Invisible army continues to soldier on without any fanfare

AS THEY searched for the dead in the Underground at the weekend, London’s emergency services were accompanied by a hidden army.

Majors. Colonels. Captains. Rank and file. Uniformed, disciplined and discreet. Armed but not with guns.

Not only was this army's emergency vehicle at Russell Square throughout the search, but as the paramedics went a hundred feet down into the hell of the underground yesterday to extricate the distorted bodies of the dead, they were accompanied by its officers individuals not employed by the state, but accepted, nonetheless, as key members of the metropolitan disaster team.

Those individuals are trained to listen to traumatised workers as they take breaks from their grim task. They are Salvation Army officers.

"People who have been in the tunnel have witnessed some very grim, disturbing scenes," Salvation Army Major Anne Read, one of the leaders of the operation, said. "They have been grateful for the chance to talk in confidence about what they've seen."

Going down into the dangerous areas of the underground was just part of the army's response. On the day of the explosions, they served tea, coffee and hot food to emergency service workers within the cordoned-off emergency area.

Their local premises was used as a quiet area where shocked travellers, many of whom had abandoned all their belongings in the Tube, could get clean clothes and food parcels, or sit down, talk through their experiences with trained counsellors and make phone calls to panicked relatives.

At every recent disaster, whether man-made, as in 9/11 and London, or natural, as in the tsunami, the Salvation Army have been welcomed as a normal army would never be.

The signs at New York's Ground Zero listed the groups with permission to work onsite, and at the bottom of every sign was the red-shield logo of the Sally Army. An astonishing role for an organisation of militaristic, Bible-carrying do-gooders which, on the face of it, is out of date by a century.

The brass bands, the military ranks and uniforms, the soldering-for-God ethos of the Salvation Army made sense when William Booth founded his church in the jingoistic Britain of the late 19th century.

Nonetheless, from the very start, his followers met with hostility. Just how robust that hostility was is illustrated by the design of the bonnets traditionally worn by female members of the Salvation Army.

Originally made of papier-maché, they were enamelled and baked to a rigidity allowing them to serve as protective helmets against the brickbats frequently thrown at them in the slums where they preached.

In Ireland, their highly identifiable Protestant evangelism was even less welcome. In Dublin, in the 1920s and 1930s, a favourite activity of mischievous children was to gather stones to throw at the army.

One seven-year-old with the ammunition and a good throwing arm could move a Salvation Army group from one location to another two or three times in a day.

The army, from its inception, was an equal-opportunities organisation where women attained the same senior rank as men. The prominence and confidence of its women intrigued that passionate atheist, George Bernard Shaw, enough to write a play about it: Major Barbara.

When the play was first produced in London, it was interpreted by critics as a savage attack on the Salvation Army. Shaw laughed at the criticisms and the critics, contrasting their po-faced earnestness with the paradoxical zest for life he saw in army members.

"The Salvationist," he said, while "repudiating gaiety, courting effort and sacrifice, yet [is] always in the wildest spirits, laughing, joking, singing, rejoicing, drumming, and tambourining: his life flying by in a flash of excitement, and his death arriving as a climax of triumph."

The happiness of army members wasn't the only thing the playwright found appealing. He liked their pragmatism, too.

The central moral question in his play was: should the Salvation Army take money from a distiller and an arms manufacturer? "On that point," he wrote, "the reply of the Army itself was prompt and conclusive.

"As one of its officers said, they would take money from the devil himself and be only too glad to get it out of his hands and into God's. They gratefully acknowledged that publicans not only give them money but allow them to collect it in the bar, sometimes even when there is a Salvation meeting outside preaching teetotalism."

TODAY, the Salvation Army is a powerful worldwide church. It varies in its presence in different locations. In Ireland, for example, it has several brass bands in Northern Ireland and none in the Republic.

In every American city at Christmas, its members do bucket collections at the door of every major store, bells incessantly ringing, whereas that has never taken on to any great extent here.

Nor do the female officers in Ireland tend to wear the old-style regalia still seen in America. But well-worn Bibles are still to hand, and the rules against alcohol, smoking and gambling still apply.

If that conveys a sense of grim piety, the contradiction is provided by the army's single church in Ireland, alive each week with music, frequently African.

Many African-Irish, introduced to the Salvation Army in their homeland, have, according to those who attend, brought a new richness to the weekly prayer services.

More practically, the army runs four hostels for the homeless, one for children in the 12 to 18 age group. They help at the point of need, making no attempt to convert.

The Salvation Army manages to deliver highly professional social service while at the same time maintaining an ethos rooted in the Victorian era.

Even their logo has an old-time look to it. They've never backed away from a view of Christianity which sees the Church engaged in spiritual warfare, stating unselfconsciously that "the Army has used to advantage certain soldierly features such as uniforms, flags and ranks to identify, inspire and regulate its endeavours".

They're also characterised by that excited delight which so captivated Shaw.

I recently heard a young Salvation Army chaplain holding forth about her work in one of the army's Dublin hostels for the homeless.

She told of sitting, in the dark watches of the night, by the bedside of men who have lost jobs, families and self-respect, through drink, drugs, gambling or misfortune. She was not there to preach. Just to listen.

Yet she couldn't hold still, couldn't stop her hands flying, couldn't keep her face from lighting up with enjoyment.

She could have been recounting how she snaffled a Prada handbag for half-nothing. She had the joyousness Shaw described as "a sacred gift long dethroned by the hellish laughter of derision and obscenity". She couldn't understand that absorbing the sodden sagas of the self-destroyed might be seen as a miserable duty.

"I love people who've never BEEN loved," she said, as if she had the job to die for.

Whether at the bedsides of the homeless or in the depths of the Tube, post-explosions, the Salvation Army marches to an unchanging tune, red military epaulettes on the shoulder, Bible in hand.

Dated as hell.

And as modern as tomorrow.