A Padre in France

by George A. Birmingham

“I am never happy,” he said, “unless I have some young thing to train—dog, horse, anything. That’s the reason I’m so keen on doing something for these boys.”

J. had no easy job when he took up the cause of the boys. It was not that he had to struggle against active opposition. There was no active opposition. Every one wanted to help. The authorities realised that something ought to be done. What J. was up against was system, the fact that he and the boys and the authorities and every one of us were parts of a machine and the wheels of the thing would only go round one way.

Trying to get anything of an exceptional kind done in the army is like floundering in a trench full of sticky mud—one is inclined sometimes to say sticky muddle—surrounded by dense entanglements of barbed red-tape. You track authority from place to place, finding always that the man you want, the ultimate person who can actually give the permission you require, lies just beyond. If you are enormously persevering, and, nose to scent, you hunt on for years, you find yourself at last back with the man from whom you started, having made a full circle of all the authorities there are. Then, if you like, you can start again.

I do not know how J. managed the early stages of the business. He had made a good start long before I joined him. But only an Irishman, I think, could have done the thing at all. Only an Irishman is profane enough to mock at the great god System, the golden image before which we are all bidden to fall down and worship “what time we hear the sound of” military music. Only an Irishman will venture light-heartedly to take short cuts through regulations. It is our capacity for doing things the wrong way which makes us valuable to the Empire, and they ought to decorate us oftener than they do for our insubordination.

There was an Irishman, so I am told, in the very early days of the war who created hospital trains for our wounded by going about the French railways at night with an engine and seizing waggons, one at this station, one at that. He bribed the French station masters who happened to be awake. It was a lawless proceeding, but, thanks to him, there were hospital trains. An Englishman would have written letters about the pressing need and there would not have been hospital trains for a long time. J. did nothing like that. There was no need for such violence. Both he and the boys had good friends. Every one wanted to help, and in the end something got done.

A scheme of physical training was arranged for the boys and they were placed under the charge of special sergeants. Their names were registered. I think they were “plotted” into a diagram and exhibited in curves, which was not much use to them, but helped to soothe the nerves of authorities. To the official mind anything is hallowed when it is reduced to curves. The boys underwent special medical examinations, were weighed and tested at regular intervals. Finally a club was established for them.

At that point the Y.M.C.A. came to our aid. It gave us the use of one of the best buildings in the camp, originally meant for an officers’ club. It was generous beyond hope. The house was lighted, heated, furnished, in many ways transformed, at the expense of the Y.M.C.A. We were supplied with a magic-lantern, books, games, boxing gloves, a piano, writing-paper, everything we dared to ask for. Without the help of the Y.M.C.A. that club could never have come into existence. And the association deserves credit not only for generosity in material things, but for its liberal spirit. The club was not run according to Y.M.C.A. rules, and was an embarrassing changeling child in their nursery, just as it was a suspicious innovation under the military system.

We held an opening meeting, and the colonel—one of our most helpful friends—agreed to give the boys an address. I wonder if any other club opened quite as that one. In our eagerness to get to work we took possession of our club house before it was ready for us. There was no light. There was almost no furniture. There was no organisation. We had very little in the way of settled plan. But we had boys, eight or nine hundred of them, about double as many as the largest room in the building would hold.

They were marched down from their various camps by sergeants. For the most part they arrived about an hour before the proper time. The sergeants, quite reasonably, considered that their responsibility ended when the boys passed through the doors of the club. The boys took the view that at that moment their opportunity began.