While I was still with him the Red Cross officials arrived.  They had already wired to Paris.  Their lorries and ambulances were converging from all points to meet the emergency.  They undertook at once to place all their transport facilities at his disposal.  They had started their arrangements for the handling of the children.  Extra personnel were being rushed to the spot.  There was one unit already in the city.  They had hoped to go nearer to the Front, but on arriving had learnt that their permission had been cancelled.  It was a bit of luck.  They could set to work at once.

I knew this unit and went out to find it.  It was composed of American society girls, who had been protected all their lives from ugliness.  They had sailed from New York with the vaguest ideas of the war conditions they would encounter; they believed that they were needed to do a nurse-maid’s job for France.  Their original purpose was to found a creche for the babies of women munition-workers.  When they got to Paris they found that such institutions were not wanted.  They at once changed their programme, and asked to be allowed to take their creche into the army zone and convert it into a hospital for refugee children.  There were interminable delays due to passport formalities—­the delays dragged on for three months.  During those three months they were called on for no sacrifice; they lived just as comfortably as they had done in New York and, consequently, grew disgusted.  They had sailed for France prepared to give something that they had never given before, and France did not seem to want it.  At last their passports came; without taking any chances, they got out of Paris and started for the Front.  Their haste was well-timed; no sooner had they departed than a message arrived, cancelling their permissions.  They had reached the doomed city in which I was at present, two days before its sentence was pronounced.  Within four hours of their arrival they had had their first experience of being bombed.  Their intention had been to open their hospital in a town still nearer to the front-line.  The hospital was prepared and waiting for them.  But in the last few days the military situation had changed.  A hospital so near the trenches stood a good chance of being destroyed by shell-fire; so once again the unit was held up.  It volunteered to abandon its idea of running the hospital for children; it would run it as a first aid hospital for the armies.  The offer was refused.  These girls, whose gravest interest a year ago had been the season’s dances and the latest play, were determined to experience the thrill of sacrifice.  So here they were in the doomed city, as the Red Cross officials said, “by luck”—­the very place where they were most needed.