I saw the new recruits
marching off, and I knew that for the children many of them were leaving
behind there would be no Santa Claus unless the American people out of
the fullness of their own abundance filled the Christmas stockings and
stocked the Christmas larders.
And seeing these things, I realized how tremendous was the need for
organized and systematic aid then and how enormously that need would
grow when Winter came--when the soldiers shivered in the trenches, and
the hospital supplies ran low, as indeed they have before now begun to
run low, and the winds searched through the holes made by the cannon
balls and struck at the women and children cowering in their squalid and
desolated homes. From my own experiences and observations I knew that
more nurses, more surgeons, more surgical necessities, and yet more,
past all calculating, would be sorely needed when the plague and famine
and cold came to take their toll among armies that already were thinned
by sickness and wounds.
The American Red Cross, by the terms of the Treaty of Geneva, gives aid
to the invalided and the injured soldiers of any army and all the
armies. If any small word from me, attempting to describe actual
conditions, can be of value to the American Red Cross in its campaign of
mercy, I write it gladly.
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