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.
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 déjeuners 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).