Father Duffy's story

by Francis Patrick Duffy

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.”