The success of the Limelight media convinced Herbert Booth that it had enormous power to communicate and persuade. Commitments were made to erect a new training college for officers in The Salvation Army at 68 Victoria Parade East Melbourne. Booth was determined to fill it with 200 young men and women.

Booth, in collaboration with Joseph Perry produced the most famous of all the Limelight era presentations, Soldiers of the Cross.

Twelve months in the planning and making, the multimedia presentation consisted of fifteen 90-second film clips (3,000 feet), 200 hand-coloured lantern slides, music and spoken narrative by Herbert Booth. It was themed around the startling, stirring and often brutal stories of the early Christian martyrs and their devotion, their daring and their deaths.

Whilst Booth declared that it was not an entertainment, the audience disagreed and applauded and remonstrated loudly with pleasurable agreement.

"A ferocious epic that would have turned even
Cecil B. de Mille white.
Martyrs were crucified, beheaded, hacked to pieces, thrown into pits of burning lime, burned at the stake and fed to wild animals.

All of this designed to encourage Salvationists in 1900 to emulate the example of the martyrs who so nobly laid the foundation of the Christian faith at the cost of their own lives. It was highly appropriate that Booth’s final appeal in Soldiers of the Cross was a coloured slide asking the question, ‘Will you also follow Christ?’"

Peter Luck,
"This Fabulous Century".

There are many legends, claims and counter claims as to the place that Soldiers of the Cross holds in film-making history.

The film sequences were devised, produced and directed by Herbert Booth, with Perry as cinematographer, and Limelight department staff assisting. They used Salvation Army officers and officer cadets as actors. These films are considered to be the first use of narrative drama on motion picture film and certainly the first local films with costumed actors performing on elaborate sets.

The music used was performed by a 20-piece orchestra and a small choir which presented typical Salvation Army choruses and hymns and selections from works such as the Masses of Mozart.

Most of the film used in the two and a half hour presentation was produced by The Salvation Army. The film was shot at locations including the back yard of the Bourke Street headquarters, at the Richmond Baths, and on the tennis court at The Salvation Army girls’ home at Murrumbeena. Smaller sets were erected in the Life Model Studio purposely built for the Limelight Department on the roof at 69 Bourke Street, Melbourne.

The film has become part of film-making history and legend.