an excavation rather than the heart of a great world metropolis.
Before the war, to cross the Place de la Concorde and go into the
Champs Elysees was an adventure of a life time. One took one's
chances. One survived, but he had his thrills. But that morning we
might have walked safely with bowed head and hands clasped behind
us through the Place, across the Elysian fields; there we sat for
a moment in one of the Babylonian cafes and saw nothing more shocking
than the beautiful women of France gathering in the abandoned
cafes and music halls to assemble surgical dressings for the French
wounded.

In due course, in that first day of our pilgrimage in Europe, we
came to the headquarters of the American Red Cross in the Place de
la Concorde. The five floors of a building once used for a man's club
are now filled with bustling, hustling Americans. Those delicately
tinted souls in Europe who are homesick for Broadway may find it
in the office of the American Red Cross; but they will find lower
Broadway, not the place of the bright lights. The click and clatter
of typewriters punctuate the air. Natty stenographers, prim office
women, matronly looking heads of departments, and assistants from
perhaps the tubercular department, the reconstruction department,
the bureau of home relief in Paris, or what not, move briskly through
the corridors. In the reception rooms are men from the ends of the
earth--Rumanians, Serbians, Armenians, Belgians, Boers, Russians,
Japs--every nation at peace with America has some business sometime
in that Paris office of the American Red Cross. For there abides
the commissioner of the Red Cross for all Europe. At that time he
was a spare, well made man in his late thirties,--Major Grayson M.
P. Murphy; a West Pointer who left the army fifteen years ago after
service in the Philippines, started "broke" in New York peddling