"'Dear Mother:"'I was hurt the other day but not enough to keep me down very long and I am as well as ever now. They certainly do use me fine in this hospital. I am having a great time. Gee, I am a happy boy, and don't you worry none about me, mother."'Your son,'Mike.'"
"'Dear Mother:
"'I was hurt the other day but not enough to keep me down very long and I am as well as ever now. They certainly do use me fine in this hospital. I am having a great time. Gee, I am a happy boy, and don't you worry none about me, mother.
"'Your son,'Mike.'"
"After making this effort he lay back on the pillow and shut his eyes for a moment, tired out, only to open them anxiously to ask: 'That'll fix her, won't it?' Apparently it did not entirely 'fix her,' for her answer came back to me—an anxious scrawl—'I received your letter and, dear Red Cross lady, it was so kind of you to write when you must be so busy and let me know how my son was getting along, as I was waiting day after day for a letter from him and I didn't know what could be the matter as he always writes regularly like the good son he is. I am worrying day and night and even if Mike did say I shouldn't because what do boys know about it if they aresick or well and my Mike would say that he was well if he could only lay flat on his back and look at the ceiling he would. As this is all I have to say, I will bring this letter to a close. Tell Mike, I and all the family have wrote him!'"
Our Red Cross as well as our army officers, themselves, recognized almost from the beginning that an untroubled soldier always is the best soldier. It also appreciated—as this book already should have told you—that its primary object in Europe was to bring the utmost comfort and relief to America's fighting millions. That was why, in the early summer of 1918, it issued a small pamphlet telling the doughboy to "pack up his troubles in his old kit bag" and to hand them to the first Red Cross representative he met. He was assured that there was no worry of any kind, either on the one side of the ocean or the other, that the Red Cross could not or would not shoulder for him. These pamphlets were printed by the hundreds of thousands and distributed to every American soldier in France. And they were an evidence of the real desire of the great organization of the crimson cross to make itself invaluable, not alone in the comparatively few large ways of succor, but in an almost infinite number of smaller and individual ones. It was in this last sort of help, of course, that the Home Communication Service shone. It was its own particular sort of a job to take from the harassed minds of individual soldiers their individual problems—as varied and as complicated as the temperaments and the conditions of the doughboys, themselves. Take a single instance:
Here was a man who was owner of a small but growing business in the Mohawk Valley of New York State. When a unit was being recruited near Utica and a call for volunteers was being issued, he responded—with instant promptness. At the time he donned the khaki the two banks in the little town from which he came held notes against his business for a sum of a little more than a thousanddollars. They had been endorsed by his brother, a hard-working farmer of the valley.
Before this boy had been mobilized he arranged to have his young wife conduct the business—with the aid of his long-time assistant. The banks told him that the notes would, in no event, be called before his return from the service of his country. They were fairly perfervid in their expressions of their desires for patriotic service, and the young man left for France, his mind well at ease.
His first letters from home were full of optimistic comfort. A little later, however, they were not quite so serene. Finally this soldier received a letter from his wife stating quite frankly and without reserve that the two banks had called the loans, forced his brother to sell part of his farm stock, and then had sold out their little business.
The boy in khaki was furious. A week before he had stuffed into hismusettethe little American Red Cross booklet which told of that organization's sincere desire to help the individual American soldier who found himself in trouble. "I'll take them at their word," thought he and immediately sought out the Red Cross man with his unit, and to him spilled the entire story. The Red Cross man boiled. He was not a young man—being a bit too old for regular army service, he had taken the Red Cross way as being the best for him to serve his country—and he had heard stories of that sort before, and decided to take prompt action on this one.
It so happened that there were some pretty big American bankers on the American Red Cross staff over there in France. When this incident was rushed through to them—with vast promptness—they, too, took action. They did not even wait for the mails, but cabled the main facts of the story to the secretary of the American Bankers' Association, saying that the proofs were coming on by post, but requesting immediate action. A representative of the Association took the first train up into central New York and, through a personal investigation of the books of the twobanks, quickly verified the incident—in every detail. After that he promptly returned to New York city and, placing the matter before the executive committee of the Bankers' Association, asked that justice be quickly done. It was. The two miserly and hypocritical banking institutions were forced to return the young soldier's business to his wife and to pay back the brother the money which they had taken from him. After which they were both kicked out of the national association.
Along with the pamphlet advising the doughboy to pack up his troubles in his old kit bag and then carry them to the nearest Red Cross man or woman, there was prepared a poster originated by a man out in the Middle West, who because of his understanding affection for boys was particularly well qualified to prepare it. It was used to placard Brest and some other port towns. As I recall it, it read something like this:
American Soldier and SailorAre you worried about anything back home; your wife, children, mother, insurance, allotments, taxes, business affairs, wills, powers of attorney, or any personal or family troubles of a private nature?The American Red Cross Home Service Menwill help you by cable, telegraph, letter—assisted by forty million members of the Red Cross at home. InformationFree.
