Exit Betty : The War Romance of the Salvation Army

This book is contained  2 works of Grace Livingston Hill, who was Known today as The Queen of Christian Romance. She was an American novelist who sold over a million novels in her lifetime. A very popular author, Hill published hundreds of inspirational novels and short stories, often featuring young female characters who face dramatic turning points, and their eventual return to grace.

“Exit Betty ”

Betty, alone in the midst of her bridal finery, shrank back from the gaze of the curious onlookers, seeming very small like a thing of the air caught in a mesh of the earth.  She had longed all day for this brief respite from everyone, but it had passed before she could concentrate her thoughts. She started forward, a flame of rose for an instant in her white cheeks, but gone as quickly. Her eyes reminded one of the stars among the far-away clouds on a night of fitful storm with only glimpses of their beauty in breaks of the overcast sky. Her small hands gripped one another excitedly, and the sweet lips were quivering. A white-gloved hand reached out to open the car door, and other hands caught and cared for the billow of satin and costly lace with which she was surrounded, as if it, and not she, were the important one. They led her up the curtained way, where envious eyes peeped through a furtive rip in the canvas, or craned around an opening to catch a better glimpse of her loveliness, one little dark-eyed foreigner even reached out a grimy, wondering finger to the silver whiteness of her train; but she, all unknowing, trod the carpeted path as in a dream.

“The War Romance of the Salvation Army”

The war is over. The world's greatest tragedy is arrested. The awful pull at men's heart-strings relaxed. The inhuman monster that leapt out of the darkness and laid blood-hands upon every home of a peace-blest earth has been overthrown. Autocracy and diabolical tyranny lie defeated and crushed behind the long rows of white crosses that stand like sign-posts pointing heavenward, all the way from the English Channel to the Adriatic, linking the two by an inseverable chain. While the nations were in the throes of the conflict, I was constrained to speak and write of the Salvation Army's activities in the frightful struggle. Now that all is over and I reflect upon the price the nations have paid I realize much hesitancy in so doing.  When I think of England-where almost every man you meet is but a piece of a man! France—one great graveyard! Its towns and cities a wilderness of waste! The allied countries—Italy, and deathless little Belgium, and Serbia—well-nigh exterminated in the desperate, gory struggle! When I think upon it—the price America has paid! The price her heroic sons have paid! They that come down the gangways of the returning boats on crutches! They that are carried down on stretchers! They that sail into New York Harbor, young and fair, but never again to see the Statue of Liberty! The price that dear mothers and fathers have paid! The price that the tens of thousands of little children have paid! The price they that sleep in the lands they made free have paid! When I think upon all this, it is with no little reluctance that I now write of the small part taken by the Salvation Army in the world's titanic sacrifice for liberty, but which part we shall ever regard as our life's crowning honor.