SIDELIGHTS ON THE WAR

New Zealand Tablet, 6 May 1915, Page 17

SIDELIGHTS ON THE WAR

GENERAL. Lieut, the lion. Howard Carew Stonor, of the 4th Bedfordshire Regiment, attached to the 2nd South Staffordshire Regiment, son of Jessie, Lady Camoys and of the fourth Lord Camoys, was killed in action on March 10. The deceased officer was in his 22nd year. The Musicians’ Company of London have presented gold watches to three military bandsmen who recently won the Victoria Cross, one of the recipients being Lance-Corporal Kenny, a Catholic serving in the Gordon Highlanders, though born in Drogheda. The Lord Mayor of London made the presentation. The other day a French soldier was awarded “ la mcdaille militairc et la citation a I’ordre du jour ' of his regiment both on the battlefield and in the depot of Montpellier. Five reasons were assigned for the reward. The officer who received the despatch in the barrack square, apparently much struck, paused and said: ‘Who is this M. de G. ? Does anybody know him?’ A soldier (a Benedictine) replied: ‘Yes, 1 know him: he is a Jesuit priest.’ Tremendous applause on the part of all the soldiers. CHURCHES AT DIXMUDE. The Maasbode publishes a letter from a chaplain at Dixmude, who says that in the ecclesiastical district of Dixmude not a single church remains undamaged. About forty have been demolished, and the priests of St. George’s, Mannekens, Vere Lodslod, and Ysenberghe are dead. The Abbe Deman, chaplain of Essen, near Dixmude, was shot in the churchyard of his own parish. The Burgomaster of Handzoeme was also ~ L ~i- £ SIX BROTHERS SERVING THE KING. ( A Catholic family in Diversion holds a. commendable record. Six sons of the late Mrs. Dixon are serving in the forces. The eldest of this notable sextette is John Mulrennan, who is 39 years of age. He joined the South African Mounted Police twelve years ago, and is now serving with General Botha. He is married, and just recently the press recorded the gallant feat of his son, Tom, a naval cadet, in saving a boy from

drowning in Cape Town Harbor. Richard (32) ' has enlisted in the Highland Light Infantry. Robert (28) is leading signalman on'H.M. Flagship Defence. He has served in the Navy for nearly twelve years. Isadora (2p) has been, in Canada eight years, and is in Princess Patricia’s Canadian Light Infantry. Willie (26) is in the Royal Field Artillery, and has been in the fighting line. Fred (21) joined the Gordon Highlanders when war broke out. A PRIEST’S. FORGIVENESS. Writing in the Jersey Weekly /'os/, Father A. Pitot, S.J., recounted the experiences of several French priests who are fighting with the French Army. Of Father Veron he says: ‘He deserved to be called a martyr.’ 1 Caught by the Germans when he was helping the dying soldiers on the battlefield near Le Cateau, he had to follow the foe for several days on foot, without sleep or food, except one or two apples, having .besides to bear the most horrible treatmentskicks blows, pricks from the bayonets. After eight days of this agony he breathed his last in a forsaken farm, assisted by another priest, also a prisoner, who had borne almost the same sufferings, but who, being younger and stronger, was able to endure them. Father Veron’s last words were words of forgiveness for his tormentors, and words of hope that Almighty God would accept the sacrifices of his life for the success in the war of the countries so dear to his heart— and England. Is not this a beautiful death indeed V REMARKABLE STORY OF GERMAN KINDNESS. That the ill-treatment of the Catholic priests captured by the Germans is not universal is evident by the story of Father Doncoeur, an Army chaplain. ‘ Captured at Soissons with a lot of officers and men of my regiment (he says), I was offered to be set at liberty at once. Of course, the thought of forsaking my companions would never have entered my mind, so I refused to leave them, and I was taken with them to Germany to Krefeld, in- Westphalia. There the commander of the place showed me the greatest respect, and gave me all facilities for performing my holy ministry to the troops. I was even allowed to pass every morning to go to the church in town. After three months’ captivity I was sent back to France through Switzerland with several officers of the Army Medical Corps. My most earnest wish was to stay with my dear regiment, but this time I had not the choice. A fact which.-struck me was this : Whilst going in a cab from the barracks to the railway station of Krefeld many good people were on the threshold of their houses saluting us with sympathy and shouting, “Good-bye : a pleasant journey to you ! ” ’ CATHOLIC CHAPLAINS AT THE FRONT. .In the course of a letter from the front to his father, Mr. Patrick McMahon, Castletown road, Dundalk, Private Owen McMahon, of the Royal Irish Fusiliers, says; ‘ We have an Irish priest with our regiment here, and a brave man he is. Three weeks ago we were going up one night with rations to our firing line trenches when we met-the priest, who had been praying over the graves of some of the men who had fallen. We were wet to the skin, and he must have been the same. We did not know who he was until he saluted us. Immediately afterwards there came a swarm of bullets across the road and we had to take shelter in an old house. We did not know whether the priest had been struck or not, but three days afterwards we were glad to meet him again. It was Christmas morning, and we were at Mass in an old barn- — about a hundred of us. The priest was much moved, and we did not-know the cause. When Mass was over he told us that he was moved not with sorrow, but with joy to see so many of us at Mass that Christmas morning in the barn—so far from home and from our friends in Ireland. We

