She got the tent—the permission and all else that went with the getting it up, of course. In the spring of 1919 it still was there, although in use as a check room instead of a canteen; for the canteen service long before had outgrown even its generous facilities. It spread in various directions; into a regular hotel for enlisted men, right across the narrow street from the station; a resthouse for both officers and enlisted men back on the Route de Paris about a block distant; a huge new canteen on the station grounds, and still another on one of the long island-platforms between the tracks, so that men held in passing trains—all of which stopped at Toul for coal and water, if nothing else—and so unable to go even into the station to feel the comforting hand of the Red Cross, might be served with good things of both food and drink.
To maintain four such great institutions, even though all of them were within a stone's throw of one another, was no child's play. The mere problem of providing those good things to eat and drink was of itself a really huge job. For by January, 1919, in the sandwich room of the enlisted men's hotel across the street, 2,400 pounds of bread a day were being cut into sandwiches. These sandwiches were worthy of investigation. They were really worth-while—the Red Cross kind. I have sampled them myself—all the way from Havre to Coblenz and south as far as Bordeaux, and so truthfully can call them remarkable. For fancy, if you can, corned beef—the miserable and despised "corn willie" of the doughboy—being so camouflaged with pickles and onions and eggs as to make many and many a traveling hungry soldier for the nonce quite unaware that he was munching upon a foodstuff of unbridled army ridicule. And ham, with mustard, and more of the palatable camouflage. Oh, boy, could you beat it? And, oh, boy, did you ever eat better doughnuts—outside of mother's, of course—than those of the Red Cross, and the Salvation Army, too, gave you?
In the big kitchen of the American Red Cross canteen hotel at Toul they cooked three thousand of these last each twenty-four hours, which would have been a sizable contract for one of those white-fronted chains of dairy restaurants whose habitat is New York and the other big cities of the United States, while four thousand cups of coffee and chocolate went daily to wash down these doughnuts—and the sandwiches.
Figures are not always impressive. In this one instance, however, I think that they are particularly so. Is it not impressive to know that in a single day of September, 1918, when the tide of war had turned and the oncoming hosts of Yanks were turning the flanks of the boche farther and farther back, ground once lost never to be regained—in the eight hours of that day, from five o'clock in the morning until one o'clock in the afternoon, just 2,045 men were served by the American Red Cross there at the Toul station, while in the month of January, 1919, just 128,637 hungry soldiers were fed and refreshed there?
Figures do not, of course, tell the story of the resthouse—that apartment home first secured by Miss Andress—but the expressions of gratefulness that come from the fortunate folk who have been sheltered beneath its hospitable roof are more than ordinarily eloquent. It is not a large building; a structure rather ugly than otherwise. But it has spelled in every true sense of the word: "Rest." Yet to my mind its really unique distinction lies in another channel; it is the only army facility that I chanced to see in all France which extended its hospitality under a single roof to both officer and enlisted man, and so bespoke a democracy which, much vaunted at times, does not always exist within the ranks of the United States Army. For so far as I could discover, there was not the slightest particle of difference in the cleanliness and comfort between the beds assigned to the enlisted men in the upper floor of the house and those given to the officers in its two lower floors. When they passed its threshold the fine distinction of rank ceased. The Red Cross in its very best phases does not recognize the so-called distinction of rank.
Its hospitality at Toul did not cease when it had offered food and drink and lodging to the man in khaki who came to its doors. A very humble yet greatly appreciated comfort to a man coming off a hot, overcrowded, and very dirty troop train was nothing more nor less than a good bath. The bathhouse was a hurried but well-adapted one in the basement of the enlisted men's hotel. Two Russian refugees ran the plant and did well at it—for Russian refugees. A system was adopted, despite Slavic traditions, by which at a single time sixteen men might be undressing, sixteen taking a quarter-hour bath, and a third sixteen dressing again—all at the same time. In this way 250 men could bathe in a single hour, while the daily average of the institution during the busy months of the war ordinarily ran from eight hundred to nine hundred. It has handled 1,200 in a single working day, giving the men not only a bath, hot or cold, as might be desired, but a complete change of clean underclothing—all with the compliments of the Red Cross. The discarded garments were gathered in huge sacks, some twenty-five of these being forwarded daily to the army laundries in the neighborhood.
"The Red Cross in Toul?" said a young lieutenant of engineers one day to Miss Gladys Harrison, who was working there for the American Red Cross. "It saved my life one forlorn night. Every hotel in town was full to the doors, it was raining bullets outside and no place to sleep but the banks of the canal, if—if the Red Cross hadn't taken me in."
Let Miss Harrison continue the story; she was extremely conversant with the entire situation in Toul, and so most capable to speak of it.