Chapter VII: The Red Cross on the Field of Honor (2)

During the Château-Thierry drive nine of these portable showers were set up by our Red Cross, and in one week, seven thousand men were brought back from the firing line, bathed, given clean clothes, and sent back refreshed mentally and morally as well as physically. Sixty men an hour could easily be bathed in one of these plants, and two gallons of water were allowed to each man.

The delouser, as the army quickly came to know the sterilizing plant, almost always accompanied the portable shower upon its travels. It, too, was a simple contraption; a great cylinder, into which the dirty clothing was tightly crammed until it could hold not one ounce more, and live steam poured in, under a pressure of from sixty to one hundred and fifteen pounds to the square inch. This was sufficient to kill all the vermin; and, in some cases, the bacteria as well, although this last was not guaranteed. The delouser, with a capacity of fifty suits a day, could almost keep pace with one of the shower baths, and both could be set up or taken down in ten minutes.

A shower bath mounted on a Ford was one of the best friends of the Eighty-first Division as it played its big part in the defeat of the Hun. It made its first appearance in September, when the Division was stationed in the Vosges, with headquarters at St. Dié. After a few hard days in the trenches the men would return to their headquarters, well to the rear of the lines, and beg for some sort of bathing facilities--and these, apparently, were not to be found.

Captain Richard A. Bullock was our Red Cross man with the Eighty-first. It bothered him that the men of his Division could not have so simple a comfort when they asked for it and needed it so much. He determined to try and solve the problem, and so found his way down to the big American Red Cross warehouse and there acquired one of the portable field equipments such as I have just described. It was a comparatively easy trick to mount the device on a Ford, after which Bullock paraded the entire outfit up and down the lines of the Eighty-first and as close to the front-line trenches as fires were ever permitted. In a mighty short time he could get the bath in order and showering merrily, and when all the men who wanted to bathe had been accommodated the contraption would move on.

* * * * *

For the camps where larger numbers of men must be bathed, the Red Cross, through its Mechanical Equipment Service of its Army and Navy Department, provided even larger facilities, although still of standardized size and pattern. This was known as the pavilion bath and disinfecting plant and could easily take care of 150 an hour. Where the sterilization of their clothing was not necessary this number was very greatly increased. In fact at one time a record was made in one of the large field camps of bathing 608 men in two hours through a single one of these plants. In another, which was in operation at the Third Aviation Center, 3,626 men bathed in one week in a total of twenty-eight operating hours and some 4,200 men in the second week. It was estimated that the plants could, if necessary, be operated a full twenty-four hours a day; but even on the part-time basis it was an economical comfort. It required the services of a sergeant and three privates--whose time cost nothing whatsoever--to operate it, and, based on fuel costs, each man bathed at an expense, to the Red Cross, of less than one cent.

They were handled with military simplicity and expedition. The men, told off into details, entered the first room--the entire outfit was housed in a standardized Red Cross tent of khaki--where they removed their clothes and placed them within the sterilizer, then went direct into the bath. While they bathed their garments were cleansed, sterilized, and dried, and the two functions were so synchronized that the clothes were ready as quickly as the men--and the entire process completed within the half hour.

* * * * *

Return, if you will, for a final minute with Gibson of the Red Cross, up with the Thirty-third Division at the front. I find a final entry in his diary record of his activities nearly three weeks after the signing of the armistice; to be exact, on November 29. It runs after this fashion:

"A couple of days before Thanksgiving I accompanied the Division Graves Registration Officer to the woods north of Verdun where our Division had been heavily engaged during the month of October and where we had quite a list of missing. The fighting had been intense through these woods, portions of them changing hands five or six times in the course of three weeks, and naturally it was impossible to keep careful track of all the brave fellows who fell. Delving into the earth, uncovering rotten corpses, and searching for proper marks of identity is as gruesome and as horrible a job as could be imagined and I must confess my nerve was a bit shattered at the close of the second day...."

Yet not all the work of the Division men of the Red Cross was gruesome and horrible. The war had its humors as well as tragedies, major and minor. For instance, how about the job of the Red Cross man with the Seventy-seventh Division, when he found himself asked to become stage manager for a troupe of seventeen girls--real girls, mind you, none of them the make-believe thing with bass voices and flat feet. He, like many of his fellows, found that the hardest part of his job came after the signing of the armistice, when time hung heavy indeed upon the hands of the doughboys and to keep them occupied was a task worthy of the best thoughts of men--and angels. The mere job of serving coffee and chocolate from the canteens, establishing reading rooms, and distributing cigarettes, magazines, and newspapers ceased to be sufficient. The boys were fairly "fed up" with these things. And with the continued rain and mud and damp of Manonville getting upon the nerves of the Seventh, they demanded something new and mighty good in the way of amusement.

Captain Biernatzki was the Red Cross man with the Division. He quickly sensed the situation, and, taking his little motor car, drove to Toul not far distant, and, as you already know, a Red Cross center of no small importance. He began at once signing up dramatic talent among the American Red Cross girls there in the canteens and the hospitals, and after securing motor transportation for the entire troupe, bore it north to his own Division. The officers of the Seventh were in on the plan and heartily supported it, and as an earnest of their support had the visiting ladies of the Red Cross Road Company No. 1 lunch at a special and wonderful mess on the occasion of their Thespian début.

