big packing case held a great many. A mathematical
genius at Camp Cody, away down in Texas, figured up in
his idle moments that if the cases of sweaters that had come
in were ranged in a row they would make a fine barricade
nearly half a mile long.

Then there were the pitiful things in the base hospital --
the things that laid bare the quick of life and drew forever
on the reserve fund of nerve and heart. There was the
drawing of wills, the adjustment of allotments, and the
constant touch that must be kept with all the teeming and
changing life of that city which was called a camp. It
certainly was a variegated industry, this Camp Service!
A man of unsteady nerves or inflammable temper or lacking
in resourcefulness would not have kept his sanity in it longer
than twenty-four hours. It did not require continual
searching to find the "gaps"; other people found them for
you; the Red Cross mission was to fill them. To get soap,
brooms, medicine-glasses, and hot water bottles for a hospital
whose supplies were held up on a railroad siding somewhere;
to provide a heater for heating liquids; to get screens to
give the ward patients a certain amount of necessary
privacy; to rig up a building where junior officers could
study nights; to provide entertainment for a delegation
of Civil War veterans; to get a Ford car for the Division
Surgeon to go his rounds in when an epidemic was over-
hanging the camp; to hurry in a consignment of horse
medicine out of the blue sky in time to save the whole herd
of sick and dying remounts from being sent to the horse
cemetery; to find laundry tubs on twenty-four hours'
notice for a quarantined regiment; to skirmish up quarters
for a staff of nurses; and, finally, to get a flag to put on the
coffin of a dead soldier on his last journey home, represent
a few of the requirements and not even a decimal part of the
work accomplished.

-51-