To reduce all of this to organization was a distinct and difficult problem. Our Red Cross which had jumped into the French civilian and military situation while it awaited the coming of the first troops from America, first organized in practically the only way that it was possible for it to organize. It found men in big jobs--some of those very activities that we found more or less correlated in the work of the American Relief Clearing House--and told other men to take other big jobs and work them out in their own way. This was far from ideal organization, of course. It meant much duplication and overlapping of functional work--in purchasing, in transportation, personnel, and the like. But it was the only sort of organization that was possible at first, and for a considerable time afterward. By the fall of 1917, when Commissioner Perkins had settled down to the details of his big new job and was ready to take up the reorganization of the Red Cross activities in France, there came the great drive of the Austrians and the Germans against the Italian front, with the direct result that the American Red Cross organization in Paris was called upon to bend every effort toward rushing whole trainloads of workers and supplies southward toward Italy. And in the spring of 1918 came the last great drive of the Germans in France--that supreme hour when disaster hung in the very air and the fate of the democracy of the world wavered. Yet the first half of 1918 was not entirely spun into history before the Red Cross in France was beginning its reorganization. The third Commissioner for France, Harvey D. Gibson, had been appointed and by June was on his way to Paris. One of the first of the huge tasks that awaited him--for it then seemed as if the war was to last for years instead of but four or five months longer--was this very problem of reorganization. Without delay he set upon it, and with the help of his Deputy Commissioner and assistant, George Murnane, evolved an entirely new plan, which gave far larger opportunities for the development of the American Red Cross in France and was, in fact, so simple and so logical in its workings as to become the permanent scheme of organization. Let me emphasize and reiterate: the old plan, with its two great separate departments of military and civilian affairs, was not only not essentially a bad plan, but it was the only plan possible with the conditions of great stress and strain under which our Red Cross began its operations in France. But it was quickly outgrown. It did not and could not measure up to the real necessities of the situation.