No mere cataloging of the work of our Red Cross in the embarkation ports can ever really begin to tell the story of the fullness of its service there. Charts of organization, details of operations, pictures of the surroundings go just so far, but never quite far enough to tell of the heart interest that really makes service anywhere and everywhere. Such service the American Red Cross rendered all across the face of France--and nowhere with more strength and enthusiasm than in those final moments of the doughboy which awaited him before his start home. Have I not already told you that our Red Cross over there was not a triumph of organization--or anything like it? It was a big job--and with big mistakes. But the bigness of the things accomplished so far outweighed the mistakes that they can well be forgotten; the tremendous net result of real achievement set down immutably and indisputably as a real triumph of our American individualism. CHAPTER XII THE GIRL WHO WENT TO WAR On the ship that bore me from New York to Europe in the first week of December, 1918, there were many war workers--and of many sorts and varieties. We had men and women of the Y. M. C. A., of the Y. W. C. A., of the Jewish Welfare Board, of the Knights of Columbus--and twenty-five women of the American Red Cross. And so, in the close-thrown intimacy of shipboard, one had abundant opportunity to study this personnel at rather short range, and the fact that our ship, which had been builded for South African traffic rather than for that of the North Atlantic, nearly foundered in mid ocean only served to increase the opportunity.