The Tent City, as it quickly became known, was opened about March 4, 1919, with bed accommodations for 1,400 men, while preparations were quickly made to increase this capacity by another five hundred, for the latest and the biggest of American Red Cross hotels in Paris had leaped into instant popularity. Between six and nine-thirty in the morning and ten-thirty and midnight in the evening, the boys would come streaming in to the registry desk, like commercial travelers into a popular hostelry in New York or Philadelphia or Chicago. They would sleep--perhaps for the first time in many, many months--in muslin sheets. And these were as immaculate as those of any first-class hotel in the States. There was no charge whatsoever for these dormitory accommodations. For the meals--simple but good and plentiful--the normal price of fifty centimes (nine or ten cents) was asked, but never demanded; while merely for the asking any of our boys in khaki could have at any hour the famous Red Cross sandwiches of ham or salmon or beef mixture or jam--chocolate or coffee or lemonade a-plenty to wash it down. Definite provision was made for their amusement; there were "rubberneck wagons" to take them afield to the wonderful and enduring tourist sights of Paris and her environs--and at the Tent City itself a plenitude of shows and dances as well as the more quiet comfort of books or magazines, or the privilege and opportunity of writing a letter home. "Of what use these last in Paris?" you ask. Your point is well taken. I would have taken it myself--before I first went to the Tent City. When I did it was a glorious April day, the sun shone with an unaccustomed springtime brilliancy over Paris, and yet the air was bracing and fit for endeavor of every sort. Yet the big reading room tent of the Red Cross hotel in the Champs de Mars was completely filled--with sailor boys or boys in khaki reading the books or paper most liked by them. The sight astonished me. Could these boys--each on a leave of but three short days--be blind to the wonders of Paris? Or was their favorite author particularly alluring that week? I decided to ask one of them about it. "I saw Paris yesterday--Notre Dame, the Pantheon, Napoleon's Tomb, the Opera House, the Louvre, the Follies--the whole blame business. It's some hike. But I did it. An' to-day I'm perfectly satisfied to sit here and read these guys a-telling of how they would have fought the war." Of such was the nature of the American doughboy. * * * * *