When the Auteuil plan was first brought to the attention of the officers of the Medical Corps of our army they were inclined to scoff at it. To them it seemed vast, visionary, impracticable. And as Burlingame went steadily ahead with his plan--in those days, remember, it was to be chiefly a rest camp--there were folk even in the ranks of the Red Cross who criticized it. Then it was that Burlingame answered criticism, not by drawing in on his plans, but by greatly extending them, by planning to build a full surgical evacuation hospital out there on the race course in the park. The criticisms grew, and finally Perkins, whom you already know as the head of the Red Cross organization in France, called the young doctor to him. "They say that we already have two excellent Red Cross surgical hospitals here in Paris and that they are quite enough," suggested Perkins. "We shall need more," insisted the hospital expert of his organization. "The medical sharps in the army don't think that it is necessary," added the Commissioner. "Then they are wrong," said Burlingame. "We are going to need Auteuil--and we are going to need it mighty badly." "Then go to it, Major," said Perkins. And Burlingame went to it, with the results that we have just seen, while those very army men who came to scoff at Auteuil remained to praise it--in unmeasured terms. "It was a godsend," said Colonel Samuel Wadhams, medical officer on General Pershing's staff. "I don't know what we would have done without it." Done without it? I sometimes wonder what the American Army really would have done without the hospitals of the American Red Cross. Although far fewer in number than its own, they performed a valorous service indeed. In the six great eventful months from the first of June to the first of December, 1918, these Red Cross hospitals together furnished an excess of 1,110,000 days of hospital care to our troops, which was approximately the same as giving to every battle casualty in the A. E. F. five days of care. It admitted to its hospitals a total of 89,539 sick and wounded men, and cared for them--not merely adequately, but with a real degree of comfort--at a total cost of 9.57 francs (a fraction less than two dollars) a day. * * * * * Back of, and closely allied to, these distinctive Red Cross hospitals were several groups of auxiliary institutions, which also had been financed and equipped and were under the care of our American Red Cross. The first of these groups was that of the military dispensaries, the value of whose work can be roughly estimated by the fact that Number Two, down at Brest, cared for 1,751 cases in the first month of its existence. The others of the so-called permanent dispensaries were at Bordeaux, Lorient, Nantes, Neuilly, Paris, and St. Nazaire, while temporary ones were operated from time to time and as the emergency demanded at Dijon, Senlis, Verberie, Compiègne, and La Rochelle.