he progressed.
The ordinary method of handling the vast volume of these messages was in
the form of short, concise, personal reports which passed through the
Paris headquarters of the American Red Cross and were forwarded by it to
the National Headquarters at Washington, where they were made up into
letters and forwarded to the families. There were, of course, many
variations in this method; for instance, when it was advisable for Paris
to write direct to the boy's parents, and in those other cases, which
you have already seen, where the letter to America went direct from the
Red Cross worker's room at the hospital. The choice between these
methods was left quite largely to the individual worker who, in turn,
weighed each situation and its necessities, individually and separately.
It was only in these last instances that the lie was sanctioned and even
permitted, and even then only upon the absolute demand of the wounded
man, himself. He had all the rights in such a situation, and the Red
Cross bowed to and respected those rights--in every case.
The Red Cross reports through headquarters were accurate--invariably,
and, at first sight, generally unemotional. Here is one of them that is
quite typical:
"Private Edward Jones--20th Regiment, Company H--has been wounded in
both legs. Wounds painful, but amputation not necessary. In excellent
spirits--sends love to family."
Short, to be sure. But to a newsless family three thousand--perhaps six
thousand--miles away, with its necessary detail, tremendously
satisfying.
* * * * *
Return with me if you will for a final visit to Vichy. No group of Red
Cross workers anywhere held a more sacred responsibility than the women
who were stationed there. Day in and day out they passed through the
white lanes of wards in the military hospitals and each day looked--and
looked deeply--into the hearts of the American boys that lined them.
Heart and soul these women of the steel-gray uniforms were at the
service of our wounded soldier men--at their very beck and call, if you
please. And when of a morning a bed here or a bed there was empty, the
searchers understood, and prepared to write a letter--a scant matter of
sympathetic record at the best--that somewhere back in America would at
least relieve the tension of waiting.
Some of the messages that these searchers sent were--as you already
know--full of gladness; thank God for them! Others warned gently--the
boy was coming home with his face forever scarred or his limbs or his
eyes gone. Still others told--and told again and again--of the brave and
the battling soul that finally had slipped away into the eternal mystery
of the Valley. Each of these last held between its tiny pages a single
flower--plucked at the last moment from the funeral wreath.
Let me quote from one of these letters of a Red Cross searcher.
"I am constantly on duty here," she says, "and visit your brother Harry
almost daily. He has been unfortunate enough to have been wounded in the
right leg, which the doctors found necessary to amputate just below the
knee. I know this will be a great shock to you, but let me hasten to add
that Harry is in the best of condition otherwise. The wound is healing
marvelously clean and quickly. He is in the healthiest and happiest
frame of mind and exceptionally cheerful. Harry wants me to tell you
that the last dressing of the wound was yesterday. He expects to be up
and trying his crutches within ten days. He received your September
money order of ten dollars for which he thanks you very much. I have
just cashed it for him.... I am sorry to be the bearer of this sad news,
but am happy that I can assure you of his early recovery and his
splendid courage."
Men who were able to write for themselves were supplied with paper and
encouraged to do so. Others who were far too ill or confined prone in
surgical apparatus--their very hands caught and held taut in a cruel
network of pulleys and weights and drain tubes--dictated their letters
home--and invariably lied as to their condition. All was "going well."
The patient sufferer had but one report to pass his lips. "Tell them
that I'm feeling fine," was the message that he ordered home.
Sometimes by piecing together information culled from a variety of
sources, the searcher was enabled to reconstruct the picture of the last
hour of some soldier's life. Comrades would recount the story of his
death at the front or describe the moment of his capture by the enemy.
In fact persistent questioning revealed such facts as finally cleared up
the doubt as to the fate of a certain Yankee corporal. It happened that
the boy had disappeared in April, 1918. It was a number of months
afterward that a patient was discovered at a port of embarkation who
said:
"Yes, he was killed when the Germans were attacking and a heavy barrage
was coming over. They came around back of us and threw hand grenades
from the rear. Corporal ---- pulled his pistol and yelled: 'Here they
come, boys! Give it to them!' He was awfully generous. He used to get a
lot of scrapbooks and pass them around to the boys. When he got a box
from home he shared it. He was a mighty generous fellow about lending
money, too."
