HOWEVER much I may have taken advantage of the rather exceptional opportunities that I had of observing the manifold sacrifices --- be it financial, moral, or military --- that Great Britain made to strengthen her support of her Allies, my good friends the British would prefer, I know, that I should not enumerate them. But for all their modesty the soldiers of the American Army know what the British did in France; the men of the American Navy know full well what the British did for us in the transportation of our Armies and in the moving of our supplies; and the Red Cross knows, as neither the Army nor the Navy can know, how ungrudging was the measure of British achievements in labors of mercy at a time when her own resources in man-power and money were taxed to the breaking point.

There was no scene of suffering, whether near by or distant, in Belgium or Baikalia, France or Mesopotamia, Italy or Palestine, wherein Great Britain did not bear the largest part of the burden of relief. From the early days of the War the members of the British Red Cross, never ruffled or flurried, went about performing their difficult task in that unostentatious manner that is so characteristic of their race. And no matter whether the Americans pitched their tents along the northern shores of the White Sea or beside the southern waters of the Black Sea or anywhere else, they were sure to find that an encampment of the British Red Cross had preceded them.

Whatever disagreements, to put it mildly, may have been fated to the two great English-speaking nations in the past, there can be no question that Great Britain, from the King to his last stout soldier, has been our close friend and good Ally all through the Armageddon that has now ended. Quite naturally, therefore, it was our appreciation of this friendship, together with the knowledge of the magnitude of the British efforts, that had so much to do with the spirit in which the work of the American Red Cross was begun in Great Britain. For some time British activities had enjoyed our intelligent help in England, not a few of our men having foreseen our eventual entry into the war. Indeed, it is a well-known fact that more or less definite plans were made for the establishment of our work in England --- chiefly through the organization of a London Chapter---before the declaration of war in April, 1917. So that when the tide of American soldiers began to flow through England, it was clear that we had in that country a great natural center for our work on behalf of our troops, even though it offered little protection against the bombing planes. And, in time, as we all know, this center became a great distribution depot for our men until we had established adequate facilities on the French coast.

In October, 1917, the War Council appointed the Commission for Great Britain. Scarcely had it arrived at its post before its Commissioner made a large donation to the British Red Cross. It was nothing more than an act of civility, and the War Council proceeded to vote three more appropriations in rapid succession, amounting to $4,750,000, to enable the British Red Cross to expand its work still further. Nevertheless, it is not difficult to imagine that a people, who had given for one war purpose and another until giving was very hard, should have shown, as indeed they did, a lively appreciation of our gift.

It was not long, however, before the wisdom of our promptly setting up the American Red Cross organization in England was made manifest when it was suddenly decided to brigade American troops with the English in Northern France. Thousands and tens of thousands of American soldiers thereafter went to England, and nobody at that time could foretell how many of those who reached France would be borne back on hospital ships to Dover and Folkestone and Southampton,---towns which, as every Englishman will tell you, had had more than their share of that sort of thing.

In the midst of these preparations there suddenly came the news that. the Tuscania had been sunk by a submarine, off the Irish Coast. No sooner had the first tidings of this disaster reached London than a little company of Red Cross men were rushed to the scene. In true American fashion they went strenuously to work, helping to equip the survivors, supplying money for needful things, talking with the men, .and writing letters home for them; in short, doing everything that was necessary and helpful to relieve their anxieties until the last train-load had left the little Irish village. Obviously, since this was a new experience for us, most of the troops who came through safely were quartered at five British Military Camps in the North of Ireland, where all their needs for clothing and other things were supplied from the British Red Cross stores under an American Red Cross guarantee. Necessities were purchased wherever they could be obtained, and each man was not only fully supplied but had an extra bag of good things when he boarded the boat at Belfast to complete his journey to his camp in England. When it was learned that nearly all of the 107 officers on the Tuscania lost their outfits, the Red Cross at once advanced $17,000 to enable them to reëquip.

Nor must it be supposed that this disaster did not teach us anything; far from it. From that time on there were provisions at half a dozen Irish stations for six thousand men in case the submarines should score another hit off those difficult coasts. Arrangements were also made for prompt billeting of any number of men, and squads of Red Cross motor cars were kept in readiness for the transport of workers and emergency supplies. And that the American Red Cross had certainly taken time by the forelock in establishing these Irish Emergency Stations and preparing for every possible contingency --- not only in Ireland but along the shores of England and Scotland --- was soon shown by the terrible Otranto disaster that followed. It was after this tragedy that the Army gracefully acknowledged its obligation to the Red Cross through the Commander of the American Forces in Great Britain. "The first thing we did," said General Biddle, "was to go to the Red Cross for material and supplies . . . we in the army feel a gratitude to the Red Cross which is hard for me to express in words." And praise from the Army, to paraphrase the well-known saying, is praise indeed.

But it must not be thought that the other departments were not at work in the camps and along the lines of communication. Effort was concentrated in an attempt to bring an atmosphere of home into the life of every American soldier and, particularly, to surround the sick and wounded with it. The hospitals for American wounded had to have a thoroughly American personnel, and the patients back from Northern France found themselves in the sympathetic hands of American doctors, surgeons, and nurses, to say nothing of the smiling Red Cross women "Visitors."

