So, with its activities increasing, the Red Cross further divided its work. In the fall of 1917, Major Perkins became Commissioner for France and a short time afterwards separate commissioners were appointed for Great Britain, for Italy, for Switzerland, for Belgium, and for other countries. And these in turn appointed their own individual organizations, complete structures erected for business efficiency and to get a big job done quickly and well. All this sounds simple, but it was not; for it is one thing to accomplish business organization, and accomplish it quickly, here at home in a land which has barely been touched by the ravages of war and not at all by invasion, and quite another to set up such a structure in a land shell-shocked and nerve-racked and man-crippled by four years of war and actual invasion. Poor France! The war smote hard upon her. By the time that the Murphy Commission reached her shores she had even abandoned the smiling mask which she had tried to carry through the earliest months of the conflict. In Paris the streets were deserted. By day one might see an omnibus, or might not. Occasionally an ancient taxi carriage drawn by an ancient horse, too decrepit for service of any sort at the front, might be encountered. By night the scene was dismal indeed. Few street lights were burning--there was a great scarcity of coal and street lights meant danger from above, from the marauding raids of the great airships of the _boche_. The few street lamps that were kept alight as a matter of safety and great necessity had their globes smeared with thick blue paint and were but faint points of light against the deep blackness of the night. So that when the glad day of armistice finally came and the street lights blazed forth again--if not in their old-time brilliancy at least in a comparative one--Paris referred to the hour as the one of her "unbluing." The difficulties of obtaining materials, even such simple office materials as books and blanks and paper, to say nothing of typewriters and the more complicated paraphernalia, the problem of service of every sort--clerical, stenographic, telephone, repair--can easily be imagined. There were times when to an ordinary business man they would have seemed insurmountable; but the Red Cross is not an ordinary business man. It moves under inspiration--inspiration and the need of the moment. And so it does not long permit difficulties, either usual or abnormal, to block its path.