A few days later she was talking with another boy just landed. She asked him how it seemed to be home again, and to her surprise he turned a sorrowful face to her:
“It’s the greatest disappointment of my life,” he said sadly, “the folks here don’t understand. They all want to make me forget, and I don’t want to forget what I learned out there. I saw life in a different way and I knew I had wasted all the years. I want to live differently now, and mother and her friends are just getting up dances and theatre parties for me to help me to forget. They don’t understand.”
Forty miles west of Chicago is Camp Grant and there the Salvation Army has put up a hut just outside of the camp.
During the days when the boys were being sent to France, and were under quarantine, unable to go out, no one was allowed to come in and there was great distress. Mothers and sisters and friends could get no opportunity to see them for farewells.
The Salvation officer in charge suggested to the military authorities that the Salvation Army hut be the clearing place for relatives, and that he would come in his machine and bring the boys to the hut, taking them back again afterwards, that they might have a few hours with their friends before leaving for France.
This offer was readily accepted by the authorities, and so it was made possible for hundreds and hundreds of mothers to get a last talk with their boys before they left, some of them forever.
One day a young man came to the Salvation Army officer and told him that his regiment was to depart that night and that he was in great distress about his wife who on her way to see him had been caught in a railroad wreck, and later taken on her way by a rescue train. “I think she is in Rockford somewhere,” he said anxiously, “but I don’t know where, and I have to leave in three hours!”
The Ensign was ready with his help at once. He took the young soldier in his car to Rockford, seven miles away, and they went from hotel to hotel seeking in vain for any trace of the wife. Then suddenly as they were driving along the street wondering what to try next the young soldier exclaimed: “There she is!” And there she was, walking along the street!
The two had a blessed two hours together before the soldier had to leave. But it was all in the day’s work for the Salvation Army man, for his main object in life is to help someone, and he never minds how much he puts himself out. It is always reward enough for him to have succeeded in bringing comfort to another.
One of the Salvation Army Ensigns who was assigned to work at Camp Grant hut had been an all-round athlete before he joined the Salvation Army, a boxer and wrestler of no mean order.