A Padre in France

by George A. Birmingham

Most of the men were calm, quiet, and very patient. I think their patience was the most wonderful thing I ever saw. They suffered, had suffered, and much suffering was before them. Yet no word of complaint came from them. They neither cursed God nor the enemy nor their fate. I have seen dumb animals, dogs and cattle, with this same look of trustful patience in their faces. But these were men who could think, reason, feel, and express themselves as animals cannot. Their patience and their quiet trustfulness moved me so that it was hard not to weep.

By twos and threes the men were called from the group outside and passed through the door of the dressing-station. The doctors waited for them in the surgery. The label on each man was read, his wound examined. A note was swiftly written ordering certain dressings and treatment. The man passed into what had been the ward of the hospital. Here the R.A.M.C. orderlies worked and with them two nurses spared for our need from a neighbouring hospital. Wounds were stripped, dressed, rebandaged. Sometimes fragments of shrapnel were picked out.

The work went on almost silently hour after hour from early in the morning till long after noon. Yet there was no hurry, no fuss, and I do not think there was a moment’s failure in gentleness. Some hard things have been said about R.A.M.C. orderlies and about nurses too. Perhaps they have been deserved occasionally. I saw their work at close quarters and for many days in that one place, nowhere else and not again there; but what I saw was good.

With wounds dressed and bandaged, the men went out again. They were led across the camp to the quartermaster’s stores and given clean underclothes in place of shirts and drawers sweat soaked, muddy, caked hard with blood. With these in their arms they went to the bath-house, to hot water, soap, and physical cleanness. Then they were fed, and for the moment all we could do for them was done.

These were all lightly wounded men, but, even remembering that, their power of recuperation seemed astonishing. Some went after dinner to their tents, lay down on their beds and slept. Even of them few stayed asleep for very long. They got up, talked to each other, joined groups which formed outside the tents, wandered through the camp, eagerly curious about their new surroundings. They found their way into the recreation huts and canteens. They shouted and cheered the performers at concerts or grouped themselves round the piano and sang their own songs. Those who had money bought food at the counter.

But many had no money and no prospect of getting any. They might have gone, not hungry, but what is almost worse, yearning for dainties and tobacco, if it were not for the generosity of their comrades. I have seen men with twopence and no more, men who were longing for a dozen things themselves, share what the twopence bought with comrades who had not even a penny. I passed two young soldiers near the door of a canteen. One of them stopped me and very shyly asked me if I would give him a penny for an English stamp. He fished it out from the pocket of his pay-book. It was dirty, crumpled, most of the gum gone, but unused and not defaced. I gave him the penny. “Come on, Sam,” he said, “we’ll get a packet of fags.”

They say a lawyer sees the worst side of human nature. A parson probably sees the best of it; but though I have been a parson for many years and seen many good men and fine deeds, I have seen nothing more splendid, I cannot imagine anything more splendid, than the comradeship, the brotherly love of our soldiers.

The very first day of the rush of the lightly wounded into our camp brought us men of the Ulster Division. I heard from the mouths of the boys I talked to the Ulster speech, dear to me from all the associations and memories of my childhood. I do not suppose that those men fought better than any other men, or bore pain more patiently, but there was in them a kind of fierce resentment. They had not achieved the conquest they hoped. They had been driven back, had been desperately cut up. They had emerged from their great battle a mere skeleton of their division.

But I never saw men who looked less like beaten men. Those Belfast citizens, who sign Covenants and form volunteer armies at home, have in them the fixed belief that no one in the world is equal to them or can subdue them. It seems an absurd and arrogant faith. But there is this to be said. They remained just as convinced of their own strength after their appalling experience north of the Somme as they were when they shouted for Sir Edward Carson in the streets of Belfast. Men who believe in their invincibility the day after they have been driven back, with their wounds fresh and their bones aching with weariness, are men whom it will be very difficult to conquer.

Nothing was more interesting than to note the different moods of these wounded men. One morning, crossing the camp at about 7 o’clock, I met a Canadian, a tall, gaunt man. I saw at once that he had just arrived from the front. The left sleeve of his tunic was cut away. The bandage round his forearm was soiled and stained. His face was unshaven and very dirty. His trousers were extraordinarily tattered and caked with yellow mud. He had somehow managed to lose one boot and walked unevenly in consequence. I had heard the night before something about the great and victorious fight in which this man had been. I congratulated him. He looked at me with a slow, humorous smile. “Well,” he drawled, “they certainly did run some.”