"'Captain, I do the same thing you do. And I find I get along pretty well.'"
This is the letter a young Catholic wrote the evening before a battle to his fiancée:
My dear Jeanne:
Tomorrow at ten o'clock, to the sounds of "Sidi Brahim" and the "Marseillaise" we charge the German lines. The attack will probably be deadly. On the eve of this great day, which may be my last, I want to recall to you your promise.... Comfort my mother. For a week she will have no news. Tell her that when a man is in an attack he can not write to those he loves. He must be content with thinking of them. And if time passes and she hears nothing from me, let her live in hope. Help her. And if you learn at last that I have fallen on the field of honor, let the words come from your heart that will console her, my dear Jeanne.
This morning I attended mass and communion with faith. It was held some yards away from the trenches. If I am to die, I shall die a Christian and a Frenchman.
I believe in God, in France and in Victory. I believe in beauty and youth and life. May God guard me to the end. But, Lord, if my blood is useful for victory, may Thy will be done.
Finally, here is a priest, Father Gilbert de Gironde, second lieutenant in the 81st infantry, who was killed on the seventh of December, 1914, at Ypres, writing his last letter.... For of the twenty-five thousand priests who went off at the beginning of the mobilization, three hundred were called military chaplains, the rest were officers, stretcher-bearers, or common soldiers—and note the 4,000 citations in the army orders which the "Journal Officiel" has published, which report the acts of courage and of bravery done by these priests on the battle field:
To die young. To die a priest. To die as a soldier in the attack, marching to the assault in full sacerdotal garb, perhaps in the act of granting an absolution; to shed my blood for the Church, for France, for her Allies, for all those who carry in their hearts the same ideal I do, and for the others also, that they may know the joy of belief ... how beautiful that is, how beautiful that is!
Catholics, Protestants, Jews, priests, ministers and rabbis, that is what they write. It is a belittling, a profanation, that, in spite of myself, I have separated and differentiated among them. For down there, in the bloody mud of the trenches, they are one body which lives together and dies together.
There was a little Breton who, on the Battle field of the Marne, was shot in the chest. The death agony at once set in, and in his agony he asked for a crucifix. No priest happened to be on the spot, there was only a Jewish rabbi. The rabbi ran to get the crucifix, he brought it to the lips of the dying man, and he, in his turn, was killed!...