All these days Kellogg was trying to get Red Cross headquarters at Paris on the long-distance telephone. But all France was particularly demoralized those last days of July; and the telephone service, never too good under any circumstances, was gloriously bad. So after several attempts to talk with headquarters and get some sort of instructions and help, he decided that he would have to go there; which was easier said than done. For remember that this Red Cross man had no credentials; in fact, no identification papers of any sort whatsoever. While travel in France in those days, and for many, many days and months thereafter, was rendered particularly difficult and almost impossible by strict regulations which compelled not only the constant display of identification papers but a separate and definite military travel order for each trip upon a railroad train. Which in turn meant that it would be fairly suicidal for Kellogg to attempt to go into Paris by the only logical way open to him--by train. It was more than doubtful if he would have been able to even board one of them. For at every railroad station in France stood blue-coated and unreasoning _poilus_ whose definite authority was backed by the constant display of a grim looking rifle in perfect working condition.
So Kellogg walked to Paris, not every step of the way, for there were times when friendly drivers of camions gave him the bumping pleasure of a short lift. But even these were not frequent. Travel from Crépy to Paris at that particular time happened to be light. Still, after a night at Senlis, in which he slept stretched across a table in a café, he did manage to clamber aboard a truck filled with French soldiers and bound straight for their capital.
One might reasonably have expected an ordinary sort of man to have been discouraged by such an experience, but a good many of our Red Cross men over there were quite far removed from being ordinary men. And so Kellogg, after a few days of routine office work at headquarters, insisted upon his being given an outpost job once again. And soon after was dispatched to the little town of La Ferte upon the Marne, not many miles distant from Château-Thierry. This time he had his working papers; to say nothing of the neat document which told "all men by these presents" that he was a regular second lieutenant of the American Red Cross. His upward progress had begun.