This work was exceedingly trying on the girls. Permits were never secured for any of the Salvation Army workers in this Sector. They were applied for regularly through the French Army. About three months after application was made, they were all received back with the statement from the French that, seeing the workers were already there, it was not now necessary that permits should be issued. It must be reported that the French Army was opposed to the presence of women in any of the camps of the soldiers. This prejudice existed for a long time, but it was finally broken down because of the good work done by Salvation Army women, which came to be fully recognized by the French Army. The work in the Montdidier Sector was particularly hard. Permanent buildings could not be established. The best that could be done was to erect portable tents, which were about twenty feet wide and fifty-seven feet long. Huts were established in partially destroyed buildings or houses or stores that had been vacated by their owners, and on the extreme front canteens were established in dugouts and cellars and the entire district was under bombardment from the German guns as well as from the airplane bombs. The Salvation Army had no place there that was not under bombardment continually. The huts were frequently shelled and there was imminent danger for a long time that the German Army would break through, which, of course, added to the strain. The Zone Major went back and forth bringing more men and more lassies and more supplies from the Base at Paris to the front, and many a new worker almost lost his life in a baptism of fire on his way to his post of duty for the first time. But all these men and women, as a soldier said, were made of some fine high stuff that never faltered at danger or fatigue or hardship. They rode over shell-gashed roads in the blackest midnight in a little dilapidated Ford; made wild dashes when they came to a road upon which the enemy’s fire was concentrated, looking back sometimes to see a geyser of flame leap up from a bend around which they had just whirled. Shells would rain in the fields on either side of them; cars would leap by them in the dark, coming perilously close and swerving away just in time; and still they went bravely on to their posts. Everything would be blackest darkness and they would think they were stealing along finely, when all of a sudden an incendiary bomb would burst and flare up like a house-on-fire lighting up the whole country for miles about, and there you were in plain sight of the enemy! And you couldn’t turn back nor hesitate a second or you would be caught by the ever watchful foe! You had to go straight ahead in all that blare of light!