"One of the girls was a wonderful singer," said Biernatzki afterward in describing the incident. "Another proved a marvel in handling the men, making them sing and keeping them laughing, and there were one or two others, too, who did their bit in a most creditable manner. One of our troupe had brought a clothes basket full of fudge which was thrown out to a forest of waving palms, while the remaining members of the party were sufficiently decorative and charming to put the finishing touches to the affair by their mere presence."

It seems a far cry from the Red Cross extending succor to a man wounded on the field of battle toward staging a show in a big rest camp, yet I am not sure that the last, in its way, did not do its part toward the winning of the war quite as much as the first.

Of course our American Red Cross was not primarily represented in canteen work in the actual zones of fighting; this function, by the ruling of the United States Army and the War Department, you will perhaps remember, was given almost entirely to the Young Men's Christian Association and to the Salvation Army. There were, however, a few exceptions to this general rule. For instance, at Colombes-les-Belles, an important aviation station, ten or twelve miles south of Toul, I saw a very complete Red Cross equipment at a field camp which at no time was far removed from the front-line fighting. It consisted of a canteen, which served as high as from two thousand to three thousand men a day, and even as late as March, 1919, was still serving from seven to eight hundred; an officers' club, to which was attached an officers' mess, feeding some seventy men a day, and a billeting barracks for the nine Red Cross women stationed at the place. There also was a huge hangar which, with a good floor and appropriate decorations, had been transformed into a corking amusement center. This last was not under the direct charge of the American Red Cross, yet our Red Cross girls were the chief factors in making it go. They danced there night after night with our boys. In fact, in order to have sufficient partners, it was necessary to scour the country for twenty miles roundabout with motor cars and bring in all the Red Cross and Y. M. C. A. girls that were available. It seems that it really is part of a Red Cross girl's job to be on her feet eight hours a day and then to dance full ten miles each night.

This Colombes-les-Belles canteen originally had been established in the very heart of the grimy little village, but when the Twenty-eighth (Pennsylvania) Division came to the place on the thirteenth of January, 1919, it took the old canteen structure for division headquarters, but squared the account by building the Red Cross a newer and bigger canteen group in the open field.

"I can't give too much praise to the Red Cross personnel that have been assigned to this particularly isolated spot," the colonel in charge of the flying field told me on the occasion of my visit to it. "I know that the women must have been fearfully lonely out here; but they have never complained. On the contrary, they have given generously and unstintingly of their own time and energies in order that time should not hang heavily upon the hands of the men. The problem of amusement for the aviator is a peculiarly difficult one. He has actually only two or three hours of service each day, and the rest of his waking hours he must be kept ready and fit, mentally as well as physically, for his job, which requires all that a man may possess of nerve and judgment and quick wit. The Red Cross women quickly came to sense this portion of our problem and in helping in its assistance they have been of infinite assistance."

* * * * *

Yet, while service in a field camp such as this at Colombes-les-Belles represents a high degree of fidelity and persistence and, in many, many cases, real courage as well, the real test of high courage for the Red Cross man, as well as for the soldier, came in the trenches or the open fighting, which, in the case of our Yanks, was brought in the final weeks and months of the war to supplant the intrenched lines of the earlier months. Here was a man, a canteen worker for the American Red Cross, who suddenly found it his job to hold the hand of a boy private of a Pennsylvania regiment while the surgeon amputated his arm at the shoulder. War is indeed a grim business. The Red Cross workers in the field saw it in its grimmest phases; but spared themselves many of its worst horrors by virtue of forgetting themselves and their nerves in the one possible way--in hard and unrelenting work, night and day. They found unlimited possibilities for service--now as canteen workers and now as ambulance drivers, again as stretcher bearers, as assistants to the overburdened field surgeons, as couriers or even as staff officers, and fulfilled these possibilities with a quickness, a skill, and a desire that excited the outspoken admiration of the army men who watched them.

* * * * *

I said a good deal at the beginning of this chapter about the Second Division and the work of young Captain Kimball, of Boston, with it. The Second--which was very well known to the home nation across the seas--had an earnest rival in the First, made up almost entirely of seasoned troopers of the Regular Army. And Captain George S. Karr, who was attached to the First, had some real opportunities of seeing the work of the Red Cross in the field, himself.

"It was when our Division was on the Montdidier front and preparations were being made for the American offensive against Cantigny," says Captain Karr. "One of the commanding officers called at the outpost station where I made my headquarters and asked if I could get him three thousand packages of cigarettes, the same number of sticks of chocolate, lemons, and tartaric acid for the wounded who would be coming in within the next few hours. It was necessary to deliver these in Chrepoix, where the outpost was located, within twenty-four hours.

