"After making this effort he lay back on the pillow and shut his eyes for a moment, tired out, only to open them anxiously to ask: 'That'll fix her, won't it?' Apparently it did not entirely 'fix her,' for her answer came back to me--an anxious scrawl--'I received your letter and, dear Red Cross lady, it was so kind of you to write when you must be so busy and let me know how my son was getting along, as I was waiting day after day for a letter from him and I didn't know what could be the matter as he always writes regularly like the good son he is. I am worrying day and night and even if Mike did say I shouldn't because what do boys know about it if they are sick or well and my Mike would say that he was well if he could only lay flat on his back and look at the ceiling he would. As this is all I have to say, I will bring this letter to a close. Tell Mike, I and all the family have wrote him!'" * * * * * Our Red Cross as well as our army officers, themselves, recognized almost from the beginning that an untroubled soldier always is the best soldier. It also appreciated--as this book already should have told you--that its primary object in Europe was to bring the utmost comfort and relief to America's fighting millions. That was why, in the early summer of 1918, it issued a small pamphlet telling the doughboy to "pack up his troubles in his old kit bag" and to hand them to the first Red Cross representative he met. He was assured that there was no worry of any kind, either on the one side of the ocean or the other, that the Red Cross could not or would not shoulder for him. These pamphlets were printed by the hundreds of thousands and distributed to every American soldier in France. And they were an evidence of the real desire of the great organization of the crimson cross to make itself invaluable, not alone in the comparatively few large ways of succor, but in an almost infinite number of smaller and individual ones. It was in this last sort of help, of course, that the Home Communication Service shone. It was its own particular sort of a job to take from the harassed minds of individual soldiers their individual problems--as varied and as complicated as the temperaments and the conditions of the doughboys, themselves. Take a single instance: Here was a man who was owner of a small but growing business in the Mohawk Valley of New York State. When a unit was being recruited near Utica and a call for volunteers was being issued, he responded--with instant promptness. At the time he donned the khaki the two banks in the little town from which he came held notes against his business for a sum of a little more than a thousand dollars. They had been endorsed by his brother, a hard-working farmer of the valley.