Under the second grouping one finds those great hospitals, in most cases established by the American Red Cross while the medical and surgical plans of our army were still forming and were in a most unsettled and confused state. These were known, even after the Surgeon General had taken them under his authority, as American Red Cross Military Hospitals. They were then operated jointly by the United States Army and our Red Cross; the army being usually responsible for the scientific care and discipline of the organization, while our Red Cross took upon its shoulders both the actual business management and the supplying of the necessary materials.
The third and fourth groupings are smaller, although, in their way, hardly less consequential. In the one were the American Red Cross Hospitals which were operated purely for military purposes and for which the American Red Cross assumed the full responsibility of operation, while in the other were the hospitals, infirmaries, and dispensaries which were operated by the Red Cross--in some few cases jointly with the other organizations--for the benefit of civilians, including several thousand American civilian war workers who found themselves in France during the past two years.
If I have bored you with these details of organization it has been to the direct purpose that you might the better understand how this important phase of Red Cross operation functioned. Now, for the moment, forget organization once again. Go back to the earlier days of our Red Cross in France--the days of Grayson M.-P. Murphy and James H. Perkins and their fellows.
None of these men either realized or fully understood either the importance or the overwhelming size to which the hospital function of the United States Army would attain before our boys had been in actual warfare a full year. The army itself did not realize that. Remember that for many weeks and even months after Pershing had arrived in Paris its hospital plans were in embryo. In this situation our Red Cross found one of its earliest opportunities, and rose to it. With Colonel Lambert--he then was Major Lambert--in charge of its Medical and Surgical Division it began casting about to see how it might function most rapidly and most efficiently.