The women who made those scrapbooks and packed those boxes of "goodies"
can have no memento from his grave over there, but here was the sweet
memory of his courage and his generosity. Think of the comfort that her
woman's soul must have found in that frank, outspoken boyish tribute and
the relief at finally having had at least the definite information of
the truth! So it was that our Red Cross searchers gave constant and
almost invaluable aid in revising and verifying the casualty lists of
the army; and many who were accounted missing--that dread term that
means nothing and yet can mean so much--could, because of their work, be
accurately enrolled as dead or as prisoners.
As far back as the summer of 1917 five women had been definitely
assigned to this activity--not at Vichy then, but at the American army
hospitals which already were beginning to multiply in France. By
December of the following year this staff numbered nearly two hundred
women, who worked either in the hospitals or in the American Red Cross
headquarters in Paris. And while these worked in the hospitals, the Red
Cross officers in the field--men serving as searchers, chaplains, or
Home Communication representatives--were working in close coöperation
with the statistical officers of the army. These were stationed in
training camps and concentration camps and with various combat
divisions. Ten men were assigned direct by the Red Cross to the Central
Records Office of the Adjutant General's Department of the A. E. F.
Understand very clearly, if you will, please, once again, that while in
very rare cases our Red Cross did announce casualties, that, after all,
was not its real province. To engage in that would have been a mere
duplication of the army's own work. Mortality letters were not sent
direct to the nearest of kin; they were forwarded to the A. E. F.
Central Records Office in France for final disposition, so that their
release through the mails would not anticipate the official announcement
from the War Department; while the other information, in most instances,
was reported to the Paris headquarters of the American Red Cross and was
later disseminated here in the United States from the American Red Cross
headquarters in Washington.
The lists of the missing soldiers were furnished by the army. Duplicates
of these were then immediately distributed to the Red Cross searchers
and representatives, who at once sought clues to the individual stories
to be builded about the name of each man. Sometimes through arrangements
with the army authorities the _boche_ prisoners were interviewed, and
these occasionally furnished facts with reference to American prisoners
in Germany and gave definite information about aviators who had
apparently disappeared within the enemy lines.
Incorporated in these lists of the missing were also the names of all
soldiers and sailors concerning whom inquiries had been made of our Red
Cross either here in America or over there in France. In the one case
these inquiries and in the other through the Paris headquarters in the
Hotel Regina. In one month 1,955 cables were sent across the Atlantic
from the United States requiring immediate information regarding wounded
or missing men. In December, just following the armistice, the Paris
office received more than a thousand individual requests for news of the
doughboys. Almost literally these came in floodtides; but none was
ignored or forgotten. It made little difference, either, as to whether
any of them was addressed. The Red Cross cleared its mail with a good
deal of efficiency and promptness. Its huge central post-office in Paris
was a marvel of precision--and it had at all times a difficult job. Yet
it so happened that it was in charge of a man without any previous
experience in such a task--Senator Henry Brevoort Kane, of Rhode Island.
It chanced that Senator Kane displayed an immediate adaptability for the
job--and with this, combined with great patience and persistence, he
made a real success of it.
Perhaps the most satisfactory part of the searcher's job was in many
ways the search for missing men--by interviewing the boys in the
hospitals about their friends and intimates, getting tremendously tiny
details about these in camp or in battle, or even in the hospitals
themselves, and from these details evolving the web of evidence--Conan
Doyle or E. Phillips Oppenheim could hardly have had a more fascinating
time of it than did some of our Red Cross women in unraveling the tangle
of confusion which they found wound about this boy or that, or the other
fellow. Many an agonizing situation, indeed, was cleared up through the
efforts of these women. And such times were almost the sole relief from
a task that frequently was dreary and almost always distressing.
If you would the better understand the real task that these women faced,
permit me to quote from a letter written by one of them:
"The most entertaining part of my work is writing letters home for the
wounded boys. In answer to my letters the replies that come back are
more than adequate reward. The letters come from farmhouses in Vermont,
from factory towns in Connecticut, from busy Massachusetts cities, and
from lonely Western ranches. They are pathetic, sad, funny; but all of
them are overflowing with surprises and gratitude for the person in the
mysterious 'over there' who had taken the trouble to visit and write
home for her 'particular boy' after he was wounded. These letters for
the boys were usually written to a woman--mothers, sisters, or 'girls'
the favorites first, of course, although occasionally 'aunty' or
'teacher' came in for a message of reassurance.
"The first letter I had to write was for a boy who had lost his right
eye. He wanted me to write his girl, whose photographs I had seen
several times. She had very fluffy hair and usually seemed to stand in
an apple orchard. After this he made a rather staggering suggestion:
Would I please read all of Alice's letters so that I should know what
kind of a girl she was and so answer her letters better! Realizing that
a Red Cross worker should flinch at nothing and trying not to think of
Alice's feelings in the matter, I took the letters out of a bag at the
head of his bed and plunged into the first one.
