LETTER TO A CURATE
June 10th, 1918
In spite of all you tell me I have lost, I have a stray assortment of arms and legs left, ungainly, I admit, but still serviceable, whether for reaching for the bread at messtime or for pushing me around my broad parish. I hear that I am dead—wounded—gone crazy. I hate to contradict so many good people, but I must say that I know I am alive, and that I never felt better in my life. As for the third count, perhaps I had better leave it to others to testify, but I’m no worse than I always was. I may be considered a bit off for coming over here, but that’s a decent kind of craziness, and one I am glad to see becoming quite popular.
I wish that my case could serve as a warning to good folks at home who are distracted by all sorts of rumors about their lads here. If anything happens to any one of us, the folks will hear of it from Washington within a hundred hours. If it says “Slightly Wounded,” they may take it as good news. For let me tell you, if I was worrying continually about the fate of some dear one over here, and got word he was “Slightly Wounded,” I would sigh a sigh of relief that the beloved was out of harm’s way and having a good time for a while.
I don’t mind rumors in the army. They are part of the game. With eating and growling, they constitute our chief forms of recreation. Fact is, I am made the father of most of them in this regiment. When some lad starts his tongue going, and everybody tells him just what kind of a liar he is, he says that Father Duffy said so, and Father Duffy got it straight from Secretary Baker or General Pershing, or, who knows?—by revelation. It is a great compliment to me, but a left-handed one to my teaching.
At home, though, rumors don’t just interest—they hurt. I know how much they hurt, for my pile of “agony letters” keeps mounting up with every mail. And I can’t answer them all at length, as I would wish—not if I want to do anything else.
First-class mail is the bane of my life as Chaplain. Like everyone else, I don’t mind reading it, but I know what it means when it comes to answering it. Gosh! how I hate that. I like to keep on the go. I have to keep on the go to get anything done, with the regiment scattered in five different villages, miles apart, and outside work to do in the other outfits for men that want the sacraments, and hospitals to visit. And to have to stick a whole day at a table to soothe sorrows that don’t exist, or oughtn’t to—whew!
The letters I am most ready to answer are from those who have gotten real bad news from Washington. God be good to them. I’d do anything for them. And the ones I am glad to get—if I don’t have to answer them myself—are those that put me onto something I can do for the men—see that Jimmy keeps the pledge, or that Tom goes to Church, or find what’s the matter with Eddie who lost his stripes, or break bad news to Michael, or see that Jack doesn’t fall in love with any of those French hussies, but comes back to the girl that adores him. These all help, and I get round to them in time—and make the victim write a letter, to which I put my name as censor—a proof of my efforts.
But the biggest bulk of my mail consists of inquiries why no mail has arrived from Patrick for three weeks—and is he dead—or why Jerry’s allotment had not been made. When I interview Patrick, he informs me disgustedly that he has written home every twenty minutes. And I know that before any letter of mine can get there, the Sullivans will have received a bunch of mail that will make them the gossips and the envy and the pride of the parish till they begin to get worried and write to me again.
As for the allotments, the nearest I come—don’t ask me how near—to falling into the sole vice of our army of using strong language is when I get a letter from some poor mother or wife about their non-payment. Our men have been extraordinarily decent about helping out the folks at home. But it has been new forms to make out, or the demand for a change of the name of Mrs. Michael J. Farrell to Mrs. Mary Farrell—and all the time decent folks going short at home, and the best men we’ve got fretting in the trenches. That’s the way these fountain-pen soldiers are helping to win the war. How have they kept it so secret? Even men like those that make up our Board of Trustees have written me that our men are slack about making allotments. And the poor fellows in most cases have stripped themselves to ten dollars a month, and are scudding along on bare poles half way between paydays—I know all about that, and the Trustees, all good men and true, will hold back their language when I report that I had to use their money for lads that had left themselves destitute for their folks, while their folks were being left destitute by those people in Washington.
You ask me to tell you about my work here. Well, in the main it is what I did at home, though under different circumstances. The old Sixty-Ninth is a parish—an itinerant parish. Probably a sixth of the “parishioners” do not look to me for dogmatic instruction, but you know how much that counts for in my ordinary relations with them. Remember the afternoon last Spring, when Father Prunty went into the play-hall to get helpers from my gang for his patriotic gardening and found afterward that his five volunteers consisted of two Protestants, two Jews and Andy O’Hare.
I have this class of parishioners very much on my conscience. I can’t get the other chaplains to help except on the few occasions when regiments, or parts of them occupy the same place. Every chaplain has five times what he can do to supply Sunday services for his own scattered command.
At any rate, I can assure you that the different elements in the old regiment have fused properly. By the way, I cannot remember anything that delighted me more than when I heard Sergeant Abe Blaustein was to get the Croix de Guerre—he was recommended for it by Major Donovan and Major Stacom (the pride of our parish) and Lieutenant Cavanaugh. He is a good man, Abe, and the 69th appreciates a good man when it sees him. John O’Keefe’s poem made a hit with all of us.
That reminds me of something at my expense. Captain John Prout approached me with a genial grin to tell me that at our Christmas Mass he had seen a Jew boy present, and later on he asked him “What were you doing at Mass?” “Oh, Captain,” he said, “you know I’d go to Hell with you.” Prout said to me, “The compliment to myself is very obvious, Father,—I hope that you will be able to find in it one for yourself too.”
