Have you ever stood beside a fairly complex machine--a linotype or a silk loom or a paper machine, for instance--and after examining its intricacy of cams and cogs and shafts, wondered how it turned out its product with such precision and rapidity? So it is with the big business machine of the American Red Cross. You might stand close to any one of its many, many individual activities--the sewing room of a chapter house here in the United States, a base hospital behind the front in France, a transport receiving its medical supplies--and wonder truly at the coördination of such huge activities; for they did coördinate. The big machine functioned, and as a rule functioned very well indeed. And because it did function so very well the largest single humanitarian effort in the history of the world was carried forward to success with a minimum of friction and loss of precious energy. So much, if you please, for practical business methods in an international emergency. CHAPTER IV THE PROBLEM OF TRANSPORT To attempt aid or comfort to a fighting army six hundred miles inland from the coast without adequate transportation was quite out of the question. Transportation, in fact and in truth, was the lifeblood of the American Expeditionary Forces which began to debark at the Atlantic rim of France before the summer of 1917 was well spent. It was the obvious necessity of transportation that made it necessary for the War Department of the United States to plan to operate an American railroad system of some 6,000 miles of line--all told about equal to the length of the Northern Pacific system--over certain designated portions of the several French railway systems. Nothing was ever more true than the now trite Napoleonic remark, that an "army travels on its stomach." The imperial epigram about the progress of an army meant transportation, and little else. In other days in other wars the transport of the United States was in the completely adequate hands of its Quartermaster General and its Corps of Engineers. But in those days we fought our wars in North America. The idea of an army of two million men--perhaps even four or five million--fighting nearly four thousand miles away from the homeland was quite beyond our conception. When that remote possibility became fact the necessities of our transport multiplied a thousandfold. They swept even beyond the capabilities of a Quartermaster General and a Chief of Engineers who found their abilities sore-taxed in many other directions than that of the water, the rail, and the highway movement of troops. It became a job for railroad men, expert railroad men, the most expert railroad men in the world. And where might railroad men be found more expert than those of the United States of America?