were quite happy. Father Ryan is the name of this fine priest’. h Private Percy King, of Warwick, writing from the front, mentions the visit of an indefatigable English, priest * who travels miles and miles to attend to the spiritual wants of Catholics in the troops.’ EXPECTED CRISIS NEXT MONTH. Mr. Hilaire Belloc, lecturing on the war to a crowded audience in the Victoria Hall, Exeter, on March 13, said the Prussian armies crossed the Belgian frontier on the same day and hour as they crossed the French frontier in 1870. It was obviously superstitious, but it was premeditated. Since August the plans of the enemy had been fundamentally changed. At the beginning their plan was to hold up the Russian forces, while on the west the French were rapidly destroyed. They started out to accomplish it with vastly superior forces, and calculated rightly that Russia would not be able to put more than two million men in the field in two and a half months. The conception which was widely spread in this country at the beginning of the war that Russia controlled innumerable hosts which were going to be poured like a flood upon Germany was the conception of men who did not know what they were talking about; but it was true that if the war went on year after year Russia would be first as regards numbers. The whole story of the beginning of the campaign was the failure of Germany to crush the Franco-British resistance. The fact that every other large German strategic plan in the war had failed should harden onlookers against the belief that they would take Warsaw, and if he were a betting man he would offer two to one that Warsaw would not be taken by the Ist of June. The Russian plan was to avoid being pushed back over the Vistula until they could get equipment and supplies through the Dardanelles, or what were now the ice fields; and in the west the plan of the Allies was to wait for the better weather, which would make an advance possible, and for a great reserve of munitions and men, and eventually wear down the German forces. The Allies’ policy of attrition was going on all along the line. In the western theatre there would be an addition of at least one million men on the side of the Allies by the summer, and Russia would very likely have two million more. What had the enemy to put against that? He doubted whether Germany had another million men to train and put into the field unless she weakened herself militarily. The Germans could not run their military machine with much less than two million efficients kept from the army for military work. Mr. Belloc enumerated various causes which would lead towards a crisis in June, when he thought the effect of the blockade would begin to be severely felt. Unless the enemy got a decision in the east and came back and got a decision in the west within the comparatively brief period of ten or twelve weeks, they would have lost the campaign. AN ANGLICAN ON THE CHURCH IN BELGIUM. Last week in referring to the bitter attack made on the Catholics of Belgium at a meeting of the Clapham and Wandsworth branches of the Women’s Protestant Union in the- Northcote road Baptist Church, we (Catholic Times ) said it is no wonder that Protestantism is held in contempt the Continent. It is pleasant to be able to quote the words of an Anglican in reply to the bigoted critics. In the last issue of the Church Times a writer who had had personal experience in Belgium gives his opinion of the work done there by the Catholic clergy. On the whole it is exceedingly favorable. The Belgian priest, he tells his readers, understands the lives and sympathises with the lot of his people as few Anglican clergymen can do, and he considers that, at his best, the Belgian P.P. is perhaps the most edifying specimen of a parish priest that can be found. ‘The Belgian priest, in town or country,’ affirms the writer in summing up his impressions, ‘ well deserves to be called the father of his people, and no

class of citizens has come out in a finer light during the war. Nor must it be forgotten that Belgium, though the Government is Catholic, is Liberal in the best sense; for all religious communities, Homan Catholics, Jews, Anglicans, Lutherans, etc., are subsidised by the State in proportion to their membership.' The fact is that there is no nation in the world in which, prior to the war, the condition of the people was at a higher level morally and industrially. BELGIAN STUDENTS MOBILISED. One of the first results of the Royal Decree which has been signed by the King of the Belgians is (writes O. F. C.) the mobilisation of the ecclesiastical students of the diocese of Bruges. Most of them had fled to England together with their fellow-countrymen of the devastated parts of Flanders. The Rev. A. Legrand, the spiritual director of the Seminary at Bruges, had just succeeded in gathering them together and placing them in a house secured through the good offices of the Bishop of Portsmouth. Now, however, they are all bound to be at the front by the 15th of April. They left Portsmouth on the Bth to spend a few days in Retreat at Holy Rood House, in London, preparatory to their departure on the 12th. This is just one other proof, if any were needed, that Belgium is prepared to give all she can in the present struggle, with which she 1. personally so little concerned. The Reverend Director is asking for prayers for those young men, whose peaceful preparation for the sanctuary has been thus rudely interrupted. A CONTRAST. A Protestant chaplain at the front, writing in the Church. Times, says; —The almost entire ignorance of the average soldier of the elements of religion, the paucity of confirmed men or regular communicants, is simply appalling. A Roman Catholic soldier knows at once what to do—he asks for a Rosary to help him to say his prayers; he asks you to' get him a priest he wants to receive Communion or make his confession. He knows the Gospel of Christ; he understands about repentance, about grace, about the presence of the unseen army of saints and angels. Our poor Tommy, not from any fault of his own, but from our neglect, is quite unconscious of most of this as a reality. Someone wrote to me the other day these words: ‘ This war should make a different manhood for the Church of the future. Men cannot live by the French churches for nothing. Their eyes must be opened.’ My friend meant that this great company of ‘ Anglicans ’ —soldiers, orderlies, doctors, nurses, chaplains, etc.- —living in a Catholic country day by day, feeling a need for religion, as they must, in the midst of such a critical experience, will ask themselves: ‘ Does Anglicanism give us what these Catholic Allies of ours find in their religion ? Here we have churches crammed day by day with Roman Catholics doing just the same work as we are doing. They find time to pray, to make their confessions and Communions. Why do not we? Why do -we not want these things?’