And then the prayers would be said once more, and another song sung.
Those were solemn, sorrowful times, death and destruction on every side. The fighting was everywhere. United States anti-aircraft guns firing at German planes; Germans firing at us; air fights in the sky above.
And in the midst of it all the boys had meetings every night on log piles out in the open. These meetings would begin with popular songs, but the boys would soon ask for the hymns and the meetings would work themselves out without any apparent leading up to it. The boys wanted it. They wanted to hear about religious things. They hungered for it. So they were held at the throne of God each night by the wonderful men and girls who had learned to know human hearts, and had attained such skill in leading them to the Christ for whom they lived.
It was not alone the doughnut that bound the hearts of the boys to the Salvation Army in France, it was what was behind the doughnut; and here, in these wonderful God-led meetings they found the secret of it all. Many of them came and told the girls they did not believe in the so-called “trench religion” and wanted to know the truth from them. And those girls told them the way of eternal life in a simple, beautiful way, not mincing matters, nor ignoring their sins and unworthiness, but pointing the way to the Christ who died to save them from sin, and who even now was waiting in silent Presence to offer them Himself. Great numbers of the men accepted Christ, and pledged themselves to live or die for Him whatever came to them.
How close the Salvation Army people had grown to the hearts and lives of the men was shown by the fact that when they came back from the fight they would always come to them as if they had come to report at home:
“We’ve escaped!” they would say. “We don’t know how it is, but we think it’s because you girls were praying for us, and the folks at home were praying, too!”
There were three cardinal principles which were deemed necessary to success in this work. The first and most important depended upon winning the confidence of the boys. This was a prime requisite in any work with the boys, especially by a religious organization.
The first quality looked for in a person professing religion is always consistency. It was felt that if the boys saw that the Salvation Army was consistent, that it stood only for those things in France which it was known to stand for in the United States, that the first step would be established in winning the confidence of the boy. It was therefore determined that the Salvation Army would not, under any circumstances, compromise, and that it should stand out in its religious work and adhere to its teachings as firmly and as vigorously as it was known to do at home.
A stand upon the tobacco question was, therefore, highly important. Other organizations were encouraging the use of tobacco but those who had come in contact with the Salvation Army at home knew that it had always discouraged its use, and although the officers had to go against the judgment of many high military authorities who thought they should handle it, they decided that the Salvation Army would not handle tobacco and that no one wearing its uniform should use it. The consistency of the Salvation Army and the careful conduct of its workers won the esteem of the boys.
The second requisite was that the Salvation Army should be willing to share their hardships. To accomplish this, it was made a rule that Salvation Army workers should not mess with the officers but should draw their rations at the soldiers’ mess, also that they should not associate with the officers more than was absolutely necessary and that in the huts. It was neither possible nor desirable that officers should be kept out of the huts, but as far as possible soldiers were made to feel that the Salvation Army was in France to serve them and not for its own pleasure or convenience.