published by the National Geographic Society

“ The story of Macedonia today is the story of the Monastir road. Along this highway Alexander and Xerxes and Galerius once tramped with their legions. It has been the link between the Adriatic and the Ægean seas ever since history was written.
For centuries it has carried its ox-carts with their solid wooden wheels, and long trains of donkeys and peasant women bowed under packs. Serb and Bulgarian raiders have descended on Saloniki along it. For thirty centuries fighting men and peasants and thieves and slaves have marched through its bottomless mud. ”

“ We count confidently upon you to rouse, and it should not be difficult, the deep-seated spirit of humanity that permeates this Northern Continent of America—to rouse that soul of your people to translate itself into terms of hard cash; as an earnest that those who cannot fight will pay, and that, if it be the will of God that wars shall continue in this imperfect world, then you are determined to relieve and mitigate its horrors for its victims to the utmost of your power. ”

“ The Red Cross is perhaps founded fundamentally for the care and comfort of soldiers, but we are not fighting this war alone for the direct efficiency of battle. We are fighting here for infinitely greater objectives, and there is no support that can be given to the American ideal, to the American objective of this war, better and greater than a proper organization of that side of our civilization which we believe is today imperiled.
We are fighting against an enemy who had become dominated with a philosophy, with an idea, for which there is no room in this world with us. ”

“ I suppose that when this war comes to be written as an epic—and it will some day be written as an epic of the folly of mankind—the tragic figures in it that will persist in the imagination and memory of mankind forever will be countries like Belgium and Roumania and Poland. ”

“ But in the meantime, as the armies which are being called are trained and are led to battle, all along the national wayside of every nation in the world still crouch the terrified and trampled figures of the children of mankind—disowned, starving, and dying. ”

“ I speak of its casual character because for a great many hundred years we have been progressing in the direction of limiting the horrors of war to the combatants, and that in this twentieth century we should revert to the casual slaughter of children, to the improvident slaughter of women, to the theory of warfare by the extermination of peoples, and to the use of weapons of war like starvation and disease—for both of them have become weapons of war—is an unthinkable reversion to a barbarous type which it was the hope of the intelligent that the world had outgrown. ”

“ It has already overwhelmed the nations of Europe. The blood and the travail of Europe thus far, terrible as it has been, may be justified by the birth of a great nation, the United States of Russia, and I pray God devoutly that the last stages of this war, terrible as they are going to be, awful as will be the cost, may be justified by the birth of another great nation, the United States of Germany! ”

“ The minds of a people poisoned So deftly has that conspiracy been carried on that the minds of a great people—a people that have demonstrated their greatness in many fields—even in that fifty years, have been poisoned into the conviction that it is their highest duty to subordinate every consideration of humanity to the exaltation and the development of military force, so that by that, force they can take from the rest of the world what is needed to accomplish their destiny, at whatever cost of honor or principle. ”

“ They cannot give to their people.
It is going to devolve upon this nation to go in there, remembering our duty, remembering the fate of Belgium and Poland, to resuscitate those people and give them hope and prove to them that there is a God in Heaven, and that liberty is worth any price! ”

“ Germany is not exhausted. She is, by reason of this system of fifty years standing, the greatest military nation that ever was organized, and she still has great fighting power; and she arrayed ourselves as her enemies because, with that devotion to system, with that failure to understand the influence of moral force in a people, she was contemptuous of what we, who had ignored military preparation, could do in this war. ”

“ And now, my friends, the one thing for which we ought to be grateful is that in this great war, in this war in which we shall have to make sacrifices—oh, such sacrifices, so great that they wring tears from us as we think of them—we should be grateful that we have a cause worthy of all the sacrifices that we can make! ”

“ During the whole of this period we have had as one of our duties the care of the civilian population in northern France. We are, I think, the only Americans who have been in intimate contact or even in any contact with that imprisoned population. We are the only group who know of their suffering, of their misery, of their destruction, and who know of what confronts those people even after peace. ”

“ Our contention of civilization lies in the tempering of the struggle for existence by the care of the helpless. The survival of the strong, the development of the individual, must be tempered, or else we return two thousand years in our civilization.
While the Red Cross devotes itself to the strengthening of the strong, to the support of the soldier, it is a duty of the Red Cross to illume that part of American character and American ideal which stands for the care of the helpless. ”

“ A purgatory of pain Then turn your minds to the picture of some great engagement; try to conceive long trenches of men writhing in torture from poisonous gas or from liquid flame, soldiers smashed and disfigured by shell wounds, their lacerations indescribable as their heroism is undaunted. ”

