Father Duffy's story

by Francis Patrick Duffy

CAMP MILLS

Sunday

I mess with the Headquarters Company, and James Collintine, who has the job of looking after us, always welcomes Sunday morning because it gives a chance for a friendly chat between the two of us. James had been a deep-water sailor for a good many years since he first left his home in the Old Country, but has taken up with the Infantry because it gives more prospects for fighting service in this war. This morning he said, “Father Duffy, did ye iver hear of Father Hearrn of my parish in the County Longford?” “No, Jim, I never did.” “Well, he was the grandest man in all Ireland. There was eight hundhred min in Maynooth College where they study to be priests and he could lick ivery dam wan of thim. He was a fine big man, six foot two in his stockin’ feet. He used to come down the sthreet with a big stick in his hand, and if anybody gave anny throuble he’d knock you down just as quick as look at you. The whole parish loved him. Wanst there was a fight in the village green between the peelers and the people, and Father Hearrn was sent for to keep the peace and he came down the road bowling over the peelers as if they was nine pins. There niver was a nicer man within the four seas of Ireland.”

A soldier of Company K came to my tent one afternoon last week and stood at the entrance fumbling his hat in his hand like an Irish tenant of the old days that had not the rent to pay the landlord. “What’s the matter, Tom?” “I took a dhrop too much, and Captain Hurley got very mad about it and brought me up before Major Moynahan. I wouldn’t mind if they’d fine me and be through with it, for I know I deserve it. But the Major and the Captain say that they’re not going to stand anything like this, and that they won’t lave me go to the war. And sure, Father Duffy, if I couldn’t go to the war it’d kill me.” The smile that came to my lips at this very Irish way of putting it was suppressed when I thought of the number of men born in the country who were worried sick lest the Draft should catch them and send them to the war. I assured Tom that I would use my powers of persuasion with the Captain and the Major to give him his heart’s desire, if he would take the pledge. But we shall keep him worried by a suspended sentence until we get him safely away from the temptations of New York.

I have found an old friend in Camp in the person of Mike Donaldson of Company I. Mike was an altar boy of mine in Haverstraw not long after I was ordained. We both left there, I to teach metaphysics and Mike for a career in the prize-ring, in which he became much more widely and favorably known to his fellow citizens than I can ever hope to be. One of his titles to fame is that he was sparring partner to Stanley Ketchell. He has brought me a set of battered boxing gloves which he presented to me with a very moving speech as relics of that departed hero. I do not know exactly what he expects me to do with the relics but I rather feel after his speech of presentation that it would be considered appropriate if I suspend them reverently from the rafter of my chapel like the ex voto offerings of ships that one sees in seaport shrines.

I have become a marrying Parson. Love and fighting seem to go together—they are the two staples of romance. I have had a large number of marriages to perform. In most cases the parties enter my church tent from the rear and are quietly married before the simple altar. We have had a few weddings however on the grand scale. Michael Mulhern of the Band had arranged for a quiet wedding with a very sweet little girl named Peggy O’Brien. This afternoon at four o’clock when I was ready to slip over with the young couple and their witnesses to my canvas church I saw the band forming. “What is this formation for, Michael. You don’t have to be in it, do you?” “Ah, Father,” said Michael, with a blush, “the boys heard somehow what was going to happen and they’re going to serenade us.” We had to parade over to church behind the band playing a wedding march, with 10,000 soldiers and visitors following curiously in the rear. So Michael and his bride were united in matrimony before a vast throng that cheered them, and showered them with rice that soldiers brought over from the kitchens, many of the lads battling with the groom for the privilege of kissing the bride.

October 15th, 1917

We will soon be off to the war and I have been looking over the Regiment, studying its possibilities.

About the enlisted men I have not a single doubt. If this collection of hand-picked volunteers cannot give a good account of themselves in battle, America should keep out of war. The men will fight no matter who leads them. But fighting and winning are not always the same thing, and the winning depends much on the officers—their military knowledge, ability as instructors and powers of leadership. The Non-coms are a fine lot. The First Sergeants as I run over the list are a remarkable body of good old-time soldiers. Starting with Company A, we have John O’Leary, John O’Neill, William Hatton, Tom Sullivan, William Bailey, Joseph Blake, John Burke, Jerome O’Neill, Patrick McMeniman, Tim Sullivan, Eugene Gannon, John Kenny; with Denis O’Shea, A. McBride, J. Comiskey, and W. W. Lokker, for H. Q. M. G. Supply and Medical. All of these men have been tried out in the eight months of Border service and we are sure of them. Under Colonel Haskell the hard driven Company Commanders had to break their Sergeants in, or break them—life was too strenuous for favoritism. In fact, except for recruits, it is surprisingly Haskell’s regiment that is going to the front; Haskell’s, that is, with the reservation that his work was done on the basis of Colonel Conley’s selection and promotion in the more difficult period of peace service. When we were selected for immediate over-seas service the authorities were free to make what changes they would, and they left the regiment intact except for the transfer of one Major and one Captain. The M. G. Company was vacant by resignation. All other officers remained at their posts, though we have been assigned a large number of newly created Lieutenants to correspond with the new tables of organization for a regiment of three thousand six hundred.

Francis P. Duffy
Chaplain 165^th Inf.
69^th N.Y.

We like our new Colonel, though he was a total stranger to us before the day he came to command us. He is a West Pointer, and went into railroading after some years in the army as a Lieutenant; but he has loyally reverted to the army whenever there was a real call to arms. In 1898 if I had achieved my desire to go out as Chaplain of the 1st D. C. I would have had him as one of my Majors. He came into this conflict as organizer and commander of trains, a work for which his experience fitted him. He is a man of middle height with a strong body and an attractive face, healthily ruddy, strongly featured, with a halo of thick grey hair above. He is a man of ideas, of ideas formed by contact with life and business. He is a tireless worker, and demands the same unflinching service from every man under him. He has confidence in his men, especially the tried soldiers, and he has a strong liking for the Regiment and its traditions. The Regiment will do good work under the leadership of Colonel Charles Hine.

Lieutenant Colonel Reed I like better and better every day I am with him. I did not take to him at first and I think he was largely to blame. He kept himself too much aloof. The fault, however, was partly ours. He came to us at a time when we felt suspicious that it was the intention to destroy our character as an Irish organization, and we owed too much to the men who had created the Regiment and made its reputation with their blood to submit tamely to such a scheme as that. Colonel Reed was not used to being where he was not wanted, and his attitude was the result of this decent feeling. When the task of forming a war strength regiment fell to him he took hold and worked with single-minded vigor, and he then found that everybody was anxious to work with him loyally. He discovered, what I could have told him, that one thing the Sixty-ninth admires is a good soldier. And Reed is a good soldier, keen, active, and aggressive. He learned at once to love the regiment and is as enthusiastic as myself in his regard for it. We spend a great deal of our free time together, for we have much in common.

The senior Major, Timothy J. Moynahan, is the ideal of the Irish soldier, as he comes down to us in history and in fiction. He inherits from Patrick Sarsfield’s cavaliers, from the regiments of Dillon and Burke at Fontenoy, from the Connaught Rangers at Fuentes d’Onoro. A soldier born—trim, erect, handsome, active in his movements, commanding and crisp in his orders. And a soldier bred—he lives for the military game, devotes his life to his work as military instructor in colleges, and to the old 69th. He is ready with a toast or a speech or a neatly phrased compliment, and equally ready to take up the gage of battle, if anyone should throw it down. A vivid interesting character in our drab modern life. He has one fault—a flaring Irish temper when military discipline is violated or high ideals belittled. A fault, yes, but I feel there will be tense moments of life for anybody with Tim Moynahan when the time comes for a death grapple with the Germans. Phil Sheridan would have delighted in him.

Major Stacom is my parishioner and I am his recruit. He acquired his interest in soldiering as a boy at St. Francis Xavier College under the stalwart old soldier, afterwards the hero of Santiago—Captain Drum. He came to the Regiment as a boy out of college, an enlisted man, and the Irish lads, after guying the handsome youngster in his college clothes, learned to love and admire him for his knowledge and ability. When he became Captain of Company B he recruited it by his personal efforts, and on the Border he had one of the best companies in the Regiment. Colonel Haskell picked him from the Company Commanders as the first man to nominate for a Majority. He rules by reason and kindliness, and evokes the best co-operation of all under him—officers or men.

Major William J. Donovan, who commands the first Battalion was transferred to us from the Brigade Staff, but he is no stranger to us. On the Border when he was Captain of Troop I of the 1st Cavalry he was the best known man of his rank in the New York Division. It was almost certain that Donovan would be appointed our Colonel after the efforts to get Colonel Haskell had failed, as he was our next choice, and General O’Ryan knew that there were no politics about it, but a sincere desire to find the best military leader. General O’Ryan esteems Donovan as highly as we do. When we were selected to put the green in the Rainbow all the vacancies were to be filled by transfer, not by promotion. Donovan was a Major on the Staff of our Brigade. Everybody knew that he could get higher rank by staying with the 27th Division but he preferred to join in with us. He would rather fight with the 69th than with any other Regiment, especially now that it is to be the first in the fray, and he would rather be Major than Colonel, for in battles as now conducted it is Majors who command in the actual fighting.

Donovan is a man in the middle thirties, very attractive in face and manner, an athlete who always keeps himself in perfect condition. As a football player at Niagara and Columbia, he gained the sobriquet of “Wild Bill.” But that is tribute gained by his prowess rather than his demeanor. He is cool, untiring, strenuous, a man that always uses his head. He is preparing his men for the fatigues of open warfare by all kinds of wearying stunts. They too call him “Wild Bill” with malicious unction, after he has led them over a cross country run for four miles. But they admire him all the same, for he is the freshest man in the crowd when the run is over. He is a lawyer by profession, and a successful one, I am told. I like him for his agreeable disposition, his fine character, his alert and eager intelligence. But I certainly would not want to be in his Battalion.

Major George Lawrence of the Sanitary Detachment is one of the best acquisitions of our Border experience. When Major Maguire had to leave us, we all reached out for Lawrence, who was attached to the 12th, but was doing duty at the hospital there. He is well educated, a product of St. Francis Xavier and Pennsylvania, a competent physician and surgeon, a famous athlete in football and basketball in his day, and an athlete still; and one of the most devoted and most reliable men that God has made for the healing of wounds of mind or body. When I think of what we shall have to go through it makes me feel good to see George Lawrence around.

Captain Walter E. Powers of Headquarters Company is an old soldier though still a young man. He entered the Regular Army out of high school, out of short trousers, I tell him. He was Regimental Sergeant Major of the 7th Cavalry when Haskell was Adjutant of that famous Regiment. And when Haskell became Colonel he pulled Powers out of the Pershing Expedition and made him Adjutant of the 69th; and he was the best Adjutant on the Border. Latterly he has begun to pine for a Company and Colonel Hine gave him the Headquarters Company, the duties of which are so varied and so new that it will take a soldier-lawyer like Powers to organize it. He has the keenest dryest humor of any man I know. If he had not run away to be a soldier he would have made a successful lawyer or journalist.

Captain George McAdie of Company A is a Scotchman. We tell him that is the worst thing we know about him, which is our way of saying that we do not know anything bad about him. Personally I am very fond of our Scottish cousins, because I have known many real Scotchmen and not merely jokes about them. The jokes never give you a suspicion that Scotland idolizes Robert Burns, and produces fighting men as fine as there are in the world. George is my kind of Scot—like a volcano, rugged to outward view, but glowing with fire beneath. A good soldier and a true friend—you like him when you know him a while, and you find something new to like in him the longer you know him. If his health be as strong as his spirit he will do great things in the 69th.

Captain Thomas Reilley of Company B is an imposing being. He stands six feet three or so and fills the eye with seeing any way you look at him. He is also a college athlete, a football player of renown, of Columbia and New York Universities. A lawyer of real power and ability, he has not given himself time yet to reach his full stride in his profession. Since his college days he has been too much in demand for other services for which his endowments and instincts fit him—athlete, soldier, with a short course in political life, characteristically as an independent. He writes well and talks well—too well, sometimes, for the Irish in him makes him indifferent to the effects of what he has to say. It makes him indifferent to all other sorts of danger too; so with his great physical and mental powers and his capacity for organization he will render invaluable service to the work of the Regiment.