American Soldier and Sailor
Are you worried about anything back home; your wife, children, mother, insurance, allotments, taxes, business affairs, wills, powers of attorney, or any personal or family troubles of a private nature?
The American Red Cross Home Service Men
will help you by cable, telegraph, letter—assisted by forty million members of the Red Cross at home. InformationFree.
Troubles? The American doughboy seemed to have all the troubles that the poster catalogued—and then some more. The response to the poster and the pamphlet was immediate. Soldiers sought out the American Red Cross Home Communication people all over France. At Brest the first office was in a tent near Camp Pontanzen. Later two offices were established. One, for the sailors, was located in Brest itself, and fairly accessible to the landing stages. Another was located in a stone barracks that had been builded by the great Napoleon. This office not havingan outside door available to passers-by, wooden steps were built up the wall to a French window. Another set of steps was affixed to the inner wall and led right down to the desk of the Red Cross representative. Eventually this work at just this one point became so great in volume that four of these offices were pressed into service.
"What does Home Service really do for a man?" asked a magazine woman who was "doing" France for her publication at one of these offices. The answer to her inquiry was definite.
"It does everything," they told her, "from giving a soldier a needle and thread to letting our tears mingle with his between sobs when he tells us of his home troubles."
Upon the request of our men, wills in proper form were drawn up by Red Cross attorneys and forwarded to the men's families in this country. There were men with wives not only in the United States, but in every corner of the world—in Russia, in Assyria, in Italy, for instance—who wished to be assured that their allotments from the government were being delivered. During the influenza epidemic here and at a time when the flames of a forest fire were winging their way across great spaces in our West, the American Red Cross offices in Paris were besieged with tragic appeals for immediate information from home.
In some of the army divisions the movements of troops were so sudden and so uncertain that mail was badly delayed. Then the doughboys begged our Red Cross for reports from home and our Red Cross furnished them—through its service here.
"Our visitor found daddy and your wife and baby at luncheon," read one of these reports from America. "They had roast chicken, stewed tomatoes, mashed potatoes, hot bread, and jam.... Your wife is teaching school.... The B—— family has moved.... Your mother has one boarder and the crops are fine.... Willie and Carrie are going to move away in the spring."
Can youimagine what such a report might mean to a man who had not heard from home in over five months? There were many such. There were times when men—American fighting men—"went over the top" with aching hearts for some one who faced a particularly difficult problem of life back here at home. Then it was that the Red Cross did not hesitate to use the cable. It is hardly necessary to emphasize the relief which the following exchange of messages must have meant to some one fighting man in our khaki:
Paris, August 6, 1918.To AMCROSS, Washington:Report concerning confinement, Mrs. Harold W——, Rural Free Delivery Five, H——, Penn.
Paris, August 6, 1918.
To AMCROSS, Washington:
Report concerning confinement, Mrs. Harold W——, Rural Free Delivery Five, H——, Penn.
Washington, August 14, 1918.To AMCROSS, Paris:Answering Inquiry No. ——. Mother and baby son three months old well and happy.
Washington, August 14, 1918.
To AMCROSS, Paris:
Answering Inquiry No. ——. Mother and baby son three months old well and happy.
In this instance the worried fighter was an officer—a captain of infantry. During the time which elapsed between the two cablegrams he was wounded and the answer found him in a hospital, side by side with a Frenchblessé. A Red Cross searcher acted as interpreter for their felicitations and in her official report of the incident included this notation:
"Captain W—— was much improved as a result of the good news. He is sitting up and eating roast chicken to-day. He says the American Red Cross has cured him."
The Red Cross representatives here in America could not enter a home unless they were welcome; neither could they force their way into the hearts of men. They were compelled to wait until their help was sought. The growing mental depression of a certain major of a fighting division during those tense months of the midsummer of 1918 did not escape the attention of the American Red Cross man attached to that division. Suddenly the man, who had been marked because of his poise, became taciturn—isolatedhimself. A reference to the Red Cross Home Service which its division worker tactfully introduced into the table talk at the mess at which both sat, however, did elicit some trivial rejoinder from the man with the golden oakleaf upon his shoulder; while the following day that same major wrote a letter to the Red Cross man—and bared the reason for his most obvious melancholy.
It seemed that back here in the United States he had a little son, from whom he had received no word whatsoever in more than six months. The child was with the major's divorced wife, and his father was more than anxious to know if he was regularly playing out of doors, if he was receiving his father's allotment, and if he was buying the promised Thrift Stamp each week. The army man already had his second golden service stripe and greatly feared that his little son might be beginning to forget him.
