With The Doughboy In France Part 22

These led to the leasing of the Hotel Louvre, at the head of the Avenue de l'Opera and almost adjoining the Comedie Francaise, 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-fas.h.i.+oned 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. _Pet.i.t dejeuners_ begone! 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:

BREAKFAST Five Francs--($1.00).

Bananas Quaker Oats Eggs and Bacon Griddle Cakes with Sirup Confiture Coffee, Cocoa, or Chocolate

LUNCHEON Eight Francs--($1.60).

Oyster Soup, with Okra Scollops of Veal, Dewey Nouilles, Milanaise Cold Meats, with Jelly Russian Salad a.s.sorted Eclairs Raspberry Ice Cream Coffee

DINNER Ten Francs--($2.00).

Creme St. Cloud Rouget Portugaise Roasted Filet of Beef, Cresson Pommes Chateau Endive Flamandes Salade de Saison Candied Fruits Coffee Ice Cream Coffee

Yet the charm of the American Officers' Hotel in Paris rested not alone in the real excellence of its cuisine, nor in the comfort of its cleanly sleeping rooms. It carried its ideals of genuine service far beyond these mere fundamentals. It recognized the almost universal Yankee desire to have one's shoes s.h.i.+ned in a shop and so set up a regular American boot-blacking stand in one of its side corridors, a thing which every other Parisian hotel would have told you was quite impossible of accomplishment. It recognized the inconvenience of tedious waiting and long queues at the box office of the Paris theaters by setting up a theater ticket office in its lobby, which made no extra charge for the distinct service rendered. Nor was there a charge for the services of Miss Curtis, the charming little Red Cross girl, who went shopping with a fellow or for him, and who had a knack of getting right into those perplexing Paris shops and getting just what a fellow wanted at an astonis.h.i.+ngly low price--for Paris in war times, anyway. Her range of experience was large; from the man with a silver star on each shoulder who wanted to buy a modish evening gown for his wife at a price not to exceed forty dollars, to the chunky Nevada lieutenant who had won three thousand francs at "redeye" on the preceding evening and was anxious to blow it all in the next morning in buying souvenirs for mother. With both she did her best. Her motto was that of the successful shop keeper: "We aim to please."

When Mr. Boomer had this hotel set up and running and turned his attention to some other housing problems of our Red Cross, the management fell to Major H. C. Eberhart, who had been his a.s.sistant in Paris and before that had been affiliated in a managerial capacity with several large American houses. He carried forward the job so well begun.

With the slow but very sure movement of our doughboys back from eastern France and Germany toward the base ports along the westerly rim of France, where they were embarking in increasing numbers for the blessed homeland, it became necessary for General Pers.h.i.+ng to establish concentration areas, or reservoir camps, well back from the Atlantic Coast but convenient to it. By far the largest and most important of these was in the neighborhood of the city of Le Mans, some one hundred and fifty miles southwest of Paris, which meant in turn that what was finally destined to be the largest of the canteens of our American Red Cross in France outside of Paris was the final one established. It was known as the American Red Cross Casual Canteen and, situated within three blocks to the east of the railroad station at Le Mans, was a genuine headquarters for all the American soldiers for ten or fifteen or twenty miles roundabout. And in the bare chance that there might not be a doughboy who had chanced to hear of it, it was well indicated--by day, by a huge sign of the crimson cross, and by night that emblem blazing forth in all the radiance of electricity.

When the doors were finally opened--about the middle of March, 1919--there were sleeping quarters under its hospitable roof for 250 enlisted men and forty officers. In the canteen portion of the establishment, 200 men could be served at a single sitting; in all 500 at each of the three meals a day. The comforts of this place almost approximated those of a hotel. When the men rose from their beds in the morning--clean sheets and towels and pillowcases, of course, even though it did mean that the Red Cross had to establish its own laundry in the establishment--they could step, quickly and easily, into a commodious washroom and indulge, if they so chose, in a shower bath. Eighteen showers were installed--for their convenience. It represented the acme of Red Cross service.

Finally the beginning of the end for the average doughboy in France--that long antic.i.p.ated and seemingly never-arriving day of departure in the troops.h.i.+p for home.

