Long before the signing of the armistice, Pershing had ruled that the work of the American Red Cross with the well men of the A. E. F. was specifically to be limited to them while they were en route from one point to another--along the lines of communication, as you already have seen in an earlier chapter. To the Young Men's Christian Association was intrusted the chief burden of caring for them in their more or less permanent camps. This meant for our Red Cross in the final months of the war--before peace was actually signed and declared--a task almost exactly like that which had confronted it in its very first months of war experience in France. The stations along the railroad lines of eastern France, Luxembourg, and the Moselle Valley--the lines of communication between our French base ports and the occupied districts of the German states--offered to the American Red Cross the very same canteen problems as had once faced it at Châlons-sur-Marne and Épernay. Treves and Coblenz were hardly different from either of these--save perhaps in their increased size. Because Coblenz is rather more closely connected in the mind of the average American with our Army of Occupation, let us begin with it, here and now. It was, in fact, the easternmost outpost of the work of our Red Cross with our army over there. There the lines of communication officially began, and ran up the railway which ascends the beautiful but extremely tortuous valley of the Moselle. And where the lines of communication began--in the great railroad station of Coblenz--the American Red Cross also began. It had two canteens in that station; one just off the main waiting room, and the other, for the convenience of troops who were merely halted in the train shed of the station while going to and from the other American mobilization centers in that Rhine bridgehead, right on the biggest and the longest of the train platforms. Both were busy canteens; never more so, however, than just before 10:30 o'clock in the morning, which was the stated hour for the departure of the daily leave-train toward the border lines of France. Then it was the Red Cross coffee and sandwiches, tobacco and chewing gum were in greatest demand; for the long leave-train boasted no such luxury as dining cars, and there was scarce enough time at the noonday stop at Treves for one to avail oneself of the lunch-room facilities in the station there.