Then came the call to march, and with a last prayer the boys filed silently out into the night and fell into line. A few minutes later the steady tramp of their feet could be heard as they went down the street that led to the front.
Later in the night, quite near to morning, there came a terrific shock of artillery fire that heralded a German raid. The fragile army cots rocked like cradles in the hut, dishes rolled and danced on the shelves and tables, and were dashed to fragments on the floor. Shells wailed and screamed overhead; and our guns began, until it seemed that all the sounds of the universe had broken forth. In the midst of it all the gas alarm sounded, the great electric horns screeching wildly above the babel of sound. The women hurried into their gas masks, a bit flustered perhaps, but bearing their excitement quietly and helping each other until all were safely breathing behind their masks.
The next day several times officers came to the hut and begged the women to leave and go to a place of greater safety, but they decided not to go unless they were ordered away. On June 19th one of them wrote in her diary: "Shells are still flying all about us, but our work is here and we must stay. God will protect us." Once when things grew quiet for a little while she went to the edge of the village and watched the shells falling on Boucq, where one of her friends was stationed, and declared: "It looks awfully bad, almost as bad as it sounds."
The next morning as the firing gradually died away, Salvation Army people hurried up to Raulecourt from near-by huts to find out how these brave women were, and rejoiced unspeakably that every one was safe and well.
That night there was another wonderful meeting with the boys who were going to the front, and after it the weary workers slept soundly the whole night through, quietly and undisturbed, the first time for a week.
It was a bright, beautiful Sunday morning, June 23, 1918, when a little party of Salvationists from Raulecourt started down into the trenches. The muddy, dirty, unpleasant trenches! Sometimes with their two feet firmly planted on the duck-board, sometimes in the mud! Such mud! If you got both feet on it at once you were sure you were planted and would soon begin to grow!