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. If you would see these canteens as they really worked, gaze upon them through the eyes of a brilliant newspaper woman from San Francisco, who took the time and the trouble to make a thorough study of them. She wrote: