Part 6 (1/2)
CHAPTER V
THE AMERICAN RED CROSS AS A DEPARTMENT STORE
From the Commissioner in Paris came this cablegram: ”Get us six of the biggest circus tents that you can.”
From the Was.h.i.+ngton headquarters was flashed this reply:
”Tents are on their way.”
For the Red Cross it was all a part of the day's work. When Colonel Harvey D. Gibson, our Red Cross Commissioner in France in the latter half of 1918, found that the absolute limit for storage supplies in and around Paris had been reached and pa.s.sed and that it would be several weeks at least before more additional warehouses could be constructed, his practical mind went at once to circus tents to meet the emergency.
They would be rain-proof, sun-proof, frost-proof as well. And so, turning to the cable, he ordered the tents, as casually as he might have asked for 10,000 sweaters or 100,000 surgical dressings, and received them as he might have received the sweaters or the dressings, without an hour of unnecessary delay.
When we first came to consider the work of the Transportation Department of the American Red Cross in France, I spoke of the women who, with patriotic zeal directing both their minds and their deft, quick fingers, turned out the sweaters, the wristlets, the knitted helmets by not merely the tens, but by the hundreds of thousands. Their capacity--the united capacity of a land of some 20,000,000 adult women workers--was vast. But the necessity was even more vast. And while the proportion of these creature comforts which were handmade and individual grew to great size, there also were vast quant.i.ties of these things and others which were purchased from manufacturers and in quant.i.ties which not only compelled these very manufacturers to turn over the entire output of their plants for many months but also compelled them to add to their factory capacity. And, of course, there were many things which the wives and mothers and sisters and sweethearts of America, with all their loving desires and keen capabilities, could not produce. Which meant that our Red Cross in France must have purchasing and warehousing functions--like big business of almost every other sort.
It would have been foolish and worse than foolish to have even attempted the problem without organization. That was the difficulty of the well-meaning American relief work which was launched upon French soil before the coming of our Red Cross. In the early days of the war the French ports were littered with boxes of relief supplies addressed ”The American Emba.s.sy,” ”American Chamber of Commerce,” ”French Army,” and just ”France.” People did so want to help, and so, in our impulsive American way, sent along things without sending any notice whatsoever as to whom they were to go. One of the big reasons for the foundation of the American Relief Clearing House was to combat this very tendency. As far back as October, 1914, it began by organizing French and American committees, obtaining freedom of customs for relief goods, free sea and rail freights, and finally, by organizing the War Relief Clearing House in New York, as a complementary committee for systematic collection and forwarding.
Eventually the Clearing House brought American donors to the point where they would actually mark the contents of boxes, but there was always great waste in not pa.s.sing upon the serviceability of s.h.i.+pments until they had reached Paris and great delay in having to pack and re-sort them there. The secondhand material which came was of fair quality, but not sufficient in quant.i.ty. And while people here in the United States were always willing to contribute money generously they seemed disinclined to have goods bought outside this country. The result was that the American Relief Clearing House in Paris never had a sufficient acc.u.mulation against emergency. At the time of the first great offensive against Verdun, in the spring of 1916, it was compelled to send out all of the supplies which it held and to appeal to the United States for more clothes, food, and the like, which meant all of a six weeks' delay.
Such a state of things could not exist in our Red Cross work there. And yet the problem in this very phase that confronted Major Murphy and his party was tremendous. The Compagnie Generale Transatlantique had just notified the Clearing House that it could no longer afford to supply free s.p.a.ce; and in view of the subsequent s.h.i.+pping situation, the heavy torpedoing, and the army demand for tonnage, it is considered not improbable that had the Clearing House continued it would have had to give up handling anything except money. Yet in spite of obstacles, the Red Cross would have to purchase and store supplies--not in the quant.i.ties that the Clearing House had purchased and stored them, but in far, far greater number.
Major Murphy met the problem squarely, as was his way. He cabled to America, and seven men were sent to him late in September, 1917. They were men taken from various corners of the country, but all of them expert in the task allotted to them. At once they began the work of coordinating the vast problem of American Red Cross purchase and supply.
There was large need for them; for, while at the very beginning of our Red Cross work over there, while its problem, because of its vastness and its novelty, was still quite largely a question of guesswork, purchases were made for each department as it requisitioned material or was stored for them individually. Such a method was quickly outgrown, and was bound to be succeeded by a far better one, which, as we shall see presently, finally did come to pa.s.s.
