Our Red Cross Best In Turkey.

New York Times 100 years ago today, April 13, 1913:
Has Covered a Wider Field Than Other Foreign Branches of the Organization.
HOSPITALS MADE SANITARY
Laundry Work, Neglected by Others, Saved Lives and Greatly Impressed the Turks.
Special Correspondence The New York Times.
    CONSTANTINOPLE, March 22.— The American Red Cross Society has done notable work for Turkey during the past five months, and has had a much wider field of activity than any of the other foreign branches of the Red Cross working with the Turkish Army. Most of the Red Cross missions have confined their efforts to service on the battlefield and in the hospitals of Constantinople. Missions of physicians, nurses and orderlies have come here from Great Britain, France, Germany, Italy, Russia, Japan, Egypt, India, Austria, Rumania, Switzerland, Holland, Belgium. Spain, Portugal, Norway, Denmark and Sweden.
    The American Society, under the management of Consuls General G. B. Rayndal, Treasurer W. W. Peet of the American Board of Missions, and Mrs. Rockhill, wife of the American Ambassador, has undertaken not only field work at San Stefano and hospital work in Stamboul, but also an extensive relief work among the refugees here and at Salonica, Brousa, Konia and Angora.
    Major Ford, U.S.A., and Dr. Dodd have had charge of the surgical work where the American Red Cross equipped and maintained two wards of sixty beds each in the Tashliska barracks, Stamboul, which at the beginning of the war was turned into a hospital of 1,500 beds. At San Stefano Hoffman Philip, first secretary of the American Embassy, carried on a wonderful work among the patients in the cholera camp superintending the disinfection, and the burying of several thousand soldiers a day.
    Outside the walls of Stamboul, where many thousands of refugees were congregated, being refused entrance to the city owing to the prevalence of cholera in their midst, Mr. Peet distributed daily food and blankets. In Brousa, Miss Jillson, an American missionary, did so great and so heroic a work single-handed to prevent 12,000 refugees from dying of starvation that she was awarded a decoration by the Sultan. Dr. Wilfred Post, another missionary, has spent several months on horseback in the interior between Eski Scheir and Konia, locating the refugees who had been scattered and endeavoring to feed and clothe them. He was the only worker to come into contact with more than a hundred thousand of these poor victims of the war in Thrace. Dr. Haskell, assisted by Messrs. Davis and Jacob, traveling secretaries of the Y.M. C. A., looked after thirty thousand, Turkish refugees in Salonica, administering the Swiss as well as the American relief funds.
    In caring for the wounded and the refugees the Turks have shown good spirit, but have lacked skill, and especially administrative ability. The situation was too tremendous for them to cope with alone. In recognition of the aid which they have received from the foreign Red Cross Societies the Ottoman, Red Crescent Society has issued a public letter of thanks, in which the work of each nation is briefly specified and acknowledged. It is a bit of delicious humor that the principal work of the Americans is put down as "running a laundry." When asked how this happened Major Ford laughingly said:
    "Shortly after we had started, our work at the Tashliska Hospital we were confronted with a shortage of linen for our patients and for our beds. When I investigated I found that there were ten thousand pieces of linen waiting to be washed in a wretched place close by the hospital. The work had backed up upon the launderers, who found themselves unable to keep up with the demand for clean stuff. By getting a little behind each day naturally the reserve supplies were exhausted soon, and every bit of linen in the hospital was waiting to be washed. The situation was most serious, for in those days of confusion it was impossible to get fresh linen, even if there had been the money to pay for it.
    "As soon as I could persuade them to put the laundry in my hands the matter was simple enough. By applying a little common sense, a little industry at a distasteful task, and a little 'American efficiency methods,' I soon had the laundry functioning in such a way that it moved like clockwork. Every piece of linen was washed immediately upon being sent down. There was no more shortage. Not only that, but the expense was cut down 75 per cent. — even more in some things. I found I could run the laundry for a month on the sum they had previously been spending for inefficient service in a week.
    "I suppose this so impressed the Turks that it overshadowed our work upstairs in the hospital and at San Stefano, and among the refugees here and in the provinces. To the Turks we Americans are not surgeons and nurses and overseers of refugee relief — we are just the fellows who did the laundry. And so we shall go down in the history of this war."