These prisoners, as well as the greater numbers of the wounded, arrived with practically no personal possessions. The army promptly re-equipped them with uniforms, but the job of the Home and Hospital Bureau of the Army and Navy Department, which had this particular part of the big Red Cross job as its very own province, was to anticipate and look after all of their personal necessities. This thing it did, and its representatives coöperated with the army officers in studying the most urgent requirements and finding the very gifts which would provide the greatest proportion of real comfort. * * * * * Come back, if you will, once again to statistics. I make no apologies for introducing the flavor of the official report into this narrative from time to time. Reports ofttimes are indeed dull things; but the reports of almost any department of the Red Cross have a real human interest--even when they seemingly deal with mere percentages and rows of figures. Take a hospital which solemnly reports that 175,872 hospital days have been given to the army in the short space of four months. That fact can hardly be dismissed as a dull statement. It carries with it pictures of white wards, of the capable hands of nurses, of the faces of brave boys in long lines along the ways of an institution which modestly confesses that it holds but a mere fifteen hundred beds. Because the following excerpt from the report of a Red Cross captain at Vichy carries with it a picture of the boys who straggled into the local headquarters asking for everything from socks to chewing gum, it is set down here: "During the month of October (1918), 78,278 packages of tobacco, 7,480 tubes of tooth paste, 7,650 toothbrushes, 3,650 combs, 3,460 Red Cross bags, 2,850 packages of gum, 1,650 cakes of soap, 1,250 pipes, 1,560 handkerchiefs, 1,245 cakes of chocolate, 1,200 packages of shaving soap, 950 pencils, 1,000 boxes of matches, 900 shaving brushes, 500 packages of playing cards, 450 washcloths, 400 sweaters, 350 razors, 350 boxes of talcum powder, and various smaller amounts of pens, ink, malted milk, razor blades, checkers, thread, games, pipe cleaners, scissors, and drinking cups were distributed free; chiefly, so far as we know, to penniless boys. As this is written, this office is having a thousand applicants a day and, while all their wants cannot be met, no one leaves empty-handed...." "No one leaves empty-handed...."