The War Romance of the Salvation Army Part 8

The American boys were drilling from early morning until dark; the weather was wet and cold; the roads were seas of mud and the German planes came over the valleys almost nightly to seek out the position of the American troops and occasionally to drop bombs. It was necessary that all tents should be camouflaged, windows darkened so that lights would not show at night, and every means used to keep the fact of the Americans' presence from the German observers and spies.

Another party of Salvation Army officers, men and women, arrived from New York on September 23rd, and these were quickly sent out to Demange which for the time being was used as the general base of supplies, but later a house was secured at Ligny-en-Barrios, and this was for many months the Headquarters.

One interesting incident occurred here in connection with this house. One of its greatest attractions had been that it was one of the few houses containing a bathroom, but when the new tenants arrived they found that the antic.i.p.ated bathtub had been taken out with all its fittings and carefully stowed away in the cellar. It was too precious for the common use of tenants.

All Salvation Army graduates from the training school have a Red Cross diploma, and many are experienced nurses.

A Salvation Army woman Envoy sailed for France with a party of Salvationists about the time that the epidemic of influenza broke out all over the world. Even before the steamer reached the quarantine station in New York harbor a number of cases of Spanish influenza had developed among the several companies of soldiers who were aboard, a number of whom were removed from the ship. So anxious were others of these American fighting men to reach Prance that they hid away until the steamer had left port.

Land was hardly out of sight before more cases of the disease were reported--so many, in fact, that special hospital accommodations had to be immediately arranged. The ship's captain after consulting with the American military officers, requested the Salvation Army Envoy to take entire responsibility for the hospital, which responsibility, after some hesitation, she accepted. Under her were two nurses, three dieticians (Y.M.C.A. and Red Cross), a medical corps sergeant (U.S.A.), and twenty- four orderlies. She took charge on the fourth day of a thirteen day voyage, working in the sick bay from 12 noon to 8 P.M., and from 12 midnight to 8 A.M. every day. She had with her a mandolin and a guitar with which, in addition to her sixteen hours of duty in the sick bay, she every day spent some time (usually an hour or two) on deck singing and playing for the soldiers who were much depressed by the epidemic. To them she was a very angel of good cheer and comfort.

Many amusing incidents occurred on the voyage.

Stormy weather had added to the discomforts of the trip and most of the pa.s.sengers suffered from seasickness during the greater part of the voyage.

On board there was also a woman of middle age who could not be persuaded to keep her cabin porthole closed at night. Again and again a ray of light was projected through it upon the surface of the water and the quarter- master, whose duty it was to see that no lights were shown, was at his wit's end. His difficulty was the greater because he could speak no English, and she no French. Finally, a pa.s.senger took pity on the man, and, as the light was really a grave danger to the ship's safety, promised to speak to the woman, who insisted that she was not afraid of submarines and that it was foolish to think they could see her light.

"Madam," he said, "the quartermaster here tells me that the sea in this locality is infested with flying fish, who, like moths, fly straight for any light, and he is afraid that if you leave your porthole open they will dive in upon you during the night."

If he had said that the sea was infested with flying mice, his statement could not have been more effective. Thereafter the porthole stayed closed.

When the first man died on board, the Captain commanding the soldiers and the ship's Captain requested a Salvation Army Adjutant to conduct the funeral service.

At 4.30 P.M. the ship's propeller ceased to turn and the steamer came up into the wind. The United States destroyer acting as convoy also came to a halt. The French flag on the steamer and the American flag on the destroyer were at half-mast. Thirty-two men from the dead man's company lined up on the after-deck. The coffin (a rough pine box), heavily weighted at one end, lay across the rail over the stern. Here a chute had been rigged so that the coffin might not foul the ship's screws. The flags remained at half-mast for half an hour. The Salvation Army Adjutant read the burial service and prayed. Pa.s.sengers on the promenade deck looked on.