"To my intense relief they all began 'Dear Bill,' and ended 'Your true
friend, Alice.' Her only reference to matters of the heart was the hope
that he would not fall in love with any of those pretty Red Cross nurses
over there. For the most part Alice seemed to prefer impersonal topics,
such as the potato crop, the new class, and the party at the grange
Saturday night. Bill thought she was a mighty fine writer and, I think,
was a little worried lest I be unable to compose a letter worthy of her.
He was worried, too, about the best way to tell her that he had lost an
eye. 'You know, _I_ don't care. The left one is working better than it
ever did and I know it won't make no difference in the way she thinks of
me, but she'll feel pretty bad for me, I know that, and I want you to
please tell her about it real gentle.' We finally decided to tell her in
this letter that he had been seriously injured in his right eye and
then, in the next letter, which he would write himself, he would tell
her it was gone.
"In due time I received a grateful note from Alice in a very long,
elegant, and exceedingly narrow envelope inclosing a correspondence card
covered with high-schoolish-girlish writing. 'Thank you so much,' she
wrote, 'for your letter giving me news of Bill, who I was getting so
anxious about, as I had not heard from him for so long. I am glad he is
getting better and that he really is not suffering.'
"Another grateful letter came from the mother of Michael Holihan. Mike
had been badly wounded and at first no one thought he could possibly
pull through, for he had a piece of shrapnel in the liver. He survived
the operation, however, and became very anxious to write his mother.
'Now you just please write her what I tell you,' he said. 'Mother is
pretty old now and she is always worrying, but I got it all thought out
just what I am going to say to make her stop.' This is what he dictated:
"'_Dear Mother_:
"'I was hurt the other day but not enough to keep me down very
long and I am as well as ever now. They certainly do use me fine
in this hospital. I am having a great time. Gee, I am a happy
boy, and don't you worry none about me, mother.
"'Your son,
'MIKE.'"
"After making this effort he lay back on the pillow and shut his eyes
for a moment, tired out, only to open them anxiously to ask: 'That'll
fix her, won't it?' Apparently it did not entirely 'fix her,' for her
answer came back to me--an anxious scrawl--'I received your letter and,
dear Red Cross lady, it was so kind of you to write when you must be so
busy and let me know how my son was getting along, as I was waiting day
after day for a letter from him and I didn't know what could be the
matter as he always writes regularly like the good son he is. I am
worrying day and night and even if Mike did say I shouldn't because what
do boys know about it if they are sick or well and my Mike would say
that he was well if he could only lay flat on his back and look at the
ceiling he would. As this is all I have to say, I will bring this letter
to a close. Tell Mike, I and all the family have wrote him!'"
* * * * *
Our Red Cross as well as our army officers, themselves, recognized
almost from the beginning that an untroubled soldier always is the best
soldier. It also appreciated--as this book already should have told
you--that its primary object in Europe was to bring the utmost comfort
and relief to America's fighting millions. That was why, in the early
summer of 1918, it issued a small pamphlet telling the doughboy to "pack
up his troubles in his old kit bag" and to hand them to the first Red
Cross representative he met. He was assured that there was no worry of
any kind, either on the one side of the ocean or the other, that the Red
Cross could not or would not shoulder for him. These pamphlets were
printed by the hundreds of thousands and distributed to every American
soldier in France. And they were an evidence of the real desire of the
great organization of the crimson cross to make itself invaluable, not
alone in the comparatively few large ways of succor, but in an almost
infinite number of smaller and individual ones. It was in this last sort
of help, of course, that the Home Communication Service shone. It was
its own particular sort of a job to take from the harassed minds of
individual soldiers their individual problems--as varied and as
complicated as the temperaments and the conditions of the doughboys,
themselves. Take a single instance:
Here was a man who was owner of a small but growing business in the
Mohawk Valley of New York State. When a unit was being recruited near
Utica and a call for volunteers was being issued, he responded--with
instant promptness. At the time he donned the khaki the two banks in the
little town from which he came held notes against his business for a sum
of a little more than a thousand dollars. They had been endorsed by his
brother, a hard-working farmer of the valley.
Before this boy had been mobilized he arranged to have his young wife
conduct the business--with the aid of his long-time assistant. The banks
told him that the notes would, in no event, be called before his return
from the service of his country. They were fairly perfervid in their
expressions of their desires for patriotic service, and the young man
left for France, his mind well at ease.
