Part 2 (1/2)

Before Major Murphy, the first American Red Cross Commissioner to France, had proceeded very far with his work, he found that he would have further to divide and subdivide its activities. In connection with his deputy, Major James H. Perkins, he held several conferences with General Pers.h.i.+ng who, day by day, was becoming better acquainted with the situation and the opportunities it offered. General Pers.h.i.+ng stated quite frankly that in all probability it would be many months before his army would be an effective fighting force and that the Red Cross must, during those months, carry the American flag in Europe.

The first organization scheme comprehended several American commissions for the various countries in the zones of military activities, each independent of the other, but all in turn reporting to the Commissioner for Europe at Paris, who was responsible only to the War Council of the Red Cross at Was.h.i.+ngton. As a matter of actual and chronological fact the Commission to Belgium antedated the coming of the first Red Cross party to France. Long before even that stormy and historic April evening when the United States formally declared war upon the Kaiser and all the things for which the Kaiser stood, the American Red Cross was in Europe, helping to feed and clothe and comfort ravished Belgium. And its Commissioner ranked only second in importance to Herbert C. Hoover, who was in entire charge of the situation for America.

So, with its activities increasing, the Red Cross further divided its work. In the fall of 1917, Major Perkins became Commissioner for France and a short time afterwards separate commissioners were appointed for Great Britain, for Italy, for Switzerland, for Belgium, and for other countries. And these in turn appointed their own individual organizations, complete structures erected for business efficiency and to get a big job done quickly and well.

All this sounds simple, but it was not; for it is one thing to accomplish business organization, and accomplish it quickly, here at home in a land which has barely been touched by the ravages of war and not at all by invasion, and quite another to set up such a structure in a land sh.e.l.l-shocked and nerve-racked and man-crippled by four years of war and actual invasion. Poor France! The war smote hard upon her. By the time that the Murphy Commission reached her sh.o.r.es she had even abandoned the smiling mask which she had tried to carry through the earliest months of the conflict. In Paris the streets were deserted. By day one might see an omnibus, or might not. Occasionally an ancient taxi carriage drawn by an ancient horse, too decrepit for service of any sort at the front, might be encountered. By night the scene was dismal indeed. Few street lights were burning--there was a great scarcity of coal and street lights meant danger from above, from the marauding raids of the great airs.h.i.+ps of the _boche_. The few street lamps that were kept alight as a matter of safety and great necessity had their globes smeared with thick blue paint and were but faint points of light against the deep blackness of the night. So that when the glad day of armistice finally came and the street lights blazed forth again--if not in their old-time brilliancy at least in a comparative one--Paris referred to the hour as the one of her ”unbluing.”

The difficulties of obtaining materials, even such simple office materials as books and blanks and paper, to say nothing of typewriters and the more complicated paraphernalia, the problem of service of every sort--clerical, stenographic, telephone, repair--can easily be imagined.

There were times when to an ordinary business man they would have seemed insurmountable; but the Red Cross is not an ordinary business man. It moves under inspiration--inspiration and the need of the moment. And so it does not long permit difficulties, either usual or abnormal, to block its path.

To reduce all of this to organization was a distinct and difficult problem. Our Red Cross which had jumped into the French civilian and military situation while it awaited the coming of the first troops from America, first organized in practically the only way that it was possible for it to organize. It found men in big jobs--some of those very activities that we found more or less correlated in the work of the American Relief Clearing House--and told other men to take other big jobs and work them out in their own way.

This was far from ideal organization, of course. It meant much duplication and overlapping of functional work--in purchasing, in transportation, personnel, and the like. But it was the only sort of organization that was possible at first, and for a considerable time afterward. By the fall of 1917, when Commissioner Perkins had settled down to the details of his big new job and was ready to take up the reorganization of the Red Cross activities in France, there came the great drive of the Austrians and the Germans against the Italian front, with the direct result that the American Red Cross organization in Paris was called upon to bend every effort toward rus.h.i.+ng whole trainloads of workers and supplies southward toward Italy. And in the spring of 1918 came the last great drive of the Germans in France--that supreme hour when disaster hung in the very air and the fate of the democracy of the world wavered.

