Part 14

A Salvation Army Adjutant ran up there one day with his truck and found an awful state of things. The whole place was full of refugees, families bereft of their homes, everybody that could trying to get out of the city. Just by accident he found out that the merchants were willing to sell their jam at a very reasonable price, and so he bought tons and tons of Bar-lé-Duc jam. That would help out a lot and go well on bread, for of course there was no butter. Also it would make wonderful pies and tarts if one only had the flour and other ingredients.

As he drove into Montiers he was still thinking about it, and there on the table in the Salvation Army hut stood as pretty a chocolate cake as one would care to see. A bright idea came to the Adjutant:

“Let me have that cake,” said he to the lassie who had baked it, “and I’ll take it to the General and see what I can do.”

It turned out that the cake was promised, but the lassie said she would bake another and have it ready for him on his return trip; so in a few days when he came back there was the cake.

Ah! That was a wonderful cake!

The lassie had baked it in the covers of lard tins, fourteen inches across and five layers high! There was a layer of cake, thickly spread with rich chocolate frosting, another layer of cake, overlaid with the translucent Bar-lé-Duc jam, a third layer of cake with chocolate, another layer spread with Bar-lé-Duc jam, then cake again, the whole covered smoothly over with thick dark chocolate, top and sides, down to the very base, without a ripple in it. It was a wonder of a cake!

With shining eyes and eager look the Adjutant took that beautiful cake, took also twelve hundred great brown sugary doughnuts, and a dozen fragrant apple pies just out of the oven, stowed them carefully away in his truck, and rustled off to the Officers’ Headquarters. Arrived there he took his cake in hand and asked to see the General. An officer with his eye on the cake said the General was busy just now but he would carry the cake to him. But the Adjutant declined this offer firmly, saying: “The ladies of Montiers-sur-Saulx sent this cake to the General, and I must put it into his hands”

He was finally led to the General’s room and, uncovering the great cake, he said:

“The Salvation Army ladies of Montiers-sur-Saulx have sent this cake to you as a sample of what they will do for the soldiers if we can get flour and sugar and lard.”

The General, greatly pleased, took the cake and sent for a knife, while his officers stood about looking on with much interest. It appeared as if every one were to have a taste of the cake. But when the General had cut a generous slice, held it up, observing its cunning workmanship, its translucent, delectable interior, he turned with a gleam in his eye, looked about the room and said: “Gentlemen, this cake will not be served till the evening’s mess, and I pity the gentlemen who do not eat with the officer’s mess, but they will have to go elsewhere for their cake.”

The Adjutant went out with his pies and doughnuts and distributed them here and there where they would do the most good, getting on the right side of the Top Sergeant, for he had discovered some time ago that even with the General as an ally one must be on the right side of the “old Sarge” if one wanted anything. While he was still talking with the officers he was handed an order from the General that he should be supplied with all that he needed, and when he finally came out of Headquarters he found that seven tons of material were being loaded on his car. After that the Salvation Army never had any trouble in getting all the material they needed.

After the tents in Montiers were all settled and the work fully started, the Staff-Captain and his helpers settled down to a pleasant little schedule of sixteen hours a day work and called it ease; but that was not to be enjoyed for long. At the end of a week the Salvation Army Colonel swooped down upon them again with orders to erect a hut at once as the tents were only a makeshift and winter was coming on. He brought materials and selected a site on a desirable corner.

Now the corner was literally covered with fallen walls of a former building and wreckage from the last year’s raid, and the patient workers looked aghast at the task before them. But the Colonel would listen to no arguments. “Don’t talk about difficulties,” he said, brushing aside a plea for another lot, not quite so desirable perhaps, but much easier to clear. “Don’t talk about difficulties; get busy and have the job over with!”

One big reason why the Salvation Army is able to carry on the great machinery of its vast organization is that its people are trained to obey without murmuring. Cheerfully and laboriously the men set to work. Winter rains were setting in, with a chill and intensity never to be forgotten by an American soldier. But wet to the skin day after day all day long the Salvationists worked against time, trying to finish the hut before the snow should arrive. And at last the hut was finished and ready for occupancy. Such tireless devotion, such patient, cheerful toil for their sake was not to be passed by nor forgotten by the soldiers who watched and helped when they could. Day after day the bonds between them and the Salvation Army grew stronger. Here were men who did not have to, and yet who for the sake of helping them, came and lived under the same conditions that they did, working even longer hours than they, eating the same food, enduring the same privations, and whose only pay was their expenses. At the first the Salvationists took their places in the chow line with the rest, then little by little men near the head of the line would give up their places to them, quietly stepping to the rear of the line themselves. Finally, no matter how long the line was the men with one consent insisted that their unselfish friends should take the very head of the line whenever they came and always be served first.

One day one of the Salvation Army men swathed in a big raincoat was sitting in a Ford by the roadside in front of a Salvation Army hut, waiting for his Colonel, when two soldiers stopped behind him to light their cigarettes. It was just after sundown, and the man in the car must have seemed like any soldier to the two as they chatted.

