Читать книгу With the Doughboy in France: A Few Chapters of an American Effort - Edward Hungerford - Страница 7

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In that supreme hour when the United States consecrated herself to a world ideal and girded herself for the struggle, to the death, if necessary, in defense of that ideal, the American Red Cross was ready. Long before that historic evening of the sixth of April, 1917, when Congress made its grim determination to enter the cause "for the democracy of the world," the Red Cross in the United States had felt the prescience of oncoming war. For nearly three years it had heard of, nay even seen, the unspeakable horrors of the war into which it was so soon to be thrust. It had witnessed the cruelties of the most modern and scientific of conflicts; a war in which science seemingly had but multiplied the horrors of all the wars that had gone before. Science and kultur between them had done this very thing. In the weary months of the conflict that began with August, 1914, the American Red Cross had taken far more than a merely passive interest in the Great War overseas. It had watched its sister organizations from the allied countries, already involved in the conflict, struggle in Belgium and France and Russia against terrific odds; it had bade each of these "Godspeed," and uttered many silent prayers for their success. The spirit of Florence Nightingale and Clara Barton still lived—and still enthused.

It would have been odd—almost inconceivable, in fact—if anything else had been true. It would have been unpardonable if the American Red Cross had not, long before our entrance into the conflict, scented that forthcoming step, and, having thus anticipated history, had failed to make the most of the situation. We Americans pride ourselves as a nation upon our foresightedness, and an institution so distinctly American as the American Red Cross could hardly fail to have such a virtue imbedded in the backbone of its character.

Ofttimes, as a boy, have I read of the warriors of long ago, and how, when they prepared for battle, it was their women—their wives and their mothers, if you please—who girded them for the conflict; who breathed the prayers for their success, and who, whether or not they succeeded in attaining that success, bound up their wounds and gave them comfort upon their return. Such is the spirit of the Red Cross. The American artist who created that most superb of all posters, The Greatest Mother in the World, and who placed in the arms of that majestic and calm-faced woman the miniature figure of a soldier resting upon a stretcher, sensed that spirit. The American Red Cross is indeed the greatest mother in the world, and what mother—what American mother in particular—could have failed in the early spring of 1917 to anticipate the inevitable? Certainly none of the mothers of the hundred thousand or more boys who anticipated our own formal entrance into the Great War, by offering themselves—bodies and hearts and souls—to the armies of Britain, France, and Canada.

Other pens more skilled than mine have told, and will continue to tell, of the organization of the Red Cross at home to meet the certainties and the necessities of the oncoming war. For if America had not heretofore realized the magnitude of the task that was to confront her and had even permitted herself to become dulled to the horrors of the conflict overseas, the historic evening of the sixth of April, 1917, awakened her. It galvanized her from a passive repugnance at the scenes of the tragic drama being enacted upon the great stage of Europe into a bitter determination that, having been forced into the conflict, no matter for what reason, she would see it through to victory; and no matter what the cost. Yet cost in this sense was never to be interpreted into recklessness. Her boys were among her most precious possessions, and, if she were to give them without stint and without reserve—all for the glory of her supreme ideal—she would at least surround them with every possible requisite for their health, their comfort, and their strength. This was, and is, and will remain, the fundamental American policy.

With such a policy, where should America turn save to her Red Cross? And who more fit to stand as its spiritual and actual head than her President himself? So was it done. And when President Wilson found that the grave responsibilities of his other great war tasks would prevent him from giving the American Red Cross the detailed attention which it needed, he quickly appointed a War Council. This War Council was hard at work in a little over a month after the signing of the declaration of war. It established itself in the headquarters building of the Red Cross in the city of Washington and quickly began preparations for the great task just ahead.

For the fiber of this War Council the President scanned closely the professional and business ranks of American men. He reached out here and there and chose—here and there. And, in a similar way, the War Council chose its own immediate staff. A man from a New York city banking house would find his office or his desk—it was not every executive that could have an office to himself in those days—adjoining that of a ranch owner from Montana or Wyoming. The lawyer closed his brief case and the doctor placed his practice in other hands. The manufacturer bade his plant "good-by" and the big mining expert ceased for the moment to think of lodes and strata. A common cause—a common necessity—was binding them together.

War!

War was the cause and war the necessity. A real war it was, too—a real war of infinite possibilities and of very real dangers; war, the thing of alarms and of huge responsibilities, and for that war we must prepare.

It was said that America was unready, and so it was—in a way. It was unprepared in material things—aëroplanes and guns and ships and well-trained men. But its resources in both money and in men who had potential possibilities of becoming the finest soldiers the world had ever seen, were vast, almost limitless. And it was prepared in idealism, and had assuredly a certain measure of ability. It was prepared too to use such ability as it had in turning its resources—money and untrained men—into a fighting army of material things; material things and idealism. One thing or the other helped win the conflict.

"They said that we could not raise an army; that if we did raise it, we could not transport it overseas; and that if we did transport it overseas, it could not fight—and in one day it wiped out the St. Mihiel salient."

These words tell the entire story—almost. Not that it becomes us Americans to talk too much about our forces having won the war. For one thing, it is not true. The British and the French armies also won the war, and if both had not hung on so tenaciously ours would not even be a fair share of the victory. But for them there would have been no victory, not on our side of the Rhine, at any rate, and men in Berlin, instead of in Paris, would have been dictating peace terms.

It is true, however, that without our army, and certainly without our moral prestige and our resources, the fight for democracy might have been lost at this time, and for many years hereafter. Count that for organization—for real American achievement, if you please. We builded a machine, a huge machine, a machine not without defects and some of them rather glaring defects as you come close to them, but it was a machine that functioned, and, upon the whole, functioned extremely well. It took raw materials—men among them—and fashioned them into fighting materials; fighting materials which flowed in one channel or another toward the fighting front overseas. And with one of these channels—the work of the American Red Cross with the Army of the United States in France—this book has to do.