In regard to hospital work of the American Red Cross, it is necessary for me to go back to the time of the arrival of the Commission in England. This was, of course, work that would brook no delay and the Commission opened its first hospital within a few weeks at Mossley Hill, Liverpool. From the very first day of its installment there it was filled with Americans who had been taken ill on board the incoming transports. In more ways than one it was a distinct achievement on the part of our people; for otherwise our soldiers and sailors would have had to be taken to the British hospitals in the vicinity.

Another hospital was early established at Paignton in sunny South Devon, which was taken over in January, 1918, from an American Committee which had established it as far back as 1914 for the use of British privates. Like many similar enterprises in England and France, this hospital was in danger of being discontinued from lack of funds. After assuming responsibility for it, we arranged to leave it to be used by British privates until it was needed for American soldiers a few months later: There was a similar institution at Lancaster gate in London for officers which was taken over with the same understanding.

In this connection, it would be a mistake not to include St. Catherine's Lodge in London. This house had been given by an American for the duration of the war, together with a gift of fifty thousand dollars for equipment, and was occupied by British officers until the American began coming back from the hard fighting of the late summer. It was conducted in conjunction with the famous British Orthopedic hospital at Shephard's Bush.

By all odds the most impressive American Red Cross hospital in England was located at Salisbury Court, not far from Southampton. It was opened with about 400 beds, but had facilities for about three thousand more. It was in the park of one of the most beautiful country estates in England, and had a mile of waterfront along the Hamble. Around the Manor House our Red Cross began building acres of hut wards, a separate isolation hospital, and large buildings for the medical and surgical staff. And, as often is the case in England, there were trees of the great-grandfather type on this 186-acre estate, and from which, by the way, much of the heavy timber was taken for the hospital buildings. Well might a wounded soldier feel that he had the best chance in the world of convalescing successfully in a hospital situated in the loveliest of the English picture country, with boating, fishing, fresh milk and eggs and the products of a 10-acre vegetable garden to tempt him back to hunger and health!

In some ways, perhaps, the most pretentious of all the American institutions in England was the Naval hospital in Park Lane in London. Built by a South African diamond king, this big marble mansion occupied an entire block, and was used during the first years of the war as a hospital for British officers before it was taken over by the Red Cross to provide a place for the officers and men from our warships.

Another London hospital was that in Kensington Palace Gardens, the former residence of an Indian prince; and a little way out of London was the magnificent Lingfield rest house for convalescent officers. It gives me pleasure to recall that among other kind thoughts on the part of the British Red Cross, it offered to build for us a model war hospital in the Royal Park at Richmond, which work of construction was just starting when the Armistice made its continuance unnecessary. In summing up I must not neglect to say that our Commission also established tent hospitals to accommodate men suffering from minor ailments in about fifty small American cantonments in England.

While the needs of the sick and wounded were being thus provided for, another large section of Red Cross personnel in England was devoting its attention to the soldiers who were not ill. These were pouring into England by the thousand, shipload after shipload, in never ending streams. Needless to say these men had no aches and no pains; they needed no bandages, no sphagnum moss, and no ether; but what they did want was the old comfortable familiar things which they had seen the Red Cross doing along the line of communication in the States, and the Red Cross saw to it that they got it likewise in England. As a matter of fact, our whole Camp Service, with every familiar feature, was transplanted from America to England by a Red Cross man who knew it backwards and forwards. He saw to it that a homelike Red Cross headquarters was set up in every camp; and that we had the same familiar type of Field Director from New York or Boston or Chicago or Ohio, ready to do anything or get anything. Let me take a few figures from the record to let you know how prodigiously this Camp Service figured in the life of the American Army. The record shows that in one month there went out from the Red Cross storehouses to the American fighting men on their way to the front the following supplies: 30,000 sweaters; 2000 blankets; 10,000 razor-blades; 500,000 paper napkins; 5,000,000 cigarettes; 3000 pairs of socks; 10,000 pairs of gloves; 300,000 boxes of matches; 8000 pounds of soap; 2000 pounds of chocolate; 50,000 sticks of chewing gum; 10,000 tubes of tooth paste; and other things ad infinitum.

As for the canteens --- they were along the railways and in the camps and always had the best British war bread and the toothsome "Chicago ham" and "lamb-chop" and chocolate and all the rest of the innumerable other things at hand. Our supplies, of course, required considerable storage space, although nothing like that in Paris. Nevertheless there were three large warehouses in London, two in Liverpool, and more in Glasgow and in Edinburgh and various English and Irish cities, and their contents all went to our soldiers.

On the whole our Red Cross in England had every right to feel that they took as good care of the soldier on their side of the water as we did on our side, if allowance is made for the fact that in England, however hospitable and considerate her people, facilities there were not comparable with those at home.

Nor did an American soldier ever have to lose sight of the Red Cross on his journey to the continent. Just as the Red Cross had been the first to meet him when he landed in England and last to bid him good-by when he embarked for France, just so it again welcomed him on the French dock and took him in charge.

On each succeeding visit I made to England during the war I was impressed with the fact that the Red Cross in England was really a good deal like, if not precisely a replica of, our Red Cross at home : the Chapter was there, the workrooms, the busy fingers, the flying needles, and the gauze for bandages. The London workrooms were a modest affair at first, but in a few months they grew to 30 vigorous branches with 2000 workers turning out 300,000 articles a month. When a call came for 2,250,000 surgical dressings of a special type, they were turned out at the rate of 150,000 a week, and the whole order was finished long before the time set by the Army.

