Remember, if you will, that it was but a mere nine months after the American Red Cross Commission to Europe landed in France that its organization was put to its greatest test. The news of the long-expected and well-advertised German offensive reached Paris on the very evening of the day on which it started, March 21, 1918. Paris caught the news with a choking heart. The _coup_, which even her own military experts had frankly predicted as the turning point of the entire war, actually had come to pass. No wonder that the once gay capital of the French fairly held its breath in that unforgetable hour--that every other community of France, big or little, did the same--and fairly fought for news of the day's operations. Yet news gave little comfort. It was bad news, all of it; fearfully and unmistakably bad. Each succeeding courier seemed to bring enlarged statements of the enemy's immensity and seemingly irresistible force. It was indeed a real crisis. * * * * * In that hour of alarm and even of some real panic, our American Red Cross showed neither. It kept its cool and thinking head. Major James H. Perkins, then ranking as Red Cross Commissioner to Europe and a man whom you have met in earlier pages of this book, called a conference of his department heads on that very evening of the twenty-first of March. He told them quietly that they were to make known every resource at their command and to have each and every one of their workers--men or women--ready for call to any kind of service, night or day. "Let every worker feel that on him or her individually may rest the fate of the allied cause," was the keynote of the simple orders that issued from this conference. It was in the days that immediately followed that the flexibility and the emergency values of the American Red Cross organization--qualities that it had diligently set forth to attain within itself--came to their fullest test. The discipline and willingness of practically every worker was also under test, while for the very first time in all its history overseas it was given large opportunity to carry to the men of the allied lines a great material message. How well was that material message carried? Before I answer that point-blank question, let me carry you back a little time before that night of the spring equinox. Let me ask you to remember, if you will, that the super-structure of Red Cross effort in that critical hour had been laid many weeks before; in fact very soon after its original unit of eighteen men under command of Major Murphy had first arrived in France. It had experimented with the French, in definite and successful efforts to relieve the hard-pressed civilian population of that distressed country. It had worked, and worked hard, in the broad valleys of the Somme and the Oise, which had been devastated by the _boche_ when he made his famous "strategic" retreat to the Hindenburg Line in March, 1917--just one year before.