IT is one of the psychological phenomena of the war that the longest mark in the Belgian's score against his assailant is that the villain, not content with destroying his agriculture, also took away all the industrial machinery of the busy Belgian cities to his own shops across the Rhine. That one item of vandalism left in the Belgian soul a scar that time cannot obliterate.

By ill fortune Belgium was the first horrible example which Germany depended on to awe the rest of Europe into submission. The brutality of the blow, delivered when German strength, long held in check, was at its bestial maximum, staggered civilization. When the first numbing impact was past, Belgium struggled to her feet. If, in her agony, however, she was an object for pity, in the longer and more trying struggle for self-maintenance she gained universal admiration. A helpless and vicarious sacrifice to humanity's salvation, she rose from her altar a giant in courage and a model for faint hearts the world around.

And so although Belgium ran the whole gamut of suffering from the first hour of war down to the present minute, and although she still suffers, her stalwart courage and conspicuous practicality, her sturdy sense and simple dignity have long since lifted her above the lime-light zone of hysterical pity.

In September, 1917, however, there were 275,000 Belgian refugees in France; 150,000 in England; 50,000 in Holland; and many thousands more in Switzerland. It was estimated that in free Belgium,- the 500 or less square miles which still remained free from invasion, though all within easy reach of the German lines had been swept every day and hour by missiles from the German guns,- there were 90,000 more stubborn ones to whom the soil of home was dearer than life. There were fewer than 250,000 left of the Army, who had gathered about the stalwart figure of the King and settled down in the trenches of the coast sectors in a grim determination to see it through.

The rest of the teeming population, which had made Belgium the leader of the world in productive agriculture, and, for her size, foremost as well in industrial output, Germany or the grave had swallowed them all. Belgium had nothing save what she could borrow --- no land, no industries, no food, and no clothing. She was down, helpless, stripped and with winter not far away.

Into this situation came the Red Cross, in the person of a deputy dispatched by the Commissioner for Europe to visit what was left of Belgium along the British front. "This strip," the deputy wrote back, "is only about thirty-five miles long and fifteen miles wide and there is no foot of it that cannot be reached by German shells or air bombs."

Of the 90,000 people still clinging to this target that they called home, more than 10,000 were children, and from this district the Belgian government, circumscribed as it was, had already taken away six thousand imperiled children and placed them in homes in Switzerland and France, viz., in Paris and in the Colonies Scolaires north of Paris, and others in the departments along the coast of the English Channel. At this time, however, burdened as they were with a multiplicity of problems, they had come to the vanishing point of their resources; so they asked if the American Red Cross would not help to remove and furnish shelter for some six hundred more who were in the area of greater danger.

The world has never seen a more pathetic lot than were those children! For "coolness under fire," as the phrase runs, commend me now and evermore to those little children in the lost corner of Belgium who, day by day, they tell me, went trudging fearlessly and cheerfully from shell-shattered homes to half-ruined schoolhouses, along roads where the deep shell holes yawned like giants' graves! In all the great panorama of danger and desperation and death that made up the battlefront, I venture to say there were no stouter hearts than these. To mark their unconcern, as the missiles came and went, was to understand a little more of the spirit that kept their fathers on the firing line through four years of hardship and misery, and their mothers guarding the home fires and holding the families together as best they could, with hideous death forever at their elbows. These toddlers had seen their mothers, fathers, brothers, and sisters blotted from the earth beside them in a whirl of sand and not gone mad. They were the soul of Belgium!

At first, the Red Cross work in Belgium was organized as a department of the French Commission; but later, as it expanded, there was established a separate commission with headquarters at Havre. And when once the start was made in Belgium the labor did not lag. The territory that remained accessible, of what was Belgium, was so small as to be easily canvassed and planned for; only the refugee problem was distributed over a large area. But in it all the work was simplified, first by the keen organizing sense and the intense devotion of the leading people, both men and women, among the Belgians, and second by the habitual industry of the working folk. It was speedily found that a great number of these were nearly or almost self-supporting. After the Belgian fashion they had sought service at the trades in which they were skilled. The Flemish refugees from Belgium in the year 1917 tilled 60,000 acres of land in France, and helped to feed the Belgian Army at the front. The Red Cross and the Belgian organizations made systematic effort to place the refugees; and lace makers, jewelers, machinists, and men and women proficient in many lines were soon permanently and profitably established. Most of them, to be sure, were old, but a Belgian is seldom too old to work. When he is he dies. The French government, likewise, with all the multitudinous loads of its own to carry, was giving to a great many of these Belgian wanderers a small allocation or allowance to guard them against want.

A most perplexing need, however, was for living quarters for the refugees. Naturally, in the cities of France,- Paris and Havre,--- to which most of the refugees made their way, no proper provision had been or could be made to care for such a horde and under such stress of circumstances; as a result, respectable Belgian families were compelled to take lodgment in the lowest quarters of the city, sometimes in wretched old houses, sometimes in sheds or outbuildings where there were no conveniences, no comfort, and no sanitary safety.