With branches everywhere throughout England, the London Chapter had what was called a " Care Committee," composed of American women who were notified as soon as an American soldier arrived at any hospital in England, and the members of this Committee, I am told, looked after 10,000 American soldiers on an average in a month, establishing communication with their families and providing all the little things that go to make life in a hospital more bearable.

Communication Service also was maintained at a high level of effectiveness. Home Service --- which somebody dubbed the "Trouble Bureau "--- was as busy in England as it was everywhere else, and everyone knows how busy this Department can be. Moreover, a large staff of searchers was enrolled by our Home Communication Service in England, and in one single day they secured complete records of more than a thousand American soldiers in British hospitals; and what is more it did not fail to gather detailed information concerning each and every one of them.

As may be easily seen there were all sorts of odds and ends of kindly work for the Red Cross to do. The schedule was never exhausted. Those whom it served, British as well as American, included not only officers and men but war workers, soldiers' families, and slum babies. Eight maternity centers were opened, and the Red Cross maintained a considerable amount of health and welfare work among the children of half a dozen crowded cities. Working in conjunction with local associations in London, it dealt with 500 cases of aggravated shell-shock among children after the German air raids; and it provided money to send those most in need of quiet to homes in remote rural districts.

Then there was our Library Committee in London, first organized by the London Chapter.. It dispensed from its headquarters upwards of ten thousand books monthly to soldiers. This feat may be said to have aroused the interest, if not envy, of His Majesty King George V whenever he visited an American camp or hospital. He is represented as being unable to understand how our convalescents received the American papers so promptly. I do not know, of course, what explanation was given to him, but all Americans will understand, I think, when I say that the Red Cross saw to it.

Grosvenor Gardens was the center of Red Cross war activities. The organization occupied five or six buildings close to the American Army and Navy Headquarters as well as the Embassy. And how busy these Red Cross buildings were during the height of their activity may be judged from the fact that their total budget reached nearly a million dollars a month. It is almost a pity that I have not space for the items of this budget, for they reflect clearly the tremendous increase in the number of men sent over during the latter months and the corresponding increase in Red Cross activity which spread rapidly to the remotest corners of the British Isles. Thus the canteen service installed large canteens at Southampton, Edinburgh, Birmingham, Cardiff, Glasgow, Winchester, Leicester, Derby, Romsey, and Chester, as well as hospital exchange canteens in fifteen places. The items in the general budget included provision not only for hospitals and camps but such things as officers' clubs, camp warehouses, shower-bath buildings, garages, portable houses for infirmaries, hospital theaters, and so, on.

On October 25 the indefatigable British Red Cross had what is called "Our Day," which is the date set apart for its annual drive for funds. It was our good fortune to start it off with a rush the night before when the Commissioner of the American Red Cross for Great Britain, at a Red Cross dinner in their honor, handed to the Treasurer of the British organization a check for five hundred thousand pounds --- two million, three hundred and eighty-five thousand dollars at the then current rate of exchange --- as a subscription from the American Red Cross. Many distinguished British and Americans attended the dinner. Towards its close our Commissioner, in a few happy words, told his attentive hosts how grateful we Americans were for the great and generous service of the British Red Cross in placing at his disposal almost their entire organization. "I can cite countless instances," he went on to say, "of your valuable assistance . . . and we should be sadly lacking in appreciation if we did not make some effort to show our gratitude."

The remarks of the Commissioner ---as all who were present have testified --- expressed so succinctly the appreciation of our people for the stupendous and ever increasing effort during four years of war on the part of the indomitable men and women of Great Britain, and there is no need for me to give here the contents of the letter which I sent with the check on behalf of the American people to the representatives of the British Red Cross and the Order of St. John. In conclusion, suffice it to say that no American could have been in England or the War Zone without a realization that no words could adequately express this admiration for the glorious part that England played towards bringing victory to her Allies and to herself.

IN the chapters of unhappiness which German-made war has written, there is none, to my mind, more pathetic than that of Rumania. Geographically, that country is a part of the Balkans whose mountain passes, since the days of the Csars, have resounded without ceasing to the clash of arms. Battered by Romans, Turks, and Austrians, traded upon by Greeks, Russians, and Prussians, she has held fast to her place on the Danube, to her oil fields and her salt mines, her. honesty of purpose and her faith in God.

Here is a nation skilled in arms but which has no need for capital punishment. Here is a people which, even amid the horrors of destructive war and in the clutches of starvation, maintained and expanded its system of compulsory education; a country where there are petty misdemeanors but no crime. Subject for divers periods to the Moslem, it remains a Christian nation. Surrounded by Slav, Goth, Vandal, and Turk and, although invaded times without number, it has still in its veins the blood of Trajan's soldiers. It remains a Latin race.

