Our First Ten Thousand
Purchase of this book includes free trial access to www.million-books.com where you can read more than a million books for free. This is an OCR edition with typos. Excerpt from book: CHAPTER III. First Impressions Of Paris. INSTEAD of being met at the Gare du Nord by a liveried porter with a gold hat cord from the Ritz or the Meurice and being packed into an omnibus with the baggage stacked out of the way on top, we were met by two French officers with gold hatcords and were packed into five large motor trucks with our baggage under foot. Through the Boulevard de Magenta and the Place de la Republique we were driven, people stopping in the streets to greet us and waving their hands to us from their seats at sidewalk tables in front of cafes. The column at the Bastille loomed just in front of us, but we turned into a side street and I was lost! Our destination was the "caserne de Reuilly," a barracks used by Napoleon. All French barracks are built in the same manner, and this one was no
...exception. There were three long, four- story buildings of cement on three sides of a hollow square, which was used as a drill ground. On the fourth side, which ran along the street, was a stone wall ten or twelve feet high, in the centre of which was an iron gateway. In the rear of the large middle building, and extending ad fini- tum according to necessity, were the mess-halls and other buildings necessary to camp housekeeping. We carried our bags up three flights of stairs and entered a long room lined on each side with cots. This was to be our home. It was lunch time, however, and down we went again promptly, but with some misgiving, to a mess consisting principally of a plate so thickly covered with cold grease that you could easily write your name on it, into which was poured hot soup. Black bread, potatoes and cold coffee completed the menu, which we supplemented, in the course of an afternoon ramble, at a canteen where we found sweet chocolate on sale, with win...
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