Our Red Cross was down to see him off when he sailed. It might have been from Brest or Bordeaux or St. Nazaire that he took his departure--or from some one of the lesser ports that were used to a greater or less extent. That made no difference to the American Red Cross. It was part of its job to be on hand whenever and wherever the boy of the A. E. F.

sailed for home--whether it was Brest or Vladivostok or Southampton or Ma.r.s.eilles.

As a matter of real and actual fact, Brest was the most used of all the embarkation ports for the journey home. It boasted what was sometimes called "the most beautiful canteen in France" which had been builded by our Red Cross, with the generous help of the army engineers. It immediately adjoined the embarkation sheds, and night and day in the months that followed the signing of the armistice, it was supremely busy--serving the inevitable cigarettes, doughnuts, chocolate, and other hot drinks. An interesting and extremely valuable adjunct to the place was a bakery, with a capacity of twenty thousand buns a day.

The enlisted men's rest room, with its bright hangings and draperies, its cartoons of army life painted upon its wall panels, its big fireplace, its comfortable settees, lounging chairs, and tables supplied with games, magazines, and writing material, held especial attraction for the doughboys. In all the mud and grime of the dirty _Port du Commerce_ it was the one cheery and homelike place.

I told in an earlier chapter of the American Red Cross canteen at Ba.s.sens, just across the Gironde from Bordeaux. It is enough to add here and now that this American-builded port with its mile-long Yankee timber pier at which seven great s.h.i.+ps might be berthed simultaneously, discharging or loading cargoes, never justified its worth half so much as in the days after the armistice. Thomas Kane's coffee attained a new perfection while Miss Susanne Wills, the Chicago woman who was directress of the canteen on the pier, and her fellow workers made renewed efforts to see that the boys that pa.s.sed through the canteen had every conceivable comfort--and then some others. I, myself, spent a half day questioning them as to these. The verdict to the questionings was unanimous. It generally came in the form of a grin or a nod of the head, sometimes merely in a pointing gesture to the crimson-crossed comfort bag, that the big and blus.h.i.+ng doughboy carried hung upon his wrist.

For the sick boy, going homeward bound from all the ports, very special comfort provisions were made--and rightly so. All of these last pa.s.sed through the Red Cross infirmaries on the embarkation docks. As each went over the gangway he was questioned as to his equipment. If he was short a mess kit or a cup, a fork, a knife, a spoon or a blanket, the deficiency was promptly met; in addition to which each boy was given a pair of flannel pajamas and the inevitable comfort bag, with its toothbrush, tooth paste, wash cloth, bar of soap, and two packages of cigarettes. Books and magazines also went upon each troops.h.i.+p, while Red Cross nurses accompanied the boys on to the s.h.i.+ps and saw them safely settled in the hospital wards.

No mere cataloging of the work of our Red Cross in the embarkation ports can ever really begin to tell the story of the fullness of its service there. Charts of organization, details of operations, pictures of the surroundings go just so far, but never quite far enough to tell of the heart interest that really makes service anywhere and everywhere. Such service the American Red Cross rendered all across the face of France--and nowhere with more strength and enthusiasm than in those final moments of the doughboy which awaited him before his start home.

Have I not already told you that our Red Cross over there was not a triumph of organization--or anything like it? It was a big job--and with big mistakes. But the bigness of the things accomplished so far outweighed the mistakes that they can well be forgotten; the tremendous net result of real achievement set down immutably and indisputably as a real triumph of our American individualism.

CHAPTER XII

THE GIRL WHO WENT TO WAR

On the s.h.i.+p that bore me from New York to Europe in the first week of December, 1918, there were many war workers--and of many sorts and varieties. We had men and women of the Y. M. C. A., of the Y. W. C. A., of the Jewish Welfare Board, of the Knights of Columbus--and twenty-five women of the American Red Cross. And so, in the close-thrown intimacy of s.h.i.+pboard, one had abundant opportunity to study this personnel at rather short range, and the fact that our s.h.i.+p, which had been builded for South African traffic rather than for that of the North Atlantic, nearly foundered in mid ocean only served to increase the opportunity.