“ Starvation is a great force, and if we can use that to the advantage of the German Government we are going to use it.
“Furthermore, this is a rich alluvial country. We have wanted it and needed it for a long time, and if these people die off through starvation, perhaps a lot of German people will overflow into this country and settle here; and after the war, if we have to give up Poland, the question of the liberty of Poland will be solved forever, because it will be a German province.” ”

“ Soon we'll realize we're at war We shall not realize what the war is until our men, those beloved by us, have been exposed to the dreadful dangers, to the character of wounding that is so horrible under this modern system of warfare, and until we all go to the bulletins and study the names to see whether those who are near and dear to us have been taken for their country's sake. ”

“ May I not take it for granted that just as the fighting manhood of the United States is soon to be with us in the trenches, so you of the Red Cross who have done so much for us in the past are now eager to be mobilized in the allied Army of Mercy, and of charity that is almost divine? ”

“ If you will study the history of Germany for the last half century, you will see that conspiracy disclosing itself more and more clearly.
The doctrine preached openly in the philosophy of that country was that there is no international morality; that there is no rule by which a nation may be governed except that of self-preservation, as it is called, which means self-exploitation over the ruins of other civilizations and other peoples and other nations. ”

“ O'er Fritz and Pierre and Jack to mend
What shells have torn.
I go wherever men may dare,
I go wherever woman's care
And love can live;
Wherever strength and skill can bring
Surcease to human suffering,
Or solace give. ”

“ We now see that the struggle against autocracy and tyranny which our Allies have been making is and from the first has been in reality no less our struggle than theirs. We ourselves must now share the suffering which they have endured; we, too, must bear the burdens and we must do our part in a very real way. ”

“ On the big road the great motor lorries slip and strain and beat the surface into huge ruts. When a car is stranded it is pushed into the ditch by the side. The men attached to it paddle about barefooted, hopelessly, doing little things they know will do no good. They must wait for the road to come to its senses. The pack-trains abandon the road completely and strike across the open country.
Ox-carts the final reliance of transport department But the ox-carts groan and creak and waggle on. The little oxen sway and grunt under the goad. Progress is infinitely slow, but there is progress. ”

“ If there is a spare donkey, the man of the house always rides. If there are two spare donkeys, the eldest sons ride. The women always walk. Only once did I see a man walking while his wife rode the donkey. The road buzzed with the gossip of it.
They have suffered greatly, these poor folk. Yet candor compels me to say that at first sight the difference between a Macedonian peasant evicted and a Macedonian peasant at home is so slight that it fails to arouse much sympathy. These poor folk seem to a westerner always on the edge of starvation. ”

“ That is the point which should be uppermost in the minds of those who are working for the soldier.
The great work, however, for this Red Cross is to help our allies. As I understand it, the people in France need supplies of all kinds. Therefore, it is our first duty to help them rehabilitate themselves.
We must help their orphans and their widows. We must help put them in a position to produce. We must help them in every way to relieve the French nation from the drain upon it which will, in turn, be a drain upon its military resources. ”

“ The whole Russian line collapsed with the surrender of that fortification. The commandant of the Russians telephoned to the German commander and said, “We will surrender the fortification if you will stop firing.”
“No,” he said, “not until you have surrendered all your men; and if you burn that warehouse we will not take your men alive.”
“It is all yours.” And it was all over with the Russians in Russian Poland. That Russian line, 300 miles long, swept across Russian Poland and clear into Russia before it stopped, trying every now and then to resist, but failing, continued its retreat. ”

“ Our Armies of Mercy By Henry P. Davison, Chairman of the War Council of the American Red Cross
From a meeting of the American Red Cross War Council, Washington, D.C., May 24–25, 1917
The most stupendous and appealing call in the history of the world to aid suffering humanity confronts our Red Cross. Millions of men who have been fighting for liberty lie dead or wounded; millions of women and children are homeless and helpless; hundreds of towns and villages have been destroyed; disease and distress are rampant. ”

“ Where unassuaged wounds cry for America's compassion Nay, further, I should like to assume that, with your resources inexhaustible as your hearts are warm, you will pour out of the fullness of your treasure into war zones where we have no men fighting, but where ambulance columns are desperately needed, such as Russia and Roumania. ”

“ Then the Greeks took Macedonia and began to tax him. Then the Bulgars established themselves, and right on the retreating heels of his new masters came the Serbs, accompanied by a swarm of strange men wearing many uniforms and speaking in many tongues. The peasant takes refuge from his confusion in a sour philosophy.
“One year the crops fail,” he says, “and the next year there is war. It is all one to the poor man.”
Along the Monastir road there is a continuous, dribbling stream of refugees—not many at a time. Sometimes half a dozen will trudge by in the course of a day. ”

“ By that same token it requires the highest degree of organization, of concentration and consecration of purpose, the most careful coöperation, the most willing harmony, the utmost centralization of effort, to deal with the woes of a world. ”

