The part which the French clergy took in the war of 1870 exceeds that taken by them in any previous war, when some few members of their body acted as salaried chaplains to the troops. Even during the “wars of religion” under Henry IV. of France few priests accompanied the troops; the abbés of Turenne and Condé’s times were officers and gentlemen rather than pastors and nurses; during the wars of the great Napoleon public opinion would have frowned down their services; and the successful wars of the Crimea and of Italy under the late emperor, though they stirred the clergy more, were yet too successful to vie as a field of action with the ever-present needs of city and country parishes. But the last disastrous conflict was emphatically a home war; each family in the quiet hamlet where his cure of souls lay came to the parish priest, asking blessings for its departing members and prayers for its dead ones; each wife and mother claimed his comforting words and poured her sorrows and fears into his ears; soldiers on the march made his presbytery their natural home, slept and ate there, asked him for common little necessaries, and made sure of getting no denial had they asked for anything he possessed; boys whom he had christened came home to die, and it was he who gave them the last sacraments and read the burial service over their graves; in a word, he lived on the battle-field even while still cooped up in his village. It was not strange, then, that he should easily take one step further, and go himself to share abroad the same danger whose face was so familiar to him at home. A German historian, writing of the late war, says that there was more patriotism found among the French clergy as a class than in any other class in the whole nation. General Ambert, a soldier and a civil servant, has gathered together[[38]] many interesting episodes of the war relating to the heroic behavior of the priests, who from the beginning came eagerly to ask leave to act as chaplains for the love of God and their neighbor only; for when war was declared there were but forty-six accredited chaplains in the whole army. Not only parish priests presented themselves, but also hundreds of monks, brothers, and confraternity-men; every order was represented—Jesuits, Capuchins, Dominicans, Benedictines, Carmelites (the most distinguished of whom was Père Hermann, who died at Spandau), Trappists (of whom one convent alone furnished thirty-five), Cistercians, Oratorians, Lazarists, Redemptorists, Christian Brothers (of whom nineteen died during the war, besides those who were the victims of the Commune), and other brotherhoods, old orders and new, their members drawn from all classes, from the Legitimist nobleman to the peasant and the artisan, from the doctor of laws or of theology to the brother-scullerer or porter. One day in mid-winter, during the armistice, the Christian Brothers had been for more than twelve hours unceasingly at work digging in the snow for the bodies of the French dead of Petit-Bry, Champigny, and Croisy. Two Prussian officers, at the head of a detachment of their men, were doing the same for the bodies of the Germans. It was a bitterly cold night, the wind blew the flames of the torches about, and nothing was heard but short, business-like sentences, the sound of pickaxes breaking the ice, and that of the carriers’ feet as they bore the dead away on rough litters. The Prussian officers looked admiringly at the silent brothers, and one said to the other: “We have seen nothing so fine as this in France.” “Except the Sisters of Charity,” answered the other.
One day Brother Nethelmus, of St. Nicholas’ School, Paris, was wounded by a ball, which proved his death-blow two days later, and hardly was he buried before a young man asked to see the superior, and said to him very simply: “I am the younger brother of Nethelmus, and have come to take his place.” “Have you your parents’ consent?” asked the superior. “My father and mother blessed me before I left, and bade me come,” said the youth, as if nothing was more commonplace.
The service of the wounded was the priests’ favorite field of work, and it was in this that they most frequently met death themselves. The Abbé Géraud, after the defeat of Mans, being chaplain of the Vendean francs-tireurs, was seeking out the most dangerously placed among the wounded. The latter had in many cases been abandoned by the drivers of their ambulances, who, in the general rout and panic, had unharnessed the horses and run away. On one of these carts were two soldiers and two officers of “Mobiles”—one of whom tells the story—all badly wounded and trembling with cold and ague. Many a man ran past them, intent on his own safety and heedless of their piteous appeals, and the men despaired of help, when they saw a priest running quickly towards them with cheery looks and words, telling them he was looking for them. The first thing he did was to take off all his available clothing to cover the men and warm them a little; then, stopping some of the runaways, he begged, promised, and reproached so effectually as to induce several to help him. “Push the wheels, my fine fellows,” he cried, as he harnessed himself to the shafts, and from the battle-field he drew the cart to a village, where he never rested till he had begged for his charges food, coverings, and straw, and at last a horse, with which he drove them to the nearest hospital. He continued his labors throughout the war. The Abbé de Beuvron, who has lived with the soldiers for fifteen years in various times and climates, tells us of the priests at Fröschwiller, who, after confessing and anointing the dying placed in the village church, saved the wounded while the building was in flames, and persuaded the Prussians who guarded the wells to let them have a few drops of water for the sick; this blockade lasted for four days, after which fifteen Alsatian peasants were condemned to be shot for having mutilated the bodies of some Prussian soldiers. This system of shooting the first-comer for a crime committed by an unknown person was one of the most cruel features of the late war. These poor wretches, taken at random—some mere boys, some old, infirm men—were tied with their hands behind their backs to one thick rope which kept them all on a level. The Protestant clergyman, who had himself gone to the general and asked the lives of these men, came to beg M. de Beuvron to intercede for them; he was equally unsuccessful, and, when he begged as a Catholic priest to be allowed to see the condemned, the general smiled and said: “You are welcome; I will give you an escort.” But on addressing the poor men the priest found that they understood no French, and he could not speak German. He pointed to heaven, and spread his hands while he gave them absolution, and they, with one accord, fell on their knees, sobbed and prayed, and bowed their heads. This solemn, silent service seems to us as noble as the most magnificent of triumphant processions, with chants and rejoicings, and imperial cortége following—this, the last moment between time and eternity, between faith and vision.
