Page:This side the trenches, with the American Red cross (IA thissidetrenches00desc).pdf/24

 cannot be hoped that she will cease to worry, but because of Home Service she has become better able to bear the absence of her husband.

Many of the women who seek through the Red Cross an escape from loneliness have never lived long enough in any one neighborhood to make friends. They have no one whom they have known for years and to whom they can turn for comfort. This is true largely because people in the United States are constantly moving about from place to place. In many parts of the country it is unusual to find a family which has lived in the same locality for a generation. In a study of thirteen-year-old boys in the city schools of seventy-eight American cities of between 25,000 and 200,000 inhabitants, it was found that only one in six of the fathers of these boys was living in the city of his birth, and that among the boys themselves only a few more than half were living where they were born.

The feeling of loneliness and helplessness which comes to many women after the departure of the man is increased by the very complexity and vastness of the war and the many different departments and branches of the service. The mother knows that her son has become part of the army or the navy; she believes that he is in camp, or somewhere in France, or somewhere on the Atlantic. But it is all vague. She does not understand how to obtain word about him when, perhaps, no letter has come to her for several months. It is through the Home Service Section of the Red Cross that she learns how she can communicate with her son,