Under conditions such as these, visiting the boy was a diplomatic mission indeed. Finally it was intrusted to the wife of an army officer. And because army officers' wives are usually achieved diplomats if not born ones, the ultimate result came in weekly letters from the boy, which not only greatly relieved his father's mind but greatly increased the bonds of affection between the two. The Greatest Mother in the World is never above diplomacy—which is, perhaps, just another way of expressing tact and gentleness.
There were many, many occasions, too, when the relatives at home depended upon that selfsame diplomacy of hers to tell the disagreeable stories of losses or perhaps to prepare the boys overseas to face an empty chair in the family circle. There was one particularly fearful moment when a brilliant young officer had to be told that the reason why his young wife had ceased to write was because she had gone insane and specialists believed that she could not recover. Boys were driven to Red Cross offices by hidden affairs that flayed them hideously and of which they wished to purge themselves. Some wanted to set oldwrongs right. Others had fallen blindly into the hands of the unscrupulous and had only fully awakened to see their folly after they actually were upon the battlefields of France. Then there were the softer phases of life—the shy letters and the blushing visitors who wished to have a marriage arranged with Thérèse or Jeanne of the black eyes and the delicate oval face. I remember one of our boys who had fallen in love with a girl in Nancy. Theirs was a courtship of unspoken love, unless soft glances and gentle caresses do indeed speak more loudly than mere words; for they had no easy bond of a common tongue. His French was doughboy French, which was hardly French at all, and her English was limited. So that after he had gone on to the Rhine and the letter came from her to him in the delicate hand that the sisters at the convent had taught, he needs must seek out Red Cross Home Communication and intrust to it the task of uncommon delicacy, which it fulfilled to the complete delight and satisfaction of both of them. For how could any mother, let alone the Greatest Mother in the World, blind her eyes entirely to love?
She apparently had no intention of doing any such thing. For how about that good-looking doughboy from down in the Ozark country somewhere, who arrived in Paris on a day in the autumn of 1918 with the express intention of matrimony, if only he knew where he could get the license? French laws are rather fussy and explicit in such matters. Some one suggested the Home Service Bureau of the American Red Cross to the boy. He found his way quickly to it—with little Marie, or whatever her name really was, hanging on his arm. A Red Cross man prayerfully guided the pair through the legal mazes of the situation. First they went to a law office in the Avenue de l'Opéra where the necessary papers were made out; then the procession solemnly moved to the office of the United States Vice Consul at No. 1 Rue des Italiens, where the signature of the American official representative was duly affixed to each ofthe papers; after which to the foreign office, where the French went through all the elaborate processes of sealings and signatures which they seem to love so dearly, and then—the work of Mother Red Cross was finished. They were quite ready for the offices of the Church.
With the signing of the armistice all this work was greatly increased—was, in fact, doubled and nearly trebled. When a man was fighting his physical needs seemingly were paramount; but once off the field, the worries that lurked in his subconscious mind seemed to rise quickly to the surface. He then recalled that long interval since last he heard from home. That troubled him, and he turned to the Red Cross—those pamphlets and posters did have a tremendous effect. And if he had no definite troubles over here, such as those we have just seen, he was apt to be just plain hungry for a sight of the home—and the loved ones that it held.
It was in answer to a demand such as this last that a Red Cross representative right here in the United States took her motor car and drove for a half day out to see a family of whose very existence she had never before even heard; and, as a result of her call, wrote back a letter from which the following excerpts are taken:
"I want to tell you about a never-to-be-forgotten trip that I took the other day out to see a one hundred per cent patriot; an American mother who has three sons in the service. The home is one of the coziest, homiest, friendliest places you can imagine; one story, with that cool spacious plan of construction that makes you want to get a book, capture a chair on the wide, comfortable porch, and forget the world and its dizzy rush; a great sweep of lawn and with some handsome Hereford calves browsing in one direction and a cluster of shade trees nearer the house.
"The hills surrounding the house make a lovely view and all were covered with grazing stock, also the fine Hereford cattle for which the place is known. But the best part of the home is the dear little woman who hung a service flagin the window with the name of a boy under each of the three stars. She is the type of mother that draws every one to her; tender, sensible, capable, broad-minded, and with a shrewd sense of humor that keeps things going and makes life worth living for the entire household.
"She took us to a roomy side porch where her sewing unit of the Red Cross meets each Tuesday. A marvelous amount of work has been turned out in that side porch, and I'll wager a dollar to a doughnut that I know the moving spirit of the workers. Off in a big, cool parlor bedroom there were stacked up several perfectly enchanting 'crazy quilts' made by these same busy women at odd moments. These are ready to be sent to Serbia or they may be sold at auction for the benefit of the Red Cross.