When the Red Cross first came to Belgium, it entered into close and practical coöperation with the government officials and, together, they attacked at once the troublesome housing problem. In Havre,--- where the population had increased by sixty thousand and never a new house had been built,---the situation was most acute. Here the Red Cross and the Belgians took over and equipped a group of vacant barracks and also leased a number of apartment houses, thus providing shelter for several hundred families. With the Famille Belge the

Red Cross organized a chain of coöperative stores, such a are in vogue in Belgium, and cut down the high cost of living to the refugee families.

To assist in maintaining the health of the Havre colony a 250-bed hospital was presented to it, which was managed by the Minister of the Interior and included in its personnel the Red Cross staff of doctors and nurses, Health centers were established at Havre and Rouen with infant clinics and pouponnières for the care of abandoned babies. The operation of these shelters was taken in charge by a group of prominent Belgian women.

Here, as in France and Italy, it was the aim of the Red Cross in all its work of relief to coördinate by means of needed assistance, monetary or otherwise, all the scattered agencies and enterprises that were trying to cope with the situation, organizing them all into sections under the direction of a governmental official. There was a host of them, too, for clothing, for layettes, for the families of Belgian soldiers, for emergency relief, for mothers and children, for housing, for hospital service, and for tuberculosis. By means of monthly conferences with delegates from each section, however, all the work was correlated and widely extended, and coöperation was maintained through a system of weekly inspection with all governmental and private agencies of relief, both French and Belgian.

Meanwhile, -the refugee problem was never quiescent: always the stream of the newly homeless kept drifting down the long road from the zone of war. To relieve the situation in Havre the Red Cross gave $600,000 for the construction of a village of temporary cottages. The site was prepared by the Albert Fund, with paved streets, water supply, and electric lights. Each of the hundred cottages soon boasted a laundry-shed at the rear and a garden neatly fenced in. There were two schoolhouses with Belgian teachers, a church with a Belgian priest, and the inevitable coöperative store, without which the Belgian would not feel at home even in Brussels. There was also a town-hall for meetings and administration use. The rents were nominal. As a matter of fact the whole project was characteristically Belgian.

After its entrance into Belgium, the first important contribution of the Red Cross was 500,000 francs to the Belgian Red Cross toward its great military hospital at Wulveringhem. La Panne, which had been the hospital center, had become a barrack town; and the great hotel where the hospital was installed was a pet-mark for the German gunners and air-men. At Wulveringhem the work on the splendid new hospital with its wide range of barrack wards was lagging for lack of means, but the Red Cross gift hurried it to usefulness. When it was finished the plant and the patients from La Panne were moved there and, once more, the Belgian Army doctors could operate without the perpetual interference of German shells.

It was a needy army, in those days, that Belgian Army which helped the English to hold the Channel front, and it lived the life of a hunted animal! There were the abris and dugouts in the first line, wet and overcrowded; on the second line, about seven or eight miles back, some shelters and ruined buildings; and in the rear some new brick barracks where at intervals good Belgian soldiers went when they did not die. When they did die --- and their casualty roll mounted into the thousands each month --- there was the endless graveyard near at hand. It was a somber place, all in all. "It is not the bombs that we are afraid of," said a Belgian soldier, who had once been an attaché of the Rockefeller Foundation,-" it is not the bombs, or even the shells, when they have the location of our quarters; it is the bitter cold and the wet feet, and no place to go."

Indeed, they had no place to go. All the way by Merckhem and Bixschoote and up to the edge of the Houthuist forest trench lines were blotted out; in their mad plunges for the mastery of the Channel coast the Germans had torn the whole land to tatters. The entire front was a wilderness of shell-holes, cratered and furrowed to the limit of desolation! The defenses were not lines at all --- merely advance posts, machine-gun emplacements and batteries, and always under fire. In the second line retreats there were no lights of any nature. In the tumbledown barns the soldiers on repose slept on soggy straw, or ran back and forth all night to keep warm because of the lack of blankets. Many a Belgian hero took his "day off" sleeping in a pigsty; and where there was a stove the men were brought in to get warm beside it in detachments.

It became evident, therefore, that the Red Cross must do something towards removing this situation. A million francs was appropriated; and together with the Belgian Minister of War, and other Belgian representatives, a project was set on foot for the erection in the Army zone of recreation and eating huts and of double tents, equipping them with dishes, baths, moving pictures, and reading rooms. The men themselves undertook to manufacture the furniture.

In addition, the Red Cross gave a fund to the Livres des Soldats Belges, which sent out books to soldiers in the field. There was a great demand for technical books of the professions by soldiers who had left engineering and law offices and scientific schools to take their places against the invader and who did not wish to die intellectually. All these demands the Red Cross supplied. It contributed to societies whose object it was to furnish small comforts to the soldiers; it helped in the expansion of the canteen system; and it gave money for the erection and equipment of new canteens. It also gave money liberally to the Foyer du Soldat Belge --- and if there ever was a soldat who was entitled to a Foyer it surely was the Soldat Belge. There were thousands of them who had not known a day away from the cheerless expanse of mud and shell-holes and ice since the war began, for the very simple reason that they had no place in the world to go nor a sou to take them anywhere. In the Army, where the wages of the soldiers ran as low as seven cents a day, where the baths were few and far between, and the clothing dilapidated, one did not travel for pleasure. So, when the Red Cross took detachments of these poor fellows and cleaned them up and with money in their pockets to spend sent them for a ten days' stay in Paris for a look at the bright lights and a change of diet, it brought these men back to a realization that there were still people in the world who were not dirty and unshorn, unshaven and scarred, and it made a distinct contribution to the cause of democracy.