But I started to tell you about my work. I have a congregation of the old faith, approximately three thousand souls. They are generally scattered through five or six French villages, when en repos, and more scattered still through trenches and abandoned towns when in line.
To begin with the form of pastoral activity you are no doubt most interested in, for you will be getting a parish one of these days—I take up no collections. ’Tis a sad confession to make, and I expect to be put out of the Pastor’s Union when I get back for breach of rules. But the lads are not left entirely without proper training. The old French curés (God bless them, they are a fine lot of old gentlemen) take up the collection. A tremendously important-looking old beadle in a Napoleonic cocked hat and with a long staff goes before, with a money-or-your-life air about him, and in the rear comes the apologetic mannered curé, or perhaps a little girl, carrying a little dish that is a stimulus to stinginess, which is timidly pushed forward a few inches in the direction of the man on the outside seat. If the man is an American he grabs the dish and sticks it under the nose of his neighbor, with a gruff whisper, “Cough up.” They cough up all right—if it isn’t too far from payday. Even at that they are good for more of the Cigar Store coupons and the copper washers that pass for money here than are the local worshippers. The curés proclaim us the most generous people in the world—and so we are—which makes it unanimous. They listen with open mouths to my tales of financial returns in city parishes at home and wish secretly that they had started life where things are run like that—until I tell them of the debts we have to carry, and they are content once more that their lot has been cast in the quiet, old-time villages of Lorraine.
But to do them justice, they are most impressed by the way our men practice their religion. Two companies of our regiment jam a village church—aisles, sanctuary, sacristy, porch. A battalion shows its good will by filling the churchyard, the windows being ornamented by rough martial visages which don’t look exactly like those of the placid looking saints in the stained glass above—but I feel that the saints were once flesh-and-blood people themselves, and that they have an indulgent, perhaps even an admiring eye, on the good lads that are worshipping God as best they can.
There is no doubt anyway about the opinion of the good priests who are carrying on the work of the dead and gone saints. They are full of enthusiasm about our fellows. What attracts them most is their absolute indifference to what people are thinking of them as they follow their religious practices. These men of yours, they tell me, are not making a show of religion; they are not offending others; they touch their hats to a church, or make the sign of the Cross, or go to Mass just because they want to, with the same coolness that a man might show in taking coffee without milk or expressing a preference for a job in life. They run bases with scapulars flying, and it don’t occur to them that they have scapulars on, any more than they would be conscious of having a button of their best girl or President Wilson pinned to their shirts—they may have all three.
Come to think of it, it is a tribute not only to our religious spirit, but to the American spirit as a whole. The other fellows don’t think of it either—no more than I do that one of our Chaplains who is closest to me in every thought and plan wears a Masonic ring. We never advert to it except when some French people comment on our traveling together—and then it is a source of fun.
I often drop in on soldiers of other outfits around their kitchens or in the trenches, or during a halt on the road, and hear confessions. Occasionally Catholic soldiers in country regiments, with the small-town spirit of being loth to doing anything unusual while people are looking at them, hold back. Then my plan is to enlist the co-operation of the Protestant fellows, who are always glad to pick them out for me and put them in my clutches. They have a lot of sport about it, dragging them up to me as if they were prisoners; but it is a question of serious religion as soon as their confession begins, the main purpose of the preliminaries being simply to overcome a country boy’s embarrassment. It proves, too, that the average American likes to see a man practice his religion, whatever it may be.
With my own men there is never any difficulty of that kind. I never hear confessions in a church, but always in the public square of a village, with the bustle of army life and traffic going on around us. There is always a line of fifty or sixty soldiers, continuously renewed throughout the afternoon, until I have heard perhaps as many as five hundred confessions in the battalion. The operation always arouses the curiosity of the French people. They see the line of soldiers with man after man stepping forward, doffing his cap with his left hand, and making a rapid sign of the cross with his right, and standing for a brief period within the compass of my right arm, and then stepping forward and standing in the square in meditative posture while he says his penance. “What are those soldiers doing?” I can see them whispering. “They are making the Sign of the Cross. Mon Dieu! they are confessing themselves.” Non-Catholics also frequently fall into line, not of course to make their confession, but to get a private word of religious comfort and to share in the happiness they see in the faces of the others.
Officers who are not Catholics are always anxious to provide opportunities for their men to go to confession; not only through anxiety to help them practice their religion, but also for its distinct military value. Captain Merle-Smith told me that when I was hearing confessions before we took over our first trenches he heard different of his men saying to his first sergeant, Eugene Gannon, “You can put my name down for any kind of a job out there. I’m all cleaned up and I don’t give a damn what happens now.”
That is the only spirit to have going into battle—to be without any worries for body or soul. If battles are to be won, men have to be killed; and they must be ready, even willing, to be killed for the cause and the country they are fighting for. While we were still in Lunéville the regiment attended Mass in a body and I said to them, “Much as I love you all I would rather that you and I myself, that all of us should sleep our last sleep under the soil of France than that the historic colors of this Old Regiment, the banner of our republic, should be soiled by irresolution or disgraced by panic.”
The religion of the Irish has characteristics of its own—they make the Sign of the Cross with the right hand, while holding the left ready to give a jab to anybody who needs it for his own or the general good. I cannot say that it is an ideally perfect type of Christianity; but considering the sort of world we have to live in yet, it as near as we can come at present to perfection for the generality of men. It was into the mouth of an Irish soldier that Kipling put the motto, “Help a woman, and hit a man; and you won’t go far wrong either way.”