His first letters from home were full of optimistic comfort. A little
later, however, they were not quite so serene. Finally this soldier
received a letter from his wife stating quite frankly and without
reserve that the two banks had called the loans, forced his brother to
sell part of his farm stock, and then had sold out their little
business.
The boy in khaki was furious. A week before he had stuffed into his
_musette_ the little American Red Cross booklet which told of that
organization's sincere desire to help the individual American soldier
who found himself in trouble. "I'll take them at their word," thought he
and immediately sought out the Red Cross man with his unit, and to him
spilled the entire story. The Red Cross man boiled. He was not a young
man--being a bit too old for regular army service, he had taken the Red
Cross way as being the best for him to serve his country--and he had
heard stories of that sort before, and decided to take prompt action on
this one.
It so happened that there were some pretty big American bankers on the
American Red Cross staff over there in France. When this incident was
rushed through to them--with vast promptness--they, too, took action.
They did not even wait for the mails, but cabled the main facts of the
story to the secretary of the American Bankers' Association, saying that
the proofs were coming on by post, but requesting immediate action. A
representative of the Association took the first train up into central
New York and, through a personal investigation of the books of the two
banks, quickly verified the incident--in every detail. After that he
promptly returned to New York city and, placing the matter before the
executive committee of the Bankers' Association, asked that justice be
quickly done. It was. The two miserly and hypocritical banking
institutions were forced to return the young soldier's business to his
wife and to pay back the brother the money which they had taken from
him. After which they were both kicked out of the national association.
Along with the pamphlet advising the doughboy to pack up his troubles in
his old kit bag and then carry them to the nearest Red Cross man or
woman, there was prepared a poster originated by a man out in the Middle
West, who because of his understanding affection for boys was
particularly well qualified to prepare it. It was used to placard Brest
and some other port towns. As I recall it, it read something like this:
AMERICAN SOLDIER AND SAILOR
Are you worried about anything back home; your wife, children,
mother, insurance, allotments, taxes, business affairs, wills,
powers of attorney, or any personal or family troubles of a
private nature?
THE AMERICAN RED CROSS HOME SERVICE MEN
will help you by cable, telegraph, letter--assisted by forty
million members of the Red Cross at home. Information _Free_.
Troubles? The American doughboy seemed to have all the troubles that the
poster catalogued--and then some more. The response to the poster and
the pamphlet was immediate. Soldiers sought out the American Red Cross
Home Communication people all over France. At Brest the first office was
in a tent near Camp Pontanzen. Later two offices were established. One,
for the sailors, was located in Brest itself, and fairly accessible to
the landing stages. Another was located in a stone barracks that had
been builded by the great Napoleon. This office not having an outside
door available to passers-by, wooden steps were built up the wall to a
French window. Another set of steps was affixed to the inner wall and
led right down to the desk of the Red Cross representative. Eventually
this work at just this one point became so great in volume that four of
these offices were pressed into service.
"What does Home Service really do for a man?" asked a magazine woman who
was "doing" France for her publication at one of these offices. The
answer to her inquiry was definite.
"It does everything," they told her, "from giving a soldier a needle and
thread to letting our tears mingle with his between sobs when he tells
us of his home troubles."
Upon the request of our men, wills in proper form were drawn up by Red
Cross attorneys and forwarded to the men's families in this country.
There were men with wives not only in the United States, but in every
corner of the world--in Russia, in Assyria, in Italy, for instance--who
wished to be assured that their allotments from the government were
being delivered. During the influenza epidemic here and at a time when
the flames of a forest fire were winging their way across great spaces
in our West, the American Red Cross offices in Paris were besieged with
tragic appeals for immediate information from home.
In some of the army divisions the movements of troops were so sudden and
so uncertain that mail was badly delayed. Then the doughboys begged our
Red Cross for reports from home and our Red Cross furnished
them--through its service here.
"Our visitor found daddy and your wife and baby at luncheon," read one
of these reports from America. "They had roast chicken, stewed tomatoes,
mashed potatoes, hot bread, and jam.... Your wife is teaching school....
The B---- family has moved.... Your mother has one boarder and the crops
are fine.... Willie and Carrie are going to move away in the spring."