“ The response which we ought to make ought to be limited only by the extent to which our sympathy, enlightened by knowledge and stirred by imagination, and then overstepping rather than understepping the mark, will enable us to make sacrifices for the greatest need the world has ever known! ”

“ You must remember that in Belgium nearly five millions of people for many months now have been completely destitute and are getting their one meager meal per day, consisting of approximately three hundred grams of bread—a piece of bread about as big as my fist—and a half liter of soup—approximately a pint of soup in 24 hours; a nation, in other words, whose sole living is obtained by going up and standing in line from one to three or four or five hours a day, to wait, without shelter from the weather, for one meager meal a day given to them by charity. ”

“ Here is a call not only to aid the brave and liberty-loving French people, but also to help make this afflicted country healthy for our own sons and brothers who are soon to be there in such great numbers. ”

“ For two years we have been suspicious of the hyphen, but it behooves us, as a free, liberty-loving people, to get over that suspicion, to dispel from our hearts rancor and hatred, because the fire of Americanism has fused that hyphen in an incredibly short time, and we must assume that the German-American today is one with us, and that free America, with all its citizenship, is going in whole-heartedly, with money and with men, to fight for a free world. ”

“ The entire ferro-silicon industry, practically, is centered at Niagara, which thus gives pure steel and sound castings as another part of America's contribution to the cause of Allied victory. Every contract for shell steel that has been made in two years calls for a content of ferro-silicon.
There is another alloy of iron indispensable in war, and well-nigh so in twentieth century peace—ferro-chromium. This is the alloy which gives that peculiar hardness to steel which makes it resistant almost beyond human conception. ”

“ I have long had the feeling that all civilian charities in Europe should be better organized and better consolidated in the United States. We have had a multitude of bodies engaged in that effort, a multitude of overlapping effort, a multitude of overlapping in collection of support, and a multitude of overlapping in distribution on the other side. ”

“ Leave the trenches and retire behind the firing line with me. Here we are on roads lined with men on stretchers some dead, scores mortally wounded, hundreds upon hundreds of casualties in one or another degree of collapse. The middle of the roadway is filled by dozens of ambulances after every action; there is perhaps a mile length of hospital trains waiting in a siding to convey the wounded to base hospitals. ”

“ There has, it seems to me, developed in the war some evidence of the divine plan of eliminating from the family of nations a conspiracy to put the world under the heel of a ruthless philosophy of military force to take away the liberty of mankind. ”

“ Mad as the world seems to be, some day there will be reëstablished on this stricken planet a peace which will be just and wise and permanent—just in proportion as America pours out her spiritual resources in the waging of the war from now on and is heard at the conference table to challenge the attention of mankind to the beauty of righteousness among nations! ”

“ Going back to the cities, where the destruction was not so awful, we saw little people and grown people, mothers and children, sitting on the sidewalk, leaning against a building, sometimes covered with snow or rain-soaked, too weak to lift their hands to take the money or bread that we might offer them. ”

“ If, in making a survey of the obligations and opportunities of our Red Cross a gloomy picture is drawn, we must not be discouraged, but rather rejoice in this undertaking and in the confidence that we can by our voluntary action render a service to our afflicted allies which will for all time be a source of pride and satisfaction in a good deed well done. ”

“ And so, in the interest of making effective our generous impulses, in the interest of saving just as many as we can—facing an impossible task in size, and yet seeking to save life and alleviate pain and suffering just as far as we can—the concentration of our efforts through the Red Cross, which has both a national and an international status and is managed and conducted by men of large affairs and great experience with this sort of thing, seems to be essentially demanded. ”

“ Tragic figures in history But, whatever the cause, the fact remains that the suffering of the people in these warring countries is more widespread, the desolation and devastation more complete, than ever before within the knowledge of living persons; and as this mode of warfare has not spared little persons, so it has not spared little nations. ”

“ The Red Cross of this country has a problem that no Red Cross has ever had before—that of doing its own work in our own armed forces and at the same time trying to give the greatest possible help to the nations who are in desperate need of that help and who are really fighting our battle. ”

“ Englishmen and Frenchmen, when from time to time they are relieved from their grim duties in the trenches, go home. The soldiers from other countries on the firing line cannot go home; there is no home to go to! They go to Paris. Many of them do not return from Paris as efficient soldiers as they were when they went there.
Our American soldiers must have a home in France—somewhere to rest, somewhere to find a friendly atmosphere, somewhere to go for recreation and wholesome amusement. ”

“ We Americans are a good people—we admit it; but one of our weaknesses is an assumption, justified by a good many things that have saved us from egregious mistakes in the past, that God looks after children, drunken men, and the United States! ”