"What did we do? We went ahead and ate our dinner. It was the best thing we could do. I realized for the first time in my life the real handicaps of the blind. I don't see how they ever learn to eat fried chicken gracefully."
In an earlier chapter I told of the remarkable work done by the Smith College girls at the crux of the great German drive. It was impossible in that chapter to tell all of the sacrifice and the devotion shown by these women--the most of them from five to fifteen years out of college, although one of the best of them was from the class of 1882 and still another from that of 1917. "We were an unbaked crew," one of them admitted quite frankly to me.
Miss Elizabeth Bliss was typical of these college girls. A long time after Château-Thierry they were all working behind the lines in the Argonne, Miss Bliss herself in charge of a sanitary train for the Red Cross from the railhead back to the base hospital. It was part of her job to work up to midnight and then be called at three o'clock in the morning to see the four o'clock train start off with its wounded. On one of those October mornings, when the weather was a little worse than usual, if that could be possible, she exerted a perfectly human privilege and decided not to get up.
But no sooner had this decision been made than the still, small voice spoke to her.
"Can you afford to miss even one day?" it said to her.
"I'm all in. I just can't get up," she replied to the S. S. V.
"Can you afford to miss--even one day?" it repeated.
She got up and dressed and made her way down in the rain to the waiting train. As she went into the long hospital car a wounded doughboy raised himself on one elbow and shouted to all his fellows:
"Hi, fellows, I told you that a Red Cross girl would be here, and here she is. I told you she'd come."
"Just think if I hadn't," says Miss Bliss in telling of this incident.
When life back of the front was not dangerous or dramatic, it was apt to be plain dreary. There is not usually much drama just in hard work. Take once again the case of Miss Mary Vail Andress, whom we found in charge of the canteen at Toul. Miss Andress came to France on the twenty-fourth of August, 1917, one of a group of seven Red Cross women, the first of the American Red Cross women to be sent over. The other members of the party were Mrs. Dickens, Mrs. Lawrence, Miss Frances Mitchell (who was sent to the newly opened canteen at Épernay), Miss Rogers, Miss Andrews, and Miss Frances Andrews, and were immediately dispatched to Châlons. For a short time Miss Andress was the assistant of Henry Wise Miller, who was then in charge of canteen work in France. She, however, enlisted for canteen work and so asked Mr. Miller to be allowed to go into the field and was sent to Épernay. From there she went back to Paris and on to Chantilly, where she prepared a home for girls in canteen work. She came to Toul in January, 1918, and, as you already know, was the first woman worker to reach that important American Army headquarters.