To understand the dislike and rancor of the Teuton powers towards Rumania, one has merely to recall to mind that Rumania has a Hohenzollern king and that it was the people of Rumania who indorsed the Allied cause. In justice to the King, however, it must be said that once the decision was made, he loyally acquiesced and won the respect of his people and those of the Allied countries by his courageous leadership in the midst of disaster. The ambition of the Rumanians was to recover their ancient province of Transylvania and restore to their own household the populations suffering under notorious Austrian misrule. With this prime purpose in view at their first entry into war, they drove their armies through the Austrian opposition into Transylvania in the autumn of 1916, and with the remainder held watch upon the Danube against the Bulgarians, who were massed to the south. But the Rumanian armament at the opening of the war was of German manufacture and, obviously, could not be replaced. Again, their third province, Dobrudga, was by the terms of alliance to be defended by Russia, who, as we all know, failed in her compact. And Russia's failure in her part of the task spelled disaster to the Rumanian contingents on the west. German forces were added to the Austrians, and together they drove the Rumanian armies back into Wallachia; they bombarded Bucharest, and with its fall and the removal of the court to Jassy there began the Rumanian exodus into the northwest.

Moldavia is a little province no larger than the state of Connecticut, and it was at once filled with millions of people who had little or nothing to eat or to wear. This was in the beginning of December, 1916,--- and Rumania has a climate, it is well to note, that is not unlike that of middle and lower Canada.

When in 1917 the American Red Cross went into Rumania, its army was holding with grim tenacity the Moldavia boundaries, but machine guns could not block the progress of the invisible legions of disease. Every condition in the overcrowded, underfed remnant of Rumania, that still was free, was a standing invitation to this most deadly of the forces of war. At first came pneumonia, then typhus with a toll alone of 1000 lives, which was followed by recurrent fever and smallpox, all traveling with fatal swiftness through the crowded thoroughfares of Jassy and other towns, and along the country roads where the little villages joined one another. The uncomplaining, half-clad refugees, huddled like animals in their dugouts, struggled to keep the cold from pinching their lives out. They were consumed by vermin, the chief and efficient distributors of pestilence. In these wretched retreats the dead lay with the living, and hunger, the last executioner, waited at the doorway for such as might by miracle escape. There were two feet of ice and snow through that awful winter, and children, whose covering consisted only of a single cotton garment, went up and down crying for food until the clutch of the cold at last strangled their crying and put an end to their hunger. The dead were everywhere in the Jassy streets; in the wards of civil hospitals patients were frozen to death. This was the price the Rumanian people paid for casting their strength into a cause that seemed to promise a united nation, living its simple life with work in a place of freedom.

When the Red Cross went to lend what help it could to Rumania and its army at the front, the soldiers were well-ordered and intent upon their purpose, but the Russians were yielding to the spirit of disorder which followed the revolution. Wherever they were quartered, there was filth. The manure piles from their horses littered the streets of the villages. The Russians drove the people out of their houses and took up residence in their stead; they invaded the hospitals and slept beside patients who were ill with contagion, and they consumed eternally the food supply, while the Rumanian peasantry starved and died. The people in the villages back of the lines had no shoes and no stockings; the refugees slept in the fields, exposed to the pitiless winds.

There was little left to sustain life nor medical care to sustain what there was of it, for the doctors were in the army or had succumbed to disease. A fortunate hamlet here and there had bread twice a week, while others had none at all. There were people in these miserable districts who subsisted like the beasts, by gnawing the grass and roots of the fields.

In Beltiu, a village in the district of Putna, our Red Cross visitors reported the most gruesome conditions. They found in one house three children whose father was at the front and the mother had died from typhus. A girl of ten was trying to care for the other two, one of whom lay dying on the floor of starvation. The third had only a ragged shirt which partly covered her and whose little body was no more than a frameworks There was no one to help them --- three little souls flickering out.

"It was a tragic picture," our representative wrote, "of famine and disease from which even the Rumanian officer was forced to turn away."

Another report told of a dilapidated house with the roof full of shell-holes and the glass all shattered from the windows, and in which ten persons were crowded in squalor and misery. There was no bedding except some bags The tenant was an old woman whose husband had just died, but she had three sons in the army. She was a mere specter. There was not even a handful of cornmeal in the house. One child of three lay under the stove in which there lingered dying embers of a little fire; the other nine were strewn about the place. Hunger-stricken, horror-stricken, waiting the death-stroke from shell-fire or pestilence, trusting in the bravery of the Rumanian Army to guard them from harm, complaining not at all, burying at night their poor little possessions to save them from the Germans---these were the wretched people for whom Marie of Rumania, granddaughter of Queen Victoria, sacrificed earthly riches and gave gladly the best years of a gifted and beautiful life.

In the first crowded months when the Red Cross War Council faced its problem of carrying relief to a world overwhelmed with suffering, the word that came out of Rumania had been sorry enough; but by the time the Red Cross Mission which was dispatched in August had traversed the long way to the scene of its labors, Rumania had become a tragedy, the more heartbreaking because it was played out in stoical silence and with unwavering faith. All know that in our devotion to the niceties of surgical science we demand the perfection of sterilization; but the wounds of soldiers in Rumania, torn by German missiles, were being dressed with whatever was available. Rumanian children swarmed the streets with stomachs and feet swollen from dropsy; pellagra claimed its victims by thousands.

