The headquarters of the Second were at Mananville to the south of the fighting lines. And halfway between Limey of the trenches (they ran right through the streets of the little town) and Mananville was Noviant where, as you already know, the _triage_ was established beside the walls of the church and the Red Cross functioned at the front. Remember that the _triage_ was nothing more nor less than a sorting station, where wounded men, being sent back in a steady stream from the front--three to six miles distant--were divided between four field hospitals of the Regular Army service; one handling gassed cases, another badly wounded, and the other two the strictly surgical cases. Each of these divisions consisted roughly of from ten to fifteen doctors and about one hundred enlisted men--no women workers were ever permitted so near the front--and was equipped with from five to eight army trucks of the largest size. There has been sometimes an erroneous impression that the Red Cross was prepared to assume the entire hospital functions of the United States Army; I have even heard it stated by apparently well-informed persons that such a thing was fact. It is fact, however, that if the enormous task had been thrust upon the shoulders of our Red Cross it would have accepted it. It has never yet refused a work from the government--no matter how onerous or how disagreeable. As a matter of fact, the army, for many very good and very sufficient reasons of its own, preferred to retain direct charge of its own hospitals, both in the field and back of the lines, and even took over the hospitals which the Red Cross first established in France before the final policy of the Surgeon General's office was definitely settled, which hardly meant a lifting of responsibility from the shoulders of the American Red Cross. Its task, as we shall see in the chapters which immediately follow this, was almost a superhuman one. It needed all its energies and its great resources to follow the direct line of its traditional activity--the furnishing of comfort to the sick, the wounded, and the oppressed. A wise man, one with canny understanding, if you will, who found himself at the Saint Mihiel sector would have understood that a battle was brewing. There was a terrific traffic on each of the roads leading up toward the trenches from the railhead and supply depot at the rear--big camions and little camionettes, two-man whippet tanks, French seventy-fives (as what is apparently the best field cannon yet devised will be known for a long time into the future), motor cars with important-looking officers, ambulances, more big camions, more little camionettes--all a seemingly unending procession. Fifth Avenue, New York, or Michigan Avenue, Chicago, on a busy Saturday afternoon could not have been more crowded, or the traffic handled in a more orderly fashion.