Part 44

The shells were coming every twenty minutes and there was no time to lose for now the enemy had their range. At once all hands got busy and began to evacuate the wounded men into the Salvation Army cave. The cave would accommodate seventy men, but they managed to get a hundred men inside, most of them on litters. They were all safe and the girls heard the whistle of the next shell and made haste toward safety themselves. But someone had carelessly dropped a whole outfit of blankets and things across the passageway of the dugout and the first woman to enter fell across it, shutting out the other two. Before anything could be done the next shell struck the doorway, partly burying the fallen young woman. Inside the dugout rocks came down on some of the men on litters, and anxious hands extricated the lassie from the débris that had fallen upon her, and lifted her tenderly. She was pretty badly bruised and lamed, besides being wounded on her leg, but the brave young woman would not claim her wound, nor let it become known to the military authorities lest they would forbid the girls to stay at the front any longer. So for three weeks she patiently limped about and worked with the rest, quietly bearing her pain, and would not go to the hospital. One lassie outside was struck on the helmet by a piece of falling rock. If she had not had on her helmet she would have been killed.

The shelling continued for six hours.

The hospital was all the time filled with wounded men and there was plenty to be done twenty-four hours out of every day. The women moved about among the men as if they were their own brothers.

A poor shell-shocked boy lay on his cot talking wildly in delirium, living over the battle again, charging his men, ordering them to advance.

“Company H. Advance! See that hill over there? It’s full of Germans, but we’ve got to take it!”

Then he turned over and began to sob and cry, “Oh God! Oh God!”

A lassie went to him and soothed him, talking to him gently about home, asking him questions about his mother, until he grew calm and began to answer her, and rested back quite rationally. The stretcher-bearers came to take him to another hospital, and he started up, put out his hand and cried: “Oh, nurse! I’ve got to get back to my men! I’m the only one left!”

Thus the heart-breaking scenes were multiplied.

One boy came back to the hospital in the Argonne badly wounded. He called the lassie to him one day as she passed through the ward, and motioned her to lean down so he could talk to her. He said he knew he was hard hit and he wanted to tell her something.

“I was wounded, lying on the ground over there in No Man’s Land,” he went on. “It was all dark and I was waiting for someone to come along and help me. I thought it was all up with me and while I was lying there I felt something. I can’t explain it, but I knew it was there and I saw my mother and I prayed. Then my Buddy came along and I asked him if he could baptize me. He said he wasn’t very good himself but he guessed the heavenly Father would understand. So he stooped down and got some muddy water out of a shell hole close by and put it on my forehead, and prayed; and now I know it’s all right. I wanted you to know.”

Often the boys, just before they went over the top, would come to these girls and say:

“We’re going up there, now. You pray for us, won’t you?”

One day some boys came to the hut when there were not many about and asked the girls if they might talk with them. These boys were going over the top that night.

“We fellows want to ask you something,” they said. “Some of the chaplains have been telling us that if we go over there and die for liberty that it’ll be all right with us afterward. But we don’t believe that dope and we want to know the truth. Do you mean to tell me that if a man has lived like the devil he’s going to be saved just because he got killed fighting? Why, some of us fellows didn’t even go of our own accord. We were drafted. And do you mean to tell me that counts just the same? We want to know the truth!”

And then the girls had their opportunity to point the way to Jesus and speak of repentance, salvation from sin, and faith in the Saviour of the world.

A lassie was stooping over one young boy lying on a cot, washing his face and trying to make him more comfortable, and she noticed a hole in his breast pocket. Stooping closer she examined it and found it was a piece of high explosive shell that had gone through the cloth of his pocket and was embedded in his Testament, which he, like many of the boys, always kept in his breast pocket.

Another boy lay on a cot biting his lips to bear the agony of pain, and she asked him what was the matter, was the wound in his leg so bad? He nodded without opening his eyes. She went to ask the doctor if the boy couldn’t have some morphine to dull the pain. The Sergeant in charge came over and looked at him, examined the bandage on the boy’s leg and then exclaimed: “Who bandaged this leg?”

“I did” said the boy weakly, “I did the best I could.”

The poor fellow had bandaged his own leg and then walked to the hospital. The bandage had looked all right and no one had examined it until then, but the Sergeant found that it was so tight that it had stopped the circulation. He took off the bandage and made him comfortable, and the agony left him. In a little while the Salvation Army lassie passed that way again and found the boy with a little book open, reading.

“What is it?” she asked, looking at the book.

“My Testament,” he answered with a smile.

“Are you a Christian?”

“Oh, yes,” he said with another smile that meant volumes.

It grew dark in the tent for they dared not have lights on account of the enemy always watching, but stooping near a little later she could see that his lips were murmuring in prayer. There was an angelic smile on his white, dead face in the morning when they came to take him away.

There was a funeral every day in that place. A hundred boys were buried that week. Always the girls sang at the graves, and prayed. There would be just the grave digger, a few people, and some of the boys. Off to one side the Germans were buried. When the simple services over our own dead were complete one of the girls would say: “Now, friends, let us go and say a prayer beside our enemy’s graves. They are some mother’s boys, and some woman is waiting for them to come home!”

And then the prayers would be said once more, and another song sung.

Those were solemn, sorrowful times, death and destruction on every side. The fighting was everywhere. United States anti-aircraft guns firing at German planes; Germans firing at us; air fights in the sky above.

And in the midst of it all the boys had meetings every night on log piles out in the open. These meetings would begin with popular songs, but the boys would soon ask for the hymns and the meetings would work themselves out without any apparent leading up to it. The boys wanted it. They wanted to hear about religious things. They hungered for it. So they were held at the throne of God each night by the wonderful men and girls who had learned to know human hearts, and had attained such skill in leading them to the Christ for whom they lived.