Surgical dressings formed an important portion of the contents of these packages. Our Red Cross did not wait upon America for these; the huge plan for standardizing and making and forwarding these from the United States was also still in process of formation. It went to work in Paris, and without delay, so that by the end of 1917 two impressive manufacturing plants were at work there--one at No. 118 Rue de la Faisandre, where 440 volunteer workers and a hundred paid workers were averaging some 183,770 dressings a week, and a smaller establishment at No. 25 Rue Pierre Charron, where a hundred volunteer and ninety paid workers were at similar tasks. Eventually a third workroom was added to these. And it is worth noting, perhaps, that immediately after the signing of the armistice these three workrooms were turned into manufactories for production of influenza masks, for which there was a great emergency demand. In three weeks they turned out more than 600,000 of them. * * * * * The hospitalization phases of the Medical and Surgical Department of our Red Cross over there were, of course, far more difficult than those of the mere production or storage of dressings and other medical supplies. And they involved a vast consideration of the human factors of the super-problem of the conflict. "In this war there were two kinds of fellows," Colonel Burlingame told me one evening in Paris as we sat talking together, "the ones who went over the top and those who didn't. It was up to the second bunch to look out for the first--at every time and opportunity, which brings us squarely to the question of the French hospitals, and the American soldiers who woke up to find themselves in them. You see the Red Cross was just as responsible for those fellows as for the ones who went directly into our own hospitals over here. The French authorities told me not to worry about those boys. 'We will take very good care of them,' they said, and so they meant to do. 'Who will take care?' I asked them in return. "I went straight to one of the chief surgeons of their army. I put the matter to him as plainly as I could. 'You are the best ever,' I said to him, 'but--don't you see?--you are tired out. We want to help you. Can't we? Won't you let us loan you nurses and other American personnel as you need them?' "Would they? Say, the French fell for that suggestion like ducks, and we sent them thirty or forty girls, just as a beginning. Can you think of what it would mean for one of our Yankee boys wounded in a French hospital and perhaps ready to go on an operating table to lose an arm or a leg and then finding no one who could speak his kind of language? And what it would mean if a nice girl should come along--his own sort of a nice girl--ready to let him spill his own troubles out to her--in his own sort of jargon?"