Can you imagine what such a report might mean to a man who had not heard
from home in over five months? There were many such. There were times
when men--American fighting men--"went over the top" with aching hearts
for some one who faced a particularly difficult problem of life back
here at home. Then it was that the Red Cross did not hesitate to use the
cable. It is hardly necessary to emphasize the relief which the
following exchange of messages must have meant to some one fighting man
in our khaki:
PARIS, August 6, 1918.
_To AMCROSS, Washington_:
Report concerning confinement, Mrs. Harold W----, Rural Free
Delivery Five, H----, Penn.
WASHINGTON, August 14, 1918.
_To AMCROSS, Paris_:
Answering Inquiry No. ----. Mother and baby son three months old
well and happy.
In this instance the worried fighter was an officer--a captain of
infantry. During the time which elapsed between the two cablegrams he
was wounded and the answer found him in a hospital, side by side with a
French _blessé_. A Red Cross searcher acted as interpreter for their
felicitations and in her official report of the incident included this
notation:
"Captain W---- was much improved as a result of the good news. He is
sitting up and eating roast chicken to-day. He says the American Red
Cross has cured him."
The Red Cross representatives here in America could not enter a home
unless they were welcome; neither could they force their way into the
hearts of men. They were compelled to wait until their help was sought.
The growing mental depression of a certain major of a fighting division
during those tense months of the midsummer of 1918 did not escape the
attention of the American Red Cross man attached to that division.
Suddenly the man, who had been marked because of his poise, became
taciturn--isolated himself. A reference to the Red Cross Home Service
which its division worker tactfully introduced into the table talk at
the mess at which both sat, however, did elicit some trivial rejoinder
from the man with the golden oakleaf upon his shoulder; while the
following day that same major wrote a letter to the Red Cross man--and
bared the reason for his most obvious melancholy.
It seemed that back here in the United States he had a little son, from
whom he had received no word whatsoever in more than six months. The
child was with the major's divorced wife, and his father was more than
anxious to know if he was regularly playing out of doors, if he was
receiving his father's allotment, and if he was buying the promised
Thrift Stamp each week. The army man already had his second golden
service stripe and greatly feared that his little son might be beginning
to forget him.
Under conditions such as these, visiting the boy was a diplomatic
mission indeed. Finally it was intrusted to the wife of an army officer.
And because army officers' wives are usually achieved diplomats if not
born ones, the ultimate result came in weekly letters from the boy,
which not only greatly relieved his father's mind but greatly increased
the bonds of affection between the two. The Greatest Mother in the World
is never above diplomacy--which is, perhaps, just another way of
expressing tact and gentleness.
There were many, many occasions, too, when the relatives at home
depended upon that selfsame diplomacy of hers to tell the disagreeable
stories of losses or perhaps to prepare the boys overseas to face an
empty chair in the family circle. There was one particularly fearful
moment when a brilliant young officer had to be told that the reason why
his young wife had ceased to write was because she had gone insane and
specialists believed that she could not recover. Boys were driven to Red
Cross offices by hidden affairs that flayed them hideously and of which
they wished to purge themselves. Some wanted to set old wrongs right.
Others had fallen blindly into the hands of the unscrupulous and had
only fully awakened to see their folly after they actually were upon the
battlefields of France. Then there were the softer phases of life--the
shy letters and the blushing visitors who wished to have a marriage
arranged with Thérèse or Jeanne of the black eyes and the delicate oval
face. I remember one of our boys who had fallen in love with a girl in
Nancy. Theirs was a courtship of unspoken love, unless soft glances and
gentle caresses do indeed speak more loudly than mere words; for they
had no easy bond of a common tongue. His French was doughboy French,
which was hardly French at all, and her English was limited. So that
after he had gone on to the Rhine and the letter came from her to him in
the delicate hand that the sisters at the convent had taught, he needs
must seek out Red Cross Home Communication and intrust to it the task of
uncommon delicacy, which it fulfilled to the complete delight and
satisfaction of both of them. For how could any mother, let alone the
Greatest Mother in the World, blind her eyes entirely to love?
She apparently had no intention of doing any such thing. For how about
that good-looking doughboy from down in the Ozark country somewhere, who
arrived in Paris on a day in the autumn of 1918 with the express
intention of matrimony, if only he knew where he could get the license?
French laws are rather fussy and explicit in such matters. Some one
suggested the Home Service Bureau of the American Red Cross to the boy.