"Lieutenant Bero of the outpost station and I went to the Red Cross headquarters at Beauvais, but found that we would have to get the things from Paris and that that would be practically impossible within the time limit. However, we decided to make a try for it, and so left Beauvais in a small camion at 10:30 o'clock in the evening. At a railroad station on the way we had a collision that did for our camion completely. Fortunately there were no serious injuries. We left the disabled car by the roadside about halfway to Paris and begged a ride on a French truck that happened along. We reached Paris at 4:30 Sunday morning. Red Cross officers had to be aroused and tradesmen routed out--no easy task on a Sunday morning--but we had to have the supplies, and so did it. By 9:30 we had a new camion, already loaded with cigars and cigarettes from the Red Cross warehouse, and lemons and tartaric-acid tablets from the shops of Paris.

"About a quarter of the way back we had trouble with the new camion and had to call for help again. This unpleasant and delaying experience was twice repeated; so that, in fact, the entire load was thrice transferred before it was finally delivered. But--please notice this--the entire camion load of supplies was delivered at Chrepoix--two hours later than the allotted time, to be sure, but still in plenty of time to serve the purpose. Several days later I found two boys in one of the hospitals who told me of their experiences in the Cantigny attack. They spoke of the lemonade and said that they had never before known that lemons and tartaric acid could taste so good to a thirsty man.... I think that our trip was worth while."

In July of that same year, 1918, while serving hot drinks, cigarettes, and sandwiches to the American wounded in the field hospital at Montfontain, Captain Karr was severely wounded in the hip by the explosion of an aërial bomb.

* * * * *

In the space of a single chapter--even of enlarged length such as this--it would be quite impossible to trace serially or chronologically the development of the vast field service of our Red Cross. In fact I doubt whether that could be done well within the confines of a book of any ordinary length. So I have contented myself with showing you the beginnings of this work, back there in the districts of the Somme and the Oise at the beginning of the great German drive and have let the men who knew of that service the best--the men who, themselves, participated in it--tell you of it, largely in their very own words. And so shall close the long chapter with the war-time story of a man who, like Kimball of Boston, is fairly typical of our Red Cross workers in the field.

The name of this valedictorian is Robert B. Kellogg, and he arrived in France--at Bordeaux, like so many of his fellow workers--on the sixteenth day of July, 1918, reporting at Paris upon the following evening. He came at a critical moment. The name of Château-Thierry was again being flashed by cable all around the world; only this time and for the first time there was coupled with it the almost synonymous phrases of "American Army" and "victorious army." Kellogg--he soon after attained the Red Cross rank of captain--was told of the great need of additional help in handling the wounded which already were coming into Paris in increasing numbers from both Château-Thierry and Veaux, and asked if he could get to work at once. There was but one answer to such a request. That very night he went on duty at Dr. Blake's hospital, out in the suburban district of Neuilly, which had been taken over by the American Red Cross some months before, but which now was being used as an emergency evacuation hospital. For be it remembered that those very July days were the crux of the German drive. In those bitter hours it was not known whether Paris, itself, would be spared. The men and women in the French capital hoped for the best, but always feared and anticipated the worst.

For four fearful nights Captain Kellogg worked there in the Neuilly hospital, carrying stretchers, undressing the wounded, taking their histories, and at times even aiding in dressing their wounds. It was a job without much poetry to it. In fact it held many intensely disagreeable phases. But it was, at that, a fairly typical Red Cross job, filled with perplexities and anxieties and long, long hours of hard and peculiarly distasteful labor. Yet of such tasks is the real spirit of Red Cross service born.

Four to the ambulance came the wounded into that haven of Neuilly. Many of them were terribly wounded indeed; and practically none of them had had more attention than hurriedly applied first-aid dressing. But the appalling factor was not alone the seriousness of the wounds, but the mere numbers of the wounded. They came in such numbers that at times during those four eventful July evenings the floors of all the rooms of the hospital--even the hallways and the garage--literally were covered with stretchers. No wonder that the regular personnel of the place, even though steadily increased for some months past, was unable to cope with the crisis. Without the help of Kellogg and eight or nine other emergency helpers from other ranks of the American Red Cross it is quite possible that it would have collapsed entirely.

* * * * *

Captain Kellogg's emergency task at Neuilly ended early in the morning of the twenty-second; but there was no rest or respite in sight for him. That very day a Red Cross captain stopped him at headquarters and asked him if he was free.

"I guess so," grinned Kellogg.

"Then come out to Crépy and help us out," said the other American Red Cross man. "We're in a good deal of a mess there."

"All right," was the reply. "I'm ready whenever you are."

He grinned again. He realized his own predicament. He had not yet been assigned to any definite department; in fact, although he had given up his precious American passport, he had not yet received the equally precious "Red Cross Worker's Card," which was issued to all the war workers in France and which was of infinite value to them in getting about that sentry-infested land. He had no more identification papers than a rabbit and realized that he might easily find himself in a deal of trouble. Yet within the half hour he had packed his small _musette_ and grabbing up two blankets was on his way in an automobile toward the front. He reached Crépy at about six o'clock that evening and reported to Major Brown, of the Red Cross.