There was a Red Cross canteen at the Gare du Nord which had been supported by English donors, and which the Red Cross helped to enlarge and supply. This was for Belgian soldiers coming to Paris, or passing through, and it did anything and everything to make them comfortable. The Red Cross also made substantial contributions to the Congé du Soldat Belge, which had been supported by the Belgian, French, and Italian trades unionists. The Congé was different: its plan was to take a small number of the Belgian soldiers and treat them like country cousins who had come on a visit. The old number was ten at a time. The Red Cross increased it to fifty or more.

But for the most part, as I have said, the "leave" of the Belgian soldier was not burdensome to his hosts. As soon as he was cleaned up and well fed he went out and got his pay check, which there was no trouble about his doing, and when he went back to his dugout he had money in his pocket. The Belgian Minister of Agriculture supplied employment for a multitude of the Flemish farmers on leave. The Red Cross started a fund for wounded men who, on account of their injuries, had been released from the Army, to provide them with civilian clothing to take the place of the uniforms --- which they must surrender when discharged --- and to help them make a fresh start.

Altogether, there were half a dozen hospitals in Belgium and three in France accommodating about 5000 persons, which the Red Cross assisted. It contributed to a mess at Sainte Adresse, near Havre, which supplied 300 meals a day to workers in munition factories; it furnished money to the soldiers' club at Fécamp, and another at Dieppe; and a great deal of work was done at Calais in connection with the School of Gunnery. For the canteens and barracks for permissionaires at Ouvre, Ile de Cezambre, La Panne, Isenberghe, Bulscamp, Hoogstaade, Hondschoote, and other places, maintenance funds were provided. Libraries, games, and moving pictures were furnished to keep the soldiers cheerful and mentally fit. The library equipment was extensive. Actors and singers were secured to give entertainment. A valuable work was done in the support of educational courses, in which thousands of students were enrolled; individual gifts were distributed to all soldiers who were decorated or cited in Army orders for bravery.

In all these undertakings --- the providing of comfort for the soldiers at the front, recreation for soldiers on leave, hospitals, hospital equipment, medicines, instruments, looking after the families of soldiers and stiffening all along the line the Belgian military morale --- the Red Cross was helping a government which had only a temporary abiding place, and was carrying on national business under a tremendous burden of difficulty. But throughout all the Red Cross work in Belgium it held merely the position of a contributor. The Belgian government had a thoroughly competent system for the handling of its problems; what it lacked was the means to carry its plans into execution. This the Red Cross furnished. It was a very vital contribution, for not only did it lighten the load of an overtaxed governmental machine, but it put new life into the Army of 200,000 men.

In planning its work for the territory back of the lines, the Red Cross had a more perplexing problem, which resolved itself into a species of speculation on the fortunes of war. There had been no moment since the line adjusted itself in the north that was free from the possibility of swift and imperative demand. Any day some change in conditions along those northern sectors, held jointly by English, French, and Belgian troops, might send a final stream of refugees rolling down into France, calling for shelter and for instant supplies of food and clothing; or, a German retreat might release new areas whose inhabitants, wretched after long periods of German rule, would create an even more stringent condition. There would be a great and instant tax on the Army supplies, the Red Cross stores and the foodstuffs gathered for the remaining occupants of free Belgium. With an impossible condition of transportation and a paucity of food to begin with, it was plain that any diversion in the Belgian sector of the front would make trouble, and failure to meet it would be fatal.

It was here perhaps that the Red Cross performed its most important task in the Belgian field, although the crisis which it was devised to meet never arrived. In the fall of 1917, twenty barrack-houses, each twenty by one hundred feet, were contracted for near Adinkerke. Nine of them were first erected by Army labor on sites convenient to railway lines, highways, and canals, in order to provide prompt distribution. Arrangements were made with the Friends' Ambulance Unit and the British Red Cross for the use of their trucks in case of need. In addition, Paris Red Cross Headquarters agreed to place from twenty-five to fifty loaded cars in the Belgian region on demand, within twenty-four hours. Canal boats were placed under charter, in order to make use of the network of canals running all through the districts. With these provisions made, the Red Cross Commission set about the purchase of $2,000,000 worth of emergency supplies, such as food, clothing, blankets, to supplement the great stocks in the Red Cross warehouses in Paris, which could be drawn upon at short notice.

An idea of the nature of the food supplies laid up in these warehouses against the day of need may be got from this list of goods shipped in for the first of the buildings that was completed: --

500 cases condensed milk
310 sacks of rice (50 kilos)
40 sacks of rice (100 kilos)
7 sacks of macaroni (100 kilos)
60 sacks of dried peas (100 kilos)
190 sacks of lentils (100 kilos)
914 cases of salmon (50 lb. to case)
913 cases of corned beef (50 lb. to case)
120 sacks white beans (100 kilos)
600 boxes of biscuits (4-1/2 lb. each)

All this was simply a gamble on the chances of war, an insurance against the horrible possibilities which the lack of these supplies might cause. What happened in Italy, what happened in Belgium itself at the beginning of the war might easily be repeated, and in the depleted condition of the country after four years of war the possibilities were awful to contemplate.

