With the Doughboy in France: A Few Chapters of an American Effort — Context and Discussion

Improvisation Over Organization

Hungerford repeatedly emphasizes that the Red Cross succeeded not because of elaborate planning but because of American resourcefulness. He writes that workers were "thrust upon their own initiative—that precious American birthright—time and time again." Their only orders were short: help anyone in need. At Beauvais, for instance, the Red Cross secured a huge building, obtained hay for bedding, and used its motor cars to shuttle refugees from the station to a makeshift barracks. The author explicitly warns against overvaluing organization: "We Americans are rather apt to place too great a stress upon organization." He argues that in the first military emergency, the Red Cross achieved a proficiency "far greater than even its most optimistic adherents had ever dreamed" with very little formal structure. This tension between chaos and effectiveness runs through the excerpts.

Refugees and the Human Cost

The excerpts dwell on the plight of displaced civilians. At Beauvais, each incoming train brought "more and more of these pitiful folk" who were halted before being sent to safer districts. The Red Cross provided what Hungerford calls "crude comfort"—hay cots, blankets, food—but he notes it was "infinitely better than spending the night on the stone floor of a damp and unheated railroad station." At Niort, a single delegate fed four hundred refugees on an hour's notice. At Clermont, the Red Cross supplied food to a nunnery that had opened its doors. The author records a French hardware merchant from Soissons who, after his house was shelled, came directly to Red Cross headquarters, saying: "I come to you first because it has become natural for us to go to the Americans first when we are in need." Another worker reported that refugees looked to her "to act as a proper godfather."

From Emergency to Organized Drive

Hungerford traces how the Red Cross's role shifted as the war moved from defense to offense. The initial emergency response in the Somme and Oise valleys gradually became "more strictly military in character" and better organized. He marks the transition with the German drive's halt and the Allied counteroffensive, which he calls "a drive that did not cease and hardly halted until the eleventh day of November, 1918." He lists the famous battle names—Château-Thierry, Saint Mihiel, the Argonne—as "epoch-making tablets of the superb romance of our American adventure overseas." Yet he insists that in all these, the Red Cross "played its part, and seeks no greater testimonial." The author's language here is more rhetorical than in earlier sections, suggesting a shift from reportage to tribute as he approaches the war's end.

The Limits of the Record

Because the excerpts are drawn from the preface and a single chapter, the reader cannot assess how Hungerford handles the later stages of the war or the demobilization period. The preface states that the book was finished six months before publication, when the Red Cross still had a considerable force in France. The author does not claim to have witnessed every event he describes; he relies on reports from delegates and on his own travels. The excerpts show a writer who is comfortable with anecdote and generalization but who also includes specific details—tonnage of hay, number of beds, hours of notice. Whether this balance holds across the full 102,000-word text is unknown from the supplied material.

Hungerford's book is best approached as a contemporary document rather than a retrospective analysis. Readers interested in the daily mechanics of relief work—how food was cooked over bonfires, how refugees were transported in motor cars—will find concrete details. Those seeking a critical assessment of the Red Cross's effectiveness or its relationship with the military will need to supplement this account with other sources. The author's admiration for American initiative is evident, but his insistence on the limits of his own perspective—"this book makes no pose as history"—invites the reader to treat his pictures as one set of evidence among many.

I keep returning to the moment in With the Doughboy in France where the Red Cross simply builds a makeshift kitchen at a rail junction, unannounced. It reminded me of reading With the Turks in Palestine — Reading Notes, where a similar quiet improvisation felt like the whole war, somehow, held in two outstretched hands. No grand plan, just presence.