110 IOWA DEPARTMENT OF AGRICULTURE 



in the spring as it has been brought home to tlie Allies in the past three 

 years. If the boy comes through all right in the emergency hospital, he is 

 sent to the base hospital, and from the base hospital he goes to the 

 convalescent hospital. The efficiency of this work is shown by the report 

 that 70 per cent of the German wounded go back to the firing line; 68 

 per cent in the British army, and the lowest percentage, I believe, of any 

 army is 58 per cent. The Red 'Cross will send many a boy home to us 

 who would otherwise be lost. 



That is not alone the work of the Red Cross. Our American Red Cross 

 has been furnishing supplies to 3,463 French hospitals. They have been 

 furnishing surgical dressings to over 2,000 hospitals. These hospitals 

 look to us to keep this work up. We must keep it up. In the past there 

 has been such a scarcity of dressings that the hospitals were forced to 

 use newspapers, and the printer's ink on the papers on coming in con- 

 tact with the wound has caused gangrene. Some people say, "What are 

 they doing with the surgical dressings that the women of the United 

 States are making?" They aren't making too many, for there have been 

 as many as 300,000 men put out of commission in a three-days' fight. You 

 can imagine what that means! 



As an example of the work that the Red Cross is today doing I will 

 say that last Saturday we received a requisition for 45,000 Red Cross 

 surgical dressings, which will take $7,000 of material, and we have to 

 deliver these pads by the first of January. Other chapters are being 

 requisitioned for supplies in the same way, all of which are necessary 

 for hospital work, and they are filling their requisitions just as rapidly 



The Red Cross does more work than that. They conduct the trench 

 canteen, which is a restaurant. Those canteens provide the boys a place 

 to buy food. For instance, for thirteen cents a boy will get soup, beef 

 or lamb, coffee, and rice pudding, or something like that. All that for 

 thirteen cents. That is actual cost. That is the only thing they charge 

 for, the food. The system is to put the boys in the trenches for eighteen 

 days at a stretch — six days there in the front line trench, six days in the 

 secondary trenches, and the third six days back in the first line trenches. 

 Those boys stand in the water to their hips, and they have only a dugout 

 to sleep in. Soldiers tell me that it is an actual fact that the men get 

 literally covered with vermin; they get caked with mud, and you cannot 

 tell whether they are black or white after they have been in front-line 

 service for a while. And so the trench canteens provide baths for the 

 boys and a sterilizer for their clothes. And when a boy gets off the firing 

 line he gets a bath, and has his clothes sterilized and gets a place to 

 sleep. Some of these canteens are large enough to care for 5,000 people. 

 They even have a place where a boy can get his mind off the horror 

 of war in a bomb-proof movie theatre. We have no idea what the boys 

 are subjected to, for we jump when a small cannon goes off, but think 

 what it is where there are thousands. There is a cannon every six feet 

 on that front. 



In addition to that there are many people homeless in the warring 

 countries who are being cared for by the Red Cross. There are 1,500 

 villages, as well as the country in between, that has been totally destroyed 

 by the Germans in their retreat — a section almost as large as the state 



