I imagine, too, that sometimes its finances are an uncertain quantity. Incidentally I am assured that not one of its male workers here is of draft age unless he holds exemption papers to prove his physical unfitness for military service. The Salvationists are taking care to purge themselves of any suspicion that potential slackers have joined their ranks in order to avoid the possibility of having to perform duties in khaki.
Among officers as well as among enlisted men one occasionally hears criticism—which may or may not be based on a fair judgment—for certain branches of certain activities of certain organisations. But I have yet to meet any soldier, whether a brigadier or a private, who, if he spoke at all of the Salvation Army, did not speak in terms of fervent gratitude for the aid that the Salvationists are rendering so unostentatiously and yet so very effectively. Let a sizable body of troops move from one station to another, and hard on its heels there came a squad of men and women of the Salvation Army. An army truck may bring them, or it may be they have a battered jitney to move them and their scanty outfits. Usually they do not ask for help from any one in reaching their destinations. They find lodgment in a wrecked shell of a house or in the corner of a barn. By main force and awkwardness they set up their equipment, and very soon the word has spread among the troopers that at such-and-such a place the Salvation Army is serving free hot drinks and free doughnuts and free pies. It specialises in doughnuts, the Salvation Army in the field does—the real old-fashioned homemade ones that taste of home to a homesick soldier boy.
I did not see this, but one of my associates did. He saw it last winter in a dismal place on the Toul sector. A file of our troops were finishing a long hike through rain and snow over roads knee-deep in half-thawed icy slush. Cold and wet and miserable, they came tramping into a cheerless, half-empty town within sound and range of the German guns. They found a reception committee awaiting them there—in the person of two Salvation Army lassies and a Salvation Army captain. The women had a fire going in the dilapidated oven of a vanished villager's kitchen. One of them was rolling out the batter on a plank with an old wine bottle for a rolling pin and using the top of a tin can to cut the dough into circular strips. The other woman was cooking the doughnuts, and as fast as they were cooked the man served them out, spitting hot, to hungry wet boys clamouring about the door, and nobody was asked to pay a cent.
At the risk of giving mortal affront to ultra-doctrinal practitioners of applied theology I am firmly committed to the belief that by the grace of God and the grease of doughnuts those three humble benefactors that day strengthened their right to a place in the Heavenly Kingdom.
As I said a bit ago, there is in France room and to spare and the heartiest sort of welcome for competent, sincere lay workers, both men and women. But there is no room, and if truth be known, there is no welcome for any other sort. These people over here long ago passed out of the experimental period in the handling of industrial and special problems that have grown up out of war. They have entirely emerged from the amateur stage of endeavour and direction. If any man doubts the truth of this he has only to see, as I have seen, the thousands of women who have taken men's jobs in the cities in order that the men might go to the colours; has only to see the overalled women in the big munition plants; has only to see how the peasant women of France are labouring in the fields and how the girls of the British auxiliary legions—the members of the W. A. A. C. for a conspicuous example—are carrying their share of the burden; has only to see women of high degree and low, each doing her part sanely, systematically and unflinchingly—to appreciate that, though Britain and France can find employment for every pair of willing and able hands somewhere behind the lines, they have no use whatsoever for the unorganised applicant or for the purely ornamental variety of volunteer or yet for the mere notoriety seeker.
I make so bold as to suggest that it is time we were taking the same lesson to heart; time to start the sifting process ourselves. I have seen in Paris a considerable number of American women who appeared to have no business here except to air their most becoming uniforms in public places and to tell in a vague broad way of the things they hope to do. The French, proverbially, are a polite race, and the French Government will endure a great deal of this kind of infliction rather than run the risk of engendering friction, even to the most minute extent, with the people or the administration of an Allied nation. But in wartime especially, too much patience becomes a dubious virtue, and if practiced for overlong may become a fault.
As yet there has been no intimation from any official source that the French would rather our State Department did not issue quite so many passports to Americans who have no set and definite purpose in making the journey to these shores, but even a superficial knowledge of the French language and the most casual acquaintance with the French nature enable one to get at what the French people are thinking. I am sure that had the prevalent condition been reversed our papers would have voiced the popular protest at the imposition long before now. Some of these days, unless we apply the preventive measures on our own side of the Atlantic, the perfectly justifiable resentment of the hard-pressed French is going to find utterance; and then quite a number of well-intentioned but utterly inutile persons will be going back home with their feelings all harrowed up.