The Staff-Captain and his helper suddenly lost their fine appetites and felt very tired. Camouflage! How did they do that at a moment's notice? They left their unfinished dinner and hurried out in search of help.
The first soldier the Staff-Captain questioned reassured him.
"Aw, that's dead easy! Go over the hill into the woods and cut some branches, enough to cover your tents; or easier yet, get some green and yellow paint and splash over them. The worse they look the better they are!"
So the weary workers hunted the town over for paint, and found only enough for the big tent, upon which they worked hard all the next morning. Then they had to go to the woods for branches for the rest. Scratched and bleeding and streaked with perspiration and dirt, they finished their work at last, and the white tents had disappeared into the green and the yellow and the brown of the hillside. Their beautiful military whiteness was gone, but they were hidden safe from the enemy and the work might now go forward.
Then the girls arrived and things began to look a bit more cheerful.
"But where is the cook stove?" asked one of the lassies after they had set up their two folding cots in one of the smaller tents and made themselves at home.
Dismay descended upon the face of the weary Staff-Captain.
"Why," he answered apologetically, "we forgot all about that!" and he hurried out to find a stove.
A thorough search of the surrounding country, however, disclosed the fact that there was not a stove nor a field range to be had--no, not even from the commissary. There was nothing for it but to set to work and contrive a fireplace out of field stone and clay, with a bit of sheet iron for a roof, and two or three lengths of old sewer pipe carefully wired together for a stovepipe. It took days of hard work, and it smoked woefully except when the wind was exactly west, but the girls made fudge enough on it for the entire personnel of the Ammunition train to celebrate when it was finished.
When the girls first arrived in Montiers the Salvation Army Staff-Captain was rather at a loss to know what to do with them until the hut was built. They were invited to chow with the soldiers, and to eat in an old French barn used as a kitchen, in front of which the men lined up at the open doorways for mess. It was a very dirty barn indeed, with heavy cobwebs hanging in weird festoons from the ceiling and straw and manure all over the floor; quite too barnlike for a dining-hall for delicately reared women. The Staff-Captain hesitated about bringing them there, but the Mess-Sergeant offered to clean up a corner for them and give them a comfortable table.