Priests In The Firing Line by René Gaëll

Author:René Gaëll [Gaëll, René]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: History, Military, World War I, Europe, Great Britain, General, Germany, Biography & Autobiography
ISBN: 9781782891857
Google: tQFwCwAAQBAJ
Publisher: Pickle Partners Publishing
Published: 2014-06-13T05:00:22+00:00

CHAPTER XI — HOW THEY DIE

NEWS reached me after many long days of waiting and uneasiness, from my friend Duroy, wounded in the war, under the circumstances I have already recounted.

News, but not about him. Just six lines to say that he is getting on well, and that he is ashamed of being in a good bed, with white sheets, when so many others lie on trusses of straw, when they have any.

“The Boches have above all wounded my self-love. There is nothing more humiliating than to remain immovable when others go madly ahead. I am jealous of my comrades who run about, see danger, are in the thick of it all, and die in full activity.”

If my friend had not, at the time, whole legs, my comrade had excellent eyes, and he saw beside him comforting heroism. In that hospital, at the front, where the badly wounded are sheltered, one witnessed fine acts, and sublime feats, which are the prolongation of warlike heroism and gives to it a definite meaning.

There flourished magnificent virtues, and in the tranquillity of repose, too often broken by pain, blossomed forth the noblest acts of generosity.

Those who were heroes on the battlefield, continued to be heroes now. When one is brave, one’s heart finds everywhere the occasion for showing one’s valour, and the bullet which is working about in one’s flesh has never broken the resistance of strong souls. Duroy described to me the fine devotedness of a wounded priest, nearly in his last agony, and who seeing himself about to die, was a priest to the end, a sublime apostle, who shortened his life to bring God to a soul who had lost Him for many a long year.

The hospital ward was dreary, almost silent and funereal, with its two long rows of beds, in which a too lively suffering prevents drowsiness and suppresses sleep.

Around these forlorn couches, little hope remained and the wounded men made for themselves no illusions. They knew that the least wounded, those who may be saved perhaps, have been sent off to some far-off town in the middle of France, to those parts which the noise of war will never disturb.

With the instinct of suffering beings, whose uneasy thoughts turn back upon themselves in the preoccupation about their ills, these great victims thought: “If they nurse us here, quite near the place where we fell, we must be very ill.”

And they felt ill too. Their faces spoke it; and their features, thinner already after a week, revealed an upheaval of the organism, a rapid fight with life, which could not hold out in these devastated bodies.

There, one did not know how to laugh, or rather one could not. In each one, it was the expiation which continued; the redemption of the Mother Country, which was achieving itself.

Providence does not only exact bloodshed in torrents for the tremendous redemption of nations. It demands also that, shed drop by drop from open wounds, and which will flow for a long time.

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