As the days passed, the work in this vital area was greatly expanded and increased. The refugees gradually were evacuated through to Paris and beyond, while the service in the valleys of the Somme and the Oise became more strictly military in character. It became better organized, too. But I feel that this last is not the point. We Americans are rather apt to place too great a stress upon organization. And the fact remains that the Red Cross in its first military emergency, with very little organization, indeed, attained a proficiency in service far greater than even its most optimistic adherents had ever dreamed it might attain. * * * * * I have turned the course of my book for a time away from the direct service of our Red Cross to our own army because I wanted you to see how and where that direct-service field was founded. From that beginning, at the start of the German drive, it grew rapidly and steadily and, as I have just said, with certain very definite benefits of organization. The drive halted, became a thing of memory, was supplanted by another drive--of a different sort and in the opposite direction--a drive that did not cease and hardly halted until the eleventh day of November, 1918. That was the drive so brilliantly marked with those epoch-making tablets of the superb romance of our American adventure overseas--Château-Thierry, Veaux, Saint Mihiel, the Argonne--many other conflicts, too. In all of these the American Red Cross played its part, and seeks no greater testimony than that so generously volunteered by the very men who received its benefits--the doughboys at the front. They know, and have not been hesitant to tell. My own sources of information are for the most part a bit official--the records made by the Red Cross workers in the field. These tell more eloquently than I can of the work that was done there and so I shall quote quite freely from them. "My billet has stout cement walls, a mighty husky ceiling and a dirt floor," writes Lieutenant J. H. Gibson of Caldwell, Idaho, who was attached to the Thirty-third Division. "The furniture consists of my cot and sundry goods boxes, camouflaged with blankets to make seats, and I have frequent callers. Generally they are casuals--men who have lost their organizations and don't know where to go or what to do. I had three of them the first day, footsore, weary, and homesick. I rustled them a place to get mess, loaded them into my car, and drove them to the nearest railroad railhead, where I found a truck belonging to their Division, stopped it, and got them aboard." Under date of October 13, 1918, Lieutenant Gibson further wrote: