Part 4 (2/2)
The other large garage and repair shop of the Red Cross transportation department in Paris is situated at No. 79 Rue Tangier, close to the plants in Neuilly, yet just within the fortifications. It was the first garage to be chosen, and one easily can see why Osborne and his fellows rejoiced over its selection; for it is one of the most modern and seemingly one of the most efficient buildings that I have seen in Paris--three stories in height and solidly framed in reenforced concrete. It houses each night some two hundred touring cars and has complete shops for the maintenance and repair of this great squadron of automobiles.
Up to the present moment I have only touched upon the use of touring cars for the American Red Cross in France. Yet I should like to venture the prediction that without these cars, the greater part of them of the simplest sort, our work over there would have lost from thirty to forty per cent of its effectiveness. It is useless to talk of train service in a land where pa.s.senger train service has been reduced to a minimum and then a considerable distance beyond. Remember that the few pa.s.senger trains that remain upon the French railways are fearfully and almost indecently crowded. Folk stand in their corridors for three hundred or four hundred miles at a time. For a Red Cross worker bound from point to point to be forced to use these trains constantly in the course of his or her work is not only a great tax upon the endurance but a fearful waste of time.
The same conditions which exist in the outer country are reflected in Paris. The subway, the omnibus, and the trolley systems of the city all but completely broke down in the final years of the war when man power depletion was at its very worst. The conditions of overcrowding upon these facilities at almost any hour were worse even than the overcrowding upon the transit lines in our metropolitan cities in the heaviest of their rush hours. To gain a real efficiency, therefore, it became absolutely necessary many times to transport Red Cross workers, when on business bent, in touring cars. And because there were at the height of the work some six thousand of these folk--five thousand in Paris alone--it became necessary to engage the services of a whole fleet of touring cars. Some seventy touring cars were a.s.signed to the Paris district. With very few exceptions these were operated on a strictly taxicab basis, with the Red Cross headquarters in the Hotel Regina as an operating center. Here, at the door, sat a chief dispatcher, who upon presentation of a properly filled order, a.s.signed a car; and a.s.signed it and its fellows in the precise order in which they arrived at that central station. It was all simple and efficient and worked extremely well. In the course of an average day the chief dispatcher at the Regina handled from eighty to one hundred requests, for runs lasting from twenty minutes to an entire day.
In the latter part of January, 1919, I saw this Transportation Department bending to an emergency, and bending to it in a very typical American fas.h.i.+on. A strike of the subway employees spreading in part to those of the omnibuses and trolley lines, had all but completely crippled the badly broken-down transportation of the city. And not only was the Red Cross being greatly hampered, but the personnel was being put to inconvenience and discomfort that was not at all compatible with the Red Cross idea of proper treatment of its workers.
In this emergency the transportation department jumped in. It moved up to the front door of the Regina on the first night of the strike a whole brigade of heavy camions and a squad of omnibuses such as it uses in transferring officers and men on leave between the railroad terminals and its various hotels in Paris. These were quickly but carefully a.s.signed to definite routes which corresponded in a fas.h.i.+on to those of the more important subway routes. Huge legible placards announced the destination of each of the buses or trucks--Porte Maillot, Denfert-Rochereau, Place de la Bastille--as the various instances might be. Definite announcement was made of the hours at which these trucks would return on the following morning to bring the workers back again.
The strike was over in two days, but if it had lasted two weeks it would have meant little difference to the Red Cross workers. Their organization had shown itself capable of taking full care of them.
We have drifted away, mentally at least, from the big touring-car garage at No. 79 Rue Langier. Yet before we get entirely away from it we will find that it pays us well to see its shops; great, complete affairs situated in a long wing which runs at right angles to the main structure, and which employ at almost all times from eighty to one hundred mechanics--blacksmiths, machinists, painters, even carpenters, among them. French and American workmen are employed together, but never in the same squad. That would be an achievement not easy of accomplishment.
”How do the two kinds of workmen mix?” we ask the young Red Cross captain in charge of the garage.
[Ill.u.s.tration: CHOW The rolling kitchens, builded on trailers to motor trucks, brought hot drinks and food right up to the men in action]
He does not hesitate in his answer.
