"You know, sir, I don't intend to take a liberty," he felt like saying: "I'm only carrying out what I've given my word to do. If I'm not quite up to your mark, please overlook it! As to being worthy of her—is any man breathing? Ask yourself the question, and the answer will be No...."
Save the Algerian, Crimean and Sardinian medals, and the Cross, nothing of value remained upon the Colonel....
Some soldier having left a spade sticking in the clay at the head of an unfinished trench, P. C. Breagh possessed himself of the utensil, and began to fill the grave in, though the dead face looked at him so haughtily that until he had covered it with the black silk veil, he boggled hideously at the task.
Winking away the tears that blinded him, and gulping down the lump that stuck in his throat, he finished. Remained but the need of a Catholic priest to read the Office. You saw the caped cloak, and the broad-brimmed hat, or the cossack and biretta of the Roman ecclesiastic, working side by side with the Jewish rabbi, the English Protestant clergyman, and the Lutheran pastor, in these harvest-fields of death. The secular priest and the tonsured religious were to be found with the Red Cross Ambulance-trains and in the temporary hospitals; doing their best for the souls and bodies of their broken fellow-men, now that War had done the worst.
To whom should one appeal? Hardly to the burly, bearded Franciscan, who passed supporting a laden double-stretcher at the upper end. You saw his brown robe hitched up under his white girdle, and his muscular bare legs, ending in boots of the elastic-sided description, stained as though he had been treading out ripe grapes in the press. An Army chaplain succeeded the monk, upright and thin, in a dark military frock and black-banded forage-cap, half leading, half carrying a French corporal of infantry, who had received a bullet through both eyes. Farther off, a gray-haired ecclesiastic, whose dress betokened his episcopal dignity, was administering the Viaticum to a dying Mecklenburg Hussar. Even as the sublime Mystery of Faith was uplifted—even as the Englishman bent the knee in adoration—his glance fell upon the kneeling figure of an old man a few yards away.
Undoubtedly a priest, the poor shepherd of some poverty-stricken country parish, for the cassock that covered the frail, wasted body was threadbare, green with wear and heavily patched. Absorbed in devotion, his broad-brimmed hat lying on the ground before him, his thin hands crossed upon his sunken breast, his white head erect, his rapt gaze fixed upon the Host, he remained immovable, until the brief but solemn rite was at an end. Then he looked up at the sky—shaking back the long white hair that had fallen about his peaked and meager features—making three times rapidly the sign of the Cross. And the serene and beautiful peace that rested on that broad furrowed forehead, the radiant smile upon the toothless mouth, and the beaming kindliness in the brilliant dark eyes that rested on P. C. Breagh's, told him that here was the needed man.
Yet he hesitated to speak to the priest, who rose and moved a few steps farther to where a shell-torn horse, tangled in the rope-harness that had attached to it a smashed artillery caisson, lay groaning and thrashing its long neck and tortured head to and fro.
Parties of Uhlans told off for the purpose, were even then shooting such hopelessly wounded victims. But no merciful bullet had ended the pain of this suffering beast. It groaned again, and coughed up blood as the old man stopped to look at it, and fixed its haggard eyes almost humanly upon his face.
The appeal went home. Stepping over the prone body of its dead comrade, the old man bent over the horse and gently stroked its neck. He said, and the words came clearly to Carolan:
"Poor creature of God! be thy sore anguish ended. In the Name of the Father ..."