Consider, for instance, its activities in the field with the American Army--we also shall consider these in greater detail farther along in the pages of this book. The field service of the Red Cross in France--the distribution of such homely and needed man creature comforts as tobacco and toilet articles to the troopers in the trenches or close behind them--was a work quite removed from that started by women such as Florence Nightingale or Clara Barton. But who shall rise to say that, in its way, it was not nearly if not quite as essential? It was this field service that Major Perkins inaugurated, then urged, and, in its earliest phases, personally directed. In addition he had charge of the first developments of the canteen or outpost services at the front. This consisted of the establishment of more or less permanent stations by the Red Cross as close to the front-line trenches as was either practicable or permissible. Open both day and night, these outposts took, at night under the cover of darkness, hot drinks and comforts to the men holding the trenches and at all hours took care of them as they came and went to and from the lines of advanced fighting. When, slowly but surely, the American Army began to be a formidable combat force in France, the already great problems of Major Perkins were vastly increased. Up to that time the allied soldiers had been receiving the bulk of the assistance of our Red Cross. Now the balance of the work had to be changed and its preponderance swung toward our own army. Yet Perkins did not forget the grateful words and looks of thanks that he had received so many, many times from the _poilus_ and all of their _capitaines_. "Not less for the French, but more for the Americans," he quietly announced as his policy. So it was done, and so continued. The sterling qualities of leadership that this man had shown from the first in the repeated times of great stress and emergency stood him in good stead. He already had instilled into the hearts and souls of the men and women who worked with him that consecration of purpose and enthusiasm for the work in hand which rendered so many of them, under emergency, supermen and superwomen. I have myself a high regard for organization. But I do believe that organization, without the promptings of the human heart to soften as well as to direct it, is as nothing. How often have we heard of the man with the hundred-thousand-dollar mind and the two-cent heart. And how well we all know the fate that eventually confronts him. To Harvey D. Gibson, who succeeded him as Commissioner to France in the summer of 1918, Major Perkins turned over an organization whose heart was as big as its mind, and then wended his own way toward the army, where he repeated so many of his successes in the Red Cross. But, as we have said, left behind him in this last organization enduring memorials of great affection.