With a half dozen of the Parisian "one lungers" screeching their very souls out in the second speeds, they visited four of the Paris warehouses in quick succession. A truck was brought up out of the offing. By eight o'clock it was loaded, and by midnight it was at the firing line and being unloaded of its precious supplies.
On another night during the same battle, a veteran army surgeon major arrived in Paris at one o'clock in the morning. He found the medical offices of the Red Cross open--there were no hours in those strenuous days when one found them closed--and demanded supplies. The man was faint from lack of sleep. He was put in bed for 120 minutes--not one minute less, not one minute more. When he was awakened, his supplies were at the door. They had been gathered in a motor truck from three warehouses immediately roundabout. Later this army man returned to Paris and reported that the work of our Red Cross that night had made it possible for every man in his Division to have a chance for recovery. Had it not been for the supplies, he added, sixty per cent of them might have died.
But it was in the quick establishment of hospitals that I think that Burlingame's function of the Red Cross attained its most satisfactory as well as its most dramatic results. Take Number 110 at Coincy, also no great distance from Château-Thierry. It, too, sprang up as a direct result of that famous battle. A radical change of location of our troops in that territory and increasing activities in the neighborhood of Fère-en-Tardenois made an American evacuation hospital at or near that point an immediate necessity. Burlingame, in the same trusty motor which carried him so many miles over the battle-scarred and shell-holed and traffic-worn highroads of France, went out with Colonel Stark, of the Regular Army force, to find a site for it. They decided on a little town of Coincy, on the direct main line of evacuation from the American sector.
The only things that stood in favor of Coincy were its location and the fact that it had water. There was little else left there; not a château or a ruined church or even a barn in which to locate, temporarily at least, a hospital. Moreover, there was no time for picking or choosing in that country through which the _boche_ in the beginnings of his final retreat had just passed. In the center of some partly demolished buildings, Stark and Burlingame found a pump, still in working order. This, they decided, would make a splendid site for their new hospital. The road which ran close by the ruins was the main road to the front--not far away, as the constant booming of artillery attested--and the fact that the railroad also was fairly near simplified the problem of evacuations. These two factors, together with that of the water, which was both pure and abundant--the French already had marked the pump, "_Eau potable_"--decided the question.