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
The hospital was fearfully crowded, though it was in no measure the
fault of the hospital authorities, for they were doing their best,
working with all their might; but it had not been expected that there
would be so many wounded at this point and they had not adequate
accommodations. Many of the wounded boys were lying on the ground in
the sun, covered with blood and flies, and parched with thirst and
fever. There were not enough ambulances to carry them further back to
the base hospitals.
The girls stretched pieces of canvas over the heads of the poor boys to
keep off the sun; they got water and washed away the blood; and they
sent one of their indefatigable truck drivers after some water to make
lemonade. The little Adjutant twinkled his nice brown eyes and set his
firm merry lips when they told him to get the water, in that place of
no water, but he took his little Ford car and whirled away without a
word, and presently he returned with a barrel of ice-cold water from a
spring he had found two miles away. How the girls rejoiced that it was
ice cold! And then they started making lemonade. They had known that
the Adjutant would find water somewhere. He was the man the doughboys
called “one game little guy,” because he was so fearless in going into
No Man’s Land after the wounded, so indefatigable in accomplishing his
purpose against all odds, so forgetful of self.
They had but one crate of lemons, one crate of oranges and one bag of
sugar when they began making lemonade, but before they needed more it
arrived just on the minute. It was almost like a miracle. For a whole
car load of oranges and lemons had been shipped to Beauvais and arrived
a day too late—after the troops had gone. They were of no use there, so
the Zone Major had them shipped at once to the railhead at Crepy, and
got a special permit to go over with trucks and take them up to Morte
Fontaine.
The Salvation Army never does things by halves. Colonel Barker sent to
Paris to get some mosquito netting to keep the flies off those
soldiers, and failing to find any in the whole city he bought $10,000
worth of white net, such as is used for ladies’ collars and dresses—ten
thousand yards at a dollar a yard—and sent it down to the hospital
where it was used over the wounded men, sometimes over a wounded arm or
leg or head, sometimes over a whole man, sometimes stretched as netting
in the windows. And no ten thousand dollars was ever better spent, for
the flies occasioned indescribable suffering as well as the peril of
infection.
Wonderful relief and comfort all these things brought to those poor
boys lying there in agony and fever. How delicious were the cooling
drinks to their parched lips! The doctors afterward said that it was
the cool drinks those girls gave to the men that saved many a life that
day.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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