CHAPTER V. THE SCOURGE OF WAR.

New Zealand Tablet, Volume XII, Issue 18, 22 August 1884, Page 5

CHAPTER V. THE SCOURGE OF WAR.

When in English homes we speak of " the horrors of war," we use a phrase which in those English homes is meaningless and hollow. Except for the miserable scenes of civil discord, more especially the " Wars of the Roses " and the " Great Rebellion," no battles have baen fought on English ground for many hundreds of years. Our towns have not been sacked, nor our villages burned, nor our fields laid waste by foreign soldiers. Yet this is wuat throughout the length and breadth of Europe o Continental neighbours bave had to endure. Weaie not writing a history of the French and Gorman war. Never were the French armies more repeatedly or terribly defeated. The losses of the Germaos were, however, little less terrible than those of their enemies. The highways aud byways were alike strewn with the wounded and the detd. Here a village was a h°ap of smoking ruins, the poor inhabitantp, mothere carrying their infant children, and the elder ones toiling along with such few articltß of bodding or household goods as they were able to carry, to lie in the open fields, those fields which, fall of ripening corn, taa I be^n tro idea d >wn in dust and blood. Now the tide o£ war bad rolle I upon Alsace, and Strasburg was besieged. For many miles round tbe country was laid wa-te. There had beeu a sharp skirmisli in the neighbourhood of St. Joseph s College, which ended, as did almost all the c_>ntest3 of that fatal period, in the defeat of the French. They had ported themselves in the College, but had been driven out and the building set on fire, and the adjacent hamlet bad shared the same fate. It was a lovely evening early in September, the last faint streak of crimson had scarcely faded from the western sky, and in the opposite quart;r of the heavens the narvest moon rose round and full. But her silver radianco felln>ton tbe sheaves of yellow corn, on the purpled vine, the sparkling waters of the bubbling rill, nor was it reflected on tbe cottage casements. The corn has been burned, as it stood, the waters of the brook are running red with blood, casements are a black void, and the cottage rcof has fallen, its fragments heaped upon the hearthstone. The bodies of the slain are everywhere; the wounded have crawled away, been removed by their friends, or by the charitable care of those very men whose sacred and quiet home has been burnt over their heads— tbe Christian Brothers ot St. Joseph V. Where have the inhabitants of the hamlet taken refuge? The towns and villages of the neighbourhood have equally been the scene of the bloody coctes\ After driving back and defeating the French, the detachment of Prussians who have destroyed the College, have pressed forward to join the great boily of the army besieging Strasburg. So the Christian Brothers and their pupils and the poor peasants, thirty-six hours after the battle, returue i to their homes, extinguished the tire 9, and commenced to clear away the rubbish. The College cbnrcli has been but slightly injured : the stonewalls were not combustible, and it had not bsen shelled ; for severe as the affair had been, it v)as but a chance medly, a skirmish, compared with the engagemeu ts of tfaar Louis, Gravdotte, and other pitched battles of that dreadful war. So in the church the Brothers have provided shelter not only for their pupils and some of the villagers, but for various wounded men, French and German. Among the wbole community none has been more active in the work of mercy than Brother Aloysuis ; and ever at his side — active, courageous, and efficient, without a thought of self — haß moved the

noble lad who is known at St. Joseph'a as Emmanuel, the Christmas wanderer of so many years ago, and who is really the young Count Rudolph von Wordendorf, the heir of a noble patrimony. The two, who are ever inseparable, have helped to contrive some pretence of bedding for the poor wounded wretches abandoned on the field, to assist the humble peasants back to their dismantled cottages, and once more they are passing over the bloody ground, carefully searching whether any are yet living among the grim and gory dead. Beneath a clump of hawthorn at the foot of a slope, the very spot where Emmanuel had done battle with the wolf, lay a Prussian officer : a few paces farther a private soldier, also of the Germans, had crawled to die. He lay upon the brink of the rill which came bubbling down from the eminence ; but though parched with the thirst of death, the miserable man turned sickening from the waters that ran red with blood. Carrying a lanttorn and a pitcher of water— for thirst is the great torture of the wounded on a battlefield — Brother Aloysius and Emmanuel passed so near this man that his faint, hoarse cry of " Water 1 water ! " met their ears. Emmanuel, who carried the pitcher, quickened his steps, and Brother Aloysius, setting the lanthoru on the ground, raised the fainting wretch 1 in his arms. He was a horrible-looking object, that poor wretch, for the stroke of a sabre had laid his cheek open to the bone. . The blood had clotted and dried in the night wind that made his wounds smart so terribly, and no more striking contrast of peace and beauty, of horror and despair, could have been imagined than that which the visage of the wounded soldier, sordid and repulsive even in health, presented to the aspect of the boy who kneeling beside him, presented the little tin can of water to his quivering lips. The lanthorn on the ground flashed up into the face of the wounded Prussian ; the fair, pale mooubaams fell like a shower of silver on the boy's head, and the soft light touched his fresh and comely features with the beauty of an angel. The boy placed a cup of water to the wounded soldier's lips : he drank it greedily, then raised his heavy eyes to thank him, and gazed as if transfixed upon the fair, candid face. Then he groaned heavily, stretched out his unwounded arm, and making a vain attempt to grasp at tlu boy, sank back with a few words half articulated. "Oh, Gott in HimmelJ it cannot be ! The child is dead 1 he perished in the snow 1 Aud now he comes in angel-guise to summon me to judgment !" Then the soldier fell back in a dead swoon.