"He was called major," says Kellogg, as he describes the incident, "but he wore nothing to indicate his rank and I never did find out just what he was. He left for Paris the following day to get supplies, but he never returned, nor did I hear from him again. There was nothing for us to do that night and absolutely no provision for us. We obtained coffee from a French Army kitchen and slept in a wheat field in the rain, with our sole shelter a bit of canvas tied to the rear of our car."

There may be folk who imagine that war is all organization--certain historians seemingly have done their best to create such an illusion. But the men who have been upon the trench lines and in the fields of open battle know better. They know that even well-organized armies, to say nothing of the Red Cross and other equally well-organized and disciplined auxiliaries, cannot function at the fullness of their mechanical processes in the super-emergency of battle. There it is that individual effort regains its ancient prestige and men are men, rather than the mere human units of a colossal organization. Yet brilliant as individual effort becomes, all organization is rarely lost. And so Kellogg, in the deadening rain of that July night, found the situation at Crépy about as follows: Two American evacuation hospitals--Numbers Five and Thirteen--and a French one, located in the thick woods some four miles distant from the town, which in turn was used as an evacuating point for all of them--this meant that the patients were brought in ambulances from these outlying hospitals to Crépy and there placed on hospital trains, bound for Paris and other base-hospital centers. The theory of such operation is both obvious and good. But in the super-emergency of the third week of July, 1918, theory broke down under practice. The evacuation hospitals in the woods received newly wounded men in such numbers that they were obliged to clear those who had received their first aid dressings with an unprecedented rapidity. And this rapidity was quite too fast for the limited facilities of the hospital trains; which meant congestion and much trouble at the Crépy railhead--which was the precise place where Captain Kellogg of our American Red Cross found himself early in the morning of the twenty-third day of July.

"There was I," continues Kellogg, as he relates the narrative of his personal experiences, "with Brown gone to Paris and no instructions whatsoever left for me. But I didn't need any instructions--not after that first bunch of wounded fellows came up there to the railhead--at just a little before noon. There were perhaps three hundred of them, and while they were waiting for the hospital trains they lay there in the open--and it was raining--their stretchers in long rows, resting on the cinders alongside the railroad tracks. I had secured a supply of cigarettes, sweet chocolate, cookies, and bouillon cubes from a stock left by Brown. I made a soup for the men and, with the help of some of the litter bearers, distributed it and did what else I could for their comfort. When the train came in and it was time to move the wounded upon it, we found that we did not have nearly enough stretcher bearers. So I went into the town and recruited a number of volunteers among the soldiers--including several officers. That night I left my supplies in the office of the French Railway Transport officer in the station and, with a stretcher for a bed, found a place to sleep in what had been left of a bombed house."

Let Captain Kellogg continue to tell his own story. He is doing pretty well with it:

"The next day, Field Hospital No. 120 arrived and set up part of its tents--sufficient to give protection for all patients thereafter who had to wait for the trains. Medical and orderly attention was amply provided after that, but the food supply, even for the officers and personnel of the hospital company, was very limited and the soup that I was able to make from the bouillon cubes proved a blessing.

"For several days the wounded passed through this point at the rate of several hundred a day, and every man received what he wanted from the Red Cross stock available. Hospital trains from other points sometimes stopped at Crépy. When this happened I always boarded them and, with the help of two enlisted men, distributed cigarettes and cookies. On about my fifth day there the number of wounded being evacuated through that railhead and the officers and personnel of its field hospital company were ordered to one of the neighboring evacuation hospitals. Because of the greatly reduced number of workers, our tasks were therefore rendered much harder, even though the number of wounded had been somewhat decreased. Our own comfort was not particularly increased. We moved into a small tent which was fairly habitable, although it was both cold and rainy nearly every day. I remember one night when it rained with such violence that the tent floor became flooded. I awoke to find the stretcher on which I was sleeping an island and myself lying in a pool of water. On two occasions we were bombed at night."

All these days Kellogg was trying to get Red Cross headquarters at Paris on the long-distance telephone. But all France was particularly demoralized those last days of July; and the telephone service, never too good under any circumstances, was gloriously bad. So after several attempts to talk with headquarters and get some sort of instructions and help, he decided that he would have to go there; which was easier said than done. For remember that this Red Cross man had no credentials; in fact, no identification papers of any sort whatsoever. While travel in France in those days, and for many, many days and months thereafter, was rendered particularly difficult and almost impossible by strict regulations which compelled not only the constant display of identification papers but a separate and definite military travel order for each trip upon a railroad train. Which in turn meant that it would be fairly suicidal for Kellogg to attempt to go into Paris by the only logical way open to him--by train. It was more than doubtful if he would have been able to even board one of them. For at every railroad station in France stood blue-coated and unreasoning _poilus_ whose definite authority was backed by the constant display of a grim looking rifle in perfect working condition.

So Kellogg walked to Paris, not every step of the way, for there were times when friendly drivers of camions gave him the bumping pleasure of a short lift. But even these were not frequent. Travel from Crépy to Paris at that particular time happened to be light. Still, after a night at Senlis, in which he slept stretched across a table in a café, he did manage to clamber aboard a truck filled with French soldiers and bound straight for their capital.

