Part 13 (2/2)

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 Very 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 a.s.sistance.

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, pa.s.sing through Luxembourg and down to the Moselle at the little village of Wa.s.serbillig, 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 a.s.sumed 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.

In such a situation was Red Cross opportunity, time and time and time again. And if Paris for a little was neglectful of the fullness of all of it, our Red Cross men who were at the Rhine were not--not for one single moment. They were on the job, and, with the limited facilities at hand, more than made good with it. One single final incident will show:

On the morning that the Thirty-second swung down into Wa.s.serbillig from the pleasant, war-spared Luxembourg country and first entered Prussian Germany, the Red Cross men with it found that two of their fellows--Lieutenants R. S. Gillespie and Robert Wildes--were already handling the situation. These men had previously been engaged in similar work at Longwy, and had been sent forward with a five-ton truck, loaded with foodstuffs, for such returning prisoners--and there were many of them--as the Thirty-second might encounter on its eastward march. Under Lieutenant Gillespie's direction a canteen already was in operation at the railroad station there in Wa.s.serbillig. Equipped with a small supply of tin cups, plates, and the like--to say nothing of several stoves--it was serving soup, bread, jam, beans, bacon, corned beef, and coffee. The prisoners (soldiers and civilians--men, women, and children, and many of them in a pitiable condition) came through from Germany on the trains up the valley of the Moselle. They had a long wait, generally overnight, in Wa.s.serbillig. And there the American Red Cross fed them by the hundreds, and in every possible way ministered to their comfort.

It saw opportunity, and reached to it. It saw a chance of service, and welcomed it. The record of its welcome is written in the hearts and minds and memories of the boys who marched down the valley of the Moselle, through Treves and Cochem, to Coblenz. From those hearts and minds and memories they cannot easily be erased.

[Ill.u.s.tration: TICKLING THE OLD IVORIES Many an ancient piano did herculean service in the A. R. C. recreation huts throughout France]

CHAPTER VIII

OUR RED CROSS PERFORMS ITS SUPREME MISSION

After all is said and done, what is the supreme purpose of the Red Cross?

I think that any one who has made even a cursory study of the organization--its ideals and history--should have but little hesitancy in finding an answer for that question. Despite its genuine achievement in such grave crises as the San Francisco earthquake and fire, for instance, its real triumphs have almost always been wrought upon the field of war. And there its original mission was definite--the succoring of the wounded. That mission was quite as definite in this Great War so lately ended as in the days of Florence Nightingale and Clara Barton.

The canteen work of our Red Cross in the past two years for our boys who came and went across France and Germany was interesting and important; its field work, which you have just seen, even more so. Yet its great touch--almost, I should say, its touch divine--came not merely when the boys traveled or when they went upon the field of battle, but rather when the iron hand of war cruelly smote them down. Then it was that our Red Cross was indeed the Greatest Mother in the World--the symbolic spirit of its superb poster most amply realized, in fact.

The hospital work of the American Red Cross in France, particularly in its medical phases as distinct from those more purely of entertainment, was, in the several successive forms of organization of the inst.i.tution over there, known as the Medical and Surgical Division or Department, although finally as the Bureau of Hospital Administration. In fact it was almost the only department of our Red Cross in France which did not, for one reason or another, undergo reorganization after reorganization.

This, in turn, has accounted for much of its efficiency. It was builded on a plan which foresaw every emergency and from which finally the more permanent scheme for the entire Red Cross was drawn.

”We divided our job into three great steps,” the man who headed it most successfully told me one day in Paris. ”The first was to meet the emergency that arose, no matter where it was or what it was; the second was to perfect the organization, and the third and final step was to tell about it--to make our necessary reports and the like.”

A program which, rigidly set down, was rigidly adhered to. Remember, if you will once again, that under the original organization of the American Red Cross in France there were two great operating departments side by side; one for military affairs, the other for civil. In those early days the Department of Military Affairs grouped its work chiefly under the Medical and Surgical Division which was headed by Colonel Alexander Lambert, a distinguished New York physician who then bore the t.i.tle of Chief Surgeon of the American Red Cross. It was this early division which planned the first of the great American Red Cross hospitals in France, of which very much more in good time.

In January, 1918, this Medical and Surgical Division became known as the Medical and Surgical Section of the Department of Military Affairs, while Captain C. C. Burlingame, a young and energetic doctor who had met with much success in the New England manufacturing village of South Manchester, Connecticut, became its guiding head. Of Captain Burlingame--he attained the United States Army rank of lieutenant colonel before the conclusion of the war--you also shall hear much more.

It would be quite difficult, in fact, to keep him out of the pages of this book, if such were the desire. One of the most energetic, the most tireless, the most efficient executives of our Red Cross in France, he accomplished results of great brilliancy through the constant use of these very attributes. Within six months after his arrival in France he had risen from first lieutenant to the army rank of captain, while his real achievements were afterward recognized in decorations by the French of their _Medaille d'Honneur_ and by the new Polish Government of its precious Eagle.

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