The Crimson Bookshelf

"Friends of France" is the detail and the theory of that spontaneous and amazing action which culminated in the formation of the American Ambulance Service in France. With the coming of the war it was realized by all belligerents that their sanitary services were utterly inadequate to the task before them. France, particularly, who sustained, in those hurried days of September, the cumulative blow of Germany and who saved Europe, found many of her soldiers dying because they could not promptly be attended to. It was then that the American Ambulance was organized. Well in the rear for the first eight months, it served its novitiate carrying men back and forth from train to hospital. With April, 1915, it had come of such size as to warrant its formation into three field units: No. One at Dunkirk, No. Two in Lorraine, No. Three in the Vosges: What these sections went through, the very interesting articles and the letters to the inspector general, Mr. Piatt Andrew, well describe.

Henry Sydnor Harrison's account of the work at Dunkirk and Ypres is perhaps the most finished piece in the book, while the telling of the death of Richard Hall by Waldo Pierce and of the speech by the "medicin chef" is moving and beautiful. It is impossible to read it without knowing intuitively the supreme worth of the service of all these men.

The letters from the field are more simply written. They tell of incidents that impressed the writers, they do not often theorize and when they do, they have enthusiasm. Speaking of men and things seen on the trips, they are letters home from a strange land of moral grandeur and unceasing heroism.

Unless one keeps firmly in mind the fact that the men who fight are ever in greater danger than the ambulance men, it is impossible to speak of the latter except in superlatives. The long list of citations to the order of the day at the back of the book, and the simple official statements of the acts that won them, give us the right to place these men among the heroes.

The thing that was such a welcome portent of unfailing national generosity and vision and spirituality was the thing that this most excellent book describes, namely the going abroad of all these young Americans. It was looking far beyond personal interest to that world sympathy which must be the basis of all internationalism as it is of all democracy. It was, of course, utter fearlessness. It was of what Mr. Andrew speaks in his "introduction," the longing to have some share with the people of France in defending the ideals for which, as these feel, America has always stood, and for which France is now making such vast such gallant and such unflinching sacrifice."