* * * * *

One might reasonably have expected an ordinary sort of man to have been discouraged by such an experience, but a good many of our Red Cross men over there were quite far removed from being ordinary men. And so Kellogg, after a few days of routine office work at headquarters, insisted upon his being given an outpost job once again. And soon after was dispatched to the little town of La Ferte upon the Marne, not many miles distant from Château-Thierry. This time he had his working papers; to say nothing of the neat document which told "all men by these presents" that he was a regular second lieutenant of the American Red Cross. His upward progress had begun.

He waited several days at the American Red Cross warehouse at La Ferte, during which time he had the opportunity of studying _boche_ aërial bombardments--at extremely short range. Then he was forwarded to the outpost at Cohan, conducted by Lieutenants Powell and Leighton as partners. I may be pardoned if I interrupt Kellogg's narrative long enough to insert a sentence or two about Powell. In some ways he was the most remarkable of Red Cross men. Handicapped by a deformity, he stood less than four feet and a half high, yet he was absolutely without fear. Hard test showed that. The officers and men of the Twenty-eighth Division with whom he had stood during the acid-test days on the drive at Château-Thierry called him, pertinently and affectionately, "General Suicide."

Cohan stood about five miles back from the front-line trenches and so was under frequent artillery fire. The Red Cross outpost there was in a partly demolished structure, one of the rooms of which had been used as a stall and contained the body of a dead horse which could not be gotten out through the door. It served that same Twenty-eighth Division with whom Powell made so enviable a reputation.

The confusion that had prevailed at Crépy was, happily, missing at Cohan. Powell and Leighton not only had an excellent stock of Red Cross supplies, which were replenished twice a week from the La Ferte warehouse, and a camionette in good order, but they had a systematic and orderly method of distribution. As Kellogg worked with them he studied their methods--it was a schooling of the very best sort for him. And he, seemingly, was an apt scholar. On the twenty-first of August a Red Cross man named Fuller, with supplies bound for the neighboring outposts of Dravigny and Chéry, stopped at Cohan and asked Kellogg to ride on with him. The course of study of "the game" was about completed. Kellogg had been in actual Red Cross service for a full month--which in those days made him a regular veteran. Fuller held a note from his commanding officer which stated that if a driver could be assured the camionette upon which he rode would be assigned to Chéry and Dravigny.

Thus was Red Cross Kellogg's next job set out for him. He had never driven a Ford. But other folks have mastered such a handicap and Kellogg had driven many real automobiles, and so went easily to the new job, with such rapidity and skill that before the next night he was in sole charge of the little camionette and driving it with professional speed over the steel-torn battlefields and roads of the entire Château-Thierry district.

Dravigny and Chéry shocked and fascinated him. At the first of these two towns our Red Cross men in charge were quite comfortably situated. They occupied a house in very fair preservation which was situated in a lovely garden and had large and bright rooms for living and for working. But Kellogg remembers Chéry Chartreuve as a "hell hole."

"I can think of no better words with which to describe it," he says. "Not a building with all four walls and a roof remained in all the town. The débris of fallen walls and discarded military equipment clogged the streets. Refuse and filth were everywhere. The sanitary arrangements--well, there hadn't been any. The odor of dead horses filled the air. Flies? There are no words to describe the awfulness of the flies. Our own artillery--.75's and .155's--surrounded the town in addition to occupying positions at each end of it and in its center. The roar of these guns was continuous, the concussion tremendously nerve-racking, while the presence of this artillery made the village a target for the enemy guns. It was shelled day and night. And during the nights the _boche_ seemed to take an especial delight in filling the town with gas.

"Sleep was almost impossible. We had in one night five gas alarms, in each case the concentration being sufficiently strong to necessitate the gas masks. The dressing station was next to our sleeping quarters. It was covered with gassed and exhausted doughboys who had crept in there in search of shelter. At frequent intervals the ambulances would arrive with fresh loads of wounded. The whistle and explosion of shells was constant. A battery of .155's in our back yard nearly lifted us from our cots each time it was fired. Once I got a dose of gas sufficient to cause the almost complete loss of my voice and a throat trouble that lasted for weeks."

Yet under conditions such as these, if not even worse, Kellogg and his fellows worked--all day and usually until ten or eleven o'clock at night. Their supplies went to the boys in the lines. This was not only ordinarily true, but at Chéry, particularly so. The Seventy-seventh Division had moved in close to the town, and on the twenty-ninth of August, while the Red Cross workers were pausing for a few minutes to catch up a snack of lunch, a shell landed plumb in front of their outpost building. Its fragments entered the doors and windows and perforated several of their food containers. Sugar, coffee, cocoa--all spilled upon the floor.