Captain William Kennedy of Company C is also an athlete, with the build of a runner, clean-cut, trim, alert. Brisk is the word that describes him, for the trait is mental as well as physical. He is a Company drill master in the best sense of the word. I have never seen anybody who could get more snap out of a body of men with less nagging, whether it was a parade or a policing detail than Bill Kennedy. I expect to see Company C the smartest Company in the Regiment.

Captain James A. McKenna of Company D is a lawyer—Harvard and Fordham produced him. He is a fellow of great ability, ambitious, energetic and enduring. He will go far in any line he may choose, and as a soldier he will score a high mark. He has fine ideals and fine sentiments which he chooses to conceal under a playfully aggressive or business-like demeanor. But his enthusiasms, patriotic, religious, personal, are the true fundaments of him, and everybody feels it. He lets himself out most in his affection for his men who reciprocate his devotion. Company D under Jim McKenna will play a big part in our annals of war.

Alexander E. Anderson of Company E is a 69th man by heredity. His uncle, Colonel Duffy, commanded the Regiment in 1898. His cousin, Major John Duffy, was in the Regiment when Anderson was old enough to join it—and he joined it as a private just as soon as they would let him. He is a soldier through and through. His family and his business are near to him, but the 69th is first in his thoughts. He has gone through all the stages from private to captain without any family favoritism and today he stands out as the keenest Captain in the Regiment. He went to an Officer’s Training School two years ago and graduated with a hundred percent. Sometimes they call him the 100 percent soldier, a title which grates on him exceedingly, for he hates such labels of praise, whether meant or not. Colonel Hine has asked me for the names of three Captains who might be recommended for Majors in emergency. I told him I would name only one, and after that one, half a dozen or more. “Oh,” he said, “you mean Anderson. That is what the Battalion Commanders all say.”

Captain Michael Kelly is an old soldier, though not an old man. He can wear military medals on dress-suit occasions which puzzle even the experts. A County Clare man by birth, he was drawn by fighting instincts as a youth into the British Army, since there was no Irish Army organized, and fought through the Boer War and Burmese campaigns. In New York he is second in command of the aqueduct police and a Captain of the 69th, succeeding Captain P. J. Maguire, who gave up his beloved Company F with satisfaction only because it fell to his trusted Lieutenant. Captain Kelly is a soldier first, last and all the time. His spear knoweth no brother. He visits infractions of military discipline with sternness and vigor. His Company stands in awe of him, and boasts of him to others. They are well looked after. If I have anything to distribute I have to keep an eye on him and Anderson, the two tyrants amongst Company Commanders. Give them their way and everything would go to Companies E and F, with a humorous growl between the two as to who gets the most of the spoils.

The Irish-American A. C. gave us Captain James Archer, as it and kindred organizations have given us many of our best soldiers. There are few young fellows around New York who have not heard of Jimmy Archer, and many a one has watched with delight his fleet limbs carrying his graceful figure and shining head around the track to victory. He has the cleanness and fineness of the amateur track athlete—very distinctly a man and a gentleman. He has won his way through every step upward in the Regiment and has fairly won his race to the Captain’s bars.

Captain James G. Finn of Company H is a Spanish War veteran, though he looks so young that he has to carry around his service record and the family Bible to prove it. Not that anybody would call Jim a liar. Not after taking one look at him. He is a broad-shouldered, big-chested fellow, one that the eye will pick out of a crowd, even in a congested crowd, for he stands above the heads of ordinary mortals. A football player, of course—Dartmouth College. A big honest manly man and a devoted soldier. Jim Finn thinks that Company H is the best bunch of fighting men that ever shouldered a rifle, and Company H knows that their big Captain is the finest man in the American Army. There are two hundred and fifty of them, and the Captain has thews like the son of Anak, so I don’t intend to start anything by contradicting either of them. Anyway, I more than half agree with them.

Captain Richard J. Ryan of Company I is a new comer and, like a boy in a new town, he has his way to make. If I be not “mistook in my jedgments” he will make it. He hails from Watertown, New York, and from the 1st New York Infantry, but that does not complete his military history. He fought in the Boer War, I suspect from the same reason that prompted Kelly—because that was the only war there was, and a man must do the best with the opportunities he has. He is all wrapped up in his Company. He does not seem to care a hang what anybody higher up is thinking about him. He has his job and he wants to see it done right. That is a good sign. A soldier by natural instinct and preference, a Captain devoted to his men—that goes with the 69th. I am for him.

