“It is not the guns, nor the bombs which can frighten me,” she told a Salvation Army lassie who was billeted with her for a time, “but I am very much afraid of the submarines.”
The village was several hundred miles inland.
The activity was all at night, for no one dared be seen about in the daytime. It must be a very urgent duty that would call men forth into full view of the enemy. But as soon, as the dark came on the men would crawl into the trenches, stick their rifles between the sandbags and get ready for work.
It seemed to be always raining. They said that when it wasn’t actually raining it was either clearing off or just getting ready to rain again. Twenty minutes in the trenches and a man was all over mud, wet, cold, slippery mud. In his hair, down his neck, in his boots, everywhere.
Through the trenches just behind the standing place ran a deeper trench or drain to carry the water away, and this was covered over with a rough board called a duck-board. Underneath this duck-board ran a continual stream of water. A man would go along the trench in a hurry, make a misstep on one end of the duck-board and down he would go in mud and freezing water to the waist. In these cold, wet garments he must stay all night. The tension was very great.
As the soldiers had to work in the night, so the Salvation Army men and women worked in the night to serve them.
The Salvation Army men would visit the sentries and bring them coffee and doughnuts prepared in the dugouts by the girls. It was exceedingly dangerous work. They would crawl through the connecting trenches, which were not more than three feet deep, and one must stoop to be safe, and get to the front-line trenches with their cans of coffee. They would touch a fellow on the shoulder, fill his mug with coffee, and slip him some doughnuts. At such times the things were always given, not sold. They did not dare even to whisper, for the enemy listening posts were close at hand and the slightest breath might give away their position. The sermon would be a pat of encouragement on a man’s shoulder, then pass on to the next.
One morning at three o’clock a Salvationist carried a second supply of hot coffee to the battery positions. One gunner with tense, strained face eyed his full coffee mug with satisfaction and said with a sigh: “Good! That is all I wanted. I can keep going until morning now!”
When the men were lined up for a raid there would be a prayer-meeting in the dugout, thirty inside and as many as could crowded around the door. Just a prayer and singing. Then the boys would go to the girls and leave their little trinkets or letters, and say: “I’m going over the top, Sister. If I don’t come back—if I’m kicked off—you tell mother. You will know what to say to her to help her bear up.”
Three-quarters of an hour later what was left of them would return and the girls would be ready with hot coffee and doughnuts. It was heart-breaking, back-aching, wonderful work, work fit for angels to do, and these girls did it with all their souls.