In each of these hospitals--as in each and every one of the United States Army hospitals in France and the occupied areas of Germany--the Red Cross functioned. At Savenay it had not only erected recreation huts for the men of each of the individual hospitals, but a huge auditorium or amusement hall, permanently fabricated of brick and steel and glass, equipped with a complete theater stage, and capable of seating between 1,500 and 2,000 doughboys and their officers. This super-playhouse was in use every night of the week--for cinema, for drama, sung or spoken, for dances, and, from time to time, for meetings and for religious services.
To this entertainment phase of the American Red Cross in the hospitals we shall presently return. For the moment I shall ask you to consider the part it played in the essential job of supplying hospital supplies. It was not, of course, either practicable or possible for our Red Cross to supply all of these--or even any tremendously large part of them. But it could--and did--supply goodly quantities of all of them when they were most needed, and so worth ten times their value and quantity at any other time.
Time and time again it furnished materials, both for their regular and for their emergency necessities. Sometimes the army itself did not function properly--there were instances of red tape disgraceful and some, too, of red tape inevitable. And yet there were other times when all the tape cutters in the world could not have saved the situation, but the American Red Cross, with its emergency warehouses and its well-organized transportation system all the way across the face of France, did save it. A truckload, two, three; perhaps even four or five truckloads of beds or bedding--perhaps even a small camionette filled to the brim with dressings and drugs or surgical instruments could, and did, save precious lives--by the dozens and by the hundreds. Do you remember, in the preceding chapter, the several instances where our Red Cross played its part--and no small part at that--in the winning of the big fight at Château-Thierry? Those were not unusual instances; they were fairly typical.
There came one day when the commanding officers of the U. S. A. hospital center at Allerey--one of the largest in all France--sent for Captain James C. Ramage, the American Red Cross representative in the district. He told the Red Cross man that a tremendous convoy of wounded soldiers from the Soissons-Rheims district was expected within a few days and asked his help in securing a real bulk of medical supplies. Those were the days when the Surgeon General's department of the army was not always able to furnish even drugs and dressings when they were most needed.