Then they testified in the meetings. Often as many as twelve or more before an audience of five hundred would get up and tell what Jesus had become to them. In one meeting in this glass factory two hundred soldiers pledged to serve the Lord, to read their Bibles, and to pray.
There were in this place some Christian boys who came from families where they had been accustomed to family worship, and who now that they were far away from it, looked back with longing to the days when it had been a part of every day. Things look different over there with the sound of battle close at hand, and customs that had been, a part of every-day life at home became very dear, perhaps dearer than they had ever seemed before. They found out that the Salvation Army people had prayers every night after they closed the canteen at half-past nine and went to their rooms in a house not far away, and so they begged that they might share the worship with them. So every night they took home fifteen or twenty men to the living-room of the house where they stayed just as many as they could crowd in, and there they would have a little Bible reading and prayer together. The Father only knows how many souls were strengthened and how many feet kept from falling because of those brief moments of worship with these faithful men and women of God.
"Oh, if you only knew what it means to us!" one of the men tried to tell them one day.
Sometimes men who said they hadn't prayed nor read their Bibles for years would be found in little groups openly reading a testament to each other.
When the girls opened their shutters in the morning they could look out over the spot in No Man's Land which was the scene of such frightful German atrocities in 1914.
Our field artillery, stationed in the woods, sent over to the Salvation Army to know if they wouldn't come over and cook something for them, they were starving for some home cooking. So two of the women put on their steel helmets and their gas masks, for the Boche planes were flying everywhere, and went over across No Man's Land to see if there was a place where they could open up a hut. They were walking along quietly, talking, and had not noticed the German plane that approached. They were so accustomed to seeing them by twos and threes that a single one did not attract their attention. Suddenly almost over their heads the Boche dropped a shell, trying to get them. But it was a dud and did not explode. Two American soldiers came tearing over, crying: "Girls! Are you hurt?"