The “Residence City” of Coblenz, headquarters of the American Army of Occupation, is one of the finest on the Rhine. Wealth has long gravitated toward the triangle of land at its junction with the Moselle. The owners—or recent owners—of mines in Lorraine make their homes there. The mother of the late unlamented Kaiser was fond of the place and saw to it that no factory chimneys came to sully its skies with their smoke, or its streets and her tender heart-strings with the wan and sooty serfs of industrial progress. The British at Cologne had more imposing quarters; the French at Mayence, and particularly at Wiesbaden, enjoyed more artistic advantages. A few of our virile warriors, still too young to distinguish real enjoyment from the flesh-pots incident to metropolitan bustle, were sometimes heard to grumble, “Huh! they gave _us_ third choice, all right!” But the consensus of opinion among the Americans was contentment. The sudden change from the mud burrows of the Argonne, or from the war-worn villages of the Vosges, made it natural that some should draw invidious comparisons between our long-suffering ally and the apparently unscathed enemy. Those who saw the bogy of “propaganda” in every corner accused the Germans of preferring that the occupied territory be the Rhineland, rather than the interior of Germany, “because this garden spot would make a better impression on their enemies, particularly the Americans, so susceptible to creature comforts.” By inference the Boche might have offered us East Prussia or Schleswig instead! It was hard to believe, however, that those splendid, if sometimes top-heavy, residences stretching for miles along the Rhine were built, twenty to thirty years ago in many cases, with any conscious purpose of impressing the prospective enemies of the Fatherland. It was these creature comforts of his new billeting area that made the American soldier feel so strangely at home on the Rhine. Here his office, in contrast to the rude stone casernes with their tiny tin stoves that gave off smoke rather than heat, was cozy, warm, often well carpeted. His billets scarcely resembled the frigid, medieval ones of France. Now that no colonel can rank me out of it, I am free to admit that in all my travels I have never been better housed and servanted than in Coblenz, nor had a more solicitous host than the staid old judge who was forced to take me in for a mere pittance—paid in the end by his own people. The _Regierungsgebäude_—it means nothing more terrifying than “government building”—which the rulers of the province yielded with outward good grace to our army staff, need not have blushed to find itself in Washington society. To be sure, we were able to dispossess the Germans of their best, whereas the French could only allot us what their own requirements left; yet there is still a margin in favor of the Rhineland for material comfort.