The Division moved to Vaucouleurs for rest and replacements. At Vaucouleurs there was a great big hut with a piano, a victrola, and a cookstove.
They started the canteen, made doughnuts and pies, and gave entertainments.
But best of all, there were wonderful meetings and numbers of conversions, often twenty and twenty-five at a time giving themselves to Christ. The boys would get up and testify of their changed feelings and of what Christ now meant to them, and the others respected them the more for it.
They stayed here two weeks and everybody knew they were getting ready for a big drive. It was a solemn time for the boys and they seemed to draw nearer to the Salvation Army people and long to get the secret of their brave, unselfish lives, and that light in their eyes that defied danger and death. In the distance you could hear the artillery, and the night before they left, all night long, there was the tramp, tramp, tramp of feet, the boys “going up.”
The next day the girls followed in a truck, stopping a few days at Pagny-sur-Meuse for rest.
VIII.
The Saint Mihiel Drive
The hut in Raulecourt was an old French barracks. Outside in the yard was an old French anti-aircraft gun and a mesh of barbed wire entanglement. The woods all around was filled with our guns. To the left was the enemy’s third line trench. Three-quarters of the time the Boche were trying to clean us up. Less than two miles ahead were our own front line trenches.
The field range was outside in the back yard.
One hot day in July a Salvation Army woman stood at the range frying doughnuts from eleven in the morning until six at night without resting, and scarcely stopping for a bite to eat. She fried seventeen hundred doughnuts, and was away from the stove only twice for a few minutes. She claims, however, that she is not the champion doughnut fryer. The champion fried twenty-three hundred in a day.
One day a soldier watching her tired face as she stood at the range lifting out doughnuts and plopping more uncooked ones into the fat, protested.