Then a bugler played taps. Every soldier stood facing the stern with hat off and held across the breast. As the coffin slipped down the chute and splashed into the sea a firing squad fired a single rattling volley. The ship came about and, with a shudder of starting engines, continued her voyage, the destroyer doing likewise.

During the pa.s.sage the Adjutant conducted six such funerals, two more being conducted by a Catholic priest. Four more bodies of men who died as they neared port were landed and buried ash.o.r.e.

In the hospital the Envoy was undoubtedly the means of saving several lives by her endless toil and by the encouragement of her cheerful face in that depressing place. The sick men called her "Mother" and no mother could have been more tender than she.

"You look so much like mother," said one boy just before he died. "Won't you please kiss me?"

Another lad, with a great, convulsive effort, drew her hand to his lips and kissed her just as he pa.s.sed away.

All of the American officers and two French officers attended the funerals in full dress uniform and ten sailors of the French navy were also present.

The night before the ship docked at Bordeaux a letter signed by the Captain of the ship and the American officers was handed to the Envoy lady. It contained a warm statement of their appreciation of her service.

Officers of the Aviation Corps who were aboard the ship arranged a banquet to be held in her honor when they should reach port; but she told them that she was under orders even as they were and that she must report to Paris Headquarters at once. And so the banquet did not take place.

As she left the ship, the soldiers were lined up on the wharf ready to march. When she came down the gangplank and walked past them to the street, they cheered her and shouted: "Good-bye, mother! Good luck!"

As the fame of the doughnuts and pies spread through the camps a new distress loomed ahead for the Salvation Army. Where were the flour and the sugar and the lard and the other ingredients to come from wherewith to concoct these delicacies for the homesick soldiers?

It was of no use to go to the French for white flour, for they did not have it. They had been using war bread, dark mixtures with barley flour and other things, for a long time. Besides, the French had a fixed idea that everyone who came from America was made of money. Wood was thirty- five dollars a load (about a cord) and had to be cut and hauled by the purchaser at that. There was a story current throughout the camps that some Frenchmen were talking together among themselves, and one asked the rest where in the world they were going to get the money to rebuild their towns. "Oh," replied another; "haven't we the only battlefields in the world? All the Americans will want to come over after the war to see them and we will charge them enough for the sight to rebuild our villages!"

But even at any price the French did not have the materials to sell. There was only one place where things of that sort could be had and that was from the Americans, and the question was, would the commissary allow them to buy in large enough quant.i.ties to be of any use? The Salvation Army officers as they went about their work, were puzzling their brains how to get around the American commissary and get what they wanted.

Meantime, the American Army had slipped quietly into Montiers in the night and been billeted around in barns and houses and outhouses, and anywhere they could be stowed, and were keeping out of sight. For the German High Council had declared: "As soon as the American Army goes into camp we will blow them off the map." Day after day the Germans lay low and watched.

Their airplanes flew over and kept close guard, but they could find no sign of a camp anywhere. No tents were in sight, though they searched the landscape carefully; and day after day, for want of something better to do they bombarded Bar-le-Duc. Every day some new ravishment of the beautiful city was wrought, new victims buried under ruins, new terror and destruction, until the whole region was in panic and dismay.

Now Bar-le-Duc, as everyone knows, is the home of the famous Bar-le-Duc jam that brings such high prices the world over, and there were great quant.i.ties stored up and waiting to be sold at a high price to Americans after the war. But when the bombardment continued, and it became evident that the whole would either be destroyed or fall into the hands of the Germans, the owners were frightened. Houses were blown up, burying whole families. Victims were being taken hourly from the ruins, injured or dying.

A Salvation Army Adjutant ran up there one day with his truck and found an awful state of things. The whole place was full of refugees, families bereft of their homes, everybody that could trying to get out of the city.

Just by accident he found out that the merchants were willing to sell their jam at a very reasonable price, and so he bought tons and tons of Bar-le-Duc jam. That would help out a lot and go well on bread, for of course there was no b.u.t.ter. Also it would make wonderful pies and tarts if one only had the flour and other ingredients.