Yet the first half of 1918 was not entirely spun into history before the Red Cross in France was beginning its reorganization. The third Commissioner for France, Harvey D. Gibson, had been appointed and by June was on his way to Paris. One of the first of the huge tasks that awaited him--for it then seemed as if the war was to last for years instead of but four or five months longer--was this very problem of reorganization. Without delay he set upon it, and with the help of his Deputy Commissioner and a.s.sistant, George Murnane, evolved an entirely new plan, which gave far larger opportunities for the development of the American Red Cross in France and was, in fact, so simple and so logical in its workings as to become the permanent scheme of organization.

Let me emphasize and reiterate: the old plan, with its two great separate departments of military and civilian affairs, was not only not essentially a bad plan, but it was the only plan possible with the conditions of great stress and strain under which our Red Cross began its operations in France. But it was quickly outgrown. It did not and could not measure up to the real necessities of the situation.

”The double program of the Red Cross, under two large departments of military and civilian affairs,” wrote Elizabeth s.h.i.+pley Sergeant, of this older plan in _The New Republic_, ”... followed a good Red Cross tradition and seemed to be based on a genuine separation of the problems involved. The great crisis in France a year ago was a civilian crisis, and the distinguished American business men who directed the Red Cross were wise enough to a.s.sociate with themselves specialists in social problems and to give them a free hand. The chiefs of the military bureau, some of whom, like the doctors, were also specialists, had no less a free hand. Indeed the situation was so complex and the necessities were so immediate that every bureau chief and every field delegate was practically told to go ahead and do his utmost. The result was great vitality, great enthusiasm, genuine accomplishment....”

In the twelve months that the American Red Cross had been established in France its work had multiplied many, many times; in but six months the size of the American Army there had quadrupled, and the end was by no means in sight. To plan an organization that would measure up to meet such vast growth and meet it adequately was no child's play.

To begin with, he decided that the great functional workings, such as those of which we have just spoken--transportation, supplies, personnel, construction, and the like--should be centralized in Paris and the great duplications and overlappings of the old system avoided. This, in turn, thrust far too great responsibilities and far too much detail upon those same Paris headquarters. So in turn he took from it its vast overload and divided the organization into nine zones, of which more in good time. If these zone organizations had been situated in the United States instead of in France it is quite possible that the functional activities might have been very largely concentrated at their several headquarters.

For in our own land such things as personnel, transportation, supplies, and construction could be readily obtained at headquarters points--Boston, New York, Chicago, New Orleans, or San Francisco, for instance. In France they not only were not readily obtainable, but rarely obtainable at any cost or any trouble. Think of the difficulties of obtaining either motor trucks or canteen workers which confronted the zone manager at Neufchateau, just back of the big front line! It was well that the plan of organization under which he worked provided definitely he was to requisition Paris for such supplies--human or material--and that in turn Paris might draw upon the great resources of America.

Such in brief was the plan. It was simplicity itself; yet was builded to measure to the necessities of the situation. And so it did measure--to the necessities of the situation. Time and experience proved that; also they proved the value of central bureaus, but did not segregate them as before under the separate headings of Military and Civilian. Instead there proved necessary seven ”functional departments”--to be responsible for plans and programs and instructions for carrying on the work. The directors of those seven departments served as a.s.sistants to the administrative head of the American Red Cross, the Commissioner to France. Considering him as the commander in chief and his seven directors as his staff officers, the Red Cross in France began to take on a distinctly military form.

The seven departments were as follows:

Department of Requirements: Bureau of Supplies; Transportation; Personnel; Permits and Pa.s.ses; Construction; Manufacture.

Medical and Surgical Department: Bureau of Hospital Administration; Tuberculosis and Public Health; Children's Bureau; Reeducation and Reconstruction; Nurses.

Medical Research and Intelligence Department.

Department of Army and Navy Service: Bureau of Canteens; Home and Hospital Service; Outpost Service; Army Field Service.

Department of General Relief: Bureau of Refugees; Soldiers'

Families; War Orphans; Agriculture.

Department of French Hospitals.

Department of Public Information.

So much for the general, or staff, organization. It covered, of course, all France. Yet for practical operations France was divided into nine great geographical zones which in turn were subdivided into districts.