I cannot sufficiently thank you and the Salvation Army for this very generous donation.
I am indeed glad to know that you are providing another twenty drivers for service with our Ambulance Fleet in France. This is most welcome news, as whenever Salvation Army men are helping we hear nothing but good reports of their work. Sir Ernest Clarke tells me that your Ambulance Sections are quite the best of any in our service, and the more Salvation Army men you can send him, the better he will be pleased. I would again take this opportunity of congratulating you, which I do with all my heart, upon the splendid record of your Army.
Yours sincerely,
(Signed) Arthur Stanley.
Extract from Judge Ben Lindsey’s picture of the Salvation Army at the Front:
“A good expression for American enthusiasm is: ’I am crazy about’—this, or that, or the other thing that excites our admiration. Well, ’I am crazy about the Salvation Army’—the Salvation Army as I saw it and mingled with it and the doughboys in the trenches. And when I happened to be passing through Chicago to-day and saw an appeal in the Tribune for the Salvation Army, I remembered what our boys so often shouted out to me as I passed them in the trenches and back of the lines: ’Judge, when you get back home tell the folks not to forget the Salvation Army. They’re the real thing.’
“And I know they are the real thing. I have shared with the boys the doughnuts and chocolate and coffee that seemed to be so much better than any other doughnuts or coffee or chocolate I have ever tasted before. And when it seemed so wonderful to me after just a mild sort of experience down a shell-swept road, through the damp and cold of a French winter day, what must it be to those boys after trench raids or red-hot scraps down rain-soaked trenches under the wet mists of No Man’s Land?... Listen to some of the stories the boys told me: ’You see, Judge, the good old Salvation Army is the real thing. They don’t put on no airs. There ain’t no flub-dub about them and you don’t see their mugs in the fancy magazines much. Why, you never would see one of them in Paris around the hotels. You’d never know they existed, Judge, unless you came right up here to the front lines as near as the Colonel will let you!’
“And one enthusiastic urchin said: ’Why, Judge, after the battle yesterday, we couldn’t get those women out of the village till they’d seen every fellow had at least a dozen fried cakes and all the coffee or chocolate he could pile in. We just had to drag ’em out—for the boys love ’em too much to lose ’em—we weren’t going to take no chances—not much— for our Salvation ladies!’”
Harry Lauder’s Endorsement.
In speaking of the Salvation Army’s work before the Rotary Club of San Francisco, Harry Lauder said: