The War Romance of the Salvation Army | Page 4

that have lost
their grip on things, and that if unaided go down under the high, rough
tides. Trained to meet emergencies of every character--to leap into the
breach, to span the gulf, and to do it without waiting to be told how.
Trained to press at every cost for the desired and decided-upon end.
Trained to obey orders willingly, and gladly, and wholly--not in part.
Trained to give no quarter to the enemy, no matter what the character,
nor in what form he may present himself, and to never consider what
personal advantage may be derived.
Trained in the art of the winsome, attractive coquetries of the round,
brown doughnut and all its kindred.
Trained, if needs be, to seal their services with their life's blood.
One of our women officers, on being told by the colonel of the
regiment she would be killed if she persisted in serving her doughnuts
and cocoa to the men while under heavy fire, and that she must get
back to safety, replied: "Colonel, we can die with the men, but we
cannot leave them."
When, therefore, I gathered the little companies together for their last
charge before they sailed for France, I would tell them that while I was
unable to arm them with many of the advantages of the more wealthy
denominations; that while I could give them only a very few assistants
owing to the great demand upon our forces; and that while I could
promise them nothing beyond their bare expenses, yet I knew that
without fear I could rely upon them for an unsurpassed devotion to the
God-inspired standards of the emblem of this, the world's greatest
Republic, the Stars and Stripes, now in the van for the freedom of the
peoples of the earth. That I could rely upon them for unsurpassed
devotion to the brave men who laid their lives upon the altar of their
country's protection, and that I could rely upon them for an unsurpassed
devotion to that other banner, the Banner of Calvary, the significance of
which has not changed in nineteen centuries, and by the standards of
which, alone, all the world's wrongs can be redressed, and by the

standards of which alone men can be liberated from all their bondage.
And they have not failed.
A further reason for the success of the Salvation Army in the war is, it
found us accustomed to hardship.
We are a people who have thrived on adversity. Opposition,
persecution, privation, abuse, hunger, cold and want were with us at the
starting-post, and have journeyed with us all along the course.
We went to the battlefields no strangers to suffering. The biting cold
winds that swept the fields of Flanders were not the first to lash our
faces. The sunless cellars, with their mouldy walls and water-seeped
floors, where our women sought refuge from shell-fire through the
hours of the night, contributed no new or untried experience. In such
cellars as these, in their home cities, under the flicker of a tallow candle,
they have ministered to the sick and comforted the dying.
Wet feet, lack of deep, being often without food, finding things
different from what we had planned, hoped and expected, were
frequent experiences with us. All such things we Salvationists
encounter in our daily toils for others amid the indescribable miseries
and inestimable sorrows, the sins and the tragedies of the underworlds
of our great cities--the underneath of those great cities which upon the
surface thunder with enterprise and glitter with brilliance.
We are not easily affrighted by frowns of fortune. We do not change
our course because of contrary currents, nor put into harbor because of
head- winds. Almost all our progress has been made in the teeth of the
storm. We have always had to "tack," but as it is "the set of the sails,
and not the gales" that decides the ports we reach, the competency of
our seamanship is determined by the fact that we "get there."
Our service in France was not, therefore, an experiment, but an
organized, tested, and proved system. We were enacting no new rôle.
We were all through the Boer War. Our officers were with the besieged
troops in Mafeking and Ladysmith. They were with Lord Kitchener in
his victorious march through Africa. It was this grand soldier who
afterwards wrote to my father, General William Booth, the Founder of
our movement, saying: "Your men have given us an example both of
how to live as good soldiers and how to die as heroes." And so it was
quite natural that our men and women, with that fearlessness which
characterizes our members, should take up positions under fire in

France.
In fact, our officers would have considered themselves unfaithful to
Salvation Army traditions and history,