"We saw pictures of each boy in the service—one in the navy, one in the heavy artillery, and Milton, whom we all hope is not in the hospital by now. Each boy had in his eyes the same intrepid look that the mother has—one can tell that they made good soldiers. Knowing how busy farm folk are, we reluctantly took our leave after seeing all these interesting things and, as we swung out into the country lane, we looked back and there stood the mother waving and smiling—the very best soldier of them all."
Can you not see how very simple it all was—how very human, too? As you saw in one of the earlier chapters of this book, a fairly formal and elaborate plan of organization had been laid out for all this work; but, perhaps because war after all, is hardly more than a series of vast emergencies, the American Red Cross searchers, either in the field or in the hospitals, could hardly confine themselves to any mere routine of clerical organization or work in the great task that was thrust upon them. The unexpected was forever upon them.
As a single instance of this take the time when, in the Verdun sector and in the hottest days of fighting that the American Army found there, so many demands were madeupon our Red Cross by the officers and men of the A. E. F. for the purchase of necessities in Paris that a definite shopping service quite naturally evolved itself out of the situation. The man who initiated that service raced a motor car from Verdun to the Paris headquarters in order to secure the materials necessary for its inauguration. For when the American Red Cross made up its mind to do a thing, it did it—and pretty quickly too.
So it went—a service complicatedly simple, if I may so express it. For, despite its own batteries of typewriters and card indexes, there was, at almost all times, that modicum of human sympathy that tempered the coldness of mere system and glorified what might otherwise have been a mere job of mechanical routine into a tremendously human and tender thing. The men and girls of the Home Communication Service had a task of real worth. Of a truth it was social service—of the most delicate nature. It included at all times not only the study of the physical needs of the soldier or sailor, but also at many times that of his mental needs as well. In reality, it became a large part of the scheme of preserving and enlarging the morale of the A. E. F. Every time a soldier was freed of endless, nagging worry, he became a better soldier and so just that much more strength was added to the growing certainty of victory.
On November 11, 1918, the armistice was signed and the fighting of the Great War ceased—almost as abruptly as it had begun. And the ebb tide of American troops from Europe back to the United States began; almost at once. For a time it was an almost imperceptible tide; in the following month but 75,000 soldiers all told—officers and enlisted men—were received through the port of New York, at all times the nation's chief war gateway; yet this was but the beginning. Each month of the early half of 1919 registered an increase of this human tide inflowing as against the preceding months, until May, with 311,830 troops received home, finally beat, by some 5,000 men, the record outgoing month of July, 1918, when under the terrific pressure induced by the continued German drive, 306,731 officers and men had been dispatched from these shores. Yet June, 1919, overtopped May. In that month 342,686 troops passed not only under the shadow of the beloved statue of Liberty, but also into the friendly and welcoming ports of Boston, Newport News, and Charleston, while the Secretary of War promised that the midsummer months that were immediately to follow would break the June record. A promise which was fulfilled.
Long before the signing of the armistice, Pershing had ruled that the work of the American Red Cross with the well men of the A. E. F. was specifically to be limited to them while they were en route from one point to another—along the lines of communication, as you already have seen in an earlier chapter. To the Young Men's Christian Association was intrusted the chief burden of caring for them in their more or less permanent camps. This meantfor our Red Cross in the final months of the war—before peace was actually signed and declared—a task almost exactly like that which had confronted it in its very first months of war experience in France. The stations along the railroad lines of eastern France, Luxembourg, and the Moselle Valley—the lines of communication between our French base ports and the occupied districts of the German states—offered to the American Red Cross the very same canteen problems as had once faced it at Châlons-sur-Marne and Épernay. Treves and Coblenz were hardly different from either of these—save perhaps in their increased size.
Because Coblenz is rather more closely connected in the mind of the average American with our Army of Occupation, let us begin with it, here and now. It was, in fact, the easternmost outpost of the work of our Red Cross with our army over there. There the lines of communication officially began, and ran up the railway which ascends the beautiful but extremely tortuous valley of the Moselle. And where the lines of communication began—in the great railroad station of Coblenz—the American Red Cross also began. It had two canteens in that station; one just off the main waiting room, and the other, for the convenience of troops who were merely halted in the train shed of the station while going to and from the other American mobilization centers in that Rhine bridgehead, right on the biggest and the longest of the train platforms. Both were busy canteens; never more so, however, than just before 10:30 o'clock in the morning, which was the stated hour for the departure of the daily leave-train toward the border lines of France. Then it was the Red Cross coffee and sandwiches, tobacco and chewing gum were in greatest demand; for the long leave-train boasted no such luxury as dining cars, and there was scarce enough time at the noonday stop at Treves for one to avail oneself of the lunch-room facilities in the station there.