To reach Rumania, the Red Cross Mission was compelled to journey by Vladivostok and cross the long reaches of Siberia. It was met with every courtesy by the Russian government, but underneath the visible surface of its wartime life, Russia, like every other Allied country, was honey-combed with German intrigue and peopled with German agents gnawing like rats at the underpinning of the state. Russian railroads for the most part in the secret control of Germany, lagged and miscarried in their labor of supplying the Russian troops. On the wharves of Vladivostok were lying millions of dollars' worth of supplies for the Russian soldiery which should have been delivered three years before. Already, the great clumsy body which had been Russia, was tottering to its fall; and in the midst of the unrest there came to the surface the ancient hatred of Rumania, which had been put away when the Rumanians entered into the Entente.

Assiduously nourished by the German agents, this hoary grudge wrought itself out in the studied delay of Rumanian supplies, the failure of the Russian officials to ship, even, into Rumania, the food for maintenance of their own troops. As a result, Russia, a well-nigh inexhaustible granary, was herself starving, and with munitions awaiting them somewhere, the Russian peasant soldiers confronted with bare hands the merciless artillery of the Huns.

In this light, it is not difficult for me to understand why the Red Cross Mission was ushered with all politeness and the greatest possible expedition into Rumania but thereafter could secure almost no transport for the material of relief. There was no access to the suffering Rumanians after the reverses of 1916, save over the endless roads of Russia, with the invisible German clutch upon them all.

Slowly, but surely, the patriotic people of a brave little country were being starved into the arms of the Central Powers. Behind them Turkey, Bulgaria, and the Sea; on the north a Russia which had played them false and was even now on the brink of a German peace; and to the west, the Hun, taking fuel from the Rumanian oil wells, feeding on the Rumanian harvest, harrying the devoted army, and through its Russian agents stopping the supply of the simplest necessities. Seemingly, the doom of Rumania was written, even then, in letters so large that no man could fail to read them. On the black horizon shone no ray of hope save that at last the Allied arms might triumph and the dream of centuries come true.

It had been the purpose of the Red Cross to perform a great labor of relief in Rumania, to care for her refugees and her fighting men, to supply nurses and doctors and food and clothing in abundance, to restore her strength and to uphold her courage, to help her stand firm as the pillar of Allied strength in southeastern Europe. But Germany had planned too well. From the time when the German divisions, fighting every step of the way, drove down into the rich plains of Wallachia, the days of Rumanian resistance were numbered. This fact was all too evident. Indeed, the Director of the Red Cross Mission has since informed us that he had had no illusions about the truth of this statement from the moment of his arrival at Jassy. It was the program, however, of this first Mission, to make rapid and thorough canvass of Rumanian needs, and after a few weeks to return and outline a broad general plan of action. When it came to Jassy, the Mission brought with it only the smallest of supplies. In that land of desolation and want they vanished in a day. It was not a question of studying the needs of Rumania; the need of Rumania was a nightmare. Its voices were never silent. It stared in the streets; it prayed from the cadaverous. faces of that misery-marked populace; the sick, the naked, and the starving were on every hand and winter was at the door.

In all the tragic panorama of the War, there appears, perhaps, no sadder and nobler figure than Marie of Rumania, a Queen, to paraphrase, who is every inch a woman and who had been trying at the cost of every conceivable sacrifice, with a courage equaled only by her devotion, to stem the tide of suffering. Utterly fearless, she had gone among her starved and scourge-ridden people like an angel, carrying such food and clothing and medicine as she could gather among those who themselves had nothing. Into the typhus hospitals where hundreds lay dying of smallpox; into the horrible dugouts of the refugees; into every place where there was a mouth that she could feed or a soul that she could cheer, day by day went the Queen of Rumania, and yet, by some strange dispensation, she lived.

But, although passing scathless herself, her youngest son, unfortunately, fell a victim to the typhoid in the early days of his struggle; yet far from giving up from this new grief in her heart, she plunged all the deeper into her work of mercy.

To our Red Cross Commissioner this unhappy Queen told in detail the story of her country's misfortune, which had been crowded into one brief year.

"The retreat from Wallachia," her Majesty said, "the sorrow and depression of a vanquished Army is a story filled with tragic grief; the winter was one of darkest horror, thousands of our soldiers died of sheer want. We could neither feed, clothe, warm, nor house them. Disease in its worst form fell upon us; and being cut off from all aid, we struggled against odds we had no means of overcoming. Row upon row of graves and uncounted numbers of rough wooden crosses throughout the land stand as mute witness of a tale too sad to relate. Thousands of little children, left without father or mother, died before help could reach them, and I, the Queen, heard each cry of anguish, shared each terror, and divided each fear. Then spring came---and as by a miracle, our armies seemed to have a rebirth. The specters that had haunted our streets in winter became soldiers once more. Our thinned ranks were filled up. A new desire for vengeance and intense longing for homes taken away by the enemy steeled every heart for a new effort. But our newborn hopes were destined to wither away. The Russian revolution had sown discord and disorganization in the hearts of our nearest allies, and when the great hour for action came---the hour which our army had hungered for, and into which our troops had thrown themselves with a bravery that justified our dearest hopes ---our neighbors failed us."

In the files of the Red Cross there are many declarations in various languages of gratitude for the great and the timely aid of the American people. It is doubtful, however, if ever there came a deeper note of thankfulness than that of the Rumanian Queen and her suffering people for our work of relief during the winter of 1917.

"But there was only one thing to do," wrote the chairman of the Commission. "To get food, medicine, and clothing from any source and in whatever quantity possible, in order to save what lives we could before disease and starvation and the winter should outstrip the German armies in the ruin of the land . . . ." Fortunately the Commissioner had some funds which had been placed in his hands for such casual use as might be required, and he requisitioned this for obtaining food.

