Part 48

The officer laughed and told her that was the first time in his life he had known anyone to say they were ready to die and would willingly expose themselves to such a contagious disease.

“Aren’t you ready to die?” asked the girl. “Certainly not,” replied the Captain. “Sometimes I think I am hardly fit to live, much less die.”

“Don’t you realize that there is a Power which can enable you to live in such a way as to make you ready to die?”

“Oh, well, I don’t bother about going to church, in fact, I don’t bother about religion at all, although I must say once or twice when I was up the line over there I wished I did know something about religion, that is, the kind that makes a fellow feel good about dying; but I don’t want to go to church and go through all that business.”

“It is possible to accept Christ here and now on this very spot—on this ship—if you’ll only believe,” said the girl wistfully.

The Captain could not help being interested and thoughtful. When she left, after a little more talk he put out his hand and said:

“Thank you. You’ve done me more good than any sermon could have done me, and believe me, I am going to pray and trust God to help me live a different life.”

Sad things are seen on the docks at times when the ships come into port, and the boys are coming home.

A soldier in a basket, with both arms and both legs gone and only one eye, was being carried tenderly along.

“Why do you let him live?” asked one pityingly of the Commanding Officer.

The gruff, kindly voice replied:

“You don’t know what life is. We don’t live through our arms and legs. We live through our hearts.”

Some of our boys have learned out there amid shell fire to live through their hearts.

One of these lying on a litter greeted the lassie from Indiana, just come back to New York from France to meet the boys when they landed:

“Hello, Sister! You here?”

Her eyes filled with tears as she recognized one of her old friends of the trenches, and noticed how helpless he was now, he who had been the strongest of the strong. She murmured sympathetically some words of attempted cheer:

“Oh, that’s all right, Sister,” he said, “I know they got me pretty hard, but I don’t mind that. I’m not going to feel bad about it. I got something better than arms and legs over in one of your little huts in France. I found Jesus, and I’m going to live for Him. I wanted you to know.”

A few days later she was talking with another boy just landed. She asked him how it seemed to be home again, and to her surprise he turned a sorrowful face to her:

“It’s the greatest disappointment of my life,” he said sadly, “the folks here don’t understand. They all want to make me forget, and I don’t want to forget what I learned out there. I saw life in a different way and I knew I had wasted all the years. I want to live differently now, and mother and her friends are just getting up dances and theatre parties for me to help me to forget. They don’t understand.”

Forty miles west of Chicago is Camp Grant and there the Salvation Army has put up a hut just outside of the camp.

During the days when the boys were being sent to France, and were under quarantine, unable to go out, no one was allowed to come in and there was great distress. Mothers and sisters and friends could get no opportunity to see them for farewells.

The Salvation officer in charge suggested to the military authorities that the Salvation Army hut be the clearing place for relatives, and that he would come in his machine and bring the boys to the hut, taking them back again afterwards, that they might have a few hours with their friends before leaving for France.

This offer was readily accepted by the authorities, and so it was made possible for hundreds and hundreds of mothers to get a last talk with their boys before they left, some of them forever.

One day a young man came to the Salvation Army officer and told him that his regiment was to depart that night and that he was in great distress about his wife who on her way to see him had been caught in a railroad wreck, and later taken on her way by a rescue train. “I think she is in Rockford somewhere,” he said anxiously, “but I don’t know where, and I have to leave in three hours!”

The Ensign was ready with his help at once. He took the young soldier in his car to Rockford, seven miles away, and they went from hotel to hotel seeking in vain for any trace of the wife. Then suddenly as they were driving along the street wondering what to try next the young soldier exclaimed: “There she is!” And there she was, walking along the street!

The two had a blessed two hours together before the soldier had to leave. But it was all in the day’s work for the Salvation Army man, for his main object in life is to help someone, and he never minds how much he puts himself out. It is always reward enough for him to have succeeded in bringing comfort to another.

One of the Salvation Army Ensigns who was assigned to work at Camp Grant hut had been an all-round athlete before he joined the Salvation Army, a boxer and wrestler of no mean order.

The fame of the Ensign went abroad and the doctor at the Base Hospital asked him to take charge of athletics in the hospital. He was also appointed regularly as chaplain in the hospital. Every day he drilled the five hundred women nurses in gymnastics, and put the men attendants and as many of the patients as were able through a set of exercises. Thus mingling his religion with his athletics he became a great power among the men in the hospital.