Yet Treves for the American Red Cross was a far, far more important point than Coblenz. It was the headquartersof all its work in Germany, and boasted in addition to the large American Red Cross canteens in each of the two railroad stations, on either bank of the Moselle, and the recreation huts at the base hospitals—for that matter, there were also recreation huts at the base hospitals in and about Coblenz—well-equipped clubs for both enlisted men and officers. Of these the club for the enlisted men—for the rank and file of doughboy—quite properly was the best equipped.
In the beginning it had been one of those large combination beer gardens and music halls that always have been so very dear to the heart of the German. It was the very sort of plant that could be, and was, quickly adapted to the uses of a really big group of men. Its mainbierhallemade a corking dining room for the doughboys. The meals kept pace with the apartment. Three times a day they appeared—feeding daily from 600 to 1,600 boys—and they were American meals—in fact, for the most part composed of American food products—meats from Chicago, butter and cheese from New York State, flour from Minnesota, and the like. For each of these a flat charge of two marks—at the rate of exchange then prevailing, about eighteen cents—was made. But if a doughboy could not or would not pay, no questions were asked. The Treves Enlisted Men's Club which the American Red Cross gave the A. E. F. was not a commercial enterprise. It was run by an organization whose funds were the gift of the American people—given and given freely in order that their boys in khaki might have every comfort that money might provide.
The great high-ceilingedhalleheld more than a restaurant. It was a reading room as well, stocked with many hundreds of books and magazines. In fact a branch of the American Library Association operated—and operated very successfully—a small traveling loan library in one of the smaller rooms of the club. Upon the walls of the vast room were pictures and many maps—maps of thevalley of the Moselle, of that of the Rhine, of the Saar basin, of the operations in France. These last held much fascination for the doughboys. The most of them were of divisions which had led in the active and hard fighting, and the tiny flags and the blue-chalk marks on the operation maps were in reality placed there by their own efforts—but a few weeks and months before. It was real fun to fight the old actions over and over again—this time with talk and a pointing stick.
There were, of course, such fundamental conveniences for roaming doughboys as baths, a bootblack and a barber shop—this last equipped with chairs which the boys themselves invented and constructed; a plain stout wooden armchair, into the back of which a board—not unlike an old-fashioned ironing board—was thrust at an angle. When turned one way this board formed just the proper headrest for a shave; in the other direction it was at exactly the right angle for haircutting.
For the Officers' Club of our Red Cross at Treves, the Casino in the Kornmarkt, the heart of the city, was taken over. The fact that this was in the beginning a well-equipped club made the problem of its adaption a very slight one indeed. And the added fact that officers require, as a rule, far less entertainment than the enlisted men also simplified its operation. As it was, however, the officers were usually given a dance or a show each week—in the comfortable, large hall of the Casino. In the Enlisted Men's Club there was hardly a night, however, without some sort of an entertainment in itshalle; and the vast place packed to the very doors.
The next stop after Treves in the eastbound journey from the Rhine of the man in khaki was usually Nancy. And here there were not only canteen facilities at the railroad station, but a regular Red Cross hotel—situated in the Place Stanislas, in the very heart of the town. In other days this had been the Grand Hotel, and the open squarethat it faced has long been known as one of the handsomest in all France. In fact, Nancy itself is one of the loveliest of all French towns; and despite the almost constant aërial bombardments that were visited upon it, escaped with comparatively minor damage.
"NEVER SAY DIE" Sorely wounded, our boys at the great A. R. C. field hospital in the Auteuil race track outside of Paris, kept an active interest in games and sports"NEVER SAY DIE"Sorely wounded, our boys at the great A. R. C. field hospital in the Auteuil race track outside of Paris, kept an active interest in games and sports
The Red Cross hotel there was opened on September 30, 1918, and closed on the tenth of April of the following spring—had eighty-eight rooms, capable of accommodating one hundred guests, and two dormitories capable of providing for some forty more. The room charges were invariably five francs for a room—with the exception of one, usually reserved for generals or other big wigs—which rented at eight francs a night. For the dormitory beds an even charge of two francs (forty cents) nightly was made, while in the frequent event of all these regular accommodations of the hotel being engaged and the necessity arising of placing cots in its broad hallways, no charge whatsoever was made for these emergency accommodations.
For the excellent meals—served with the fullness of a good old-fashioned Yankee tavern—a progressive charge of four francs for breakfast, five francs for lunch, and six francs for dinner was made. Surely no one could fairly object to the restaurant prices, which, even in France in war-time stress, ranged from eighty cents to a dollar and twenty! In fact it was a bonanza for the American officers who formed the chief patrons of the place—although a bit of thoughtfulness on the part of some one had provided this particular hostelry with a dormitory of twelve beds and a single room with three which was held reserved for American women war workers; an attention which was tremendously appreciated by them.
