With The Doughboy In France Part 21

For the excellent meals--served with the fullness of a good old-fas.h.i.+oned 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 Ma.r.s.eilles 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 as _Alice in Wonderland_ who 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 had clinched 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 s.h.i.+p 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 sh.e.l.l fire, of sleeping by the roadside in the woods to fool the _boche_ flyers who bombed the Red Cross buildings, she still feels the 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 s.h.i.+ft. A soldier, one of the thousands pa.s.sing daily through the six Paris stations on their way home, journeying to leave areas, going to join the Army of Occupation or a.s.signed 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 a _poilu_ who made it of sc.r.a.ps from the battlefield. There was an elaborate monogram engraved on a small copper s.h.i.+eld.

"'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 b.u.t.tons 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 support the 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 cafes 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 canteen at 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'Orleans, and Gare Montparna.s.se. The winter-time hotels were in the Avenue Victor Emanuel, Rue Traversiere, Rue la Victoire, Rue St.

Hyacinthe, and the Rue du Bac. These were all, in the beginning, small Parisian taverns of the _pension_ type, 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--our Red 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 the _Ecole 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-cla.s.s 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 amus.e.m.e.nt; 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 shows and 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 steps were taken toward finding a real officers' hotel for the men of the A. E. F. when they should come to Paris.