The room was filled with men--soldiers as well as Red Cross--at the moment. None was hurt. With little interval a second shell came. This time two men who had taken refuge in a shed that formed a portion of the building were killed. There was seemingly better shelter across the street. To it the doughboys began running. Before they were well across the narrow way, the third _boche_ visitor descended. It was a deadly thing indeed. Thirty-eight American lives were its toll. Eleven lay dead where they dropped. The others died before they could reach the hospital, while the escape of the Red Cross men was little short of providential.

The station had to be abandoned at once. The Red Cross moved back to Dravigny in good order, and what was left of miserable Chéry Chartreuve was speedily obliterated by the Germans.

* * * * *

The record of Captain Kellogg's experiences with our Red Cross in France reads like a modern _Pilgrim's Progress_. Our Christian who found himself in khaki was quickly moved across the great checkerboard of war. On one day he was reëstablishing the Chéry outpost at the little town of Mareuil, from which point the Seventy-seventh could still be served, but with far less danger; on the next he was far away from the Seventy-seventh and at the little French town of Breny, at the service, if you please, of the Thirty-second Division, United States Army. The Seventy-seventh had been chiefly composed of New York State boys; they wore the Statue of Liberty as an army insignia upon their uniforms. The Thirty-second came from the Middle West--from Wisconsin and Michigan chiefly. It had been in the lines northwest of Soissons--the only American Division in the sector--and there had coöperated most efficiently with the French. Its regiments were being used there as shock troops to capture the town of Juvigny and territory beyond which seemingly the tired French Army was quite unable to take. They were accomplishing their huge task with typical American brilliancy, but also in the American war fashion of a heavy loss of precious life. Because of the isolation of the Thirty-second from the usual American bases of supply it became peculiarly dependent upon our Red Cross for its tobacco and other creature comforts, responsibility which our Red Cross regarded as real opportunity. In addition to the ordinary comforts it ordered some four thousand newspapers each day from Paris, which were enthusiastically received by the doughboys. And you may be assured that these were not French newspapers. They were those typically Parisian sheets in the English language, the _New York Herald_, the _Chicago Tribune_, and the _London Mail_.

Thereafter and until long weeks after the signing of the armistice Kellogg remained with the Thirty-second, but did not cease his _Pilgrim's Progress_. For the Division moved; here and there and everywhere. For several weeks it was at Vic-sur-Aisne, while Red Cross Kellogg--who by this time was a real Ford expert--was making hot chocolate in a huge cave that once had been an American division headquarters. Then it moved to a new sector, not far from Bar-le-Duc, and Kellogg moved with it. In the meantime he had performed temporary work at Neufchâteau--always an important division headquarters of the American Red Cross--at Bar-le-Duc and at Rosnes; but these jobs were merely stop-gaps--the real task was forever at the front lines. And when, on the twenty-fourth of September, Kellogg came up with his Division at Wally, he was ready for hard fighting once again. So was the Thirty-second. It was moving forward a little each day and in fact was already considered "in reserve" on September 26--the day of the beginning of the great Argonne offensive. Two days later, with a borrowed army truck and an American Red Cross camionette--both filled with supplies to their limit--Kellogg and two of his Red Cross associates moved forward nine miles to the Avecourt Wood and there joined the Sixty-fourth Brigade of the Division. The brigade commander furnished them with an old dugout--which for nearly four years past had formed a part of the French trench system. After their supplies had been dumped into the place there was just room left for the bedding rolls of the Red Cross men, and even these overlapped one another. It rained steadily for several days and the mud upon the floor of the dugout became entirely liquefied. At night water came in through the doorway and trickled in innumerable sprays down from the roof. The men lived in mud knee-deep. Oh, it was some fun being a Red Cross man at the front in those days of actual fighting! But the fun was some distance removed from those popular reports of "the Battle of Paris" which used to come trickling back to America for the edification and joy of the folk who stayed behind. It was prunes and preserves being a Red Cross worker in France in those autumn days of 1918. Only the trouble was that no one ever could find the prunes or the preserves.

On the thirtieth day of September, the Thirty-second moved from the Avecourt Woods to those of Montfaucon and assumed a military position of "support."

"The intervening country had been No Man's Land for four years and the condition of the roads can only be imagined," says Captain Kellogg. "We followed the troops, who left at about eleven o'clock that morning, but were soon caught in that tremendous congestion that existed on all the roads during the first days of the drive. By dark we were still on the road, having progressed less than two miles. We finally became hopelessly stuck, being stalled, and were obliged to remain stuck throughout the night. During the day we had given out many packages of cookies to the tired and hungry men along the road. Many times since the soldiers have spoken to me in appreciation of those cookies. That night was one of the most uncomfortable experiences that I had in France. It was so cold that we could not keep warm. This, coupled with the occasional whine of incoming shells, prevented sleep, although frequently we threw down our bedding rolls at the side of the road and attempted it.