Eleven miles distant from Nancy was Toul; but Toul we have already visited in the pages of this book. We know already the comfortable accommodations that the traveler in khaki found in the group of hotels and canteens which our Red Cross operated there. There were many of these,even outside of Paris; one of the largest the tavern at the badly overcrowded city of Bordeaux. That tavern had been little to boast of, in the beginning. It was an ancient inn indeed; but good taste—the purchase of some few dozen yards of cretonne, and cleanliness—the unrelenting use of mop and broom and soap—had accomplished wonders with it. There were others of these American Red Cross hotels in France during the fighting period—the ones at Dijon, Is-sur-Tille, and Marseilles were particularly popular. But it was in Paris itself that the Red Cross accommodations for the itinerant doughboy in the final months of the war, as in the long and difficult half year that intervened between the signing of the armistice and the signing of peace, reached their highest development. In the beginning these had taken form in canteens which were operated night and day at each of the important railroad stations. These were all right—so far as they went. Their one-franc or seventy-five centime meals were wonderful indeed. I have eaten in these canteens many times myself—and always eaten well. I have been seated between a doughboy from North Carolina and one from North Dakota and been served by a society woman in steel-gray uniform—a woman whose very name was a thing to be emblazoned in the biggest headline type of the New York newspapers, but who was working week in and week out harder than the girls in busy restaurants back home are usually wont to work.
If you would see these canteens as they really worked, gaze upon them through the eyes of a brilliant newspaper woman from San Francisco, who took the time and the trouble to make a thorough study of them. She wrote:
"A brown puddle of coffee was spreading over the white oilcloth. The girl from home sopped it up with her dish towel. She brushed away messy fragments of food and bread crumbs. Again there were few vacant places for American soldiers on the benches at the long table in the canteen at the Gare St. Lazare.
"The canteen, one of a circuit of thirteen maintained by the Red Cross in Paris, had formerly been the corner of a baggage room in one of the most important Paris terminals. The concrete floor bruised her feet. She was as conscious of them asAlice in Wonderlandwho discovered her own directly beneath her chin after she nibbled the magic toadstool. The girl was tired, but she smiled.
"It was really a smile within a smile. There was one on her lips which seemed to sparkle and glance, waking responsive smiles on the faces of the men. At once the gob who was born down in Virginia and had trained at Norfolk, decided that she was from his own South. The six-foot doughboy from California knew that she came from some small town in the Sierras. To each of the men she suddenly represented home.
"That smile stays in place each day until she reaches her room in a pension across the Seine on the Rue Beaux Arts. There, closing the door upon the world with its constant pageant of uniformed men who seem forever hungry and thirsty, she lets her smile fade away for the first time that day.
"The smile within is tucked away in her heart with the memory of agonizing moments aboard an ocean liner when she felt her exalted desire for service ebbing away because she feared she would not be needed. Needed! Now she wonders who else could have managed so tactfully the boy who had been at sea for one year and discovered that he had forgotten how to talk to an American woman. His diffidence was undermined with another dish of rice pudding and an extra doughnut. He became a regular boarder at the canteen where breakfast costs nine cents and any other man's size meal may be had for thirteen cents. His leave ended in a half day of excited shopping for which his younger sister will always be grateful.
"The girl from home had been one of those solemn creatures who was called to the Overseas Club in New York for service abroad. She was one of hundreds who hadclinched their own faith in their ideals by pledging such service. It had been a wrench, saying good-bye at the station in the Middle West. There were no boys in the family, and her father had made a funny little joke which betrayed his pride about 'hanging out a service flag now.' Armed with interminable lists which called for supplies for twelve months, she bought her equipment. All the time she was saying to herself:
"'I am ready to give all of my youth and my strength to the cause and to hasten victory.'
"Then the armistice was signed. The wireless instrument sang with the message. There was a celebration. The ship remained dark, still sliding through the nights warily, but her next trip would be made with decks ablaze and portholes open. The war was ended. It seemed to the girl that in the silence of the aftermath she could hear once more the wings of freedom throbbing above the world. She was glad and she was sorry. Her fear was that after all the Red Cross would not need her because she came too late.
"Canteen service—she pictured the work minus the tonic of danger as a social job. Dressed in a blue smock and white coif she would bid a graceful farewell to the A. E. F. as it filtered out of Europe. Now she smiles. Needed? Her fingers are scarred and she wonders if she ever will be able to pour one thousand bowls of coffee from the gigantic white porcelain pitcher without blistering her hands.
"Each day she looks at the line of men jostling one another at the door. She listens to their interminable questions and comes to the full realization that she is one of the most important people in Paris, one of two hundred girls feeding thirty-five thousand soldiers daily.
