Part 11 (1/2)
The college graduate in charge of the temporary canteen there who received this request laughed.
”Tell him,” she said, ”that there have been no more than sixteen at any one time.”
But sixteen human units of individual efficiency can move mountains.
Take the Smith girl who drove a Red Cross car through the tangle of war traffic at a crossroads near Roye, while the fighting waged thick around about that little town. She found her Fordette stalled and tangled in several different lines of communication; between ammunition trucks, supply camions, loads of soldiers, batteries--all, like herself, stopped and standing idle and impotent.
The girl sensed the situation in an instant. She must have been a New Yorker and have remembered the jams of traffic that she had seen on Forty-second Street; at Broadway and again at Fifth Avenue. At any rate she acted upon the instant. She descended from the seat of her little car, and, standing there at the crossing of the roads with an American flag in her fingers, directed traffic with the precision and good sense of the skilled city traffic cop. She held up staff cars, directed whole regiments of artillery, shouted orders to convoys, and for several hours kept the important corner from becoming another hopeless tangle of traffic. Her orders were not disputed, either by private or general. All ranks smiled at her, but all ranks saluted and obeyed her orders.
It was in situations such as this that the rare combination of military discipline, the flexibility to permit of human initiative that the Red Cross sought to attain in its inner self, showed itself. The plan of withdrawal which had been carefully mapped out at headquarters was implicitly followed--almost to its last details. Yet the personnel of the organization was both permitted and encouraged to work at its highest efficiency both in evacuating human beings and salvaging the precious supplies. For instance, after that first day of the great retreat, when all the Red Cross workers in the area had reported to their chiefs at Nelse and at Roye--both well to the rear of Ham--they were dispatched to work up and down the entire constantly changing front. Geographically, Soissons was the hub of the wheel on which these emergency Red Cross activities turned so rapidly. They all swung back in good order, each unit, by motor-courier service, keeping in communication with its fellows. Roye was the center of the secondary line of the Red Cross front which for the moment stretched from Amiens in the northwest to Soissons in the southeast. When it was driven from this line the entire Red Cross force in the vicinity retired, still in good order, to a brand-new one, stretching across Amiens, Montdidier, and Noyon. From the small American Red Cross warehouse at this last town, a stock of valuable supplies was quickly evacuated to La.s.signy, a short distance still farther to the rear. Noyon quickly became a center of feverish activity and the focus of Red Cross efforts on the third day of the battle. From it Red Cross cars worked, both day and night, evacuating men and women and goods.
The line held across Montdidier, Noyon, and even La.s.signy for a bare twenty-four hours more; for on the fourth day of the retreat all three had to be abandoned, and new quarters established on a line closer to Paris than any of the others; it pa.s.sed through both Beauvais and Compiegne, where emergency Red Cross headquarters were once again established; but for the last time. This line was destined to be a permanent one. The retreat was slowing down, slowly but very surely halting. And our Red Cross with our Yanks and their Allies were ”digging in.”
The impressions which the great German drive made upon the minds of our workers who fell back before it will remain with them as long as thought and memory cling--the vast conglomeration of men, tired, dirty, unshaven; men and animals and inanimate things, moving quickly, slowly, intermittently, moving not at all, but choking and halting all progress--with the deadly perversity of inanimate things; men not merely tired, dirty and unshaven, but sick and wounded almost unto death, moaning and sobbing under the fearful onslaughts of pain unbearable, sometimes death itself, a blessed relief, and marked by a stop by the roadside, a hurriedly dug grave, prayers, the closing earth, one other soul gone from the millions in order that hundreds of millions of other souls may live in peace and safety. Such traffic, such turmoil, such variety, such blinding, choking dust. Army supply trains, motor trucks, guns, soldiers, civilians, on foot and mounted, of vehicles of every variety conceivable and many unconceivable; motor cars upon which the genius of a Renault or a Ford had been expended; wheelbarrows, baby carriages, sledges, more motor cars, ranging in age from two weeks to fourteen years, dog carts, wagons creaking and groaning behind badly scared mules and worse scared negroes who wondered why they had ever left the corn brake--for this. Such traffic, such life. And then--again and again death, more graves, more prayers, more men's souls poured into the vague unknown.
And in the midst of death, life. Here in this wagon is a haggard-looking woman. The babe which she clasps to her breast is but four hours old; but the woman is a hundred--seemingly. She stretches her long, bare arms out from the flapping curtains at the rear of the Red Cross camionette.
A group of _poilus_, in extremely dirty uniforms, catches her eyes. She shrieks to them in her native French.
”My _poilus_,” she cries, ”you shall return. G.o.d wills it. You shall return--you and my little son,” and falls, sobbing incoherently, into the bottom of the b.u.mping ambulance.
An old woman with her one precious possession saved--a bewhiskered goat--hears her, and crosses herself. A three-ton motor truck falls into a deep ditch and is abandoned, with all of its contents. This is no hour for salvage. The dust from all the traffic grows thicker and thicker.
Yet it is naught with the blinding white dust which arises from this sh.e.l.l--which almost struck into the heart of one of the main lines of traffic. The racket is terrific; yet above it one catches the shrieking cry of the young mother in the camionette. Her reason hangs in the balance. And as the noise subsides a detachment of _poilus_ falls out beside the roadside and begins opening more graves. The _boche's_ aim was quite as good as he might have hoped.
