Ofttimes, even though with the American Army women were not permitted to go very close to the front line, the job of the Red Cross girl was fraught with much real danger. The air raid was too frequent and too deadly a visitor not to have earned an awsome respect for itself. The tooth marks of Big Bertha still show all too plainly as horrid scars across the lovely face of Paris--the beauty of the world. The _boche_, as we all very well know, did not stop his long-distance warfare from the air even at the sight of the roofs which bore crimson crosses and so signified that they were hospitals and, under every condition of civilization and humanity, exempt from attack. The story of these hospital raids, with their casualty lists, not merely of American boys already sick and wounded, but of the wounding and killing of the men and women who were laboring to give them life and comfort, is already a well-known fact of record; yet even this was not all. Death never seemed far away in those hard months of 1917 and 1918, and Death was no respecter, either of persons or of uniforms or of sex. Upon the honor roll of our Red Cross there are the names of twenty-three American women, other than nurses, who made the supreme sacrifice for their country. The experiences of the Red Cross girls in the air raids were as many and varied as the girls themselves. That of a canteen worker at Toul was fairly typical. She had been over at the neighboring city of Nancy to aid in one of the innumerable soldiers' dances which had been given there. In the middle of the dance it had suddenly occurred to her chum and herself that neither had eaten since morning. A young lieutenant had taken them to a very good little restaurant in the great Place Stanislas that all through the hard days of the war held to a long-time reputation of real excellence, and had insisted that they order a dinner of generous proportions. Yet before their soup had been fairly served an air raid was upon them. The roar of the planes and the rattle of cannonading were continuous. Every light in the place went out instantly, and because the proprietor insisted even then in keeping his shades and shutters tightly drawn the place was inky black. "What did you do?" I asked her. "What did we do? We went ahead and ate our dinner. It was the best thing we could do. I realized for the first time in my life the real handicaps of the blind. I don't see how they ever learn to eat fried chicken gracefully." * * * * * In an earlier chapter I told of the remarkable work done by the Smith College girls at the crux of the great German drive. It was impossible in that chapter to tell all of the sacrifice and the devotion shown by these women--the most of them from five to fifteen years out of college, although one of the best of them was from the class of 1882 and still another from that of 1917. "We were an unbaked crew," one of them admitted quite frankly to me.