"In the morning we found a number of ambulances among the other stalled vehicles. For more than forty-eight hours they had been on the road with their wounded and neither drivers nor patients had been able to obtain much of anything to eat or drink. We supplied them with cookies and gave them what water we had in our canteens. Two of the wounded had died during the night. Two others were unconscious and another was delirious. The congestion ahead of us on the road that morning seemed as bad as ever. Finally we managed to get out of that road entirely, making a fresh start by a longer but less crowded way. At dusk that first day of October found us still quite a distance from our Division. We spent that night with some Signal Corps men in the cellar of a shell-shocked building in Varennes. The following morning we succeeded in reaching our destination and located ourselves with several enlisted men of the Forty-third Balloon Company in a dugout which until a few days before had been occupied by German officers.

"This place was interesting. Reached by a steep flight of steps, it was sunk fully fifty feet below the surface. It consisted of three rooms and a kitchen, the walls of each nicely boarded and the whole comfortably, if roughly, finished.

"The combat regiments and battalions of our army were all around us in the woods. We continued serving them. On the morning of the third I drove back to Froidos for fresh supplies. Upon my return I found that the troops of our Sixty-fourth Brigade were already on the road, moving toward the town of Véry. We knew what this meant--that in the morning they were going into the front lines and probably over the top. We quickly unloaded cookies and cigarettes from the car and, standing by the roadside in the dark, handed a supply of each to every soldier who passed by.

"The troops went into the lines at Epinonville before daybreak on the morning of the fourth of October. Lieutenant McGinnis of the Red Cross and I arrived there about noon. Never shall I forget it. The battle lines lay just a little way ahead of us. Machine guns still occupied the town which then was under violent bombardment. In fact during the entire three weeks that we made our headquarters at Epinonville there was not a single day or night that the town was not subjected to shell fire.

"Our boys had made a first attack early in the morning of the fourth. All that morning the wounded had been returning--in large numbers. Some of them were brought to regimental dressing stations of the 128th Infantry, but the majority were handled at that of the 127th. It was here that we did most of our work during the next few days. The station was in a sort of dugout, made of boards and builded into a sidehill. In the ditch beside it a sizable salvage pile had materialized already, clothing and bandages--both blood-soaked, rifles, shoes, helmets, mess kits, here and there a hand or a foot. On the ground, lying on stretchers, were a number of wounded men waiting for the ambulances that would take them to the field hospitals. All about were soldiers; slightly wounded, gassed, shell-shocked, or just plain sick or exhausted. Down the road could be seen a bunch of prisoners just captured that morning. On its opposite side lay the bodies of several of our fellows who had just died, while across the fields beyond stretched slow-moving, irregular processions of litter bearers, bringing in their burdens of wounded men.

"Such were the scenes and conditions that greeted us in Epinonville. There was work a-plenty awaiting us, and we lost no time in taking possession of a shack for our outpost of the American Red Cross. We quickly unpacked our supplies and moved into it. McGinnis had a rather formidable job of making some twenty gallons of cocoa, while I, equipped with cookies, cigarettes, and canteens filled with water, did what I could for the wounded in and around the dressing station.

"Late in the afternoon it became necessary for me to return to our dugout in the woods for supplies which we had been unable to bring in on the first trip. So, leaving McGinnis to take care of the dressing stations, I started back, taking with me a load of wounded men for whom no ambulance was available. Our route took us over a dilapidated plank road through the narrow valley between Epinonville and Véry. We had covered perhaps half of this road when Fritz began a bombardment of the valley which lasted fully fifteen minutes. A French artillery outfit was moving ahead of us at a snail's pace and we could not pass it because of the narrowness of the road. Some of the shells were breaking close at hand, showering the car with shrapnel and fragments, but there was no way I could remove the wounded to a place of safety. There was nothing to do but pray for luck and keep going as fast as the slow-moving artillery ahead would permit. Several men within our sight were hit during those fifteen minutes, but fortune favored us. Not one of our men was even scratched and I delivered my load safely at the _triage_ at Véry.

"Arriving at Epinonville late that evening I worked at the dressing station most of the night, serving hot cocoa, cookies, and cigarettes to the wounded and the men who were working for their comfort. During these first days there was hardly any food, and the doctors worked continuously day and night with only such sleep as they could snatch for a few minutes at a time.

"During the sixteen days that the Division was in the front line after we went into Epinonville, our first attention was given to the dressing stations and the wounded. As fast as new stations were opened at farther advanced points, we reached them with our cocoa and cookies. The ordinarily simple task of making cocoa became, under the conditions which we faced, a huge job. We usually made enough at a time to fill our four five-gallon thermos containers and almost always we had to do the work ourselves. Water was always scarce and to get enough of it was a problem. Wood had to be cut and fires made and handled with the utmost caution so that no smoke would show.

"Other conditions aside from the danger that constantly threatened were equally difficult. The weather was awful--cold and rainy, with deep mud everywhere. Eating was an uncertain and precarious proposition. The shack that we called home was--well, you would hesitate to put a dog in it in normal times.

