Chapter XII: “to Be, or Not to Be.’ (6)

“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.”

“But he does not even belong to the parish!” murmured the crowd.

“In such times as these,” said M. Cloti with enthusiasm, “all France is my parish, and every brave fellow who dies for you is my parishioner.”

And for sixty-five days and nights he watched the stranger, Jean Dauphin, made his bed every night, cooked his food, mixed his medicines, swept the rooms, and scarcely slept or ate himself. The doctor had insisted on the utmost cleanliness, but said that, with all precautions possible, only a miracle could save the soldier’s life. Charity wrought the miracle, and by the fortieth day the patient was sitting up listening to the priest reading to him. Only one person in the village caught the disease—the daughter of the man who had spurned the soldier from his door; and, though she did not die of it, she lost her beauty for ever. Some months after the doctor asked the priest if he knew at the time that he was risking his life, and that there was but the barest chance of escape for him. “Yes,” said M. Cloti simply, “I knew it.”

A terrible barbarity was the occasional punishment of the _bastonnade_—a kind of “running the gauntlet.” This occurred once at the village of Saint-Calais, where the enemy found some guns hidden in the belfry, and one hundred and forty-five male inhabitants, including the mayor, Baron Jaubert, and the priest, were seized. They were compelled to walk slowly between a double row of Prussian soldiers armed with clubs and sticks, and received merciless blows on their bare heads, their shoulders, back, arms, and legs. The number being odd, the priest was placed last and alone, so that both rows were able to reach and torture him. He fainted, and was given a glass of water, after which the torture began again; and when he fell the second time, his head was found to be split in five places, and his body was thrown aside for dead. He recovered, however, after a long and severe illness, but the baron died of his wounds. One priest, at Ardenay, was maltreated and imprisoned and finally carried away to Germany for having kept on his steeple a tricolor flag which had been there since 1830. Some priests whom one can forgive for their patriotism, but who were perhaps too forward, as ministers of peace, to foment war, used to go on the battle-fields and search the bodies of the dead for cartridges for the living; but these instances of enthusiasm were exceptional, and it should be remembered that some among the clergy were old soldiers.

Among the prisoners of war the priests found ample room for their ministry. Some of the clergy were themselves prisoners, while some left their country and volunteered for this special service. There was much to do. Besides saying Mass and administering the sacraments, there were the ignorant to instruct, the scoffers to convert, the young to protect, and the intemperate to reclaim. In that forced idleness many gave themselves up to drunkenness and grew reckless and desperate. This sin, which in our time seems to have sprung into new life and strength, showed itself lamentably strong among the captives, and the priests, to counteract it, had to attend not only to the spiritual needs of their charges, but to invent amusements and occupations to wean the soldiers from gross self-indulgence. Father Joseph, a missionary and military chaplain, published an interesting work on the prisoners, their behavior, pastimes, etc., the statistics of their captivity, their treatment, and such little things. During the war, more than 400,000 were taken prisoners. Letters with contributions came constantly through and from the country _curés_. Father Joseph, who was stationed at Ulm, quotes many of these letters, of which the following is a specimen: “I venture to recommend to your care one of my parishioners, made prisoner at Strasbourg. I recommend his soul to you—for it is his most precious possession—but also his bodily wants; I am afraid he is in need of clothes. If your circumstances allow it, be kind enough to give him what is needful; if not, set the whole to my account, and I will reimburse you. Our country will bless you for your charity.... May our soldiers, whom so many have labored to demoralize, be led to understand these truths; for then only will they be worthy of victory.” This dignified attitude of resignation to the hard lesson God allowed the unsuccessful war to teach France specially characterized the clergy of all ranks, but it did not take one jot from their eager and hot patriotism. Another country priest, over eighty years of age and nearly blind, begins by excusing himself on that score for his bad handwriting, and, mentioning one of his flock among the prisoners, says: “The poor boy must suffer terribly. Help him and comfort him; I shall look upon all that you do to him as done to me. It is long ago since it has been dinned into the people’s ears that we are their foes, while in truth they have no better friends; we are accused of not loving our country, while, on the contrary, we are her most devoted sons.... I fear that my age will prevent me seeing the end of her troubles, but it will be a comfort to me in death that to my latest breath I shall have labored in her service.” Charitable committees abroad and at home, mostly under church superintendence, sent food, money, and clothing, books, papers, games, etc., to the prisoners. Mgr. Mermillod’s committee at Geneva, and those of Lausanne and Bordeaux, chiefly distinguished themselves; but in this work religious fellowship overcame national prejudice, and the clergy and sisters of the Catholic Rhineland cordially helped their so-called enemies. They vied with the French in ministering to the prisoners in the several cities where the latter were confined; but not only they, for there were numberless Germans, both civil and military, who behaved generously, kindly, and delicately towards the prisoners.

We have already mentioned the terrible custom of choosing at random hostages or victims in reprisal for the acts of some unknown men. This took place once at Les Horties, a village where, despite the Prussian sentries, two hot-headed youths succeeded in picking off three German soldiers. The shots were returned, but the agile youths got away unscathed. A detachment was sent forthwith into the village, with orders to seize the first six men they happened to meet. This was done, the hostages guarded by the Prussians, and the mayor given till eleven o’clock the next morning to give up the real offenders, under penalty, if it proved impossible, of seeing the six men shot. Those who had fired on the Prussians were strangers, who hovered constantly on the outskirts of the enemy, accomplishing, most likely, some vow of vengeance for a wrong done by soldiers to some near and dear to them. There were many such. Heaven forgive them! for they brought untold sorrow on the heads of families like their own, whose death they were so blindly trying to revenge. It was out of the mayor’s power to give up the culprits, and no prayers or tears made any impression on the Prussian officer in command. The women’s lamentations were terrible; the men’s despair appalling. One of them, a widower of forty with five children, was all but out of his mind, blaspheming horribly and crying out: “Yes, yes, it was my three-year-old Bernard who fired on the wretches. Let them take me and my five boys, and let the rest go!” The priest, M. Gerd, was unable to comfort him, and slowly left the school-room where the poor victims waited their fate. Going to the headquarters of the German captain, he said: “I believe you only wish to shoot these men as an example; therefore the more prominent the victim, the greater the lesson. It cannot matter to you individually _who_ is shot; therefore I have come to beg of you as a favor to be allowed to take the place of one of these men, whose death will leave five young children fatherless and homeless. Both he and I are innocent, but my death will be more profitable to you than even his.” “Very well,” said the officer, and the _curé_ was bound with the rest of the men, and the man he had saved left him in tears. The night passed, and, like the martyrs of Sébaste, whose fortitude was strengthened by the young heathen who joined them in the stead of one of themselves who had faltered, these unhappy men were transformed by the priest’s words and examples into unflinching heroes. The hour came, and he walked at their head, saying aloud the Office of the Dead, the people kneeling and sobbing as he passed, when the condemned met a Prussian major who was passing by chance with some orders from the general. He was struck by the sight of the priest—an unusual one, even during this “feast of horrors”—and inquired into the matter, which seemed less a thing of course to him than it had to the captain. He countermanded the order and referred the whole thing to the general, who called the _curé_ before him. It ended in the former saying that he was unable to make an exception in any one’s favor, but that for _his_ sake he would pardon every one of the hostages, and, when the priest had left, he turned to his officers and said energetically: “If all Frenchmen were like that plain parish priest, we should not have long to stay on this side of the Rhine.”

But here is another story, very like this one and more tragic, which has not come within Ambert’s knowledge, and to which we are indebted to an English novelist, who, vouching for its truth, has worked it into a recent tale. Neither name nor place is given, but it runs thus: The same thing happened as at Les Horties, and a certain number—I forget how many—male inhabitants were condemned, all fathers of families. After vain appeals for mercy from the priest, the mayor, the old men, and the women, the former called all his people into the church, which had been pillaged and half burnt some time before. He went into the pulpit and held up a common black cross; it was the only ornament or symbol left of the simple village church treasury.

“My children,” he said in a voice trembling with sobs, “you know what has happened, and how many hearths are going to be left desolate. Here, in God, in Christ, is our only comfort and our only strength. I have no ties but such as bind me to each one of you equally. I have but one life to give, but I will gladly take the place of one of these fathers of families, and trust to God to protect you when I am gone. Now, if any of you feel that God will give you grace to die in the stead of any other of your brethren, say so, and God bless you!” He knelt and bent his head on his clasped hands in prayer; silence, only broken by suppressed sobbing, filled the church. The women were in agonies of weeping; the men’s faces worked as if in some mighty struggle. Presently one young man rose up and said: “Father, I will follow you; I have neither wife nor children. I will take such a one’s place.” And then rose another youth, giving up all his hopes of the future for the sake of another of the victims; and the women crowded round them, blessing them, crying over them, pressing their hands, and calling them heroes and deliverers. Those for whom no substitutes had appeared caught the high spirit of the occasion, and bore their fate like Christians and men. No Providence interposed in this case, and the priest was allowed to consummate his sacrifice. Such courage was more than human.

The part taken by the sisters of various orders in the scenes of the war and the Commune was one which neither France nor Germany will ever forget. They shared every danger to which the soldiers themselves were liable, even that of being shot in cold blood, which was the fate of four sisters at Soultz, near Colmar, on the Rhine. They were found nursing the wounded, and the Prussians accused them of advising and encouraging the inhabitants to resist. There was no inquiry, no form, but a few of the scum of the invading army dragged the women away at once, set them against a wall, and shot them. During the retreat after the battle of Reischoffen a Sister of Charity made her way among the disorganized troops, seeking some one to help. Balls and shells were whizzing past, and frightened horses wildly galloping by. A cry was heard as a man fell mortally wounded, and the sister stopped, knelt down, and began her work; but hardly a minute after a ball struck her and carried off both her legs. She fell in a swoon by the soldier’s side. M. Blandeau, who tells the story, did not know her name; he only says pointedly: “She was a Sister of Charity.” An officer of the French Army of the Rhine gives an account of a Trinitarian nun, Sister Clara, who the night of the 16th of August, 1870, after a bloody battle, was tending the wounded in a barn; they were in such pain as not to be able to bear being carried to a safer place, and all they cried for was “Water, water!” Every five minutes the nun went quietly in and out, under the fire of the enemy, to fetch as much water as her scanty number of vessels would hold; you would have thought she was armor-plated, to judge by her calm and smiling demeanor. The next day began the dreary retreat towards Metz; the wounded were heaped on carts and wagons, and there again was Sister Clara, comforting, helping, encouraging the men, giving water to one, changing the position of another. She left on the last cart, holding against her breast the head of the nearest wounded man; but not half a mile further the column was made prisoner by a detachment of Uhlans, the ambulances cut off, and in the _mêlée_ a shot struck and killed the sister, who was probably buried by and among strangers. At Forbach the superior of the Sisters of Providence, whose house was a hospital and asylum at all times, was killed by a shell, and at Metz no less than twenty-two Sisters of Charity died either from wounds, disease, or exhaustion in the service of the soldiers. At Bicêtre, during the siege of Paris, eleven died of small-pox in one day, and a request having been made for the same number to supply their place, thirty-two presented themselves at once. At Pau, at Orleans, at Mans, at Nevers, and in numberless other cities, as well as in impromptu hospitals, canvas towns, villages, and battle-fields, the Little Sisters of the Poor, the Sisters of Charity, the Visitation Nuns, and other orders too many to mention distinguished themselves. Many sisters were forced later on to accept the Legion of Honor, but a far greater number of those who deserved it did not live to have it offered. At the siege of Paris their courage seemed absolutely superhuman. An officer once met near Châlons, on the road to Paris, a blind and wounded soldier led by a Sister of Charity. He was an old veteran from Africa, without relations, of a terrible temper, and with not much religion. The Prussians had left him on the road, finding him an encumbrance among the prisoners. The sister found him and undertook to lead him to the _Invalides_, where, she said, he had every right to claim a home. In all weathers this strange couple plodded along. She begged food and shelter for him, and always gave him the best; but he was fractious and not very grateful. One day the weather was a little finer, and he heard a lark sing; he seemed quite touched and happy. The sister asked him to kneel down and repeat the “Our Father” after her, and he did not refuse. This was the beginning of his conversion. But the Sister now grew ambitious, and wanted to restore his physical sight to him as well as his spiritual; so she said: “We will not go to the _Invalides_ after all, but I will take you to the best surgeons and the most famous oculists in Paris, and beg them, for the love of God and their country, to do their utmost to cure you; and if God sees fit to let them succeed, you will promise me to be a good Christian as long as you live, will you not?” Three months later the soldier was as hearty as ever and had recovered his sight, while the sister had long been at work in a country school; but at Notre Dame des Victoires may be often seen a veteran praying on his knees before the grated door of the shrine—praying for his deliverer.

The Pontifical Zouaves formed a volunteer regiment of their own during the war, and fought like lions; most of their members were the descendants of old French families whose sympathies are with the last of the exiled Bourbons, and who, while they reject the empire and the republic equally, and keep out of the way of office or active employment of any kind, even to the prejudice of their career and to the point that many of their young men are forced to make a life for themselves in foreign service or by emigration, yet are full of real love of their country. The virtues of such enthusiasts always come out in adversity, while in prosperity their attitude of aloofness may seem rather childish. In the last war they fought nobly. Plenty of Breton peasants joined them; they have nearly the same traditions and fully the same faith; in fact, they have long been natural allies.

The incidents of the Commune—a period so much more terrible and shameful than that of the war—have been so often and fully described that we will not add much to this sketch by going over the fearfully familiar subject. Every one knows the phase of rabid feeling which came uppermost among the Communists: the hatred of God, religion, and priests—even a more rabid feeling than that entertained towards owners of property. The clergy were thus forced to be prominent in that national delirium: the chief victims were ecclesiastics. In Paris and other places it has been noticed that a certain class of lazy, good-for-nothing men live from hand to mouth around the barracks and the churches, living on the alms of soldiers and priests, inventing excuses to account for their indolence, cheating and lying and taking ravenously all they can get. When a revolution comes, these men become denunciators, assassins, and leaders. It is they who cry the loudest against the army and the priesthood—the “butchers” of Versailles and the “hypocrites” in cassocks. Raoul Rigault spoke their sentiments when he said to the porter of M. Duguerry’s house (the famous parish priest of La Madeleine, shot with Archbishop Darboy at La Roquette): “God! you fool!” (the man had exclaimed, as is the custom, innocently meant, in France, '_O mon Dieu!_') “Hold your tongue; how dare you speak of God! Our revolution is against your God, your religion, and your priests. We will sweep all that rubbish away!” And, by way of contrast to this plain confession of faith, here are the words of M. Duguerry in prison to his biographer, the Baron de Saint-Amand: “My dear friend, if I knew that my death would be of any use to the cause of religion, I should kneel down and beg them to shoot me.” But it is not necessary to multiply quotations to show the intense hatred of the Commune towards religion and its ministers. Holy Week in 1871 was indeed the _Passion_ Week of many of the latter. The devilish conduct of many women recalled the worst excesses of the Reign of Terror. A woman with a military cap on rode at the head of the escort of the hostages, three of them Jesuit Fathers, who were taken from La Roquette to Belleville to be shot. She swore and yelled and gave orders, insulting the priests especially. On the Boulevards, as the condemned passed, riots took place, and disorderly crowds nearly killed the prisoners in their impatience. Women again were prominent, brandishing guns, knives, and pistols, throwing bloody mud on the priests, and blaspheming as badly as any man; it would have been safer to run the gauntlet of a crowd of maniacs let loose from the asylum. Mgr. Surat was killed in the streets on another occasion by a young girl of sixteen, who deliberately put a pistol to his forehead. “Mercy, mademoiselle!” cried the priest quickly; but with an untranslatable slang play on his words[39]—equivalent, say, to “You shall have it hot and peppery,” or some such phrase—she drew the trigger and stretched him dead at her feet. The Abbé Perny, in his evidence before the council of war, says: “I have lived among the savages for twenty-five years, but I never saw among them anything to equal the hatred on those faces of men and women as we passed them on our way from Mazas to La Roquette.”[40] Father Anatole de Bengy, a Jesuit, was a remarkable man who had been military chaplain in the Crimea, and was volunteer chaplain of the troops during the last war till the siege, when he attached himself to the Eighth Ambulance. He had a singular power of commanding the love, obedience, and confidence of others; he was brave and good-tempered, and such a thorough soldier that Marshal Bosquet said of him: “Upon my word, if there are many Jesuits of that kind, _I_ say hurrah for the Jesuits!” His letters are full of pleasantry and life. He tells his friends how he helps “our poor soldiers,” and jokes about his tramps with “his bundle on his back,” which phrase, he says, “always rouses a certain pity in the listener; but indeed, my dear Aymard, the bundle (_le sac_) does not deserve its bad name: it urges the body forward, and its inconveniences are fully made up for by the advantages it gives rise to. Some thinker should undertake the Praise of the Bundle, and rehabilitate it in the eyes of pilgrims.” The words of this manly and brave priest at the funeral of Commander de Dampierre would serve as his own eulogy: “The fountain-head of duty is in the three world-famous words, _God wills it_.” When his name was called at La Roquette, on the list of condemned, the Communist official stumbled over it, and Père de Bengy stepped briskly forward, saying: “I know my name is on the list—Bengy; here I am.” M. Crépin, a shoe-maker, who was condemned, but saved by the entrance of the troops, saw the butchery of Belleville, and in his evidence said: “Let no one speak ill of the clergy before me again! I have seen them at home now; I know them by experience; I have witnessed their courage and been comforted by their words.”

Footnote 39:

_Tu l’auras maigre et non pas gras_ (_grasse—grâce_).

Footnote 40:

At Ménilmontant a woman named Lefêvre proposed, amid cheers and
bravos, to undermine the Cathedral of Notre Dame, fill it as full as
it would hold with priests and nuns, and blow it up. At a club-meeting
another woman—Leblanc—cried: “We must flay the priests alive and make
barricades with their carcasses”; and at Trinity Church a woman argued
thus on the existence of God: “Religion is a farce got up by men, and
there is no God; ... if there were, he would not let me speak so.
Therefore he is a coward, and no God....” And there were other and
even more revolting things said and done.

The Dominicans of Arcueil transformed their school into an ambulance during the siege, and Père Bengy happened to be chosen chaplain. But the Commune was to elicit greater sacrifices. The monks might have left, but did not, and reopened their hospital for the wounded wild beasts, whose curses sounded upon their watchers even from their sick-beds. The Geneva flag was hoisted, and the Sisters of St. Martha acted as domestic servants, besides many other women and girls. There were twenty wounded in the hospital on the 19th of May, 1871, when the Commune arrested the inmates of the house, thirty-eight persons—priests, lay brothers, tradesmen and servants in their employment, some of them foreigners, nuns, married women and widows, two young girls, and a child of eight years old, daughter of the tailor, who was afterwards shot with the priests. The latter were, with a devilish show of mercy, offered their liberty if they would take arms against the Versailles troops, and, when they refused, they were condemned. Their death took place a few days later, and the shooting was not done with military precision, but bunglingly, so that the victims were rather butchered than shot. After the bodies had ceased to breathe they were savagely mutilated, the heads and larger bones hacked with axes, and the flesh pierced with bayonets. Some of the priests managed to escape in the crowd and smoke, all of them wounded, however; and one was saved by a woman who hurriedly threw her husband’s clothes to him. According to the saying of a National Guard who escorted the Belleville victims to their death, and who, on being asked by a passer-by, “Where are they taking those men to?” answered gravely, “To heaven,” the road these priests walked was truly the “narrow road that leadeth to salvation.”

Surely, if any class of French citizens did their duty in troublous times and deserve well of their country, it is the clergy.

DE VERE’S “MARY TUDOR.”