"Don't ask us where we got it," they would answer with a twinkle in reply to the pleased inquiry. "This is war! We salvaged it!"
Around the room on the tables were plenty of magazines, books and games. Checkers was a favorite game. No card playing, no shooting crap. The canteen contained chocolate, candy, writing materials, postage stamps, towels, shaving materials, talcum powder, soap, shoestrings, handkerchiefs in little sealed packets, buttons, cootie medicine and other like articles. The Salvation Army did not sell nor give away either tobacco or cigarettes. In a few cases where such were sent to them for distribution they were handed over to the doctors for the badly wounded in the hospitals or the very sick men accustomed to their use, who were almost insane with their nerves. They also procured them from the Red Cross for wounded men, sometimes, who were fretting for them, but they never were a part of their supplies and far from the policy of the Salvation Army. Furthermore, the Salvation Army sent no men to France to work for them who smoked or used tobacco in any form, or drank intoxicating liquors. No man can hold a commission in the Salvation Army and use tobacco! It is a remarkable fact that the boys themselves did not want the Salvation Army lassies to deal in cigarettes because they knew it would be going against their principles to do so.
Occasionally a stranger would come into the canteen and ask for a package of cigarettes. Then some soldier would remark witheringly: "Say, where do you come from? Don't you know the Salvation Army don't handle tobacco?"
The men were always deeply grateful to get talcum powder for use after shaving. It seemed somehow to help to keep up the morale of the army, that talcum powder, a little bit of the soothing refinement of the home that seemed so far away.
To this hut whenever they were at liberty came Jew and Gentile, Protestant and Catholic, rich and poor. War is a great leveler and had swept away all differences. They were a great brotherhood of Americans now, ready, if necessary, to die for the right.
To one of the huts came a request from the chaplain of a regiment which was about to move from its temporary billet in the next village. The men had not been so fortunate as to be stationed at a town where there was a Salvation Army hut and it had been over four months since they had tasted anything like cake or pie. Would the Salvation Army lassies be so good as to let them have a few doughnuts before they moved that night? If so the chaplain would call for them at five o'clock.