The achievement of the first year was literally worthy of the unstinted praise it received. And perhaps its finest attribute was that most of it was permanent, and will remain, while France remains, as America's supreme gift toward her post-war recovery. CHAPTER XIV FRANCE AND THE MEDICOES The history of the A. E. F. will be in most respects the history of resources cunningly turned to new ends, of force redirected, with some of its erstwhile uses retained, and of a colossal adventure in making things do. Where the artillery was weak, the A. E. F. eked out with the coast-artillery. Where the engineer corps was insufficient, the railroads were called on for special units, frankly unmilitary. A whole citizenry was abruptly turned to infantry. But one branch of the service, though scarcely worthy of much responsibility when the war began, was, nevertheless, the one most thoroughly prepared. The prize service was the Medical Corps, and it was in this state of astonishing preparedness because immediately before it became the Medical Corps, it had been the Red Cross, and the Red Cross knows no peace-times. The question of what is Medical Corps and what is Red Cross has always been a facer for the superficial historian. Broadly speaking, the base hospitals of the army are organizations recruited and equipped in America by the Red Cross, and transported to France, where they become units of the army, under army discipline and direction, and supplied by the Medical Corps stores except in cases where these are inadvertently lacking, or unprovided for by the strictness of military supervision. In any case, where sufficient supplies are not forthcoming from the Medical Corps, they are given by the Red Cross. This is the Red Cross on its military side. In its civilian work, which is extensive, and in its recreational work it carries on under its own name and by its own authority. Where it divides territory with the Y. M. C. A., the division is that the Y. M. C. A. takes the well soldier and the Red Cross the sick one, whenever either has time on his hands. But the Medical Corps plus the Red Cross created between them a branch of the American Army in France which, from the moment of landing, was the boast of the nation. For a year before America entered the war Colonel Jefferson Kean, director-general of the military department of the American Red Cross, had been organizing against the coming of American participation. Within thirty days after America's war declaration Colonel Kean announced that he had six base hospitals in readiness to go to the front, and within another thirty days these six units were on their way, equipped and ready to step into the French hospitals, schools, and what-not, waiting to receive them, and to do business as usual the following morning.