"PRIESTS IN THE FIRING LINE"—THE CROSS AND CRUCIFIX
A Reverend Father in the French Army
By Réné Gaell—Translated by H. Hamilton Gibbs and Madame Berton
This is the revelation of the soul of a priest, who heard "the call to duty" and went to the battle lines to fight for his country and to relieve the suffering. He tells about his experiences at "A Soldier's Death Bed"; "Mass Under Shell Fire"; "Absolution Before the Battle"; "The Blood of Priests"; "How They Die"; "Confession on a Parapet"; "The Blessed Sacrament"; and "The Last Blessing." The chapters here given on "His Call to Duty" and "The Story of a Wounded Man" is by permission of his publishers, Longmans, Green and Company.
[6] I—STORY OF A PRIEST'S "CALL TO DUTY"
"It's no joke, this time," said my old friend the General.
These words were uttered on the evening of the International Congress at Lourdes.
Hearts and voices were raised in prayer.
I, too, was filled with the thought of a peace which seemed as though it could have no end.
But the General was filled with quite other thoughts. "No," he said, with that fine strength which is capable of facing the saddest emergencies and of stilling the fever which the thought of the dreaded future sends rushing to the brain. "No, it's no joke this time.... War is upon us."
And he began to explain the international complications, the appalling pride of Germany faced by two alternatives, to expand or to perish.
He showed me the uselessness of diplomacy—the treachery of international peace-parties—the rush of events towards the inevitable yet outrageous catastrophe.
In a week or perhaps less, millions of men would receive marching orders, and Europe would be bathed in blood.
Five days later, I left a deserted Lourdes. I read on the cover of my military certificate my destination for the first time ... my destination ... my orders to rejoin my unit ... and that simple piece of paper suddenly spoke to me with formidable eloquence.
I was a soldier, and this time it was "no joke." I was going to fight. The citizen in me shuddered, as every one shuddered in those first terrible hours whose emotion still prolongs itself and is not likely to end soon.
But the priest in me felt bigger, more human. To every one who asked if I were going too, I replied, "Yes, but not to kill—to heal, to succour, to absolve."
I felt those tear-filled eyes gaze wistfully at me, and that in passing, I left behind me a feeling of trust, of comfort.
A mother, whose five sons were going to the front, and who was seated near me in the train, said in a strong voice, but with the tears streaming down her cheeks: "They have scattered priests in all the regiments. You will be everywhere.... It is God's revenge!"
How much anguish has been soothed, how many sacrifices have been accepted more bravely, at the thought, "they will be there."
It was at the headquarters of a certain division of the Medical Service, during the first days of mobilisation.
There, as everywhere, feverish preparation was going on—a tumultuous activity. Through the big town, the first regiment passed on their way to the firing line.
How the fine fellows were acclaimed, how they were embraced!
There were a thousand of us already, and we were the first to be called up. Half of us were priests, and our clerical garb attracted a lot of sympathy. The love of our country and the love of God so long separated were now as one. It is no longer time to scoff or to be indifferent to religion. People now wrung us by the hand, and came close up to us.
An officer came up to us and before that enormous assembly of men, said: "Gentlemen, I should like to embrace each one of you in the name of every mother in France.... If only you knew how they count on you, those women, and how they bless you for what you are going to be to their sons. We don't know the words that bring strength and healing, and we are ignorant of the prayers that solace the last agony ... but you...." And at the words, he wept, without attempting to hide his feelings. He already realised the immensity of the sacrifice, and the powerlessness of man to bring consolation to those struck down in their first manhood.
No, it was no longer "a joke" this time, and every one felt it and showed it by their respectful looks and manner.
The others, those millions of men on their way to the front, were starting for the unknown.
We, on the other hand, knew well what lay before us ... we should have to succour the wounded and throw wide the Gates of Heaven for them to enter in—we should have to dress their wounds and arouse courage in those crushed, by the burden too heavy for mere flesh and blood to bear.
