These were the ports that became the starting points of the two main stems of the United States Military Railroad in France. Upon the great docks and within the huge warehouses that sprang up seemingly overnight were placed the constantly incoming loads of men and mules and horses and food and guns and camionettes and tents and five-ton trucks--all the seemingly endless paraphernalia of war. And from those docks and from those warehouses moved at all hours of the day and night long trains emptying them of all that same endless paraphernalia of war and in the same good order as that in which it arrived. And these trains were for the greater part of American-builded cars, hauled by locomotives from the engine-building shops of Philadelphia or Schenectady or Dunkirk and all operated by 75,000 expert railroaders, picked and culled from every state of the Union. I shall not attempt here to go into further detail of the operation of our military railroad in France, although there is hardly a detail of it that is not fascinating in the extreme. It is enough here and now to say that it functioned; that our "contemptible army" wiped out the Saint Mihiel salient in one day, and, what is perhaps far more important, there were comparatively few instances where an American soldier went for a day without his three good meals. If I were an artist I would like to paint a picture for the beginning of this chapter. And because it was for a book of Red Cross activities primarily, the painting would show the operations of the United States Army Transport on land and water as a huge motley of ships and trains and warehouses and cranes in a gray monotone in the background; while in the foreground in gay array one would find the motor trucks, the camionettes, and the touring cars of the Red Cross's own transportation department. * * * * * To that department we now have come fairly and squarely. And, lest you should be tempted to dismiss it with a wave of the hand and a shoulder shrug, let me ask if you have been a woman worker for the Red Cross somewhere in our own beloved country, if you ever have given more than a passing thought to the future of that gauze bandage that you made so deftly and so quickly and so many, many times? Did you ever wonder what became of the sweater, the helmet, or the wristlets which you knitted with such patient care and patriotic fervor? Or that warm and woolen gown which you took down from the closet hook with such a real sigh of self-denial--it still was so pretty and so new? How was it to reach some downhearted refugee of France?