"The danger from the beginning has been recognized," observed the Red Cross Commissioner at that time, "and we have resolved to take no chances. We prefer to lose part of our goods rather than to be caught napping. We realize that none of this food put in the warehouse at the front may ever be needed, that the lines may not change, and there is a possibility, even, of their changing in the wrong direction. But if the lines should change both railroad and highways will be filled and there will be delay in getting food up there from Paris. There have been protests against putting the food there on account of the danger of its being shelled. A high officer of the British Army told me that he had been in command of troops which took possession of a sector of French territory, and that if his soldiers had not been double-rationed the civilians would have starved to death before any help could have reached them. The world will never forgive," he emphasized, "the American Red Cross if it does not run the risk of losing some property for the sake of saving lives."

It was wonderful tenacity that the Belgian folk displayed in clinging to this vestige of land called "free Belgium." Their infatuation for home soil stands out as the most graphic feature of the war situation in Belgium. After the fighting around Nieuport in the spring of 1917, and the stubborn battle for Paeschendaele Ridge in the fall, this country became not only an armed camp but a battle ground wherein these peasants went about their homely tasks with their lives eternally at hazard. Many of them paid the last price, but that did not frighten away their neighbors; and the Belgian government, knowing its own people, encouraged them to stay on. They farmed away in utter disregard of German marksmanship, of danger and of horrible death, and in the words of an American writer who visited the section, "their ditches and hop-poles and stacked wheat, quite beyond the needed crops for which they stand, are so many markers of Belgium's claim to her own . . . ." Some of the most serious fighting of the war has been carried on here, from shell crater to shell crater. But to the civilian Belgian these stretches of ground and the civilian country that lies between them and the sea are alike and the same. They are his native soil. They are free Belgium, heritage of the past and earnest of the future.

At this time the Red Cross came in touch with the splendid work done by Belgian's Queen, who, as all the world knows, was an indefatigable worker for the children and the aged, and who lived in such constant peril and distress. La Panne, where the hospital had been, was at first the center for relief operations, but when the vicious attacks of 1917 began to make it untenable, the refugees there had to be gotten out and away to safer places. At first out of one hundred and eighty old men and women in the Repos d'Elizabeth, her Majesty's charity, only twenty-six answered yes when all were asked if they wanted to be taken out of danger. But when the houses all around them began going there was no longer any room for home love, and the Red Cross furnished the money to transport the whole company to a comfortable and safe place in France. Gradually the Society joined in, more or less as a silent partner, with all the organized forces of relief in the district. It gave money to the commissaries of the arrondissements and to the Service de Santé conducted by English and French women. Clothing and milk were supplied for the babies, of which, in Belgium, even in normal times, there are plenty; a portable barrack was found for a baby hospital at La Panne, and a Red Cross woman was sent from America for the clinical work. In areas where it was impossible to buy milk the Red Cross furnished it; it also bought supplies of eggs for tubercular patients.

In all the story of the war's miseries there are probably no more pathetic chapters than those of some of the private enterprises of relief in Belgium. In the heart of the British war zone the Countess Van Steen, herself a nurse, had a hospital. Her home, which she had in the beginning turned into a hospital, fell into German hands and, like a soldier, she withdrew and began work in free Belgium where she was made directress of the Elizabeth Hospital at Poperingue. Again the bombardment forced retirement, and in the next station at Proven the shells were still falling all about her and the highways resounded to all the clamors of war. On every hand the rough military buildings sprang up. To her little station there was always a procession of wounded, soldiers and civilians alike --- wounded horribly. There were children, sick and injured and blinded with gas. The record of horrors in that neighborhood is not pleasant reading. In one evening twenty-eight cases were brought in from one little neighboring village. The wards, the tents, were all full, always full, and the means were very scanty. Then the Red Cross came and supplied what was lacking, and the work went on without hindrance.

It was so with the Colonies of the Belgian Abbé Delaere at Wisques and Wizernes, which had grown out of an earlier work at Ypres. The Abbé Delaere had been the last of civilians to leave Ypres. There were others of these Colonies Scolaires, too,- nearly sixty of them, scattered all over northern France in all sorts of available buildings, filled with thin-faced children brought from places within range of the never silent cannon, broken in nerves and full of fear. To all these schools the Red Cross made gifts, supplying everything from buildings to buttons. The Queen's school at Vinckem was a thriving establishment, with playgrounds, infirmary, and splendid gardens. But it was well in the danger zone, for the King and Queen refused to leave the soil of the Kingdom, and to be in Belgium meant to be under fire. The Red Cross assisted the Queen to expand the school's facilities by the erection of a babies' pavilion so as to take in younger children; it established school buildings at Cayeux-sur-Mer in France to accommodate children from the abandoned establishments until the new permanent institutions could be completed at Leysele on the French frontier; and it transferred whole colonies of children, at the suggestion of the Queen, through Switzerland to many retreats in France. Victory, indeed, found the Red Cross more than a helper in things Belgian,- it found it a friend.

THE many millions of Americans, whose support made possible the work of the Red Cross abroad, can have no adequate conception of what the presence of Americans of the Red Cross, in the uniform of their country, meant to the people of Italy in the fall of 1917, and the year following.