"As some workers leaving for home after more than a year of service tell of making sandwiches under shell fire, of sleeping by the roadside in the woods to fool thebocheflyers who bombed the Red Cross buildings, she still feelsthe sly nip of envy. But soldiers do not cease to be soldiers and heroes when the war is done.
"Other puddles formed on the table and she mopped them up. She had used three towels during her eight-hour shift. A soldier, one of the thousands passing daily through the six Paris stations on their way home, journeying to leave areas, going to join the Army of Occupation or assigned to duty in the city, called to her.
"'Sister, I want to show you something,' he said, and unwrapped a highly decorative circlet of aluminum. It was a napkin ring which he had bought from apoiluwho made it of scraps from the battlefield. There was an elaborate monogram engraved on a small copper shield.
"'For my mother,' he explained. 'If you don't think it is good enough I will get something else.'
"At once fifty rival souvenirs were produced. Men came from other tables to exhibit their own. There was the real collector who bemoaned the theft of a 'belt made by a Russian prisoner in Germany and decorated with the buttons of every army in the world including the fire department of Holland.'
"One of the new arrivals had hands stiffened from recently healed wounds. She brought his plate of baked beans, roast meat, potatoes, a bowl of coffee, and pudding. A young Canadian with flaming, rosy cheeks divided the last doughnut with his friend, the Anzac. Crullers are the greatest influence in canteen for the general friendliness among soldiers of different armies. A League of Nations could be founded upon them if negotiations were left to the privates about the oilcloth-covered tables.
"The boy with the crippled hands protested that he did not want to accept a dinner for which there was so little charge.
"'Say, Miss,' he said, 'I can pay more. I don't have to be sponging.'
"'You have folks in the states?' she asked. He had.
"'Then,' she explained, 'they are the ones who supportthe American Red Cross. When you come here it is because the folks asked you in to dinner.'
"'But I haven't any folks,' announced a sailor.
"'I'm from the States, so I am your folks,' she retorted, 'and the Red Cross is your folks. We invite you to three meals a day as long as you stay in Paris.'
"'You are my folks,' said the boy who was only a youngster, 'and you sure look like home to me.'
"The soldier with the crippled hands wanted to describe his wounds. Like hundreds of others he began with the sensations in the field, 'when he got his.' Deftly as she had learned to do during hundreds of such recitals, she cleaned up the table and stacked the plates without seeming to interrupt. It was three o'clock, the end of her day. She had reported at seven in the morning. The following week she would report with the other members of the staff at eleven at night because the doors of a canteen must never be closed.
"The boy talked on. He was explaining homesickness, the sort which drives men from cafés where the food is unfamiliar and the names on the menus cannot be translated into 'doughboy French' to such places as the little room in the Gare St. Lazare.
"She discovered that her habitual posture was with arms akimbo and hands spread out over her hips. This position seemed to rest the ache in her shoulders. Through her memory flashed pictures of waitresses in station eating houses who stood that way while tourists fought for twenty minutes' worth of ham and eggs between trains.
"Red Cross after-war canteens were a social center for pretty idlers in smart blue smocks?
"The smile on her lips never faltered and the hidden smile in her heart became a little song of laughter.
"She was 'helping'—helping in an 'eating joint,' some of the boys called it. But it was an eating joint with a soul."
What more could one ask of an eating-house?
From the canteenat the railroad terminals—which were all right so far as they went—it was an easy step of transition to the establishment of hotels for the enlisted men in the accessible parts of Paris—until there was a total of six of these last, in addition to the five railway station canteens—at Gare St. Lazare, Gare du Nord, Gare d'Orsay, Gare d'Orléans, and Gare Montparnasse. The winter-time hotels were in the Avenue Victor Emanuel, Rue Traversière, Rue la Victoire, Rue St. Hyacinthe, and the Rue du Bac. These were all, in the beginning, small Parisian taverns of thepensiontype, which were rather quickly and easily adapted to their war-time uses.
The great difficulty with the first five of these American Red Cross doughboy hotels was their extreme popularity. They could hardly keep pace with the demands made upon them—in the last weeks that preceded and immediately following the signing of the armistice; while, with the coming of springtime and the granting of wholesale leaves of absence by the army, an immediate and most pressing problem confronted the American Red Cross in Paris. The boys were coming into the town—almost literally in whole regiments, and the provisions for their housing and entertainment there were woefully inadequate—to say the least. Not only were these accommodations, as furnished by the French, inadequate and poor, but the charges for them often were outrageous.
Yet to furnish hotel accommodations in the big town, even of the crudest sort, for a thousand—perhaps two thousand—doughboys a night was no small problem. There were no more hotels, large or small, available for commandeering in Paris; the various allied peace commissions had completely exhausted the supply. Yet our Red Cross, accustomed by this time to tackling big problems—and the solution of this was, after all, but part of the day's work, and because there were no more hotels or apartment houses or dormitories or barracks of any sort whatsoever available in the city of more than two million folks—ourRed Cross decided to build a hotel. And so did—almost overnight.