He found his way quickly to it--with little Marie, or whatever her name
really was, hanging on his arm. A Red Cross man prayerfully guided the
pair through the legal mazes of the situation. First they went to a law
office in the Avenue de l'Opéra where the necessary papers were made
out; then the procession solemnly moved to the office of the United
States Vice Consul at No. 1 Rue des Italiens, where the signature of the
American official representative was duly affixed to each of the
papers; after which to the foreign office, where the French went through
all the elaborate processes of sealings and signatures which they seem
to love so dearly, and then--the work of Mother Red Cross was finished.
They were quite ready for the offices of the Church.
With the signing of the armistice all this work was greatly
increased--was, in fact, doubled and nearly trebled. When a man was
fighting his physical needs seemingly were paramount; but once off the
field, the worries that lurked in his subconscious mind seemed to rise
quickly to the surface. He then recalled that long interval since last
he heard from home. That troubled him, and he turned to the Red
Cross--those pamphlets and posters did have a tremendous effect. And if
he had no definite troubles over here, such as those we have just seen,
he was apt to be just plain hungry for a sight of the home--and the
loved ones that it held.
It was in answer to a demand such as this last that a Red Cross
representative right here in the United States took her motor car and
drove for a half day out to see a family of whose very existence she had
never before even heard; and, as a result of her call, wrote back a
letter from which the following excerpts are taken:
"I want to tell you about a never-to-be-forgotten trip that I took the
other day out to see a one hundred per cent patriot; an American mother
who has three sons in the service. The home is one of the coziest,
homiest, friendliest places you can imagine; one story, with that cool
spacious plan of construction that makes you want to get a book, capture
a chair on the wide, comfortable porch, and forget the world and its
dizzy rush; a great sweep of lawn and with some handsome Hereford calves
browsing in one direction and a cluster of shade trees nearer the house.
"The hills surrounding the house make a lovely view and all were covered
with grazing stock, also the fine Hereford cattle for which the place is
known. But the best part of the home is the dear little woman who hung a
service flag in the window with the name of a boy under each of the
three stars. She is the type of mother that draws every one to her;
tender, sensible, capable, broad-minded, and with a shrewd sense of
humor that keeps things going and makes life worth living for the entire
household.
"She took us to a roomy side porch where her sewing unit of the Red
Cross meets each Tuesday. A marvelous amount of work has been turned out
in that side porch, and I'll wager a dollar to a doughnut that I know
the moving spirit of the workers. Off in a big, cool parlor bedroom
there were stacked up several perfectly enchanting 'crazy quilts' made
by these same busy women at odd moments. These are ready to be sent to
Serbia or they may be sold at auction for the benefit of the Red Cross.
"We saw pictures of each boy in the service--one in the navy, one in the
heavy artillery, and Milton, whom we all hope is not in the hospital by
now. Each boy had in his eyes the same intrepid look that the mother
has--one can tell that they made good soldiers. Knowing how busy farm
folk are, we reluctantly took our leave after seeing all these
interesting things and, as we swung out into the country lane, we looked
back and there stood the mother waving and smiling--the very best
soldier of them all."
* * * * *
Can you not see how very simple it all was--how very human, too? As you
saw in one of the earlier chapters of this book, a fairly formal and
elaborate plan of organization had been laid out for all this work; but,
perhaps because war after all, is hardly more than a series of vast
emergencies, the American Red Cross searchers, either in the field or in
the hospitals, could hardly confine themselves to any mere routine of
clerical organization or work in the great task that was thrust upon
them. The unexpected was forever upon them.
As a single instance of this take the time when, in the Verdun sector
and in the hottest days of fighting that the American Army found there,
so many demands were made upon our Red Cross by the officers and men of
the A. E. F. for the purchase of necessities in Paris that a definite
shopping service quite naturally evolved itself out of the situation.
The man who initiated that service raced a motor car from Verdun to the
Paris headquarters in order to secure the materials necessary for its
inauguration. For when the American Red Cross made up its mind to do a
thing, it did it--and pretty quickly too.
So it went--a service complicatedly simple, if I may so express it. For,
despite its own batteries of typewriters and card indexes, there was, at
almost all times, that modicum of human sympathy that tempered the
coldness of mere system and glorified what might otherwise have been a
mere job of mechanical routine into a tremendously human and tender
thing. The men and girls of the Home Communication Service had a task of
real worth. Of a truth it was social service--of the most delicate
nature. It included at all times not only the study of the physical
needs of the soldier or sailor, but also at many times that of his
mental needs as well. In reality, it became a large part of the scheme
of preserving and enlarging the morale of the A. E. F. Every time a
soldier was freed of endless, nagging worry, he became a better soldier
and so just that much more strength was added to the growing certainty
of victory.