Men who were able to write for themselves were supplied with paper and encouraged to do so. Others who were far too ill or confined prone in surgical apparatus--their very hands caught and held taut in a cruel network of pulleys and weights and drain tubes--dictated their letters home--and invariably lied as to their condition. All was "going well." The patient sufferer had but one report to pass his lips. "Tell them that I'm feeling fine," was the message that he ordered home. Sometimes by piecing together information culled from a variety of sources, the searcher was enabled to reconstruct the picture of the last hour of some soldier's life. Comrades would recount the story of his death at the front or describe the moment of his capture by the enemy. In fact persistent questioning revealed such facts as finally cleared up the doubt as to the fate of a certain Yankee corporal. It happened that the boy had disappeared in April, 1918. It was a number of months afterward that a patient was discovered at a port of embarkation who said: "Yes, he was killed when the Germans were attacking and a heavy barrage was coming over. They came around back of us and threw hand grenades from the rear. Corporal ---- pulled his pistol and yelled: 'Here they come, boys! Give it to them!' He was awfully generous. He used to get a lot of scrapbooks and pass them around to the boys. When he got a box from home he shared it. He was a mighty generous fellow about lending money, too." The women who made those scrapbooks and packed those boxes of "goodies" can have no memento from his grave over there, but here was the sweet memory of his courage and his generosity. Think of the comfort that her woman's soul must have found in that frank, outspoken boyish tribute and the relief at finally having had at least the definite information of the truth! So it was that our Red Cross searchers gave constant and almost invaluable aid in revising and verifying the casualty lists of the army; and many who were accounted missing--that dread term that means nothing and yet can mean so much--could, because of their work, be accurately enrolled as dead or as prisoners. As far back as the summer of 1917 five women had been definitely assigned to this activity--not at Vichy then, but at the American army hospitals which already were beginning to multiply in France. By December of the following year this staff numbered nearly two hundred women, who worked either in the hospitals or in the American Red Cross headquarters in Paris. And while these worked in the hospitals, the Red Cross officers in the field--men serving as searchers, chaplains, or Home Communication representatives--were working in close coöperation with the statistical officers of the army. These were stationed in training camps and concentration camps and with various combat divisions. Ten men were assigned direct by the Red Cross to the Central Records Office of the Adjutant General's Department of the A. E. F.