It was a summer hotel, that super-tavern for our doughboys, and it stood squarely in the center of that famous Parisian playground, the Champs de Mars—and almost within stone throw of the Eiffel Tower and theEcole Militaire. To create it several dozen long barracks—like American Red Cross standard khaki tents—were erected in a carefully planned pattern. Underneath these were builded wooden floors and they were furnished with electric lights and running water. A summer hotel could not have been more comfortable; at least few of them are.
The Tent City, as it quickly became known, was opened about March 4, 1919, with bed accommodations for 1,400 men, while preparations were quickly made to increase this capacity by another five hundred, for the latest and the biggest of American Red Cross hotels in Paris had leaped into instant popularity. Between six and nine-thirty in the morning and ten-thirty and midnight in the evening, the boys would come streaming in to the registry desk, like commercial travelers into a popular hostelry in New York or Philadelphia or Chicago. They would sleep—perhaps for the first time in many, many months—in muslin sheets. And these were as immaculate as those of any first-class hotel in the States.
There was no charge whatsoever for these dormitory accommodations. For the meals—simple but good and plentiful—the normal price of fifty centimes (nine or ten cents) was asked, but never demanded; while merely for the asking any of our boys in khaki could have at any hour the famous Red Cross sandwiches of ham or salmon or beef mixture or jam—chocolate or coffee or lemonade a-plenty to wash it down.
Definite provision was made for their amusement; there were "rubberneck wagons" to take them afield to the wonderful and enduring tourist sights of Paris and her environs—and at the Tent City itself a plenitude of showsand dances as well as the more quiet comfort of books or magazines, or the privilege and opportunity of writing a letter home.
"Of what use these last in Paris?" you ask.
Your point is well taken. I would have taken it myself—before I first went to the Tent City. When I did it was a glorious April day, the sun shone with an unaccustomed springtime brilliancy over Paris, and yet the air was bracing and fit for endeavor of every sort. Yet the big reading room tent of the Red Cross hotel in the Champs de Mars was completely filled—with sailor boys or boys in khaki reading the books or paper most liked by them. The sight astonished me. Could these boys—each on a leave of but three short days—be blind to the wonders of Paris? Or was their favorite author particularly alluring that week? I decided to ask one of them about it.
"I saw Paris yesterday—Notre Dame, the Pantheon, Napoleon's Tomb, the Opera House, the Louvre, the Follies—the whole blame business. It's some hike. But I did it. An' to-day I'm perfectly satisfied to sit here and read these guys a-telling of how they would have fought the war."
Of such was the nature of the American doughboy.
Just as it was necessary at Treves and Bordeaux and elsewhere—because of the very volume of the problem—to separate his entertainment from that of his officers, so it became necessary to effect a similar solution in Paris; for the officer is quite as much a ward of our Red Cross as the doughboy, himself. And so early in the solution of this entire great problem a superb home in the very heart of Paris—the town residence of the Prince of Monaco at No. 4 Avenue Gabriel and just a step from the Place de la Concorde—was secured and set aside as an American Red Cross Officers' Club. Lovely as this was, and seemingly more than generous in its accommodations, these were soon overwhelmed by the demands placed upon them, and stepswere taken toward finding a real officers' hotel for the men of the A. E. F. when they should come to Paris.
These led to the leasing of the Hotel Louvre, at the head of the Avenue de l'Opéra and almost adjoining the Comédie Française, the American University Union, and the Louvre. After being rapidly redecorated and otherwise transformed to meet the necessities of the A. E. F. it was reopened on the sixth of January, 1919, as the American Officers' Hotel in charge of Mr. L. M. Boomer, the directing genius of several large New York hotels. Mr. Boomer brought to the Red Cross a great practical hotel experience, and the house under his management quickly attained an overwhelming success. It had, in the first instance, been charmingly adapted to its new uses. Its rather stiff and old-fashioned interior had been completely transformed; there was all through the building an indefinable but entirely unmistakable home atmosphere. Our American officers fairly reveled in it.
Into this setting was placed good operation—a high-grade American-operated hotel, if you please, in the very heart of Paris and all her stout traditions.Petit déjeunersbegone! They are indeed starvation diet for a hungry Yank. The breakfast in the American Officers' Hotel, which our Red Cross set up and operated, cost a uniform five francs (one dollar) and had the substantial quality of a regular up-and-doing tavern on this side of the Atlantic.
Before we rest, here are three typical bills of fare of a single ordinary day in this A. R. C.-A. E. F. establishment. The day was the nineteenth of April, 1919, and the three meals were as follows: