The Zone Major went back and forth bringing more men and more lassies and more supplies from the Base at Paris to the front, and many a new worker almost lost his life in a baptism of fire on his way to his post of duty for the first time. But all these men and women, as a soldier said, were made of some fine high stuff that never faltered at danger or fatigue or hardship.
They rode over shell-gashed roads in the blackest midnight in a little dilapidated Ford; made wild dashes when they came to a road upon which the enemy’s fire was concentrated, looking back sometimes to see a geyser of flame leap up from a bend around which they had just whirled. Shells would rain in the fields on either side of them; cars would leap by them in the dark, coming perilously close and swerving away just in time; and still they went bravely on to their posts.
Everything would be blackest darkness and they would think they were stealing along finely, when all of a sudden an incendiary bomb would burst and flare up like a house-on-fire lighting up the whole country for miles about, and there you were in plain sight of the enemy! And you couldn’t turn back nor hesitate a second or you would be caught by the ever watchful foe! You had to go straight ahead in all that blare of light!
The S. A. Adjutant’s headquarters were fifty feet below the ground; sometimes the earth would rock with the explosives. Two of the dugouts were burrowed almost beneath the trenches and S. A. Officers here looked after the needs of the men who were actually engaged in fighting. Every night the shattered villages were raked and torn above them. Such dugouts could only be left at night or when the firing ceased. The two men who operated these lived a nerve-racking existence. Of course, all pies and doughnuts for these places had to be prepared far to the rear, and no fire could be built as near to the front as this. It was no easy task to bring the supplies back and forth. It was almost always done at the risk of life.
The Staff-Captain and the Adjutant were speeding over a shell-swept road one cold, black, wet night at reckless speed without a light, their hearts filled with anxiety, for a rumor had reached them that two Salvation Army lassies had been killed by shell fire. The night was full of the sound of war, the distant rumble of the heavy guns, the nervous stutter of machine guns, the tearing screech of a barrage high above the road.
Suddenly in front of them yawned a black gulf. The Adjutant jammed on his brakes, but it was too late. The game little Ford sailed right into a big shell hole, and settled down three feet below the road right side up but tightly wedged in. The two travelers climbed out and reconnoitered but found the situation hopeless. There had been many sleepless nights before this one, and the men, weary beyond endurance, rolled up in their blankets, climbed into the car, and went to sleep, regardless of the guns that thundered all about them.
They were just lost to the land of reality when a soldier roused them summarily, saying:
“This is a heck of a place for the Salvation Army to go to sleep! If you don’t mind I’ll just pick your old bus out of here and send you on your way before it’s light enough for Fritzy to spot you and send a calling card.”
He was grinning at them cheerfully and they roused to the occasion.
“How are you going to do it?” asked the Adjutant, who, by the way, was Smiling Billy, the same one the soldiers called “one game little guy.” “It will take a three-ton truck to get us out of this hole!”