Some supplies were there already, but the soldiers had had to bring most of their first supper, and the camp-cooks had their own troubles getting things just so. Major-General Sibert, field commander of the First Division, had quarters at camp, so that excuses were not in order. Even for that first supper, the marines and all others they could commandeer to help them were rushing about preparing things to the very top of their bent. Nobody had town-leave for the first day or two, till things were in apple-pie order, and the camp was in line to shelter and feed its soldiers for as long as it should be necessary to stay there. If camp life was busy these days, the town life was no less so. The chief hotel, wherein much red plush met the eye from the very entrance, was swarming with officers of both nations and all degrees of rank. General Pershing was there, with his aides and most of his staff. Admirals were there, changing uniforms from blue to white and back again as the erratic French weather dictated. There were half a dozen high officers from the French Army, making both formal and informal welcomes, and there were more busy majors and captains and more interpreters than you could count in half a day's time. The little Frenchwoman who sat behind the desk was amiable to the best of her very considerable ability, but the questions she had to answer, whether she understood them or not, would have addled an older head than hers. She could run her hotel with the best of them, but when perfectly sane-looking young officers asked her where to buy five thousand cups and saucers, and paper napkins by the ton, she said in so many words that an American invasion was worse than bedlam. The hotel's second floor was the favored place for conferences. There a fair welter of red plush was drawn up around a big table in the hallway, and livid red wall-paper added its warmth to a scene which against a plank wall would not have lacked color. At this table General Pershing could have been found much of the time. The whole practical liaison of French and American Armies was contrived here, though the first rule for this consolidation laid down by a grizzled French general with but one arm left, was that "there was no longer anything that was French, or anything that was American, but merely all we had that was 'ours,'" so that the task was one of detail only.