Never had we felt such apostles ... never had our hearts dilated with such brotherly feeling.
II—CARRYING THE CROSS OF CHRIST TO THE BATTLEFIELDS
"Attention!"
Instantly there was dead silence. In imagination we saw nothing but those far-off battlefields.
Our names were called, and we were allotted our several tasks. First the stretcher-bearers. There was a long list of these, and in two hours they were to set out for the front, to pick up the wounded in the firing line.
From time to time the officer broke the monotony of the roll-call by trenchant remarks—such as one makes on those occasions when one has accepted one's share of sacrifice simply because it's one's duty to do so.
"You will be just as exposed as those who are fighting. The enemy will fire on the ambulances; and the Red Cross on your armlets and on the buildings will not protect you from German bullets."
The list was growing longer. In their turn men of thirty and forty received the badges of their devotedness.
"There are many of you who will never come back. Your courage will only be the finer. They may kill you, but you will not be able to kill. Your sole duty is to love suffering in spite of everything, no matter how mutilated the being may be who falls across your path, and who cries for pity."
"Even the Boches?"
The officer smiled, then said almost regretfully: "Even the Boches."
Amongst us there was a hum of dissent.
"I quite understand," said the officer, "but when you remember that your duty is that of heroism without thought of revenge—just pure heroism, that of apostles who are made of the stuff martyrs are made of...."
He who had protested, and who happened to be standing next to me, was a dear old friend of mine, one of those valiant souls who fear nothing and nobody. He was a fine, soldierly priest.
He was among the number of those who were off to the front, and his face had lit up when he heard his name called.
"Thank Heaven! I was so afraid of being left behind."
To be left behind was a kind of disgrace we felt ... and we old territorials who were to be sent to the hospitals in the west, felt it badly.
The Abbé Duroy was already living it all in spirit. His eyes saw the near future and his heart beat with joy at the thought of his great work. He was going down to the terrible "là-bas," to anguish unspeakable and to death, and in his person, I thought I saw all the priests of France going towards the frontiers, invested with the divine mission of opening the gates to eternal life to those who were quitting this poor mortal life.
When we had separated, in order to pack our traps, Duroy took me apart.
"You are jealous," he said.
"Why not?"
"I understand. After all this new life is part of our very being. Do you think though that it was necessary to be mobilised in order to do what we are doing? For twenty years, always, we have been patriots ... soldiers who blessed and upheld."
There was a bugle call. It was the first signal for departure. He held out his hand ... our eyes met and spoke the same great thought, the same great fear.
I was the weaker man, and the question which wrung my heart, escaped to my lips.
"When shall we meet again?"
He, proud and stern at the thought of danger, repeated my words.
"Shall we meet again?"
Then he broke the short silence. "To die like that, and only thirty.... I'm afraid I don't deserve such a grace."
Then becoming the true soldier he always was, he struck me on the shoulder and said—
"I've an idea, old friend. I'll write to you from 'là-bas,' as often as I can ... and from the impressions you get, joined to mine, I'm sure you'll be able to write some touching pages. I am your War Correspondent."
He embraced me, and I felt that his promise was one of those which are kept.
III—A PRIEST'S STORY OF THE MAN NOT AFRAID TO DIE
It was night-time, and I could hear the hours striking, hours which would have been long if I had not beside me moaning and groaning, suffering to be consoled. We had had to wait for them for a fortnight, but there they were now, filling the great dormitories of a school which had been turned into a military hospital, where we had joined our post in the war. They suffer in silence, or when in the throes of a hideous nightmare, they scream and groan with the torture their mutilated bodies wrings from them.
I went up to a bed over which the lamp shed a subdued light. There lay a young fellow of about twenty, awakened by the intensity of his suffering. I had seen him but a short time before on his stretcher, a poor broken thing, his eyes staring, with the horrors of his dreadful journey still pictured in them.
What appalling scenes had I read in them. All the horrors of war had become present to me.