As he drove into Montiers he was still thinking about it, and there on the table in the Salvation Army hut stood as pretty a chocolate cake as one would care to see. A bright idea came to the Adjutant:

"Let me have that cake," said he to the la.s.sie who had baked it, "and I'll take it to the General and see what I can do."

It turned out that the cake was promised, but the la.s.sie said she would bake another and have it ready for him on his return trip; so in a few days when he came back there was the cake.

Ah! That was a wonderful cake!

The la.s.sie had baked it in the covers of lard tins, fourteen inches across and five layers high! There was a layer of cake, thickly spread with rich chocolate frosting, another layer of cake, overlaid with the translucent Bar-le-Duc jam, a third layer of cake with chocolate, another layer spread with Bar-le-Duc jam, then cake again, the whole covered smoothly over with thick dark chocolate, top and sides, down to the very base, without a ripple in it. It was a wonder of a cake!

With shining eyes and eager look the Adjutant took that beautiful cake, took also twelve hundred great brown sugary doughnuts, and a dozen fragrant apple pies just out of the oven, stowed them carefully away in his truck, and rustled off to the Officers' Headquarters. Arrived there he took his cake in hand and asked to see the General. An officer with his eye on the cake said the General was busy just now but he would carry the cake to him. But the Adjutant declined this offer firmly, saying: "The ladies of Montiers-sur-Saulx sent this cake to the General, and I must put it into his hands"

He was finally led to the General's room and, uncovering the great cake, he said:

"The Salvation Army ladies of Montiers-sur-Saulx have sent this cake to you as a sample of what they will do for the soldiers if we can get flour and sugar and lard."

The General, greatly pleased, took the cake and sent for a knife, while his officers stood about looking on with much interest. It appeared as if every one were to have a taste of the cake. But when the General had cut a generous slice, held it up, observing its cunning workmanship, its translucent, delectable interior, he turned with a gleam in his eye, looked about the room and said: "Gentlemen, this cake will not be served till the evening's mess, and I pity the gentlemen who do not eat with the officer's mess, but they will have to go elsewhere for their cake."

The Adjutant went out with his pies and doughnuts and distributed them here and there where they would do the most good, getting on the right side of the Top Sergeant, for he had discovered some time ago that even with the General as an ally one must be on the right side of the "old Sarge" if one wanted anything. While he was still talking with the officers he was handed an order from the General that he should be supplied with all that he needed, and when he finally came out of Headquarters he found that seven tons of material were being loaded on his car. After that the Salvation Army never had any trouble in getting all the material they needed.

After the tents in Montiers were all settled and the work fully started, the Staff-Captain and his helpers settled down to a pleasant little schedule of sixteen hours a day work and called it ease; but that was not to he enjoyed for long. At the end of a week the Salvation Army Colonel swooped down upon them again with orders to erect a hut at once as the tents were only a makeshift and winter was coming on. He brought materials and selected a site on a desirable corner.

Now the corner was literally covered with fallen walls of a former building and wreckage from the last year's raid, and the patient workers looked aghast at the task before them. But the Colonel would listen to no arguments. "Don't talk about difficulties," he said, brushing aside a plea for another lot, not quite so desirable perhaps, but much easier to clear.

"Don't talk about difficulties; get busy and have the job over with!"

One big reason why the Salvation Army is able to carry on the great machinery of its vast organization is that its people are trained to obey without murmuring. Cheerfully and laboriously the men set to work. Winter rains were setting in, with a chill and intensity never to be forgotten by an American soldier. But wet to the skin day after day all day long the Salvationists worked against time, trying to finish the hut before the snow should arrive. And at last the hut was finished and ready for occupancy. Such tireless devotion, such patient, cheerful toil for their sake was not to be pa.s.sed by nor forgotten by the soldiers who watched and helped when they could. Day after day the bonds between them and the Salvation Army grew stronger. Here were men who did not have to, and yet who for the sake of helping them, came and lived under the same conditions that they did, working even longer hours than they, eating the same food, enduring the same privations, and whose only pay was their expenses. At the first the Salvationists took their places in the chow line with the rest, then little by little men near the head of the line would give up their places to them, quietly stepping to the rear of the line themselves.

