[Illustration: "NEVER SAY DIE" Sorely wounded, our boys at the great A. R. C. field hospital in the Auteuil race track outside of Paris, kept an active interest in games and sports]
The Red Cross hotel there was opened on September 30, 1918, and closed on the tenth of April of the following spring--had eighty-eight rooms, capable of accommodating one hundred guests, and two dormitories capable of providing for some forty more. The room charges were invariably five francs for a room--with the exception of one, usually reserved for generals or other big wigs--which rented at eight francs a night. For the dormitory beds an even charge of two francs (forty cents) nightly was made, while in the frequent event of all these regular accommodations of the hotel being engaged and the necessity arising of placing cots in its broad hallways, no charge whatsoever was made for these emergency accommodations.
For the excellent meals--served with the fullness of a good old-fashioned 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 Marseilles 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.