Stretched out motionless on his stretcher, he looked like a corpse, whose eyes had not been properly closed, indifferent to all around him. Then, when we had lifted him, and with such care, he began to scream and cry out. A doctor should have dressed his wounds at the front, but they had not been done for four days. On being lifted up, his shattered leg, cramped and asleep, gave him excruciating pain, and his whole body writhed as though it had been on the rack.
I had noticed this young Marseillais, with his child's face among all the other wounded men, and I had been attracted by his youth and his sufferings.
I went up to his bed. I leant over him, and said with the instinctive gentleness which compassion inspires one with: "You are suffering, my child?"
Without answering, he withdrew his burning hand from mine, and put his arm round my neck.
"Father," he said, in a weak voice, "Father, am I going to die?"
What answer could I make? I didn't know; besides, even when one is sure, one can't say it out brutally like that.
Then the poor boy guessed I had misunderstood him, and his proud, brave soul wished to keep the glory of the soldier, who has braved danger without flinching. Now he defied death and found strength to smile.
"Oh! I'm not a bit afraid, but I wanted to ask you...."
He stopped and began to cry. He drew me still closer to him. He was no coward, this young trooper. One felt it instinctively. I knew that this lad who had lived through the bloody epopee, was not to be approached by maddening fear. His heart was stamped with virility. A month's campaign had made of him an old soldier who had gone through tragic adventures.
"No, I'm not afraid. I've seen so many die all around me that I don't care a scrap whether I live or die. But ... It's my mother, I'm thinking of. If I die, she won't understand, and it will kill her too."
Little by little the sighs and moans had ceased in the darkened ward. Only his solemn words broke the silence. Everything else faded away at the meeting of the two beings, at that supreme moment, more than mere men, the soldier and the priest, to whom France had confided the guarding of her frontiers and the treasure of her ideal.
Then, knowing how nature rebounds, and trusting to the hardy stock from which he sprang, I dared to assure him that he was not mortally wounded.
"No, my child, you won't die, you are too young to die." A sceptical smile stopped me.
"And what about those others 'là-bas?'"
All the same, I don't believe that we shall not be able to save the poor, mangled body. The head doctor, whose diagnosis is never wrong, said only a little while ago that he would save him.
"I tell you, you will recover."
IV—THE STORY FROM HIS DYING LIPS
The poor fellow looked at me, and this time believed me. He raised himself a little, made the sign of the cross, and whispered—
"You must pray for me."
He closed his eyes in prayer, and I could no longer see him, for the tears in my own. To comfort him, I placed my hand on his breast.
He winced. "Forgive me, father, I've had a bullet through there, too."
Not only had he a shattered leg, but a bullet had gone through his breast, and another had gone just above his heart.
His shirt was red with blood which had oozed through the dressings. Somehow it did not occur to me to think of his great suffering. He seemed more like a martyr broken on the wheel, with a halo round his head. This young boy, who knew how to suffer so well, must have fought magnificently.
And I thought as I raised my hand to bless him: "How fine he is!"
Four medals hung round his neck, and he held them out for me to kiss them.
They tasted of blood, and I still have the strange taste on my lips of those medals which had lain over the wound, which bled above his heart.
"That one, the biggest, was given me by a priest down there in the ambulance, which was an old farm once, and whose walls are riddled with shells. What a night it was! and what an amount of blood there was about!"
My young Marseillais writhed, not with the pain from his wounds, but with the fearful remembrance of that night. The horror of that superhuman agony took possession of his mind. I wanted him to sleep, but words poured from his lips, in his fever. It was useless to try to stop him, so I let him tell me his sad tale.
"We had been fighting all day long, and felt death stalking beside us all day too. It was like a frightful tempest, like hell let loose. Bullets fell round us like hail, and I saw my comrades fall at my side cut in half or blown into bits by shell fire. They uttered no cries, they were wiped out instantaneously. But the others ... those who were still alive.... I can tell you it was enough to make your blood run cold. It was enough to make one go raving mad."