Finally, no matter how long the line was the men with one consent insisted that their unselfish friends should take the very head of the line whenever they came and always be served first.

One day one of the Salvation Army men swathed in a big raincoat was sitting in a Ford by the roadside in front of a Salvation Army hut, waiting for his Colonel, when two soldiers stopped behind him to light their cigarettes. It was just after sundown, and the man in the car must have seemed like any soldier to the two as they chatted.

"Bunch of grafters, these Y.M.C.A. and Salvation Army outfits!" grumbled one as he struck a match. "What good are the 'Sallies' in a soldier camp?"

"Well, Buddy," said the other somewhat excitedly, "there's a whole lot of us think the Salvation Army is about it in this man's outfit. For a rookie you sure are picking one good way to make yourself unpopular _tout de suite!_ Better lay off that kind of talk until you kind of find out what's what. I didn't have much use for them myself back in the States, but here in France they're real folks, believe me!"

So the feeling had grown everywhere as the huts multiplied. And the huts proved altogether too small for the religious meetings, so that as long as the weather permitted the services had to be held in the open air. It was no unusual thing to see a thousand men gathered in the twilight around two or three Salvation Army la.s.sies, singing in sweet wonderful volume the old, old hymns. The soldiers were no longer amused spectators, bent on mischief; they were enthusiastic allies of the organization that was theirs. The meeting was theirs.

"We never forced a meeting on them," said one of the girls. "We just let it grow. Sometimes it would begin with popular songs, but before long the boys would ask for hymns, the old favorites, first one, then another, always remembering to call for 'Tell Mother I'll Be There.'"

Almost without exception the boys entered heartily into everything that went on in the organization. The songs were perhaps at first only a reminder of home, but scon they came to have a personal significance to many. The Salvation Army did not hare movies and theatrical singers as did the other organizations, but they did not seem to need them. The men liked the Gospel meetings and came to them better than to anything else. Often they would come to the hut and start the singing themselves, which would presently grow into a meeting of evident intention. The Staff-Captain did not long have opportunity to enjoy the new hut which he had labored so hard to finish at Montiers, for soon orders arrived for him to move on to Houdelainecourt to help put up the hut there, and leave Montiers in charge of a Salvation Army Major. The Salvation Army was with the Eighteenth Infantry at Houdelainecourt.

It was an old tent that sheltered the canteen, and it had the reputation of having gone up and down five times. When first they put it up it blew down. It was located where two roads met and the winds swept down in every direction. Then they put it up and took it down to camouflage it. They got it up again and had to take it down to camouflage it some more. The regular division helped with this, and it was some camouflage when it was done, for the boys had put their initials all over it, and then, had painted Christmas trees everywhere, and on the trees they had put the presents they knew they never would get, and so in all the richness of its record of homesickness the old tent went up again. They kept warm here by means of a candle under an upturned tin pail. The tent blew down again in a big storm soon after that and had to be put up once more, and then there came a big rain and flooded everything in the neighborhood. It blew down and drowned out the Y.M.C.A. and everything else, and only the old tent stood for awhile. But at last the storm was too much for it, too, and it succ.u.mbed again.

After that the Salvation Army put up a hut for their work. A number of soldiers a.s.sisted. They put up a stove, brought their piano and phonograph, and made the place look cheerful. Then they got the regimental band and had an opening, the first big thing that was recognized by the military authorities. The Salvation Army Staff-Captain in charge of that zone took a long board and set candles on it and put it above the platform like a big chandelier. The Brigade Commander was there, and a Captain came to represent the Colonel. A chaplain spoke. The la.s.sies who took part in the entertainment were the first girls the soldiers had seen for many months.