It was not, of course, a dietetic question. The need was for food,---anything that would sustain life. And the report shows that with all possible haste agents were dispatched to every corner of Russia, where starvation had already set in, to pry out from its hiding place whatever food the magic of money might discover. To Moscow, to Petrograd, to Odessa, and even distant Archangel, to every place that might afford a chance of victualment, they hurried at post haste. In Moscow they found flour and beans; in Odessa they bought tons of dried vegetables; in the North they found five thousand barrels of herrings, and all these and other things they drove forward over the congested and disorganized Russian railways through districts whose populations were even then on the verge of civil war, with guards riding the "wagons" to fend off the hungry mobs in towns through which they passed.

So at last when the food train rolled into Jassy, there was a storage house ready for its cargo, and in the heart of the city adjoining the national theater, a canteen was opened and equipped. All that were there unite in saying that it was indeed a sorry coterie --- some five hundred and odd persons who came on the first day merely to satisfy their curiosity. For the Rumanian, near neighbor to the hard trading East, had little faith in the story that these strange Americans would give away food for nothing. If it were true, they told themselves, then such people must be seen anyway, for such a phenomenon would never happen again. On the second and third days, however, the number increased until on the fourth day the American canteen was feeding two thousand people who without it would have died of starvation. In this connection I am sure that an excerpt from a Rumanian newspaper would be of interest. It read as follows: --

"The hungry poor from the outskirts of the town, especially the women and children, began to assemble early in the morning in front of the shed, in which were also the kitchen and the store full of food brought from beyond the ocean, from the country of friendly deeds, not of words, empty and illusive as the dust of the road. Every day the number of those who came from the borders of the town, the naked and hungry, increased. The distribution of the food begins at ten o'clock and lasts until three. Around the two tables there is room for a hundred and twenty people. All of these are in rags, and with faces emaciated to the bones. In one hour, about nine hundred can eat. The greater number were children between six and twelve years of age. I have even seen mites only three or four years old, with shaggy hair, bare feet, and clothed in rags, out of which their thin little bodies protruded. Some came from as far away as the windmill where on the Tatarasi hill the white belfry of the church in the Eternitatia cemetery stands. Early in the morning they leave their shanties, half dug into the earth, and drag their rags through the dust or mud of the numberless little alleys toward the shed out of which daily flows the aroma of hot food. It seems as though the American mission had spoken the Biblical words of the Savior, 'Suffer little children to come unto Me.' And the children, with thin faces and naked feet, descend every morning from all the suburbs toward the foreign Pity, which rises like a white Christ out of the midst of human evil."

Was there ever an article that appealed more to the heart? And what is more those present declared that this motley throng cheered the American flag, kissed the hands of the workers, threw things into the air, and wept and prayed and carried home morsels of food to their brothers and sisters, who were too weak to undertake the journey, while, almost simultaneously, I may say, the Commissioner was cabling us in Washington for supplies of every sort.

Although hampered by the almost total lack of transportation, the relief of the refugees was already under way and advancing day by day. There was a crying need, of course, for some means of supplying hospital accommodations for the multitude of wounded and sick. Without these, it was plain, disaster would overtake the army, which was almost entirety bereft of any means of caring for its wounded men. Besides, the defection of Russia has brought a heavier blow than the military reverse: The hospitals, maintained by the Rumanian Red Cross on the front, had been swept away in the German deluge, and at best they had little enough of equipment. Moreover, Moldavia was so far from the original front that no possibility of retreat to it had ever been entertained, and no preparation made there for the establishment of hospitals. And when the retreat did come with its great lists of wounded, every school and other large building was utilized, but there was no equipment. For beds, they had coarse sacking stuffed with straw and only one sheet and one blanket to each bed. There was no adequate supply of fuel and the transport service, what there was of it, was all employed in army supply. It must not be forgotten, also, that Rumanian had few railways. The highways were good but there were few cars, and the oil supply was in the hands of the enemy. Many of the oxen which did most of the heavy hauling of the country had been taken by the army and lost. Three million of them, along with proportionate numbers of horses and sheep, had been sold to Russia and Germany at the beginning of the war by men whose greed obscured their vision. In almost everything Rumania was beyond the possibility of self-help. She had no trained nurses --- only willing women --- and of her twelve hundred doctors, two hundred had died from typhus, and a great number, not definitely known, had met death in battle.

Indeed, so obvious and so vast was the lack of hospital accommodation that almost immediately upon the arrival of the Mission in September, the Director cabled a requisition to us in Washington for a comprehensive list of hospital supplies, which in condensed cable form covered nearly two closely typewritten pages. The list began with 250,000 yards of mattress cloth, ran through the entire range of simple drugs and essential instruments, and ended with spaghetti sufficient for 20,000 patients for six months. This list was the minimum. Two days later, the following supplementary cable was filed: --

