The War Romance of the Salvation ArmyHill, Grace Livingston
History
The War Romance of the Salvation Army
Hill, Grace Livingston
World War, 1914-1918 -- War work -- Salvation Army
They were having a meeting one night at Baccarat. There was a great
deal of noise going on outside the dugout. The shells were falling
around rather indiscriminately, but it takes more than shell fire to
stop a Salvation Army meeting at the front. There is only one thing
that will stop it, and that is a sudden troop movement. It is the same
way with baseball, for the week before this meeting two regimental
baseball teams played seven innings of air-tight ball while the shells
were falling not three hundred yards away at the roadside edge of their
ball-ground. During the seven innings only eight hits were allowed by
the two pitchers. The score was close and when at the end of the
seventh a shell exploded within fifty yards of the diamond and an
officer shouted: “Game called on account of shell fire!” there was
considerable dissatisfaction expressed because the game was not allowed
to continue. It is with the same spirit that the men attend their
religious meetings. They come because they want-to and they won’t let
anything interfere with it.
But on this particular night the meeting was in full force, and so were
the shells. It had been a meeting in which the men had taken part, led
by one of the women whose leadership was unquestioned among them, a
personal testimony meeting in which several soldiers and an officer had
spoken of what Christ had done for them. Then there was a solo by one
of the lassies, and the Adjutant opened his Bible and began to read. He
took as his text Isaiah 55:1. “Ho, every one that thirsteth, come ye to
the waters, and he that hath no money; come ye, buy, and eat.”
Those boys knew what it was to be thirsty, terrible thirst! They had
come back from the lines sometimes their tongues parched and their
whole bodies feverish with thirst and there was nothing to be had to
drink until the Salvation Army people had appeared with good cold
lemonade; and when they had no money they had given it to them just the
same. Oh, they knew what that verse meant and their attention was held
at once as the speaker went on to show plainly how Jesus Christ would
give the water of life just as freely to those who were thirsty for it.
And they were thirsty! They did not wish to conceal how thirsty they
were for the living water.
Just in the midst of the talk the lights went out. Many a church under
like conditions would have had a panic in no time, but this crowded
audience sat perfectly quiet, listening as the speaker went on, quoting
his Bible from memory where he could not read.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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