CHAPTER XLVII
THE LITTLE CURÉ OF FOSSE-DIX
Every evening at 4:30 the curé of Fosse-dix gave Benediction in his little church for the school children and any of the village people who could attend. After Benediction he usually said the beads, the Litany and a few other prayers, and before he finished my boys used to arrive for confession. As the confessional was in the rear of the church, facing the altar, I often saw the children coming down the aisle. First, an old Sister of Charity, her wide white coronet flapping on either side like two white wings, backed slowly down the aisle, the children coming two by two, facing her. Generally as they came they sang a beautiful hymn to the Sacred Heart, but I can only recall the last two lines, which they always repeated. Translated, they would read: “Heart of Jesus, heart of clemency, save, save France in the name of the Sacred Heart!” The children would walk in perfect order till they reached the door where the old fat Sister stood watching them. Although I could not see them then, I always knew when each couple had passed the good Sister; a scampering of feet and sometimes a little shouting were the signals.
One evening while the children were going out in the customary way, singing their beautiful hymn, I noticed five or six soldiers in the French uniform of grey-blue. They remained quiet while the children were singing the first stanza, but when they came to the lines I have quoted above, a great chorus sounded as soldiers joined with the children in imploring the Sacred Heart to save France.
Every evening, after coming from our mess, I stepped into the curé’s room to have a chat with him. Sometimes I had a box of good things that had come from relatives back in Canada, for our Christmas boxes were only now beginning to arrive. I remember one evening opening a parcel while the little priest voiced his simple wonder at the strange things from across the seas. He had never seen chewing gum before, so I gave him a few sticks of Spearmint. In a little while I looked at him, but his jaws were motionless and the gum was nowhere to be seen.
“Where is your gum, Father?” I asked.
He looked at me keenly, not understanding my question, so I repeated it. Again he looked at me, but this time he answered me.
“Why,” he said, “I swallowed it!”
Then, because I laughed heartily, I had to explain to him how the people of the New World use gum.
One day while I was absent, working among the soldiers, a shell came whistling over the village, bursting in the road near his garden tearing several holes in the brick wall of his house. When I returned he took me out to see the havoc that had been wrought, pointing out with minute care every place where a splinter of shell had struck. He seemed to be taking the whole thing so solemnly that I could not but become solemn, too; so I said to him, as I pointed to quite a large hole that had been torn through the frame of a ladder resting against the house, supposing he had been walking there, and that the shell had burst in the road about that time, and his head had been bent a little as the piece of shell went through the ladder—I looked at him, shaking my head ominously at the thought of what might have happened.
He looked at me quickly. “Oh, if!—if!—if!” he said. “One could take Paris and put it in a bottle—if—it would go in!”
He had a pass from a British general which permitted him to stop any military lorry going in his direction and take passage on it. It was always a mystery to the military chaplains how he had obtained it. During the day he was off searching for chaplains whose men were in the line and who could attend one or more of his shepherdless flocks the following Sunday. At different times throughout the early spring campaign I was able to help him with his work, and I always felt glad of the opportunity; for he was truly a man of God.