But it was in the quick establishment of hospitals that I think that Burlingame's function of the Red Cross attained its most satisfactory as well as its most dramatic results. Take Number 110 at Coincy, also no great distance from Château-Thierry. It, too, sprang up as a direct result of that famous battle. A radical change of location of our troops in that territory and increasing activities in the neighborhood of Fère-en-Tardenois made an American evacuation hospital at or near that point an immediate necessity. Burlingame, in the same trusty motor which carried him so many miles over the battle-scarred and shell-holed and traffic-worn highroads of France, went out with Colonel Stark, of the Regular Army force, to find a site for it. They decided on a little town of Coincy, on the direct main line of evacuation from the American sector. The only things that stood in favor of Coincy were its location and the fact that it had water. There was little else left there; not a château or a ruined church or even a barn in which to locate, temporarily at least, a hospital. Moreover, there was no time for picking or choosing in that country through which the _boche_ in the beginnings of his final retreat had just passed. In the center of some partly demolished buildings, Stark and Burlingame found a pump, still in working order. This, they decided, would make a splendid site for their new hospital. The road which ran close by the ruins was the main road to the front--not far away, as the constant booming of artillery attested--and the fact that the railroad also was fairly near simplified the problem of evacuations. These two factors, together with that of the water, which was both pure and abundant--the French already had marked the pump, "_Eau potable_"--decided the question. So the two men staked a claim to the ruin. Before they returned to the car Burlingame picked up a piece of board. He fished a bit of charred wood out of the débris. It served as chalk. With it he began slowly marking the board: "A. R. C. Hospital No. ----." He hesitated for just a moment. What the deuce was the number of that last hospital? Well, no matter. Number 110 would do. And Number 110 it became and so remained even after the hospital was ancient--whole weeks ancient--and finally had been moved to Villers-Daucourt. "And so with a little burned wood, a piece of busted wall, and a cow yard, the most advanced American hospital in the battle of the Vesle started in," says Burlingame. "We took our burned-wood sign, fastened over the pump--and, _voilà_, there was Red Cross Hospital Number 110. And then we hustled to the first military telephone and began phoning Paris and other Red Cross headquarters to hustle the stuff out to it. 'Send it up the road from Fère-en-Tardenois,' I told them, 'until you come to the cow yard with the sign. Only look out you don't miss the sign.'... And all the time it was raining like hell." * * * * *