IN THE TRENCHES

New Zealand Tablet, 15 March 1917, Page 15

IN THE TRENCHES

BISHOP CLEARY'S NOBLE WORK. By the courtesy of his Grace Archbishop Redwood we are enabled to print for the benefit of N.Z. Tablet readers the following interesting letter from his Lordship Bishop Cleary, just received from the firing lines: Your Grace,l expect, within the next week or two, to be replaced, at the French front, by a Catholic chaplain lately arrived from New Zealand. Owing to the serious lack of Catholic chaplains, one whole brigade of our New Zealand troops was, as regards its Catholic members, deprived, for several months, of spiritual assistance, and that, too, at a time when they were day by day exposed to peril of life and limb. I felt it my duty to volunteer for this much-needed service, and have now been for a good while at the front. I am glad to state that I have been able to extend and reorganise our New Zealand Catholic chaplaincies both in England and France, and to place them upon a better footing for the remainder of the war. lam in the firing line the greater part of every day, also, for a short time, in the support lines, seeing every individual Catholic as I go along, hearing many confessions daily—not infrequently under shell-fire; occasionally under very heavy fire, —and the results surpass those of any mission with which I have ever been associated in any part of Australasia. The men are, almost universally, wonderfully responsive. One meets with numbers of those wonderful escapes to which one is tempted to apply the term ' miraculous.' T have had, personally, no very striking escape, except, perhaps, one, when a 5.9 inch German high explosive shell burst within eight feet of three of us standing side by side, throwing us down with great violence, covering us with flying earth and mud, and taking tire left side of the head off a fine young officer standing close on my right—one of us three. I have also bad parapets thrown over me by bursting shells, and my steel trench helmet was well dented by a fragment of flying shrapnel. My ' church ' (just behind the lines) is a loft of a half-ruined barn: but the congregations there would, for their devotion, rejoice your heart. Shells often fall near or around it, and the roof is riddled with shrapnel. With every best wish, sincerely your?, * H. W. Cleary, Bishop of Auckland.