It was not until July, 1918, that American fighting troops were sent to Italy. Then one regiment was dispatched from France, receiving a welcome that will never be forgotten. They had been preceded in the last week of June by about 1600 officers and men of the United States Army Ambulance Service, but before that time the only uniformed American force in Italy had been a few student aviators at training camps and the personnel of the Red Cross.

It came about, therefore, that at a critical period in Italy's history and in the progress of the war, workers of the Red Cross, conducting their work from one end of Italy to the other, from the front lines to the tip of Sicily, brought to hundreds of thousands of Italian soldiers and to millions of Italian people in civil life their first sight of an American in the uniform of his native land.

The American Red Cross came to Italy just three weeks after the disaster of Caporetto, when thousands had been slain, hundreds of thousands taken prisoners, vast quantities of munitions captured, and a half million or more old men, women, and children had been driven from their homes by the invading enemy. Such a disaster has had few parallels in history and it is, perhaps, the greatest tribute possible to the power of resistance of Italy's people and the courage of her soldiers that on the slender stream of the Piave,--- almost negligible as a military barrier,--- retreating troops reformed and repulsed a numerically superior foe, advancing with all the élan that a great victory gives; while behind the lines the people of Italy, who had suffered the hardships of war for two years, rallied to the support of her heroic Army, and stood firm.

It was into these darkest days of the war in Italy ---when no one knew how long the Piave line could hold and no one could tell when the burden placed upon the people would become greater than they could bear --- that the Red Cross found its greatest opportunity for service there. Upon a telegraphic request from our Ambassador in Rome, an Emergency Commission was sent from France, and Italy had her first widespread opportunity of welcoming officers and men in the uniform of the United States Army. The Red Cross men appeared as the first visible evidence of the sincerity of America's pledge that she would devote every man and every resource to winning the war. German propaganda had been extremely active in Italy; one of its endeavors had been to discredit America's sincerity by the assertion that the United States was growing rich out of the war, that she was willing to prolong it by supplying the Allies with money and munitions but that she would never send her men. The men and women of the American Red Cross in Italy served as living refutations of that German lie; moreover, it soon became known to the Italians that these men and women were not merely the advance guard but that they had come to Italy as volunteers, leaving behind homes and positions in order to share the lot of the Italians and side by side work with them in the great common cause. Everywhere that I went in Italy, I heard from the Italians, from their statesmen, and from their women and little children, expressions of gratitude, friendship, and admiration for the spirit of the American people, as represented by these workers in the Red Cross, who came to them first in their hour of greatest suffering.

The immediate problem to be dealt with was the feeding and housing of the hundreds of thousands of refugees from the invaded districts. Few nations in modern history have been called upon to face a more serious problem than that with which Italy was confronted: from the two northernmost provinces the civilian population had come in a great flood that overflowed the roads and swept on over the fields toward the south; the barrier of steel which had held back the Austrian and German troops at the border had given way without warning, and women and children and old men, knowing only too well the cruelty of their foes, had left everything they possessed in an effort to escape. Women trudged along with children in their arms; the bedridden were carried in wheelbarrows and on stretchers. Fleeing civilians were inextricably mixed in with the retreating soldiery: abandoned guns, trucks, ammunition wagons, ambulances, and automobiles clogged the roads. Daughters were separated from mothers; little children were swept away from their parents --- some of them to be united months later in American Red Cross homes, others never to be together again. Women trudged along barefoot in nightdresses; many walked until they fell, weak with hunger. In the midst of this great military disaster and the future of the Kingdom at stake, Italy, already suffering from privations, with every resource strained for the transportation of fresh supplies of munitions to her troops, was thus called upon to transport a civilian army of half a million or more souls, to find new homes for them, to feed them immediately, and to supply them with clothing and food for their journeys to other already burdened localities.

The way in which she met the problem and solved it won the admiration of every American in the Red Cross who saw the conditions at close range. The American Red Cross coöperated with the Italian authorities and Italian Relief Societies, bringing carloads of foodstuffs and clothing from our storehouses in France, buying other necessaries in the open market, distributing food to the refugees in trains who journeyed often for days, establishing homes and, as the destitute homeless women reached the destinations assigned to them, providing work for them that would occupy their time and afford a small remuneration. Asylums were opened for the children where these war orphans could be taught, fed, and clothed. Soup kitchens were inaugurated to give simple, sustaining food to those who, still laboring under the influence of that nightmare of panic-stricken flight, were trying to adjust themselves to their new environment. In this practical way the Red Cross went about its mission of relieving the wounds that war had caused to innocent women and children. The Italians accepted it as an earnest pledge of America to share a part of the great war's burden, and the morale of the people was strengthened as the morale of any one who is suffering is strengthened by the presence of a friend.

Adding to the mental distress induced by her reverses and to the physical deprivation consequent upon the loss of two rich provinces, the winter of 1917-1918 fell upon Italy with unusual severity. There was snow in the streets of Rome and on the mountains, and in the plains, the soldiers suffered from the intense, penetrating cold. It was a foregone conclusion that when the weather permitted in the spring the Austrians would resume their drive, for all through that dismal winter the invaders boasted confidently to the unhappy inhabitants left behind in the conquered district that they would go on to Rome before the trees were green again. The forces of the Austrians were numerically superior by twenty-three divisions and military commanders awaited with anxiety that threatened attack. Would their soldiers, their morale inevitably weakened by a great defeat, be able to hold the Piave and the mountain passes, or would the enemy break through and invade the Lombardy plains? No human intelligence could answer those questions; and yet upon the answer Italy's fate depended.

