ds.
Five weeks after the first two representatives had reached Rome
three complete ambulance sections, each section being made up of 20
ambulances, a staff car, a kitchen trailer and 33 men, were turned
over to the Italian Medical Service of the third Army. By the first
week in December the stream of refugees had practically stopped. Italy
had been made to realise that she was not fighting alone; her morale
had returned to her. This work, which had been initially undertaken
from purely altruistic motives, had proved to possess a value of the
highest military importance--an importance of the spirit utterly out
of proportion to the money and labour expended. Magnanimity arouses
magnanimity. In this case it revived the flame of Garibaldi which had
all but died. It achieved a strategic victory of the soul which no
amount of military assistance could have accomplished. The victory
of the American Red Cross on the Italian Front is all the more
significant since it was not until months later that Congress declared
war on Austria.

The campaign which the American Red Cross is waging in every country
in which it operates, is frankly an "out to win" campaign. To win the
war is its one and only object. What the army does for the courage of
the body, the Red Cross does for the courage of the mind. It builds
up the hearts and hopes of people who in three and a half years have
grown numb. It restores the human touch to their lives and, with
it, the spiritual horizon. Its business, while the army is still
preparing, is to bring home to the Allies in every possible way the
fact that America, with her hundred and ten millions of population, is
in the war with them, eager to play the game, anxious to sacrifice as
they have sacrificed, to give her man-power and resources as they have
done, until justice has been established for every man and nation.

It is necessary to lay stress on this programme since it differs
greatly from the popular conception of the functions of the Red Cross
in the battle area. It was on the field of Solferino in 1859, that
Henri Dunant went out before the fury had spent itself to tend the
wounded. It was here that he was fired with his great ambition to
found a non-combatant service, which should recognise no enemies and
be friends with every army. His ambition was realised when in 1864 the
Conference at Geneva chose the Swiss flag, reversed, as its emblem--a
red cross on a field of white--and laid the foundati