There was nothing unusual about my oeuvre, in its size, its singlehandedness, or its spirit. Every American woman in France did what she could from the very beginning by taking up work as she saw it at hand--in her own home or neighborhood. Many did much more than I. There were others in Paris looking after the new-born babies.
In the summer of 1917 we Americans resident in France had to give up, all of us, the individuality of our _oeuvres_. This meant that most of them went out of existence. When the rumor ran from mouth to mouth in the American colony that the Red Cross insisted on taking over everything and would starve out the stubborn individualists, there was consternation. Since the Red Cross was a Government organization and controlled shipping, it was possible for them to tell us that we should receive no more cases of supplies after September first, even if friends at home kept on sending them. Some were furious; some were offended; some would give a generous slice of their fortune to fight the injunction; some laughed. But the charities' trust had come to stay, and started in to handle things and ride rough-shod over people in a way that I fear is typically American.
In the early stages of war fever, the Y.M.C.A. and the Army showed the same symptoms as the Red Cross in France. There was the idea that the American way is always and exclusively the right way; impatience with and resentment against existing organizations; a thirst for sweeping reforms; and the determination that Americans who had been on the ground from the beginning must be eliminated. The way our splendid Ambulance at Neuilly was absorbed by the army is a story of Prussianism pure and simple. The Red Cross men and their wives did not seem to get it into their heads that we had been at war for three years. I attended a drawing-room meeting one day, where a hundred women were gathered who had been sacrificing themselves in relief work ever since the day France mobilized. More than one had lost her son in the war. A new Red Cross woman, fresh from America, lectured on what the Red Cross was going to do. She smiled at us, and her peroration was this: "Now you must realize that we are at war, and that we are going to put you all to work, all to work!"