These were the conditions in Italy when the permanent Red Cross Commission arrived. Immediately, energetically, devotedly, they took up the work begun by the Emergency Commission, extending it until it had reached all parts of Italy---all of which was accomplished in almost an incredibly brief time. There is a map, reproduced on another page, showing graphically by means of dots and symbols the extent and variety of the work in Italy. A large majority of dots and symbols were placed upon the map in the three or four active months after the arrival of the Permanent Commission when every hour was filled with the work of organization and of actual relief.

Multiform as were the activities and urgent as was the need for haste,---for with the enemy threatening always in the north not a moment was to be lost,--- a clear, consistent purpose ran through it all. Everything that was done became the expression of the spirit of the American people in their consecration to the common cause for which Italy had suffered. To Italians, whose deep love for their children is a national characteristic, the American Red Cross became in a very real sense the great mother.

Many thousands of children whose fathers were fighting for liberty were taken under the shelter of the American Red Cross schools, homes, and day nurseries. Nearly all of these children were suffering from undernourishment, the slow starvation that renders the young an easy prey to disease. They were supplied with milk and wholesome food from America. Some of the older girls were taught lace making; the boys were taught the rudiments of carpentry and shoemaking. To mothers, whose husbands or sons were soldiers, the opportunity was afforded to supplement their meager pensions by work in shops where garments were made out of cloth from America, and these garments, together with the contents of the Chapter boxes that came in great quantities from the United States, were used to clothe the children of the soldiers at the front.

Those whom war had deprived of their natural means of support were enabled to become self-supporting by work that went toward the winning of the war, and the spirit on the part of Americans and Italians engaged in the work was the spirit of coöperation, of mutual helpfulness, of sympathetic understanding, and of fraternal friendship. Without the effective, complete, and cordial coöperation of the Italians, indeed, the work could not have achieved the measure of success which it did.

The result of this widespread activity became evident very quickly in the changed spirit of the troops. In the records of the American Red Cross at Rome are many postcards glowing with thanks from soldiers and letters from commanding officers, and in the minds of our men and women workers are the memories of innumerable spoken tributes, all eloquently indicative of the change which came about in the morale of the Army, of its renewed hope and determination to resist, now that America had come to its support.

There was much that was done, too, which affected the soldiers even more directly than this care of their families.

Hospital supplies, drugs, medicines, surgical instruments, bandages, hospital furniture had been lost in vast quantities after the defeat of Caporetto, and it was almost impossible to replace them in Italy.

Red Cross Medical Warehouses were established in Rome and other centers, particularly in the war zone; from these warehouses many Italian military and not a few civilian general hospitals were supplied with the things they lacked. In all between 1500 and 1800 hospitals were aided, many of them two and three times.

In other ways less obviously urgent, perhaps, but having scarcely less effect upon the morale of the troops, the Red Cross came into close contact with the soldiers. Ambulance sections were established at the front with advanced posts near the lines. The ambulances were manned by, young American volunteers, many of whom had seen service in France. These ambulances did effective work in transporting the occasional casualties and the many sick from the front lines and from distributing hospitals to base hospitals or evacuating hospitals to the rail-heads.

To bring some degree of comfort to the men in the stormy trenches of the Alps and the icy, mud-caked trenches along the Piave, the Red Cross established "Rolling Kitchens" where the soldiers returning from the trenches could always have hot coffee, jam for their dry bread, cigarettes, and the friendship and encouragement of the Americans in charge, and which, undoubtedly, counted far more than the food. There were a score or so of these posts, through which, it is said, a half million or more Italian soldiers passed in the course of a month. Men who had stood for hours in the cold under arms went away from these little kitchens where the Italian and American flags flew side by side, revived by the hot coffee and cheered by the greeting of a fellow soldier from another land. Of Lieutenant Edward McKey, who took out the first "Rolling Kitchen" and who lost his life in the work, it has been said that to the Italian Divisions who held the key-positions of the Brenta passes, "he was the entire American Army."

From time to time, as the winter wore on, upon the occasion of a feast day such as Christmas or New Year's or upon days significant to Italian patriotism, gifts were made to the soldiers of packages containing useful articles, generally a cake of soap, warm socks, a cake of chocolate, and a package of cigarettes, with post-cards bearing a symbol of the union of Italy and America in the cause of liberty.

As the spring advanced every effort was made by the American Red Cross, always coöperating closely with the Italians, to carry the practical message of the American people to every soldier and to every city, town, and hamlet. During part of the months of March and April, American Red Cross agents, traveling in automobiles by day and night, actually visited more than two thousand towns and villages. They sought out the destitute or needy families of soldiers, families that lacked medicines or food or clothing, and supplied their wants immediately by leaving in the hands of duly constituted authorities sufficient funds to meet the local emergency. In this work the Red Cross had the efficient coöperation of departmental prefects, mayors, and community committees. The Italian Premier, Signor Orlando, advised the prefects of the coming of Red Cross representatives; with the result that when our agents arrived they found the lists of the needy prepared and crowds of women and children waiting to receive this visit of men from America. Then, by means of speeches and of placards posted upon the walls, the purpose of the visit was explained. In all more than 300,000 families were aided in this way in the short space of a month; and from these 300,000 families word went at once to their men at the front that America was actually and actively in the war, for they had seen with their own eyes and had received with their own hands the pledge of America's faith.