He stopped to drink a little. I thought he was exhausted with the effort of recalling the awful scene.
"Try to rest now, my child. You shall tell me the rest to-morrow."
But he would not listen to me. Up to now, it was the man who had been speaking, now suddenly the soldier awoke, the lover of his country, the French trooper fascinated by the glory of it all.
"It was so sad, yet so fine. War may kill you, but it makes you drunk; in spite of everything one had to laugh. I don't know what makes one laugh at such times.... Something great and splendid passes before one's eyes.... There is danger, but there is excitement, and it's that which attracts us.... The captain was standing, we were lying down. From time to time he would say: 'It's all right, boys.... We're making a fine mess of the Huns! Can you hear the 75's singing?'
"So well were they singing that, over there, helmets were falling like nuts which one shells when they're ripe. Their voices shook the ground, and each of their cries went to our hearts and made them beat the higher. Then we sprang up to rush forward, and then we flung ourselves down again flat, as above us the bullets whistled in their thousands."
He squeezed my hand tighter then, as if to drive home the truth of his story.
"You see, it was fine in spite of everything. Even when a bullet laid you low.... It happened to me about six o'clock, just as the captain fell, shouting 'Forward, men, and at them with the bayonets!' We went forward to the attack. In front of us we saw nothing but the flames from the cannons ... our ears were deafened with the cry of the shells. I took ten steps. We were walking in flames. It was red everywhere, as far as one could see. Suddenly a thunderbolt burst in the middle of us.... I fell near a comrade, brought down at the same time as I was.
"It was the chaplain of the division, a reservist, aged twenty-eight, who called out to me, laughing: 'You've got it in the leg, old man, I've got it in my shoulder!'
"He was drenched with blood, and still he went on joking. Then, suddenly, he became serious, and he began speaking like a priest speaks to the dying.
"'Now, my children, make an act of contrition. Repeat after me with your whole heart, 'My God, I am sorry for my sins; forgive me!'
"I can see him now, half raised on his elbow; his unwounded hand was raised, while the poor fellow blessed us all, as we prayed God to have mercy on those who would never rise again.
"I saw him again in the field hospital, half an hour later. He was breathing with difficulty, but he kept on smiling. It was then that he gave me his medal.
"He died, with his rosary in his hands, and I looked at him for a long time when he had breathed his last. His face was like an angel's, and the blood went on flowing....
"I remember that the doctor stopped at this moment, and bent over him. Then standing upright he called the other orderlies round and pointed to the dead man:
"'There's a man who knew how to die finely. The poor devils who die before us so often, are sometimes sorry for themselves. This poor fellow has had no thought but for others for the last two hours. Look at him, he is still smiling.'"
The wounded boy stopped, his heart was torn at the thought of his friend. He, too, forgot his suffering in thinking of the priest whose absolution had strengthened and consoled him in his torture. I gave him something to drink; he kissed his medals, especially the big one, his precious legacy, and went off to sleep without dreaming that he had told me a sublime story.
There were twenty-four like him in the ward, and seeing them stretched out there overcome by pain, I told myself that the humblest among them, the most illiterate peasant even, had his share of glory, and that they were all transfigured by the halo round their heads.
Somehow, that first evening in the wards, I felt that I too had my share of courage and of usefulness.
Down there, in the firing line, they had found wherewith to feed their pride; here, the young heroes would be able to unburden their souls. At the front they had seen the living France. In this hospital, perhaps, they would come face to face with God—forgotten, misunderstood, abandoned—God who is so good to those who fall.
The major gave us his recommendations and the last orders. He was struck at seeing so many budding moustaches, and beards.
"Heavens! I only see priests to the fore!"
"Priests to the fore!" That is indeed our motto. Our comrades say we are rash. All the same, they are as rash as we are. They go to the bloody business laughing, we go praying.
FOOTNOTE:
[6] All numerals relate to stories told herein—not to chapters in the book.