Captain John Patrick Hurley of Company K, is an argument for the continued existence of the Irish as a people. He has everything that everybody loves in the Irish, as found even the reluctant tributes of their hereditary foes. He has a lean, clean handsome face and figure, and a spirit that responds to ideals patriotic, religious, racial, human, as eagerly and naturally as a bird soaring into its native air. He is perfectly willing to die for what he believes in. He would find that much easier than to live in a world of the cheap and commonplace. He always reminds me of the Easter-week patriots of Dublin, Patrick Pearse and Plunkett and MacDonagh. Like myself, and I may say all of us, he is in this war as a volunteer because he feels that it is a war against the tyranny of the strong, and a fight for the oppressed peoples of the earth. He is an able, practical man withal; an engineer, graduate of Cornell. He rules his company as their military commander, and the tribute of affection and loyalty they pay him is not lessened by the knowledge they have that breaches of discipline will meet with no mercy.

Captain Merle-Smith of Company L came to us on the Border from Squadron A, and the intervening year of intimacy has not changed the judgment I uttered the first time I saw him: “If I had to pick out one man to spend a year with me on a voyage to Central Africa, there is the man I would select.” A big fellow—he and Reilly and Finn are our prize specimens—and big, like them, all the way through; and with the astonishing simplicity—in the old theological sense of the word as contrasted with duplicity—that one so often finds in big men. A college athlete (Princeton) and a lawyer, the contests of the campus and the bar have only whetted his appetite for more intense battles. From the time he joined us he has felt that the best opening for real soldier work is in this regiment. He is a 69th man by conviction, and he is as fond of his valiant Kerrymen in Company L as they are of him. I found no one in the recruiting period more zealous in increasing the numbers of the regiment and maintaining at the same time its characteristic flavor than Captain Van Santvoordt Merle-Smith.

Captain William Doyle commanded Company M when we were called out, but since Captain Powers took the Headquarters Company he has been made Adjutant. It was a good choice. Captain Doyle is a college man (St. Francis Xavier) and an engineer by profession, and has been a National Guardsman for more years than one would guess. His training fits him for his new job. His mind is quick on the trigger, though the speed and accuracy with which it shoots a retort is rendered deceptive by his slightly humorous drawl in delivery. He is not one of the big fellows, but the big fellows think twice before taking him on.

Martin Meaney, Captain of Company M, was a Sergeant of Company G when we were in Texas. I wanted Colonel Haskell to make him a Second Lieutenant, but Martin hadn’t left the County Clare soon enough to satisfy the technicality of having his final citizen papers. He could fight for the United States, but he could not be an officer. He came of age as a citizen during the summer and went to Plattsburg, and the people in charge there made him not a Second Lieutenant but a Captain. Colonel Haskell, who is Adjutant at Camp Upton, found the chance to send him back to us as a Captain, and we were very glad to get him. For we know Martin Meaney; and everyone who knows Martin Meaney likes him and trusts him. He is a fine, manly upstanding young Irishman devoted to high ideals, practical and efficient withal. Granted the justice of my cause there is no man in the world I would so much rely on to stick to me to the end as Martin Meaney. It makes us all feel better to have him along with us in our adventure of war.

The vacancy in the Machine Gun Company was filled by the appointment of Captain Kenneth Seibert, an old guardsman of the Iowa National Guard. He has the position of Johnny-come-lately with us yet, but he knows the game and he will be a veteran of ours by the time we get to our first battle. His whole organization is practically new, but he is very keen about it, and is an excellent manager, so we feel that he will soon have it in shape.