It is M. de Beuvron who has said with truth: “It is the country parish priest who makes Catholic France.” And Prince Frederick Charles of Prussia echoed this sentiment when he said at an official dinner in 1872, at the table of the Bavarian ambassador: “There is in France but one class that is noble and patriotic, earnest, courageous, worthy of respect, and really influential, and that is the clergy. Impossible not to admire it as it appeared on the recent battle-fields.” Some of these heroic men preserved their incognito; one is mentioned by the London Times’ correspondent who followed the Saxon regiments. “There is a man,” he writes, “whom I have noticed, since Sedan until the struggles before the walls of Paris, constantly following the wounded. He has neither horse nor conveyance, but, stick in hand, he follows the track of the army, and, with the consummate finish of the man of the world and the tenderness of a woman, he attends and comforts the dying. He is a French priest, a Benedictine.... The other day I met him suddenly on a field of battle, and he asked me to direct him to where the wounded were. He had walked twenty miles that day. No government pays him; he is a volunteer in the best sense of the word.... He is in the prime of manhood, of handsome build, distinguished-looking, and with no less than courtly manners.” Another unknown volunteer, but a layman, was found dead at Forbach. No one had seen him till the day of the battle, and he wore a dark dress and cap and a fancy rifle. At the moment when the battle began he suddenly joined a brigade and fought like a hero. His purse held a large sum of money in gold, and his linen, unmarked, was remarkably fine, while round his neck was a medal hanging by a silken ribbon. There was nothing to identify him.
But to return to our parish priests, of whom many refused rich rewards and promotion after the war, as M. du Marhallach, who, though he accepted the Legion of Honor, declined the bishopric of Quimper, and, when his townsmen forced him to represent them in the National Assembly, managed to resign before long and return to humbler scenes of usefulness in his country parish. If a book were to be filled with incidents of the devotedness of the country priests, there would yet be ten times as many unknown and unrecorded. As the Prussians entered the village of Verrey, slaying all in their way—men, women, and children—the curé, M. Frérot, was almost ubiquitous among the dying. He was wounded twice with bayonets, and, as he retreated into his garden, the soldiers fired and wounded him twice more. He dragged himself to the doctor’s, where some wounded were being attended to, and got his wounds dressed, when the doctor, taking the flag of the Geneva Association with him, undertook to get him safe into his own (the doctor’s) house, where some of the wounded had been carried for safety. The enemy, heedless of the flag, fell upon him again with ball, bayonet, and gun-stocks till he fell down insensible. He died a few days after, glad, as he said, if his death could be in any way useful to his country. Useful! Yes, as an example; but how many precious lives are lost thus, while vile, worthless ones preserve themselves! One can only compare the pouring out of such blood to the “waste” of the precious ointment which our Lord so highly commended.
The Abbé Miroy, of Cuchery, near Rheims, died another kind of death: he was judicially murdered for having allowed arms to be hidden in the barn of his house. When asked for this permission, he was in the first agony of grief at the news of the death of his parents at a hamlet burnt by the Prussians. However, whether responsible or not—and probably as a Frenchman he saw no harm in passively helping in the defence of his country—he was shot at Rheims, at daybreak, on a bleak February morning and a Sunday. It was during the armistice. His people put this inscription on his tomb-cross: “Here lies the Abbé Charles Miroy, who died a victim to his love of country.”
M. Muller, parish priest of Sarreguemines, when asked for the keys of his church, flatly refused to give them up, and, on being threatened, answered:
“How many shots do you fire on a condemned man?”
“Eight and the 'coup-de-grâce.’”
“Very well, then, before you cross the threshold of my church to desecrate it fire these eight shots and the coup-de-grâce at me; for you shall only step in over my dead body.” There were many like instances; for the priests knew well that the enemy delighted in wantonly outraging the most sacred feelings of the people by profaning and robbing their churches. A barbarous story is told (General Ambert vouches for it) of the treatment undergone by the aged Abbé Cor, of Neuville in the Ardennes, who had considerably delayed the march of the Prussians by certain information given to the French, and who, notwithstanding his age (he was more than eighty), was tied to a horse’s tail and dragged along for a good distance, with another rope tied to his leg, with which a soldier pulled him up whenever he fell. At last the soldiers got tired, and threw him into a ditch, and, marvellous to relate, he recovered. One of his parishioners cried out in pity: “O father! what a state you are in.”