The Marietta journal. (Marietta, Ga.) 1918-1944, 1919-09-26
THE ONWARD MARCH
OF The RED CROSS
Why the Work Did Not End With
the War, but Must Continue
To Go Forward.

If you are one of those people who
think that the war we have just
fought is really over
Well, then you haven't been doing
much thinking; or if you did you
didn't work hard at it. Our troops
are home, it is true, bronzed, healthy,
crowding Fifth Avenue and Michigan
Avenue and Pennsylvania Avenue.
Our sailors, too. Victory arches OF
all kinds and descriptions dot the
country as testimony of our gratitude
to them.
But the war, nevertheless, is not
over. Not for Europe nor for Amer
lea itself. Listen to some facts, an
instant. and decide for yourself.
On one single day last week, the
village of Pruzana in Poland found it
self still within sound of cannon,
with twenty-five hundred under-nour-
ished mothers and children at the
point of starvation, with typhus
raging and no medicines or clean
clothes or health facilities with which
to check it.
On that same day, hundreds of
miles away, the city of Bucharest in
Rumanio found itself face to face
with a food of human misery that
swept irresistibly in from the Crimea,
bringing with it smallpox and typhus
and hundreds of peasants from the
Rumanian countryside - barefooted,
starving, their children emaciated and
prematurely old, and afflicted by dis
ease.
Almost at that same hour there
poured into the city of Irkutsk in ST.
IBERIA a horde of refugees as the Boil
sheviki advanced on Omsk and
throngs of abandoned children, old
people and non-combatants swept on
before them, without food or money
and nine-tenths of them stricken with
dangerous illnesses.
Except for one fact, these people
in each instance would have faced
starvation and death. In Bucharest
there was only government which
struggled desperately for its own ex-
istence, with not a single ounce of
food or clothing or medicines to spare.
In Poland there existed only newly
organized state, patriotic but bank
rupt in ready resources, threatened
with wars on two borders, and with
millions of destitute and diseased peo-
pie to be aided besides those in Pru-
Zaan.
In Irkutsk there was only the
struggling government of Admiral
Kolchak, with its totally inadequate
resources to throw into the balance.
These people would inevitably have
persisted, except for one fact. That
fact was the Red Cross. In -Prozana,
by nightfall, the Red Cross had visit
ed all the sick, had put the finishing
touches on reconstructed German
army bathhuose for bathing the vii
lage had issued old and new American
clothes to the hundreds of people who
needed them, had opened soup kitch-
en-the thirtieth in Poland-and had
completed the establishment of hos
pital of three hundred beds in an old
Russian barracks. In Bucharest Red
Cross canteens and travelling kitchens
fed the starving mobs, sent the sick
and diseased to Red Cross hospitls and
dispensaries and took charge of the
children.
In Irkutsk there was a repetition
of the same story, with the Red Cross
hastily setting up three hundred bed
hospital and rushing supply train
of twenty-six cars loaded with medi-
cines and garments and foodstuffs
from Vladivostock, hundreds of
miles away on the Pacific Coast.
A new battle line against the dis
ease and famine, the disaster and des-
titution which are following in the
wake of the war: that is the story of
the Red Cross today. For the Red
Cross the war is not over. It's battle
lines are farther flung, its tasks more
difficult in many respects than at any
tim eduring the conflict itself. In
many places, its armies of workers
are many times the size they were
last November. 1t has not all come
home with the A. E. F.
Are these facts new to you?
Two years ago in Washington, the
Red Cross built for something just
like this-for an organization which
even while it met the emergencies of
the conflict, nevertheless day by day
prepared itself for the war which
would inevitably follow close upon the
heels of any treaty Of peace-that
war of construction and relief which
would have to be waged if the scars
of the world conflict were to be heal
ed, if ever the lines of civilization
were to be held. Today, the Red Cross