BACCARAT
Easter Sunday Night
Yesterday we were at Xaffévillers, Magnières and St. Pierremont. For my Easter celebration I picked Magnières, as the whole 2nd Battalion was there and two companies of the 1st in St. Pierremont, only ten minutes away. For confessions I set up shop in the street at the crossways, and I had a busy day of it. There was always a long file waiting, but when nobody has much to tell the task is soon sped.
I stayed with Stacom. It is always a pleasure to be with Stacom and his officers. He has a way of kindly mastery that begets affectionate loyalty. A man likes Stacom even when he is getting a call down from him. At supper with Doc Houghton, Joe O’Donohue, Arthur Martin, McDermott, Fechheimer, Landrigan, Ewing Philbin, Billy Burns Guggenheim, and Joe McNamara. A man might search the list of all his acquaintances and not find a set of men so congenial and happily disposed.
I looked up the Curé, an alert slender youngish man with a keen intelligent face, a soldier just back that day en permission to keep the old feast with his own people. The Germans had held him as a hostage in 1914 and had thrice threatened to shoot him, though he had looked after their wounded. If thoroughness was their motto they would have been wiser to do it, I reflected as I talked with him; for he was a man that would count wherever he went, and he certainly had no use for Germans. “Too big a man for this place. We won’t be able to keep him long,” said Stacom’s landlady, a pleasant thoughtful woman, whose son of seventeen was just back for the holidays from some college where he is beginning his studies for the priesthood.
The village church was a ruin. Both sides had used it to fight from and both sides had helped to wreck it. The roof was gone and most of the side walls. The central tower over the entrance still stood, though the wooden beams above had burned, and the two big bells had dropped clean through onto the floor. The Curé used a meeting-room in the town hall for his services, but that would not do for my congregation. The church faced a long paved square, so I decided to set up my altar in the entrance and have the men hear Mass in the square. The church steps served excellently for Communion. It is one of the things I wish I had a picture of—my first Easter service in France; the old ruined church for a background, the simple altar in the doorway, and in front that sea of devout young faces paying their homage to the Risen Savior. My text lay around me—the desecrated temple, the soldier priest by my side, the uniforms we wore, the hope of triumph over evil that the Feast inspired, the motive that brought us here to put an end to this terrible business of destruction, and make peace prevail in the world. Here more than a thousand soldiers were present, and the great majority crowded forward at Communion time to receive the Bread of Life.
I hiked it into Baccarat with the Battalion. At a point on the road the separated elements of the Regiment met and swung in behind each other. Colonel Barker stopped his horse on a bank above the road and watched his men go by, with feelings of pride in their fine appearance and the knowledge of how cheerfully they had given up their prospects of a rest and were going back into the lines again. With his usual kind courtesy, he wanted to have me ride, but for once I preferred to hike, as I was having a good time.
Arriving in Baccarat I ran into Captain Jack Mangan,—always a joyous encounter. We found a hotel and something to eat; met there Major Wheeler, Ordnance Officer of Division, a Southerner of the finest type. I tried to start a row between him and Mangan. I always like to hear these supply people fight—they battle with each other with such genial vigor. When they began to swap compliments I left them, to look up the Y. M. C. A. to see if there were religious services in town that I could announce to my Protestant fellows.