There were women war workers of nearly every age and variety in that motley s.h.i.+p's company. There were school-teachers--one from Portland, Maine, and another from Portland, Oregon--stenographers, clerks, women of real social distinction, professional women, including a well-known actress or two, and girls so recently out of finis.h.i.+ng school or college that they had not yet attained their full places in the sun. Few of them had known one another before they had embarked upon the s.h.i.+p; there was a certain haziness of understanding in many of their minds as to the exact work that was to be allotted to them overseas. A large percentage of the women, in fact, had never before crossed the Atlantic; a goodly number had not even seen salt water before this voyage. Yet with all this uncertainty there was no timidity--no, not even when the great December storm arose, and with the fullness of its fury lashed itself into a hurricane the like of which our captain, who had crossed the ocean a hundred times or more, had not seen. And when the fury of this storm had crashed in the cabin windows, had torn the wheelhouse away, had set the stout s.h.i.+p awash and the pa.s.sengers to bailing, the courage and serenity of these American women remained undisturbed. They suffered great personal discomforts, yet complained not. And with our national felicity for an emergency organization--that sort of organization really is part and parcel of our individualism--relieved the steward's crew at night and cooked and served the Sabbath supper.

There were women in uniform on our s.h.i.+p whose mouths were tightly shut in the grim determination of service--one could fairly see "Z-E-A-L"

written in unmistakable letters upon their high foreheads--and there were girls who fretted about the appearance of the curls under the edges of their small service caps and who coquetted with the young British aviators returning home after service as instructors on the flying fields here in the United States. Between these extremes there was vast range and variety. But the marvelous part of it all was that all of them--each after her own creed or fas.h.i.+on, for the dominating quality of our individualism multiplies geometrically in the case of our American womanhood--ranged true to any test that might be put upon them. The storm showed that. I did not have the personal opportunity of seeing the Red Cross girls in battle service; but I did see them in the canteens in the hard, hard months that followed the signing of the armistice, saw them in the wards and the recreation huts of hospital after hospital, saw them, too, in Paris headquarters, working under very difficult conditions of light and ventilation--living of every sort--and at manual or office work or humdrum dreariness. The girl in uniform who sat all day in a poorly lighted and aired room at a typewriter or a filing case had a far less dramatic or poetic job than the traditional Red Cross girl who stands at a battlefield canteen or in a hospital ward holding the hand of some good-looking--and perhaps marriageable--young captain or colonel. Yet her service was as real as uncomplaining and--for the reasons we have just seen--vastly more difficult.

None of the women's work over there was easy--the romantic girl who went to France lured on by the dream pictures of some artist-ill.u.s.trator as to the dramatic phases of canteen or hospital work was quickly disillusionized. The real thing was vastly different from the picture. A dirty and unshaven doughboy in bed or standing in a long queue waiting for his cigarettes or chocolate, and speaking Polish or Yiddish when he came to them, was a far, far different creature from the young wounded officer of the picture who must have been an F. F. V. or at least from one of the first families of Baltimore or Philadelphia. And the hours! They were fearfully hard--to put it lightly. Eight, ten, or twelve hours at a stretch was a pretty good and exhausting test of a girl's vitality. Nor was this all of the job, either. Many and many a woman worker of the Red Cross or, for that matter, the Y. M. C. A., too, has stood eight or ten or twelve hours on her feet in a canteen and then has ridden twenty or thirty miles in a truck or camionette to an army dance, has danced three or four or five more hours with soldier boys who, even if they do not happen to be born dancers, do covet the attention and interest of decent girls, and has returned to only a few hours of sleep, before the long turn in the canteen once again. And has repeated this performance four or five times a week. For what? Because she was crazy for dancing? Not a bit of it. For of a truth they became sick of dancing--"fed up" is the phrase they frequently used when they spoke of it at all.

"I feel as if I never wanted to hear an orchestra again," one of them told me one day as I stopped at her canteen--in a French town close to the occupied territory. "But I have four dates already for next week and three for the week after. Another month of this sort of thing and I shall be a fit candidate for a rolling chair."

"Why do you do it?" I ventured.

"Why do I do it?" she repeated. "The boys need us. Have you noticed the kind of girls that drift up here from Paris? If you have, you will understand why my job is unending, why it only pauses for a very little while indeed at night, when I jump into my bed for six or seven hours of well-earned sleep."