On the occasion of the first anniversary of America's entrance into the war with Germany, I was in Rome and was present at the impressive ceremony held in the Coliseum in honor of the day. No one could have doubted the sincerity of the words there spoken, words of gratitude on the part of Italy's representatives, addressed to the President and people of the United States and the American Red Cross; nor could any one have failed to be touched by the spontaneous applause from the soldiers and the men and women who, in a downpour of rain, stood in that great ruined open amphitheater to do honor to our country. Later, I went to other chief cities of Italy, and everywhere there were the same cordial, fervent demonstrations of friendship and appreciation. The message of America had been well carried to the Italian people.

The Austrians had boasted, as I have said before, that they would be in Rome before the summer; but when in June they began their delayed offensive they found opposed to them men confident in victory. By weight of superior numbers they forced their way across the Piave in several places only to be beaten back with severe losses; the passes of the Brenta and the Grappa had become walls of granite which they beat at in vain. The failure of that offensive marked the salvation of Italy.

In the time of actual fighting the American Red Cross concentrated its forces in the war zone, aiding the hospitals with supplies to care for the increased demand upon them. Our rolling kitchens, supplemented in number, continued their work, and all our ambulances were in action, many of the men receiving the War Cross for their service under fire.

During the summer the work of the Red Cross throughout Italy went on with unabated energy. The main attempt of the Austrians to break through was followed by a lull in the fighting, but another affliction came upon the people of Italy: An epidemic of influenza or "Spanish fever" of great severity ravaged the entire kingdom, claiming many victims. In helping to check the spread of this plague the American nurses of the Red Cross and our men did heroic service. Milk was greatly needed to nourish the victims of the disease and to fortify children against attack. So while the nurses were visiting stricken communities, making house to house visits, our men distributed large quantities of condensed milk received from America. In every way possible our organization coöperated with the Italian authorities in combating the epidemic, even though our hospitals were filled with patients from our Army and Navy, from our diplomatic corps, the Young Men's Christian Association, and our own personnel.

With the arrival of American troops the work of the Red Cross in Italy took on another phase. The scope of this work was, necessarily, limited by the small number of American troops, but the Red Cross was able to do many comparatively small things, and stood ready at all times to meet any demand upon it by our few thousand soldiers actually in Italy, or by larger contingents, if they had been sent. In the summer the Army Ambulance Service that had been in camp at Allentown arrived in Genoa. The Red Cross at once undertook the establishment of a hospital, and in the short space of two weeks a suitable building was found near the encampment and equipped as a thoroughly modern hospital. Later this hospital was given by the Red Cross to our Navy for the use of our sailors and soldiers.

A few weeks later when an American regiment of the line, the 332d, arrived in Italy from France, the Red Cross made our soldiers welcome, provided coffee for them at the stations through which they passed on the long journey overland; at the place of detraining in the war zone they were met with something hot to drink, something to smoke, and a temporary hospital. Likewise, when these men took their place in the line, Red Cross Home Service men went with them, following them across the Piave in the victorious advance against the Austrians.

The story of Italy's complete and brilliant victory over Austria in the closing days of October, and the rapid forward march into and beyond the reconquered, devastated districts, forms the culmination of the story of our Red Cross work in Italy. It was a victory upon which every hope had centered, toward which all of the long effort of Italy and those associated with her brave soldiers and her patient, enduring people had been devoted, but when it came it was so much greater than any reasonable anticipation could have foreseen, so much more complete and rapid, that its immediate effects were well-nigh overwhelming.

After a stubborn resistance, the Austrian line in the mountains and on the plain broke, and then followed the utter rout of the enemy. Our ambulances and rolling kitchens with our officers and men swept forward with the Italian troops. It was difficult to keep up with the advance, so difficult, for instance, that our American regiment out-stripped its commissary and for three days practically subsisted, contented, happy, and victorious, on the light stores that the Red Cross with its more mobile transportation was able to bring up across the crowded pontoon bridges and over the shell-torn roads.

In the year that the Austrian, German, and Hungarian troops had held the northern provinces of Italy, they had systematically despoiled the remaining inhabitants of their possessions. It had been a year of slow starvation for those who, unfortunately, had been unable to escape, with food growing more and more scarce. When the final rout came the enemy took all that was left. It became a case of general loot: shoes were taken from the feet of citizens; women were robbed of their clothing; all of the supplies of food were commandeered, and what had been slow starvation changed to acute suffering and death from want of something to eat.