”The French are the more thorough workmen. They are slower, but their output is finer. The American gains the point more quickly and goes at it to achieve his end in a more direct fas.h.i.+on. Each is good in his own way. And each realizes the strong points of the other.”
The Rue Langier garage keeps complete books for all four of the Paris Red Cross garages. We have seen three of them already, and inasmuch as the lunch hour approaches will prefer visiting the motor camp at Parc du Prince, just outside the fortifications and close to the Bois de Boulogne, used chiefly as an overflow park during the stiffest days of Red Cross activities. But in addition to this it does other things, not the least of them the maintenance of the transportation department's own post-office facilities and a clubroom for the use of the chauffeurs when they are off duty, not a very frequent occurrence.
”Do the chauffeurs ever play poker?” we ask Captain Conroy.
He a.s.sures us that they do not.
Also poker is supposedly interdicted at the big hotel which Major Osborne has established for the officers and men of his department out in Neuilly, just around the corner from Buffalo Park. There are plenty of other amus.e.m.e.nts to be found, however--books, games, cigars, cigarettes, a phonograph, and a remarkable cage of rare Oriental birds which, with pretty good success, at times try to silence the phonograph.
It is to this hotel that we find our way for lunch and, without hesitation, p.r.o.nounce our meal the best we have had in Paris, which has more than a local reputation as a capital of good eating. We find an omelet souffle--the first to greet us in the town--roast turkey, mashed potatoes, Brussels sprouts, an American apple pie, bread and b.u.t.ter, and coffee with real creamy milk. And all for three francs! It is unbelievable. Our hotel charges us six francs for one pear--and an uncooked pear at that!
This remarkable hotel, which houses about two hundred of the transportation department workers, was one of Major Osborne's pet projects. It more than earned its modest cost in the promotion of the morale, and hence the efficiency, of his department. To its mess table, the major himself often came. Sometimes he brought his aid, Captain Hayes, out with him. Both confessed to a liking for roast turkey and omelet souffle. At the officers' table there was almost certain to be Captain Harry Taintor, a distinguished New York horseman, then at Buffalo Park and gaining experience in a distinctly different form of highway transportation; Captain M. D. Brown, also of Buffalo Park; Captain F. D. Ford, over from Rue Louis Blanc, and Captain Conroy from Rue Langier. These men and many others came to the hotel, and among them not to be forgotten a certain splendid physician who left a good practice up in Minnesota somewhere to come to Paris and look after the health and strength of the transportation-department personnel. More than sixty years young, no youngster in his twenties gave more freely or more unselfishly than this man. He was always at the service of his fellows in the Neuilly hotel.
His service was typical of the entire remarkable morale organization of the transportation department. It was the same sort of service that Miss Robinson, the capable manager of the hotel, forever was rendering, that the little supply shop across the street gave, that one found here and there everywhere within the department; a morale organization so varied and so complete that it might well stand for the entire American Red Cross organization in France, and yet served but one of the multifold activities of that organization.
Before we have quite left the more purely mechanical phases of the transportation department--and lack of s.p.a.ce or time will forbid my showing you the other important garage facilities in the outlying cities and towns of France--I want to call your attention to one important part of the problem, the supplying of fuel for the many hundreds of trucks and cars which the Red Cross operates throughout the French republic.
You may have noticed at Buffalo Park one or two of the huge 7,500-gallon trailer trucks used to bring gasoline from the United States Army oil station at Juilly, outside of Paris, to the Red Cross garages within the city.
In the months of its greatest activities, the Red Cross in France used an average of 25,000 gallons of gasoline. To have secured and transported this great quant.i.ty of oil even in normal, peaceful years would have been a real problem. To secure it, to say nothing of transporting it, in the hard years toward the end of the war, was a surpa.s.sing problem; for gasoline seemingly was the most precious of all the precious things in France. If you did not believe it, all you had to do was to ask a Paris taxi driver--even after taxis had become fairly plentiful once again upon the streets of the capital--to take you to distant Montmartre or Montparna.s.se--and then hear him curse Fate and lack of ”essence” in his fuel reservoirs.
But the Red Cross, thanks to the French and American army authorities as well as to its own energies, did get the ”essence.” How it did it at times is a secret that only Osborne knows. And he probably never will tell.
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