Early in the progress of the conflict our Red Cross foresaw the great necessity that would be coming for its acting as a medium of communication between the doughboy and his folks--three thousand miles or more away. The United States Army had made little or no provision to meet this need; it had far larger and far more immediate problems ahead of it. And so about the best that it could be expected to do would be to notify the folks at home that their boy had made sacrifice--supreme or very great--for his country; at the best, a sort of emotionless proceeding upon its part. In the meantime there was hardly a waking hour that those selfsame folks were not thinking of the boy in khaki. While if anything happened to him--serious even, but not quite serious enough to justify the setting of the somewhat cumbersome machinery of the army's elaborate system of notification into motion--both he and the folks were helpless. France is indeed a long, long distance away from the United States. Three thousand miles is a gap not easily spanned. But it was the job of the American Red Cross to span that gap; not only to bring news of the boy to the home folks, but, in many, many instances, to bring news of them to him. The one thing was nearly as valuable as the other. And while in the elaborate organization of the American Red Cross they were operated as separate functions and bureaus, their work in reality was so interwoven that in the pages of this book we shall consider them virtually as one, and shall begin a serious consideration of this important phase of Red Cross work by calling attention to a very few of the ramifications of a hospital searcher's job. First and foremost her task was to tell those same home folks all that she could pen, or typewrite, about their own particular soldier--exactly where he was at that time and just how he progressed. The ordinary method of handling the vast volume of these messages was in the form of short, concise, personal reports which passed through the Paris headquarters of the American Red Cross and were forwarded by it to the National Headquarters at Washington, where they were made up into letters and forwarded to the families. There were, of course, many variations in this method; for instance, when it was advisable for Paris to write direct to the boy's parents, and in those other cases, which you have already seen, where the letter to America went direct from the Red Cross worker's room at the hospital. The choice between these methods was left quite largely to the individual worker who, in turn, weighed each situation and its necessities, individually and separately. It was only in these last instances that the lie was sanctioned and even permitted, and even then only upon the absolute demand of the wounded man, himself. He had all the rights in such a situation, and the Red Cross bowed to and respected those rights--in every case.