In and out of these streams--this fearful turmoil of traffic, if you please, our Red Cross warped and woofed its fabric of human godlike love and sympathy. With its headquarters established with a fair degree of permanency both at Compiègne and Beauvais, it increased its attention to the soldiery. It set up a line of canteens and soup kitchens along the roadside all the way from Beauvais, and these served as many as 30,000 men a day with hot drinks, cigarettes, and food of a large variety, and showed a democratic spirit of service in that they gave, without question or without hesitation, to Frenchmen, to Britons, to Italians, and to Americans alike. The men and the girls in the canteens were blind to things, but their ears were ever alert, and they heard only the voices of the tired and the distressed asking for food and drink. At Compiègne the Red Cross took over the largest hotel, which, like the rest of the town, had been evacuated so hurriedly that parts of a well-cooked meal still remained upon the tables of the great _salle-à-manger_. Instantly it rubbed its magic lamp and transformed the hostelry into a giant warehouse, infirmary, and, for its own workers, a mess hall and barracks. And as the endless convoys rolled by its doors and down into the narrow, twisting, stone-paved streets of Compiègne, these workers stood at the curb opening up case after case of canned foodstuffs and tossed or thrust the cans into the waiting fingers of the half-starved drivers of the trucks and camions. Individual initiative--that precious asset of every American--had its fullest opportunity those days at Compiègne. It mattered not what a man had been or what he might become; it was what he made of himself that very hour that counted. A minister who had come over from America to do chaplain service for the army bruised his poor unskilled fingers time and time again as he struggled, with the help of a clerk from the Paris offices, with the stout packing cases. Departmental and bureau lines everywhere within the Red Cross had been abolished in order to meet the supreme emergency. Rank melted quickly away before the demand for manual labor. The Red Cross showed the flexibility of its organization, and Compiègne was, in itself, a superb test. It was down at the railroad station in that same fascinating, mediæval city of old France that a portable kitchen, hauled out on the great north road up from Paris, with three American business men fresh from their desks in New York, hanging perilously on to its side like volunteer fire laddies of long ago going on old "Rough and Ready" to a regular whale of a blaze, was set up on the exact spot where one Jeanne d'Arc once had been taken prisoner. Its mission of salvation was far more prosaic; yet, in its own humble way, it too functioned, and functioned extremely well. It served food and hot drinks to more than ten thousand soldiers each day. * * * * *