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, and untrue to those who had gone before, if they had deserted any post, or shirked any duty, because cloaked with the shadows of death. This explains why their dear forms loomed up in the fog and the rain, in the hours of the night, on the roads, under shell fire, serving coffee and doughnuts. This is how it was they were with them on the long dreary marches, with a smile and a song and a word of cheer. This is how it is the Salvation Army has no “closing hours.” “Taps” sound for us _when the need is relieved_.