One of our women officers, on being told by the colonel of the regiment she would be killed if she persisted in serving her doughnuts and cocoa to the men while under heavy fire, and that she must get back to safety, replied: “Colonel, we can die with the men, but we cannot leave them.”
When, therefore, I gathered the little companies together for their last charge before they sailed for France, I would tell them that while I was unable to arm them with many of the advantages of the more wealthy denominations; that while I could give them only a very few assistants owing to the great demand upon our forces; and that while I could promise them nothing beyond their bare expenses, yet I knew that without fear I could rely upon them for an unsurpassed devotion to the God-inspired standards of the emblem of this, the world’s greatest Republic, the Stars and Stripes, now in the van for the freedom of the peoples of the earth. That I could rely upon them for unsurpassed devotion to the brave men who laid their lives upon the altar of their country’s protection, and that I could rely upon them for an unsurpassed devotion to that other banner, the Banner of Calvary, the significance of which has not changed in nineteen centuries, and by the standards of which, alone, all the world’s wrongs can be redressed, and by the standards of which alone men can be liberated from all their bondage. And they have not failed.
A further reason for the success of the Salvation Army in the war is, it found us accustomed to hardship.
We are a people who have thrived on adversity. Opposition, persecution, privation, abuse, hunger, cold and want were with us at the starting-post, and have journeyed with us all along the course.
We went to the battlefields no strangers to suffering. The biting cold winds that swept the fields of Flanders were not the first to lash our faces. The sunless cellars, with their mouldy walls and water-seeped floors, where our women sought refuge from shell-fire through the hours of the night, contributed no new or untried experience. In such cellars as these, in their home cities, under the flicker of a tallow candle, they have ministered to the sick and comforted the dying.
Wet feet, lack of deep, being often without food, finding things different from what we had planned, hoped and expected, were frequent experiences with us. All such things we Salvationists encounter in our daily toils for others amid the indescribable miseries and inestimable sorrows, the sins and the tragedies of the underworlds of our great cities—the underneath of those great cities which upon the surface thunder with enterprise and glitter with brilliance.
We are not easily affrighted by frowns of fortune. We do not change our course because of contrary currents, nor put into harbor because of head- winds. Almost all our progress has been made in the teeth of the storm. We have always had to “tack,” but as it is “the set of the sails, and not the gales” that decides the ports we reach, the competency of our seamanship is determined by the fact that we “get there.”
Our service in France was not, therefore, an experiment, but an organized, tested, and proved system. We were enacting no new rôle. We were all through the Boer War. Our officers were with the besieged troops in Mafeking and Ladysmith. They were with Lord Kitchener in his victorious march through Africa. It was this grand soldier who afterwards wrote to my father, General William Booth, the Founder of our movement, saying: “Your men have given us an example both of how to live as good soldiers and how to die as heroes.” And so it was quite natural that our men and women, with that fearlessness which characterizes our members, should take up positions under fire in France.
In fact, our officers would have considered themselves unfaithful to Salvation Army traditions and history, and untrue to those who had gone before, if they had deserted any post, or shirked any duty, because cloaked with the shadows of death.
This explains why their dear forms loomed up in the fog and the rain, in the hours of the night, on the roads, under shell fire, serving coffee and doughnuts.