"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'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 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-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 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.