From the beginning the main warehouses, like the main garages, of the American Red Cross in France have been located in the headquarters city of Paris. Providing these facilities was one of the first tasks that confronted Major Murphy. And to understand the prompt.i.tude with which he met this task understand, if you will, that by the following September he already had six warehouses in Paris, organized with a capacity to handle 10,000 tons of supplies a month, which might quickly be increased to 60,000 tons a month. As a matter of fact, before Armistice Day was reached there were fourteen of these warehouses and they actually were handling some 10,000,000 tons a month.
The nucleus of this warehouse organization was again the American Relief Clearing House. It gave the first three of the store buildings. The next three were obtained by Major Murphy's organization, with the typical keenness of American business men who, having donated their services and their abilities to our great adventure overseas, purposed to make those services and abilities work to their highest possibilities.
Warehouses to be effective and efficient must have not only good locations, but appropriate railroad connections and modern equipment for handling their supplies; this is primary. The French, themselves, long since have recognized it as such. And because the freight terminal tracks at Paris are so abundant and so generally well planned there were plenty of warehouses there, if one could but find them. To find them was not so hard a task, even during the war, if one but had the time. There was the rub. The Red Cross did not have the time; there was not a day, not an hour, to be wasted. It needed storage s.p.a.ce at once--s.h.i.+ps with hundreds and thousands of tons of Red Cross relief supplies already were at the docks of French ports. More were on their way across the Atlantic. s.p.a.ce to store these cargoes must be found--and found immediately. By October 1, 1917, our Red Cross had twenty-one storage centers in France, giving it 5,000,000 cubic feet of s.p.a.ce as against but 50,000 three months earlier. The largest unit was a sugar warehouse in the wholesale center of Paris, a five-story stone structure with twelve hoists, two railroad tracks on the outside, and two within.
These facilities cost money, of course. And that in some instances they cost more money because time was a large factor in the question can hardly be denied. Yet economy was practiced as well as speed. This is record fact. Our Red Cross in France did not permit itself to become a waster; even in emergencies which called for a saving of time--no matter at what expense--it carefully watched the outgoing of dollars.
When, for instance, it sought to obtain one of the largest of its needed Parisian warehouses--a really huge structure with 2,500,000 cubic feet of storage s.p.a.ce and served by two railroad tracks thrust into its very heart--it tried to drive a good Yankee bargain. The place had been found after a day of seemingly hopeless and heartless search. Its owner was located and the rental cost discussed briefly. The owner wanted ninety centimes (approximately seventeen cents) a square meter. The Red Cross agents demurred. They counter-offered with eighty centimes. The owner accepted.
”Shake!” said the chief of the party. They clasped hands.
”Never mind the formal papers now,” laughed our Yankee Red Cross bargainer, ”we'll take each other's word. I haven't a minute to lose, as we must have the place ready for supplies within forty-eight hours.”
”Impossible!” cried the French landlord. He knew the real condition of the place, which had been unused and unrepaired for months.
Yet within forty-eight hours the Red Cross supplies from overseas actually were being moved in. Immediately upon closing the deal, the Americans had sought labor. It was not to be found, they were told; all the surplus labor of Paris being in the trenches or else engaged in some work vital to the war's operations.
”Why not use _permissionnaires_?” some one suggested.
The hint was a good one. It so happened that the French Government already had consented to the employment of this very sort of labor by the American Red Cross. So down to the larger railroad stations of Paris hurried our Red Cross agents. Soldiers back from the trenches were given the opportunity to earn a few francs--and gladly accepted it. Within a few hours a crew of more than a hundred men had been gathered and the work of making the newly acquired property ready to receive supplies begun. And under American supervision it was completed--within the allotted two days.
This experience was repeated a few weeks later when the American Red Cross took over the old stables of the Compagnie Generale des Pet.i.tes Voitures in the Rue Chemin du Vert as still another warehouse and had to clean and make them fit for supplies--all within a mere ten days. The Compagnie Generale des Pet.i.tes Voitures was an ancient Parisian inst.i.tution. It operated--of all the vehicles perhaps the most distinctive upon the streets of the great French capital--the little victoria-like _fiacre_, drawn by a wise and ancient horse with a bell about its neck. The war had drained the city of most of its horses--they were in the French artillery--and for a long time before the coming of our Red Cross the great stables in the Rue Chemin du Vert had been idle; in fact for the first time in more than half a century.
In taking over the place the officers of the American Red Cross were not blind to the fact that they were getting nothing more than a great, rambling, two-story stable and its yards, which were just as they had been left when a thousand horses had been led forth from their stalls.