"Our most interesting work generally was done under the cover of darkness. For instance, there came a night when we particularly wanted to reach Company K of our 128th Infantry. One of its cooks offered to go with us as guide, and so, with our car loaded with hot cocoa, cookies, cigarettes, sweet chocolate, and chewing tobacco, we left Epinonville shortly after dusk. A mile or so out we diverged from the road, our route then taking us across the shell-torn fields, with only a faint footpath to follow. Of course no light was possible and a blacker night there never was. Tommy--the company cook--and McGinnis walked immediately in front of the car indicating the course I should take. We continued thus until we had penetrated beyond some of our machine-gun positions. Ahead of us and back of us and all around us shells were bursting. The sing of machine-gun bullets was in the air. Our mission seemed hopeless, but we knew that those boys of Company K had been lying in the shell holes and the shallow dugouts for two long days with little to eat, drink, or smoke. We determined to reach them. Star shells were lighting the fields ahead of us, and finally we dared not proceed farther with the car for fear it would be seen and draw fire. Figuring that we could get a detail of boys to come back for the cans of cocoa and other things, we left the car in the lee of a hill and went ahead on foot, taking with us what we could carry in our pockets and sacks. K Company had shifted its position, however, and we could not locate it. We distributed the stuff we had with us to the soldiers we passed and then returned to the car. Here we sought out the officers of the outfits lying nearest us and gained their permission to let the men--a few at a time--come to the car, where we served them until our stock was exhausted. Most of these men were from the 127th. Some were from a machine-gun battalion. These boys for several days had been dependent upon their 'iron rations.' Mere words cannot express their appreciation of our hot cocoa and other things. I recall that our chewing tobacco made a great hit with them. They could not smoke after dark and welcomed something that would take the place of smoking."

Enough of the incidental detail of the Red Cross worker. I think that you have now gained a fair idea of what his job really was; of not alone the danger that it held for him at all times, but the manifold discomforts, the exposure, the almost unending hours of hard, hard work. Multiply Red Cross Kellogg by Red Cross Jones and Smith and Brown and Robinson--to the extent of several hundreds--and you will begin to have only a faint impression of the magnitude of concerted work done by the men of our American Red Cross in the battlefields of France in those fall and summer months of 1918. A good deal has been written about the Red Cross woman--before you are done with this book I shall have some more things to say about them, myself. A word of praise at least is the due of the Red Cross man. They are not the shirkers or the slackers that some thoughtless folk imagined them--decidedly not. They were men--generally well above the army age of acceptance, even as volunteers--who found that they could not keep out of the immortal fight for the freeing of the liberty of the world.

Take the case of Lieutenant Kellogg's right-hand man--now Captain McGinnis. He was a Coloradian and nearly fifty years of age when the United States entered the World War. He is not a particularly robust man, and yet when we finally did slip into the great conflict, it was this Red Cross McGinnis who recruited an entire company of infantry for the Colorado National Guard and was commissioned a first lieutenant in it. When the National Guard was made a part of the Federal Army, McGinnis was discharged. He was too old, they said.

The man was nearly broken-hearted; but his determination never wavered. He was bound to get into the big fight. If the army would not have him there might perhaps be some other militant organization that would. There was. It was the Red Cross--our own American Red Cross if you please. And what McGinnis, of Colorado, meant to our Red Cross you already have seen.

Multiply the McGinnises as well as the Kelloggs and you begin once again to get the great spirit and power of the Red Cross man. Danger, personal danger? What mattered that to these? They consecrated soul and spirit, and faced danger with a smile or a jest, and forever with the sublime optimism of a youth that will not die, even though hair becomes gray and thin lines seam the countenance. And now and then and again they, too, made the supreme sacrifice. The American Red Cross has its own high-set honor roll.

After the signing of the armistice, Kellogg's beloved Thirty-second Division was one of those chosen for the advance into the Rhineland countries. It had fairly earned this honor. For in those not-to-be-forgotten twenty days of October that it had held a front-line sector, it had gained every objective set for it. Therefore it was relieved from active duty on the twentieth and sent back to the Véry Woods in reserve. But Kellogg and his fellows were not placed "in reserve"--not at that moment, at any rate.

They found "their boys" tired and miserable, living in the mud in "pup tents" and greatly in need of Red Cross attention and assistance. Finally, on the twenty-eighth and under the insistence of their commanding officers, Kellogg and McGinnis went back to Bar-le-Duc for five days of rest. They needed it. There was a Red Cross bathing outfit at Bar-le-Duc, and the two men needed that also. It had been more than six weeks since they had even had an opportunity to bathe.

Armistice Day found the Thirty-second in actual fighting once again and Kellogg and McGinnis with it--by this time one might almost say "of course." It was located in and about Ecurey and kept up the fighting until the fateful eleven o'clock in the morning set for the cessation of hostilities. The Division remained at Ecurey for just a week after the signing of the armistice. Then it began its long hike toward the east, passing through Luxembourg and down to the Moselle at the little village of Wasserbillig, where it arrived on the twenty-ninth day of November.

Kellogg, McGinnis, and some other of our Red Cross men--to say nothing of a big Red Cross truck--kept with it. While it had been assumed by the Paris headquarters of the American Red Cross that it would be impossible to serve the boys on their long march into the occupied area and so no provision was made for the forwarding of comfort supplies, as a matter of actual fact there was a good deal that could be done--and was done.