In and out of these streams--this fearful turmoil of traffic, if you please, our Red Cross warped and woofed its fabric of human G.o.dlike love and sympathy. With its headquarters established with a fair degree of permanency both at Compiegne and Beauvais, it increased its attention to the soldiery. It set up a line of canteens and soup kitchens along the roadside all the way from Beauvais, and these served as many as 30,000 men a day with hot drinks, cigarettes, and food of a large variety, and showed a democratic spirit of service in that they gave, without question or without hesitation, to Frenchmen, to Britons, to Italians, and to Americans alike. The men and the girls in the canteens were blind to things, but their ears were ever alert, and they heard only the voices of the tired and the distressed asking for food and drink.
At Compiegne the Red Cross took over the largest hotel, which, like the rest of the town, had been evacuated so hurriedly that parts of a well-cooked meal still remained upon the tables of the great _salle-a-manger_. Instantly it rubbed its magic lamp and transformed the hostelry into a giant warehouse, infirmary, and, for its own workers, a mess hall and barracks. And as the endless convoys rolled by its doors and down into the narrow, twisting, stone-paved streets of Compiegne, these workers stood at the curb opening up case after case of canned foodstuffs and tossed or thrust the cans into the waiting fingers of the half-starved drivers of the trucks and camions.
Individual initiative--that precious a.s.set of every American--had its fullest opportunity those days at Compiegne. It mattered not what a man had been or what he might become; it was what he made of himself that very hour that counted. A minister who had come over from America to do chaplain service for the army bruised his poor unskilled fingers time and time again as he struggled, with the help of a clerk from the Paris offices, with the stout packing cases. Departmental and bureau lines everywhere within the Red Cross had been abolished in order to meet the supreme emergency. Rank melted quickly away before the demand for manual labor. The Red Cross showed the flexibility of its organization, and Compiegne was, in itself, a superb test.
It was down at the railroad station in that same fascinating, mediaeval city of old France that a portable kitchen, hauled out on the great north road up from Paris, with three American business men fresh from their desks in New York, hanging perilously on to its side like volunteer fire laddies of long ago going on old ”Rough and Ready” to a regular whale of a blaze, was set up on the exact spot where one Jeanne d'Arc once had been taken prisoner. Its mission of salvation was far more prosaic; yet, in its own humble way, it too functioned, and functioned extremely well. It served food and hot drinks to more than ten thousand soldiers each day.
The variety of opportunity, of service to be rendered, was hardly less than stupendous. For instance, when word came to Compiegne from Ressons that the French would finally be compelled to evacuate their hospital there and lacked the proper transportation facilities, our Red Cross stepped promptly into the breach and moved out the precious supplies. It did not ask whether or not there were American boys there in the wards of the French hospital--there probably were, the two armies being brigaded together pretty closely at that time; it sought no fine distinctions--in that time, in that emergency, the French were us, we were the French--and so sent its trucks hurrying up to Ressons, equipped with a full complement of workers. And these worked until the retreating Allies had established a third line in the rear of them and the advancing Germans were but two hours away.
All this while the transformed hotel at Compiegne remained a huge center for these multifold forms of Red Cross relief. It, too, formed a clearing house for a.s.sistance. Its ears were alert to the vast necessities of the moment. They listened for opportunities of service.
There were many such. A refugee brought word that an old couple in a farmhouse full ten miles distant had no way of retreating before the onrus.h.i.+ng Germans. Without a minute's delay a camionette was dispatched to the spot and it brought the weeping, grateful pair and most of their personal belongings to safety; while other cars were sent in various directions to seek out the opportunities of performing similar services.... As this situation eased itself, this transportation equipment was turned toward the carrying of supplies and tobacco to the weary men of isolated batteries and units along the ever changing battle front. It was an almost unceasing task, and the few short hours that the Red Cross workers forced themselves into an all-necessary sleep were all spent in the caves and _abris_ of Compiegne; for the _boche_ aviators had an unpleasant habit of making frequent nocturnal visits to it.
At Beauvais, simultaneous with the establishment of the headquarters at Compiegne, the American Red Cross opened both military and civilian hospitals, together with a rest station of some three hundred beds for slightly wounded soldiers and for casuals; as men detached from their units are generally known. Over a bonfire in a small hut the workers cooked food and served it hot to the soldiers and the refugees. In fact this town had been made a clearing station for these last. Each incoming train brought more and more of these pitiful folk into the town, where they were halted for a time before being sent on other trains to the districts of France quite remote from any immediate possibility of invasion. In the few hours which refugees spent in Beauvais our Red Cross made some definite provision for their comfort. It secured a huge building, obtained several tons of hay, and after establis.h.i.+ng a rough form of bus service with its motor cars, transported them from the station to its hastily transformed barracks for a night's rest, and then, on the following morning, back to the railway station and the outgoing trains to the south and west. And with the barracks and the hay cots went blankets and food, of course. It was crude comfort; but it was infinitely better than spending the night on the stone floor of a damp and unheated railroad station.
At Niort, where a small store of Red Cross supplies had been sent to a designated delegate, the delegate on an hour's notice fed four hundred refugees, while at Clermont the American Red Cross supplied food to a nunnery that had opened its doors to refugees. So it went. The variety of services was indeed all but infinite; while through the entire nightmare of activity, the workers were thrust upon their own initiative--that precious American birthright,--time and time again.
Their only orders were short ones; they were to help any one and every one in need of a.s.sistance.
How the French viewed this aid and how they came to rely upon it, is best ill.u.s.trated, perhaps, by the testimony of a hardware merchant of Soissons whose house had been sh.e.l.led. Without hesitation he came direct to the Red Cross headquarters for help, saying: