“Oh!” he answered cheerfully, with a twinkle in his eye, “it is only my old cassock!”
The parish priest of Gunstatt was brought before an improvised council of war just after the battle of Forbach; what was requested of him the book does not say, but his answer just before he was shot points to something evidently against his country’s interests: “I prefer death to the crime of betraying France.”
If these facts, which speak for themselves, allow us to make any commentary, we can think of none so appropriate as this: how does this France contrast with the feverish, theatrical, rationalistic, immoral France presented to us by a certain wide-spread form of French literature? No country is so libelled by its own writers as France. Granted that many novels represent “life as it is,” yet it is not the undercurrent of life, not the life of the majority. It is the artificial, sensational, exceptional life of large cities and of reckless cliques; and, besides this, novels have a trick of magnifying this diseased life into illusive dimensions. It fills the eye of the foreigner, it shapes his judgment, it draws his curiosity, till the sober, prosaic, quiet, respectable, and vital life of the country fades out of his memory. He forgets the vie de province, the impoverished gentlemen living in dignified retirement, like Lamartine and his mother at Milly, like the family in one part of a Sister’s Story, like Eugénie de Guérin with her homely, housekeeping cares; the cosey homes of the middle classes, their precise, thrifty, cheerful ways; the family bond that enables different families to live patriarchally in a fellowship which few Anglo-Saxons would or could imitate; the peasant-proprietors with their gardens and little farms; the healthy rural, natural life that is everywhere, and even in cities; the kindliness, the simplicity, and the innate refinement which ought to make many a traveller of the Anglo-Saxon race blush for his surliness and brutal, superficial, haughty way of setting down every foreigner as a monkey or a barbarian.
Among the country priests there were not only heroes, but strategists. Towards the beginning of the war a French column was on its way to join the main body, and had to retreat through a hilly, wooded, and unknown tract to avoid being surprised by the enemy. No one knew just what to do or advise, and the little maps were very unsatisfactory. The general stopped at a Lorraine village and sent for the authorities. The mayor and most of the inhabitants had fled in anticipation of danger; only the curé was left, with a few sick and old people. He was over seventy himself, tall and large, his hands and face swollen and his feet protected by huge wooden shoes. The general did not hope for much advice from him, but the old man sat down and explained that he was gouty and unable to get about, but knew the country. When the general had joked about this impromptu council of war, and the priest in return had reminded him how often the church had had occasion to help the army before, they examined the map together, and the curé took a pencil and quickly drew certain lines in a most business-like manner, calculating how long such a road would take to traverse, how much headway would be gained over the enemy, what points would be a safe resting-place for a few hours for the tired troops, the route which, believing the bridge to be destroyed, the Prussians would probably follow, the houses where the general would find willing and able contributors to the necessities of his men—in a word, every chance and every detail that an accomplished commander would have thought of. Then he asked for four soldiers, two to be placed in the steeple to look out for the Prussians and toll the bell the moment they came in sight, and thus give the understood signal to the column at its masked resting-place; and two to watch with him at the entrance of the village.
“Monsieur le curé,” cried the general, “you are a hero!”
The old man sneezed violently—he took snuff—and laughed as well, as he said: “Mon général, the seminaries are full of such heroes as I am. It is no heroism to love one’s country. Now, when you have given your orders, I shall carry you off to the presbytery and give you a roast chicken and some good omelet; and I think Turenne would have been glad sometimes to barter a few of his laurel branches for an omelet.”
The priest and the two soldiers had a long and cold watch through the night. At three o’clock in the morning the latter were getting tired, but the old man said: “Hist! do you see something over there?” The men peered through the dark and saw nothing; there was a wide circle of old trees and a road across—a well-known spot, the Fontaine wood. But the priest both saw and heard, or else he guessed by instinct. “See, they are creeping nearly on all fours behind the trees; now they stop to listen, they are gathering together. There is an officer speaking to them in whispers. It is time to ring the bell. Go now, children.”
“But how can we leave you alone?” said the soldiers.
“Never mind me; God will take care of me. Your general’s orders were to leave the moment the bell rang.” And as his companions withdrew he rang his little bell and the church tocsin immediately answered. Its sound was nearly drowned by the discharge of the Prussian rifles. The old man knelt down and began the Lord’s Prayer; he had not said the second line before a ball hit him and he fell. The French column escaped without the loss of one man; and when the general reported to his superior in command, the latter, lighting a cigar, said: “That priest was a brave fellow.” But the general was to meet him once more. The curé was not killed, but was afterwards condemned to be shot, which sentence was commuted to exile on account of his great age; and when he met his old friend, who believed him dead, he greeted him with the cheerful question: “Well, how did you like my omelet?” The other caught him in his arms and repeated with as much tenderness as admiration: “You are a hero!”
The next story we choose from the many related by Ambert is one of pure Christian self-sacrifice, and one that has its daily counterpart in hospitals and plague-stricken cities, even in peaceful times. Small-pox in an aggravated form had broken out among the French troops, and, on the approach of an infected battalion of Mobiles to a village not far from Beaune, a gendarme was sent on to bid the inhabitants lock their doors and keep out of the way, while the sick were taken through to an isolated camp-hospital at some distance. There were hardly any able-bodied men left in the village, as they were off harassing the Prussians and watching their movements, and the women, in their loneliness, felt a double fear. The patients came. A death-like silence prevailed; no face was seen at door or window. The sick men dragged themselves slowly and painfully along, asking for nothing, touchingly resigned to their lot of lepers and outcasts, though many of them were raw recruits of a few weeks only, whose homes were in just such villages as the familiar-looking one they were crossing now. They had passed the last houses, but at the door of one a little apart from the rest one soldier fell, and, seeing how hopeless it was to urge him further, a sergeant placed him on the doorstep and knocked at the door for help. No answer; and the battalion resumed its march, while the sergeant went back to tell the mayor. When he was out of sight a man and two women came hastily and furtively out of the house, carried the unconscious soldier some distance to the foot of a tree, and there left him. The sergeant had found the parish priest on his way back from a sick-call, and asked him to tell the mayor, as he was in a hurry to join his regiment. They came to the house, and, not finding the sick man, asked the owner where he was; the man half opened the shutter and pointed in silence to the tree. Without even seeking help, the priest, finding the soldier still alive, carried him home in his arms and laid him on his own bed. The hubbub was great in the parish; the old housekeeper indignantly remonstrated, but the priest gave her a few clear and severe orders as to her own liberty of staying away, and the substitute whom he had the means of sending for to replace him in church, also the manner of bringing him his food once a day, and then went out to speak to his excited parishioners. “There,” he said, pointing to a placard on the wall of the mayoralty, “you read 'Liberty, fraternity, equality.’ Am I to be deprived of the liberty of helping my neighbor? Is he not our equal, and does not fraternity require that we should give him every chance for his life? I cannot forget that the good shepherd lays down his life for his sheep.”