“Imagine a very beautiful valley, planted with great trees all yellowing with autumn, horses tied to every trunk, huts of every kind, shape, and style, soldiers of all arms: the whole forming a picture of incomparable dignity.
“The altar was set up against two giant oaks. There were more than a thousand soldiers present, including the Staff, generals, colonels and commandants.”
And this is how Cardinal Lucon celebrated his Christmas Mass in a cellar in bombarded Rheims—
“I shall never forget that Christmas night. The altar was supported on champagne-cases, and each person assisting had a champagne-case for a seat. There were present refugees who have nowhere else to sleep, citizens taking refuge from the shells, and at least 800 soldiers and officers of all grades. The hymns were sung by a group of fifty soldiers. They sang all our popular hymns.... It was very impressive; we seemed to have returned to the Catacombs.”
The Abbé Félicien Laroutzet, second-lieutenant in the 144th of the Line, paints us still another Mass with a brush steeped in even stranger colours. He had been permitted to say Mass for the first time for a month—
“Hardly had I finished the Elevation than a German shell hit the tower just above the choir, and plunged the church in darkness. Then a second. It was to be feared that a third would enter by the windows and shatter the altar to fragments. During the Communion the third shell arrived. Almost complete darkness ensued, but the altar, the curé, and myself went untouched. I finished Communion as quickly as possible, and we escaped.”
This famous encounter, he adds, secured his promotion to the grade of second-lieutenant.
And so on, and so on. All behind the front; with shells, friendly and hostile, whistling in a perpetual criss-cross overhead, on improvised altars; with every idle vanity shrivelled under the scrutiny of death, the soldiers of France assist humbly at the supreme sacrifice. As the celebrant raises for adoration the Host, transubstantiated from bread to the Body of Christ, the buglers lift their instruments, and a fanfare of spiritual triumph cleaves through the thunder of the guns. The Ave Maria and the Stabat Mater, chanted in stout soldier voices, are followed by the Marseillaise. Thus does France, returned to her origins, repel the invader of her peaceful land, the ravager of homes, the profaner of churches.
When we come to the priest-combatants, the curés sac-au-dos, the record is one of stainless and noble heroism. As Mgr. Herscher says, it would be necessary to invent a new language in order to characterise justly what have become deeds of every day. It is not in “clerical” newspapers that the courage of the soldier-priest is enshrined, but in the columns of the Journal Officiel. The Legion of Honour and the Military Medal have been awarded in numerous instances, and citations in the Orders of the Day have been still more frequent.
Thus Corporal de Gironde, of the 81st of the Line, receives the Military Medal for extraordinarily daring patrol work. He is a Jesuit. The Dominican Corporal Jaméguy rallies, within fifty yards of the German trenches, a party of five unwounded and eight wounded men who had been cut off, and leads them all into safety the next day under a vicious fire. The Abbé Boravalle writes—