activities at Bordeaux, the ancient port of the Gascogne country. The ship crossed the bar at the uncomfortable hour of three in the morning, and the Red Cross party first realized the fact that in army life night hours and day hours are all the same, when it was ordered to arise at once and face the customs and the passport inspectors. That inspection was slow work, yet not delaying. For the Gironde runs to the sea many miles after it passes the curving quay and the two great bridges of Bordeaux. The fact that the Lorraine was able to reach the quay well before noon was due not only to her being a good ship but to the fact that she had both wind and tide in her favor.

At fifteen minutes before twelve she docked and the Red Cross party faced the city of Bordeaux, flat yet not unimpressive, with the same graceful quay, the trees, and the old houses lining it, and in the distance the lofty spires of the lovely cathedral, with the even loftier spire of St. Michel in the farther distance. Even the uninitiated might see upon this last the complications of a wireless station and understand that here was one of the posts from which France spake far overseas.

It is but a night's ride from Bordeaux to Paris, even though it is close to four hundred miles between the two cities. That very evening Major Murphy and his party boarded the night train of the Orléans Railway for the capital, and had their first real touch of war's hardships. The night train was very crowded. It is nearly always crowded. It was then running a solitary sleeping car, but two or three of the older members of the party were able to get reservations. Still other fortunate ones were able to obtain seats. The rest of the party stood throughout the tiresome journey of twelve long hours. Major Murphy himself stood the entire night, akimbo over the prostrate body of a groaning, snoring poilu, yet was the first to be ready at the Gare d'Orsay on the morrow; to be here, there, and everywhere seeing that all were provided with proper hotel accommodations. After which he forged through the crowd to the Crillon, there to meet the hero of the day coming to Paris with "Papa Joffre"—and, like himself, every inch an American. After which again it was in order to repair to the American Relief Clearing House in the Rue François Premier to prepare directly for the big job now so close at hand.

I have described the voyage of this first Red Cross party overseas, not only because it was the first, but also because it was so very typical of many others to follow. Many and many a Red Cross man and Red Cross woman, to say nothing of veritable hosts of doughboys and their officers, had their first glimpse of lovely France as they sailed up the broad Gironde and into that lovely port of Bordeaux. The curving quay, the spires of the lovely cathedral, and the more distant but higher spire of St. Michel was the picture that greeted thousands of them. At least hundreds of them rode in the night train of the Orléans Railway to Paris, and in all probability stood the entire distance. For traveling in France in the days of the Great War was hard whether by train or by automobile.

Before I am done with this book I am going to describe the Atlantic crossing of one of the final Red Cross parties. I belonged to one of those parties myself and so am able to write from first-hand knowledge. But between the original expedition and the one in which I sailed were many others; others of far greater import. For our Uncle Samuel was aroused, and, once aroused, and having resolved that having entered the great fight he would give his all, if necessary, toward its winning, he began pouring overseas not only his fighting legions but his armies of relief, of which the Red Cross is part and parcel.

CHAPTER III

ORGANIZING FOR WORK

At No. 5 Rue François Premier stood the American Relief Clearing House. It was a veritable lighthouse, a tower of strength, if you please, to an oppressed and suffering people. To its doors came the offerings of a friendly folk overseas who needed not the formal action of their Congress before their sympathies and their purse-strings were to be touched, but who were given heartfelt American response almost before the burning of Louvain had been accomplished. And from those doors poured forth that relief, in varied form, but with but one object, the relief of suffering and misery.

Until the coming of the American Red Cross and its kindred organizations, this Clearing House was to Paris—to all France, in fact—almost the sole expression of the real sentiment of the United States. It was organized, and well organized, with a definite purpose; on the one hand the avoidance of useless duplications and overlappings, to say nothing of possible frictions, and upon the other the heartfelt desire to accomplish the largest measure of good with means that were not always too ample despite the desire of the folk who were executing them. More than this, the American Relief Clearing House had a practical purpose in endeavoring to meet the everyday problems of transportation of relief supplies. This phase of its work we shall see again when we consider the organization of the transportation department of the American Red Cross in France. It is enough to say here and now that it possessed a very small number of trucks and touring cars which were worked to their fullest possibilities, and seemingly even beyond, in the all but vain effort to keep abreast of the incoming relief supplies.

In fact the American Relief Clearing House in its largest endeavors was in reality a forwarding agency and, although possessing no large transportation facilities of its own, made large use of existing commercial agencies and those of the governments of the Allies, to forward its relief supplies to their destination; whereupon it advised America not only of the receipt of these supplies but of the uses to which they were put. The main framework of the organization consisted of a staff of clerks who kept track of the movements of shipments and who saw to it that no undue delay occurred in their continuous transit from sender to recipient.

J. H. Jordain was the chief operating manager of this Clearing House, while Oscar H. Beatty was its Director-General. Closely affiliated with the success of the enterprise were Herman H. Harjes, the Paris representative of a great New York banking house, a man whom we shall find presently at the head of one of the great ambulance relief works which preceded the coming of the American Red Cross, J. Ridgely Carter, James R. Barbour, and Ralph Preston. Mr. Preston crossed to France on the Lorraine with the preliminary party of survey and was of very great help at the outset in the formation of its definite plans.

The most dramatic feature perhaps of the American Relief Clearing House was the Norton-Harjes Ambulance Service, which was closely affiliated with it. This organization was founded in the early days of 1914 by two men, each acting independently of the other, who, by personal influence and a great amount of individual activity, succeeded in forming ambulance sections of the French Army maintained by American funds and manned by American boys and nurses who could not wait for the formal action of their government before flinging themselves into Europe's great war for world democracy. These two sections first were known as Sections Sanitaire Nu. 5 and Nu. 6 of the French Army. At a later day it was found better policy, as well as more convenient and more economical, to merge these two sections. This was done, and the merged sections became known more or less formally as the Norton-Harjes Ambulance Service.