Civil population worse condition. Three million in territory inhabited by one million. No clothing, shoes, or material for same obtainable any price. Plainest food bought in Russia limited amount. Transport uncertain. No nourishing foods available for sick or wounded. Eighteen thousand orphans registered; probably many more. All without clothes or shoes of any kind for winter. Unless warm clothing, shoes, or materials with needle, thread, and accessories make same, sent immediately, these and many additional civilians must die this winter. Much sickness now. Some typhus. Severe epidemics inevitable this winter unless can obtain supplies and take prompt measures required prevent far-reaching disaster. Useless try handle situation without some one with authority and access to Government on ground with proper organization similar to Belgium look after transport, receive, and distribute supplies and spend what money can be advantageously used here and in Russia. Can probably secure coöperation of representatives of Allies here. Deem situation so serious am willing to remain all winter, organize, and handle matter if desired, provided can be assured substantial support. Will probably require several million dollars for effective work. Large part would be spent in America, remainder here. Details be sent later. Must have regular transport for definite supplies. Think we can arrange this in Russia if you can arrange ocean tonnage. Announcement of definite policy and appropriations would have most beneficial effect now.

Spurred on by this revelation of the imperative need of Rumania, we of the War Council made haste to ship from New York such hospital supplies and food as could be obtained. Shortly after this five of the members of the Commission, following the original program, returned to America; but the Chairman together with the remaining members stayed on as did the eleven doctors and twelve nurses. And this little force set out to cope with the disheartening task of Rumanian relief despite the fact that everything seemed against their success.

But they did not have to struggle with this forlorn hope all alone: the British Red Cross fought side by side with them. This organization had undertaken a brave work of relief, but like the Rumanian Red Cross had been swamped by the conditions. Their doctors had made a canvass of all the districts in the little provinces and learned the sorrows of Rumania first hand; they had traversed the front from Delli to the Carpathians and studied the needs of the makeshift hospitals where even bedding and food and hospital clothes were wholly lacking and the patients undernourished, and where used bandages and bloodstained garments were put back after the soldier's wounds were dressed. But for the betterment of these dire conditions, there was no hope save in shipments from the United States. All western Europe was struggling under a need of them which it could not supply. There was nothing left for them but to wait and to hope, while the poison of German intrigue and treachery increased from day to day the uncertainty of all dependence upon Russia.

Meanwhile, the labor of civilian relief went on. By the New Year our Red Cross, in coöperation with the British Red Cross and Queen Marie, was feeding ten thousand people in Moldavia, and awaiting with such patience as it could the arrival of supplies which we had shipped to them. By good fortune the Director of the British Red Cross had in storage a quantity of condensed milk which he contributed for the feeding of infants; while on our part attention was given to the alleviation of the misery of the soldiers at the front. At Roman in the hospital the Red Cross gave something the patients had never dreamed of seeing --- an American Christmas. Evergreens were brought down from the mountains, and candles were found in all sorts of places for their illumination. There were little gifts, such things as the workers of the Commission could find or manufacture; there was food and songs to sing, and as if in despite of the misery that hung like a pall everywhere, there was the spirit of the Christmas over it all. To brighten the sky for a multitude of unhappy refugees, the Chairman of the Commission cabled us that he had given to the Queen just before Christmas for distribution the sum of 250,000 lei (about $20,000). Food of every sort and in lots both large and small was purchased wherever obtainable.

There was a distribution two days before Christmas in Sascut of dried fish, sunflower oil, and cornmeal. Two hundred and sixty-eight families carried away supplies of food and plans were made for further dispensation through a committee of the Commune, the Notar, the village priest, the schoolmaster, and the chief of police, who were to furnish lists of the needy. A Belgian sugar refiner in the district and his wife attached themselves to the Red Cross and gathered every available scrap of old clothing and other supplies; they established a Red Cross sub-depot in their house and visited the people of the surrounding country three or four days each week. They organized a company of young Rumanian women as relief workers, and when the first of March came, they were ready on the coming of spring to carry on the work on a larger scale. Through January the Red Cross had started to lend a hand to the government work for orphans. These constituted a large problem in themselves. The casualties of war and the ravages of disease had raised this menace to a terrifying proportion. Schoolhouses were secured which, formerly, had been used as Army hospitals and in which during the preceding years hundreds of men had died from typhus. The slow process of cleaning and equipping these places had gone on steadily. The relief work in Jassy and many of the outlying districts was well organized though hampered by the fatal lack of supplies. The hospitals at Roman and in Jassy with their 500 beds were doing a distinguished work with the limited facilities available. The Red Cross, in the face of almost insurmountable obstacles, had brought comfort and healing to the thousands of sufferers (and even dying people). In a land where there was no food it was feeding 40,000 people and turning out from its relief station clothing that saved unnumbered lives. It had reached through a sea of difficulties the firm ground of organization where it was ready to handle a great work of relief.

From America, in November, there had come two carloads of hospital supplies and one of food; and with these and what remained of the British equipment, the Red Cross took over the British hospital at Roman, 80 miles from Jassy and 30 miles from the front. This single shipment was all that ever reached Rumania of the supplies which were sent forward by orders of the War Council in Washington. But even with such materials as these limited sources could supply all accounts agree that the Commission made of the Roman hospital by far the best institution of its kind in all Rumania. The British had turned it into a good establishment, heated by steam and lighted by electricity. Its function was that of a base hospital to which soldiers were removed after first treatment at the front. A number of civil cases were also taken. In the rear of the hospital were erected wooden barracks with sleeping accommodations for upward of a hundred orderlies. There were also a carpenter's shop, shoemaker's shop, machine shop, an outside swimming pool, a disinfector, a large laundry, two motor ambulances, two operating rooms, an X-ray laboratory, and ocular and dental departments. The Thanksgiving Day celebration at the hospital, which the Queen attended, was an occasion long to be remembered.

