It also supplied specialties, and all for the comfort of our wounded boys over there. Take ice--that simple product of our modern civilization--so indispensable to the American. It is second nature with us to-day and yet little used by the French. Ice is as much an essential to our up-to-date hospitals as drugs or nurses or the beds themselves. Properly packed, it cools the fever and so greatly eases the sufferings of wounded men as they toss upon their cots. Its beverage use is too universal to even need comment here. "My, that's good!" more than one sick boy murmured, as the nurse held a spoonful of it to his hot lips. "It's just like home." Yet, while our government planned ice-making machinery for each of its hospitals, large or small, they were not always ready as quickly as the rest of the plant. There again our Red Cross stepped into the breach, supplying small portable ice-making plants not only to the field hospitals for which they were originally designed, but even for larger installations. Each of these portable plants consisted of a gasoline engine of fifteen horse power, water-cooled and attached to a compressor, which in turn was connected to the water piping in the brine tanks. The capacity of each of these was about two tons and a half each twenty-four hours. And each was accompanied by two Ford camionettes--builded with special ice boxes--to carry its product to the wards roundabout. Second only to ice in importance as a hospital auxiliary was light. In the early years of the war, the surgeons of the allied nations worked under great difficulties at night and undoubtedly many lives were sacrificed because of the lack of proper lighting facilities. I have heard of the doctors ripping off a wounded man's clothing by the light of one star shell and waiting for the next to give them enough brilliancy to examine his injuries. For at least ten or a dozen years past our larger American circuses have used portable electric-lighting plants on their various itinerant trips across the land--with a fair degree of success. Those circuses gave our Red Cross in France an inspiration. Lieutenant Harry C. Hand, a director in its Central Department of Requirements, in studying the markets for the proper sort of equipment, used them as models and so evolved, as a plant most practical for Red Cross needs, a three-and-a-half kilowatt outfit consisting of a gasoline engine, an electric generator, and a switchboard. This outfit, mounted upon a stout camion, would light 135 incandescent lamps of twenty-five watts each. On its travels it carried in its lockers the lamps, extension cords, sockets, and the like to make them available for almost instant service. And the Red Cross in the heart of the war emergency had five of these outfits at its service in France. * * * * *