“I only saw the Salvation Army once,” he replied, “but I’ll never forget it. It was when I came back to consciousness in the Dressing Station at Cheppy, and the first thing I saw was a Salvation Army girl bending over me washing the blood and dirt off my face with cold water. She looked like an angel and she was that to me. She gave me a drink of cold lemonade when I was burning up with fever, and she lifted my head to pour it between my lips when I had not strength to move myself. No, I shall not forget!”
One bright young fellow with a bandaged eye turned a cheerful grin toward the Salvation Army visitor as she said with compassion: “Son, I’m sorry you’ve lost your eye.”
“Oh, that’s nothing,” was the gay reply, “I can see everything out of the other eye. I’ve got seven holes in me, too, but believe me I’m not going home for the loss of an eye and seven holes! I’ll get out yet and get into the fight!”
The Salvation Army officer and his wife who were stationed at Bonvillers visited every man in the local hospital every day, sleeping every night in the open fields. As they are quite elderly, this was no little hardship, especially in rainy weather.
Five lassies stationed at Noyers St. Martin were for several weeks forced by the nightly shelling and air-raids to take their blankets out into the fields at night and sleep under the stars. One of these girls was called “Sunshine” because of her smile.
On the eve of Decoration Day a military Colonel visited her in the hut. He seemed rather depressed, perhaps by the ceremonies of the day, and said that he had come to be cheered up. In parting he said, “Little girl, you had better get out of town early to-night; I feel as though something is going to happen.” Less than an hour later, while the girls were just preparing for the night in a field half a mile distant, an aerial bomb dropped by an aviator on the house in which he was billeted killed him and two other Captains who were sitting with him at the time. He had been a great friend of the Salvation Army.
Out in a little village in Indiana there grew a fair young flower of a girl. Her mother was a dear Christian woman and she was brought up in her mother’s church, which she loved. When she was only twelve years old she had a remarkable and thorough old-fashioned conversion, giving herself with all her childish heart to the Saviour. She feels that she had a kind of vision at that time of what the Lord wanted her to be, a call to do some special work for Christ out in the world, helping people who did not know Him, people who were sick and poor and sorrowful. She did not tell her vision to anyone. She did not even know that anywhere in the world were any people doing the kind of work she felt she would like to do, and God had called her to do. She was shy about it and kept her thoughts much to herself. She loved her own church, and its services, but somehow that did not quite satisfy her.
One day when she was about fourteen years old the Salvation Army came to the town where she lived and opened work, holding its meetings in a large hall or armory. With her young companions she attended these meetings and was filled with a longing to be one of these earnest Christian workers.
Her mother, accustomed to a quiet conventional church and its way of doing Christian work, was horrified; and in alarm sent her away to visit her uncle, who was a Baptist minister. The daughter, dutiful and sweet, went willingly away, although she had many a longing for these new friends of hers who seemed to her to have found the way of working for God that had been her own heart’s desire for so long.
Meantime her gay young brother, curious to know what had so stirred his bright sister, went to the Salvation Army meetings to find out, and was attracted himself. He went again and found Jesus Christ, and himself joined the Salvation Army. The mother in this case did not object, perhaps because she felt that a boy needed more safeguards than a girl, perhaps because the life of publicity would not trouble her so much in connection with her son as with her daughter.