“After a very hot day our commandant announced that he was making recommendations in our company for promotion to the rank of corporal. Of four recommended, three were priests: I am proud to be one of them.”
Incidents of devoted heroism, in which there is a swift counterchange between the rôle of soldier and that of priest, are almost innumerable: certainly no selection can convey a just notion of their abundance. Let me quote the words of a writer in the Journal de Genève, the chief organ of Swiss Protestantism—
“Observe that there is not a list of those who have fallen on the field of honour or who are cited in the Order of the Day of the Army in which you will not find priests. Such a one carried the flag into action; another, recommended for the Legion of Honour, was killed that very day; a third, seeing his company waver—he was a lieutenant—leaped to their head shouting, ‘I am a priest. I do not fear death! Forward! He recovered the position, but fell riddled with bullets.
“Or we read such stories as this: After the battle, amongst the wounded and agonising, a soldier not so badly wounded as the rest dragged himself to an erect position and cried out to the dying: ‘I am a priest. Receive absolution!’ And he blessed them with his mutilated hand.”
Take again the testimony of M. Frédéric Masson, a great writer, but no Catholic—
“What Frenchmen were the first to march? Who gave the example, who went to death instantly and without a murmur, who merited the epaulettes and the crosses? The priests.
“There they are with their knapsacks on their backs, and soon the knapsacks will be off by order of our generals. In this supreme peril we need officers. And many, for many are being killed. You will see the priests in command of sections, companies—who knows if you will not see them in command of regiments if there are any priests left! There they are all the braver because it is their duty to be tender: beati milites, and if they are a little short in military instruction, which is easily acquired, one recalls the saying of Bonaparte to Subry—they have what is not to be acquired: contempt for death, for they are priests and they believe.”
The superior education of the prêtre-soldat, as compared with the majority of his comrades, gives to his narrative letters a special value. A seminarist describes a night surprise on a German sentry post—
“I crawl through the mud, stopping for five minutes every three or four yards... reach the edge of the canal and drop quietly in.... I advance very slowly, the sentry is not more than ten paces away. But suddenly my teeth begin to chatter, and I am unable, for all my efforts, to keep my jaws quiet. Fear? No, cold!... I am obliged to take my handkerchief and tie it round my head as if I had the toothache....”
He surprises the sentry, chokes him into insensibility, trusses him up, and crawls back to his men. The reconnaissance completed they return to their lair in a little wood. They are troubled about the fate of the sentry.