I understood. I had spent an evening in the grand boulevards of Paris and had watched a "Y" girl, under the escort of a member of the American Military Police, save foolish doughboys and their still more foolish officers--from themselves. In a few minutes after ten o'clock that evening an overcrowded hotel of one of our largest American war-relief organizations had regretfully turned away sixteen of our soldiers and in this time there were fifteen French girls waiting to give the hospitality that the sadly overburdened hotel had been compelled to refuse them. No wonder that our Red Cross was forced into the building of the great Tent City there on the Champs de Mars. As these French girls of the Paris streets came up to the doughboys the job of the "Y"

girl began. In a few more minutes she had convinced the boys that it was not too late to give up hope of securing lodgings in overcrowded Paris; and was quick with her suggestions as to where they might be found. It was not a pleasant job. I hardly can imagine one more unpleasant. But the girl had her reward, in the looks of grat.i.tude which the doughboys gave her. One or two of them cried like babies.

This was an unusual job to be sure. But our American Red Cross also was filled with unusual jobs for women as well as for men; jobs that took not merely endurance and courage, but in many, many cases rare wit and tact and diplomacy, and these were rarely lacking, and sometimes came where they were least expected.

I am not all anxious to over-glorify these women. It would hardly be fair; for, after all, they were very human indeed--witness one young widow on our s.h.i.+p to Europe who not merely confessed but actually boasted that she had received three proposals of marriage upon that stormy voyage. And one little secretary girl from the Middle West, who was of our s.h.i.+p's company, wanted to be a canteen worker, although she was specifically enrolled for the office work for which she was particularly qualified, but when she found that the canteen to which she was to be a.s.signed was located in a lonely railroad junction town in the middle of France, demanded that she be sent to Coblenz, where the Army of Occupation had its headquarters; she said quite frankly that she did not want to be robbed of all her opportunities of meeting the nice young officers of the army. She was very human, that young secretary, and eventually she got to Coblenz. Insistence counts. And she was both insistent and consistent.

But at the Rhine her lot, oddly enough, was not thrown in with officers but with the doughboys--the enlisted men of our most amazing army. She fed them, walked with them, danced with them, wrote their letters, and finally began to understand. And so slowly but surely came to the fullness of her real value to the country that she served.

One evening she dined in the Y. W. C. A. hostess house at Coblenz with two of these boys. Left alone, she would have dined by herself. She was tired, very tired. There comes the hour when a woman worker wearies a bit at sight of a ceaseless file of chattering and khaki-clad men. And so when she seated herself in one of the little dining booths of the "Y. W." restaurant, it was with a silent prayer that she might be left alone--just that evening. Her prayer was not granted. A big doughboy came and sat down beside her, another across the narrow table from her.

The second vouched for the first.

"You will like Hank," said he. "He's one of the livest in the whole First Division. He's from Waco, Texas, and say, he's the best gambler in the whole army."

At which Hank grinned and produced a huge wad of ten and twenty and fifty and hundred franc notes from his hip pocket.

"Don't you let him string you, Miss Tippitoes," said he, "but if ever you get where you need a little spare change you know where your Uncle Hank is to be found."

He called her "Miss Tippitoes" because he could not remember her real name even if ever it had been given to him. But he had danced with her and watched her dance, and marveled. And well might he have marveled.

For if I were to give you Miss Tippitoes' real name you might know it as the name of the most graceful and popular dancer in a fas.h.i.+onable suburb of Chicago.

Hank edged closer to her. It was in the crowded restaurant, so he took off his coat and unb.u.t.toned his blouse, as well as the upper b.u.t.tons of his unders.h.i.+rt. And Tippitoes stood for it--it was a part of her job and she knew it--while Hank leaned closer to her and confided some of his troubles--they were troubles common to so many of the doughboys.

"It's a dump that we're billeted in, miss," said he, "and it's all the fault of our colonel--him and that Red Cross girl he's stuck on. Just because he's got a mash on her he had the regiment moved in to G----.

But I've got his number. And as for her--why, that girl comes from my home town. I've got hers, too."

Tippitoes' eyes blazed. She could have lost her temper so easily. It is not difficult when one is f.a.gged and nerves begin to get on edge, but she kept her patience.