“Bunch of grafters, these Y.M.C.A. and Salvation Army outfits!” grumbled one as he struck a match. “What good are the ‘Sallies’ in a soldier camp?”

“Well, Buddy,” said the other somewhat excitedly, “there’s a whole lot of us think the Salvation Army is about it in this man’s outfit. For a rookie you sure are picking one good way to make yourself unpopular tout de suite! Better lay off that kind of talk until you kind of find out what’s what. I didn’t have much use for them myself back in the States, but here in France they’re real folks, believe me!”

So the feeling had grown everywhere as the huts multiplied. And the huts proved altogether too small for the religious meetings, so that as long as the weather permitted the services had to be held in the open air. It was no unusual thing to see a thousand men gathered in the twilight around two or three Salvation Army lassies, singing in sweet wonderful volume the old, old hymns. The soldiers were no longer amused spectators, bent on mischief; they were enthusiastic allies of the organization that was theirs. The meeting was theirs.

“We never forced a meeting on them,” said one of the girls. “We just let it grow. Sometimes it would begin with popular songs, but before long the boys would ask for hymns, the old favorites, first one, then another, always remembering to call for ‘Tell Mother I’ll Be There.’”

Almost without exception the boys entered heartily into everything that went on in the organization. The songs were perhaps at first only a reminder of home, but soon they came to have a personal significance to many. The Salvation Army did not hare movies and theatrical singers as did the other organizations, but they did not seem to need them. The men liked the Gospel meetings and came to them better than to anything else. Often they would come to the hut and start the singing themselves, which would presently grow into a meeting of evident intention. The Staff-Captain did not long have opportunity to enjoy the new hut which he had labored so hard to finish at Montiers, for soon orders arrived for him to move on to Houdelainecourt to help put up the hut there, and leave Montiers in charge of a Salvation Army Major. The Salvation Army was with the Eighteenth Infantry at Houdelainecourt.

It was an old tent that sheltered the canteen, and it had the reputation of having gone up and down five times. When first they put it up it blew down. It was located where two roads met and the winds swept down in every direction. Then they put it up and took it down to camouflage it. They got it up again and had to take it down to camouflage it some more. The regular division helped with this, and it was some camouflage when it was done, for the boys had put their initials all over it, and then, had painted Christmas trees everywhere, and on the trees they had put the presents they knew they never would get, and so in all the richness of its record of homesickness the old tent went up again. They kept warm here by means of a candle under an upturned tin pail. The tent blew down again in a big storm soon after that and had to be put up once more, and then there came a big rain and flooded everything in the neighborhood. It blew down and drowned out the Y.M.C.A. and everything else, and only the old tent stood for awhile. But at last the storm was too much for it, too, and it succumbed again.

After that the Salvation Army put up a hut for their work. A number of soldiers assisted. They put up a stove, brought their piano and phonograph, and made the place look cheerful. Then they got the regimental band and had an opening, the first big thing that was recognized by the military authorities. The Salvation Army Staff-Captain in charge of that zone took a long board and set candles on it and put it above the platform like a big chandelier. The Brigade Commander was there, and a Captain came to represent the Colonel. A chaplain spoke. The lassies who took part in the entertainment were the first girls the soldiers had seen for many months.

Long before the hour announced for the service the soldier boys had crowded the hutment to its greatest capacity. Game and reading tables had been moved to the rear and extra benches brought in. The men stood three deep upon the tables and filled every seat and every inch of standing room. When there was no more room on the floor, they climbed to the roof and lined the rafters. There was no air and the Adjutant came to say there was too much light, but none of these things damped the enthusiasm.

With the aid of the regimental chaplain, the Staff-Captain had arranged a suitable program for the occasion, the regimental band furnishing the music.

When the General entered the hutment all of the men stood and uncovered and the band stopped abruptly in the middle of a strain. “That’s the worst thing I ever did—stopping the music,” he exclaimed ruefully. He refused to occupy the chair which had been prepared for him, saying: “No, I want to stand so that I can look at these men.”

The records of the work in that hut would be precious reading for the fathers and mothers of those boys, for the Fighting Eighteenth Infantry are mostly gone, having laid their young lives on the altar with so many others. Here is a bit from one lassie’s letter, giving a picture of one of her days in the hut:

“Well, I must tell you how the days are spent. We open the hut at 7; it is cleaned by some of the boys; then at 8 we commence to serve cocoa and coffee and make pies and doughnuts, cup cakes and fry eggs and make all kinds of eats until it is all you see. Well, can you think of two women cooking in one day 2500 doughnuts, 8 dozen cup cakes, 50 pies, 800 pancakes and 225 gallons of cocoa, and one other girl serving it? That is a day’s work in my last hut. Then meeting at night, and it lasts two hours.”

A lieutenant came into the canteen to buy something and said to one of the girls: “Will you please tell me something? Don’t you ever rest?” That is how both the men and officers appreciated the work of these tireless girls.