Once having got the Roman hospital into thorough operation, the Red Cross undertook to establish a civilian hospital in an old palace in Jassy, a work which was well on the way to completion when the concentration of troops in Jassy made it necessary to take the building as barracks.

The winter was now at its height, but the clothing problem had in a measure been relieved. From various places in Russia the Commission had secured some 400,000 yards of cloth, 100,000 spools of thread, 50,000 needles, half a carload of buttons, and 50 sewing machines. The Red Cross Canteen at Jassy was operated in connection with a public triage --- a bathhouse and disinfector; and having cleaned and fed and restored to animate interest in life some thousands of starving women, the Red Cross opened in conjunction with the canteen a clothing department. There women, as soon as supplies were obtained, were set to work in the hurried manufacture of simple clothing to save threatened lives. Thousands of garments were manufactured, the Queen herself distributed many of them in the small country villages and, in addition, the utter lack of shoes was overcome by making simple moccasins from canvas and burlap, which proved a most satisfactory substitute. There were, at least, fewer frozen, bleeding feet in the streets and highways of Moldavia. The records show that at the relief station in Jassy where now food, clothing, disinfection, and medical attention were dispensed, 1200 persons were cared for daily from the date of its opening on February 5 up to March 9, when the Commission was forced to leave Rumania by the imposition of the German peace.

Now that the suffering had, in a measure, been modified, every hand in Rumania was called into service. Widows and orphans and crippled soldiers joined in the work, carrying Red Cross assistance to the needy when their own government was powerless. The American flag and the Red Cross emblem in every district were the signboards pointing the way to help. The heroic Queen traveled Rumanian roads in good and bad weather. There was no such thing in all Moldavia as public charity, for no one had anything to give away. They had lost it all. Charitable organizations, which had been amply endowed for whatever relief was necessary in peace times, were hopelessly crippled by the terrific strain of war. Commercial stocks of food and clothing had vanished and there was no hope of replacement. The greater part of the factory installation in Wallachia had been left behind in the retreat; those in Moldavia were destroyed to save them from German hands. There was no oil for machinery, no cows to furnish milk for babies, no Russian ally.

It was a people dying for a principle, no more, no less. With all their suffering, they made no complaint. The Army must have the best --- all, if need be In the desolate villages behind the front it was counted good fortune for a peasant family to get the entrails of an animal that had been slaughtered for the Army. The wretched people boiled this offal and made soup to keep the breath of life in than. The Army was in good order and would fight to its last soldier. It had no other purpose. But if Russia fell, everything fell.

And then, indeed, the bell rang for the curtain. On the 9th of March, to save herself from the utter annihilation which Germany had promised for the little Balkan country's portion, Rumania gave up the struggle. It left her hemmed in by revengeful enemies and with the knowledge that Russia, her former protector, had played her false in practically the last political act before she herself went down into an abyss of revolution and Bolshevism.

The Allied world laid no charge of bad faith at the door of Rumania. Her necessity was too obvious. She had tried and failed. In the trial she had stripped herself bare of every possession, and had lost by slaughter and disease about ten per cent of her population. With us such a payment would mean ten millions of our people! It is indeed to be hoped that Rumania's sacrifices be not wholly forgotten even in these days of short memories.

Scarcely had Rumania yielded than the Germans ordered the immediate dismissal of all French, British, and American agents of relief from the country. It was folly, of course, to expect any reversal of this order. At the time of the Mission's departure Rumania's Queen cabled to Washington as follows: --

"At this hour when tragic events leave my country defenseless in the hands of a revengeful and relentless enemy, my thoughts turn with gratitude towards those who in anxious days, but when there was still hope, came to my aid. I wish once more to thank the American Red Cross for the splendid way in which it answered my appeal of a few months ago. The work the American Red Cross Commission did amongst our wounded and amongst the suffering population is unforgettable to me and my people. Now that my country has to remain alone and forsaken, surrounded by foes, I wish once more to raise my voice and to thank all those who helped me, and to ask that we and our nation should not be forgotten, although a dreadful and humiliating peace has been forced upon us. I ask of the great heart of America to remember Rumania, if even for a while. Strangulated, her cries will not reach it, and her tears will have to be wept in secret."

There is little more of this sad story to be told. To the thoughtless, or those who think in numerals and have not the larger view of what the Red Cross purpose really is, it might appear that its mission in Rumania was a failure. But even these persons, I think, would not say so had they been among the fortunate ones who were present when Marie of Rumania conferred decorations on the members of our Mission. All of them have since said that they knew that the decorations were the only proofs of her gratitude that the Queen had left to give, but it was easy to see that she exulted in the giving. On our part, the Commission put into the Queen's hands an order for food sufficient to feed several thousand persons for six months. And when the Commission took up the perilous road to the north through Russia, thousands of these people, who for centuries have forgotten no kindness and no injury, crowded the public square to say Godspeed to those who were leaving their unhappy country. It was a demonstration of a nation's affection and an assurance that the memory of our efforts, however pitiful when contrasted with the need, will never fade as long as the Danube flows to the sea.