The Italian Army of fifty-three divisions, the French and English with three divisions each, and the 332d American Regiment pursued the rapidly fleeing enemy. All the railroads were torn up and the bridges destroyed, so that all supplies had to pass through the narrow neck of the bottle represented by the temporary pontoon bridges over the Piave and then be transported by camion over roads which were choked with moving troops and guns---wretched roads neglected by the enemy and filled with pits from heavy artillery fire. There was small opportunity at that moment of vital military emergency for Italy to take care of the starving, shivering civilian population; and it is probably no exaggeration to say that the opportunity for service which then came to the American Red Cross was the greatest and most urgent it had during all its Italian experience.

In some places the trucks of the American Red Cross laden with provisions entered a town within a few hours after the Austrians had quitted it; rarely did more than forty-eight hours elapse between the departure of the enemy and the establishment of a Red Cross center for distributing food --- condensed milk, soups, beans, peas, sugar, and often, salted beef. Pitiful stories of cruelty, oppression, and long privation were told by these unfortunate people, day after day, as they stood in line before the Red Cross distributing stations, and many and fervent were the blessings upon America as they received the life-giving food from the hands of men and women in the uniform of the Red Cross.

With the signing of the Armistice following upon Austria's utter defeat there was thrust upon Italy a new problem of large proportions --- the problem of feeding, clothing, and transporting Italian prisoners of war released by the cessation of hostilities. Austria --- anxious to be freed of the burden of their care --- turned these men loose without direction, without system, and without preliminary arrangements. They came from prison camps by tens of thousands, making their way south, as best they could, on trains as far as the trains would go, then on foot by road and field and mountain pass, a hungry, half-clad, ragged army, weak from long confinement and insufficient food. Over the Alps and down upon Trieste at the head of the Adriatic and upon the devastated, suffering redeemed districts they poured, straggling into the cities and towns.

The city of Trieste, which more than five hundred years before had fallen into Austrian hands but had remained, through many vicissitudes, Italian at heart and in speech, was the objective of many of these released prisoners. A few thousand came the first day, more the next day, and still more each succeeding day until, finally, they stood shoulder to shoulder a vast unorganized hungry army of many thousands, crowded into the only space where they could be put,---the public shipping docks. At the time Trieste was cut off by railroad; there were almost no ships available; and the mere problem of feeding the liberated city, rejoicing in its new freedom, was taxing every resource without the added burden of this army of men who had suffered many hardships, who could not be moved, and whose number constantly increased.

As fortune would have it, however, a Red Cross "rolling kitchen" with two Americans had followed the troops from the Piave far to the east, and in the first hours of the Armistice pushed on through the Austrian lines and, skirting the sea, reached Trieste overland with a stock sufficient for, perhaps, 2000 rations of soup. These men at once took up their station in the concentration camp, and while one of them served the soup the other got on board a torpedo boat and went to Venice for more Red Cross supplies. Our Venice representative with a deputy commissioner from Rome arrived in Trieste the same day and made arrangements immediately to coöperate with the military authorities. From that time on until the men were reformed and disposed of,---a period of about one month,---the Red Cross, working always with the approbation of the Italian authorities and aided for a time by a committee of Trieste ladies, relieved the situation. By camion overland and by sea provisions were sent from our warehouse; other provisions were brought by the British Red Cross. Clothing was brought and the army of the repatriated, crowded, sick, and hungry, in that provisional concentration camp by the sea, began to emerge from its long nightmare of Austrian prison camps and to experience once more the joy of liberty and life among people of their own nation and its allies who, in spite of the urgent need among themselves, had the spirit and willingness to provide for these soldier sons of Italy who had come back home again in the hour of victory.

In the reconquered districts, meanwhile, and in the land of Italia Redenta, upon which for centuries Italy had looked as provinces lost to her that would some day be restored, foodstuffs were supplied, hospitals refurnished, and the sick visited. The progress of events ever carrying the work into the towns of the Dalmatian Coast across the Adriatic.

The work in all this newly opened territory, with normal means of transportation utterly lacking, gave to the American Red Cross an opportunity to show again its effectiveness as an organization for emergency relief and, by the very nature of its organization, the relief was forthcoming more quickly than could have been possible through the more complex governmental or military machinery. The result, seen so often in the war, was typical not alone of Red Cross activity in Italy, but in all countries.

While attention was centered on the territories liberated by the victorious armies and while effort was concentrated there, the work went on throughout all Italy of caring for the women and children who were sufferers from the war. New activities were added. One entire new department began its work during this period: the Department of Tuberculosis, consisting of experts sent from America by the Red Cross to coöperate with the Italians in combating the ravages of the disease which, through conditions attributable directly to the war, has become of even greater menace.

The cessation of hostilities brought about a change in Italy, as elsewhere in Red Cross work, as there was no longer need for many of our military activities. Wherever possible and advisable the activities of the Red Cross were turned over to the Italian authorities and to duly constituted Italian societies --- a process made easy of fulfillment by reason of the close association in the work between Italians and Americans; moreover, nearly all of the children's institutions established by the Red Cross were being carried on by Italians, as wherever it was necessary, provision was made for these institutions during the period of adjustment. In all cases the American Red Cross fulfilled its obligations, express or implied; and even though our personnel are to-day no longer on the ground mingling with those who had come to be their friends, nevertheless the spirit of the work is going on, providing a lasting bond between our two countries --- a result in which not only the devoted workers of the Red Cross in Italy but every supporter of the Red Cross in America may, with just pride, claim his or her share.