Captain John Mangan of the Supply Company is the salt of the earth. I like Jack Mangan so much that I always talk that way about him, and incidentally I waste his time and mine by holding him for a chat whenever we meet. He came to us before we went to the Border. His friends were in another regiment, but all that was nice and Irish about him made him want to be with the 69th. He is a Columbia man and a contractor. Colonel Haskell got his eye on him, when, as a Second Lieutenant, he was put in charge of a detail of offenders who had to do some special work. Under Mangan their work was not mere pottering around. They did things. While we were on the big hike Mangan was left behind with a detail of cripples to build mess shacks. They were built, created is a better word, but we were doomed never to use them, as we got orders during the hike to proceed to another station. I said to Haskell: “Don’t forget to compliment Lieutenant Mangan on his work, for he has done wonders, and it looks now to have been all in vain.” Haskell answered with assumed grimness: “Lieutenant Mangan will not be Lieutenant Mangan long.” He was Captain Mangan, R. S. O. (Regimental Supply Officer) as soon as the formalities could be arranged; and in a short time he was the best supply officer on the Border, as his training as a contractor gave him experience in handling men and materials.

Everybody likes Mangan—half-rebellious prisoners and soldering details and grasping civilians and grouchy division quartermasters. For “he has a way wid him.” At bottom it is humor and justness, with appreciation of the other fellow’s difficulties and states of mind. With his fairness and balance, he carries such an atmosphere of geniality and joy of life that everybody begins to feel a new interest in the game and a new willingness to play a decent part in it.

So far as I can see it now, our Captains average higher than our Lieutenants, though time will have to show if I am right. But at present I can point my finger to half a dozen Captains at least who could easily fill the job of Major, without being so certain of finding an equal number of Lieutenants who could make as good Captains as the men they replace. Probably all that this proves is that the Captains have the advantage of experience in their positions, and that their juniors, when equal opportunity is given them, will develop to be just as good. Amongst the Lieutenants the first to my mind is John Prout, a fine young Tipperary man of the stamp of Hurley and Meaney. Others in line are Samuel A. Smith, John Poore and William McKenna, the four Burns brothers (all good, but Jim in my judgment the best), also William Burns, Richard Allen, Clifford, Kelley, Kinney, Joseph McNamara, Crimmins, Carroll, Andrew Lawrence, John Green, Thomas C. Martin, with Rowley, Grose, Baker, Joseph O’Donohue, James Mangan, O’Brien, Philbin, Cavanaugh, Reune Martin, who came to us while in the Armory. Of the newcomers sent to us here at Camp Mills four of the old regular army men stand out: Lieutenants Michael J. Walsh, Henry A. Bootz, Patrick Dowling and Francis McNamara. Our Medical Department consists of Major Lawrence with Doctors Houghton, Lyttle, Martin, Kilcourse, Levine, Patton, Bamford, Austin Lawrence and Landrigan.

October 25th, 1917

We are the best cared for Regiment that ever went to war. Mr. Daniel M. Brady, who was chairman of the Committee for employment, appointed by Justice Victor J. Dowling of the Friendly Sons of St. Patrick, when we came back from the Border, has reorganized and increased that body and our Board of Trustees now consists of Morgan J. O’Brien, chairman, Daniel M. Brady, John J. Whalen, Joseph P. Grace, Victor J. Dowling, John D. Ryan, George McDonald, Nicholas F. Brady, John E. O’Keefe, Louis D. Conley, and Bryan Kennedy. They have raised ample funds from private subscriptions and from the generous benefits offered through the kindly generosity of the New York Baseball Club and of Mr. John McCormack. They have given $10,000.00 in cash to the Company and Regimental Funds, and $1,600 for the Chaplain’s Fund “for religion and divilment.” All sorts of sporting goods, including two complete sets of uniforms of Giants and Cubs, equip us fully for the sort of strenuous life which we most enjoy.

The Women’s Auxiliary is also formed, Mrs. Hennings being the President, for looking after the families of soldiers while they are away, and sending gifts abroad.

Some of our wealthy friends in the Board of Trustees have also held dinners to which have been invited the principal officers of Regiment, Brigade, and Division. It has helped us to get acquainted with our chief superiors. I was particularly glad to have the opportunity of getting a more intimate knowledge of General Mann and his Chief of Staff, Colonel Douglas McArthur—a brilliant youthful-looking soldier for whom I had already formed a high esteem and admiration from casual meeting. He has been very helpful in furthering my plans to have a large body of priests from Brooklyn and New York give the men of the whole Division an opportunity of receiving the sacraments before going abroad.