AN ORANGEMAN AND A CHAPLAIN

New Zealand Tablet, 16 May 1918, Page 22

AN ORANGEMAN AND A CHAPLAIN

(By Patrick Magill, author of The .Great Push.) i The Ulster men and the men of the South of Ireland had made a great fight of it up by the Zonnebeke River and the Pommern Redoubt, and now that a day s hard effort was at an end, the dressing-station to the rear of the line of battle was full of stories of the struggle. Near the door a bundle of khaki which lay on a stretcher stirred itself and tried to sit up. Who are you looking for?” asked a man with his arm in a sling. “And is it you that’s here, Eamon ?” asked the man on the stretcher.

It s me, was the reply. “And ye yerself look to be in a fix, Sam Young. What have you got?” Sam Young, the man on the stretcher, lay down again. , # . J

“I got a splinter full pet across the back,” he said. “And I lost my spectacles.” “Knocked off iv ye?” queried Eamon. ‘‘They were taken off from me,” said Sam Young. Twas when I was lyin’ wounded.” Be one of the Jerrys?” asked Eamon. The spectacles were taken off me by one o’ our own men, be an officer and that officer was the padre, the Catholic priest.” Sam Young, an Orangeman, kept quiet for a minute, as if waiting for the disclosure to sink into the mind of Eamon, a staunch Catholic who happened to belong to the same battalion as Young. It s not a thing that I’d believe iv father,” said Eamon. “It goes against the grain in me to believe ye, Sam, but maybe it’s your mind that is wanderin’. But to think that that would be done by the priest, and him one of the first to get his feet over the bags when the whistle was blown, for, as he said to the colonel, his job was not so much with the men who were carried in as it was with the men who were lyin’ out. But to take your spectacles, Sam Young. Oh —no, he wouldn’t descend to that.” A third man spoke. He had a hole as big as a fist in his shoulder and the doctor was dressing it. He was lying face down on the rude dressing table - and his remarks were punctuated by groans. I m not holdin’ to the same belief as' father,” said the man. “But fox' all jffxat, I’m not going to hear him run down. Ugh —. He found me lyin’ alone on the lip iv a shell hole and he helped me in till the shelter and gives me a drink iv water. And the bullets were skelpin’ the ground all rouxx’ him, but he didn’t seem to care a hilt or hair about them. He is a fine man, one iv the best. But to the church I’d follow him anywhere else.” t( “So would 1,” said Sam Young, sitting up again. ‘‘But all the same he took my spectacles from me. And this was the way iv it. I got hit and I was lyin’ down on the ground lookin'’ up at the sky and feelin’ sorry as anything fer myself. All at once I heard a voice behind my head and who was it but the padre. “ ‘My poor boy, ye’ve got hit,’ he says till me. “ ‘I have, father,’ says I. And ye haven’t much shelter there,’ says he. ‘That I haven’t, father,’ I says. “Then he comes up and drags '’me into the shellhole. Just at that moment a shell bursts very near and sends the dirt iv the field (lyin’ all over his face. ‘Ye’re not hit, father,’ says I, and as I spoke he rubs his hand over his face and the spectacles he was wearing comes off in his hand and he looks at them. ‘They’re broken,’ says he, ‘and without them I can’t see me fingers in front iv me.’ “ ‘But ye’re Weedin' as well,’ says I, fer the blood was rminin’ down his face.

“ ‘Ah, that’s nothin’,’ says he. ‘But my spectacles,’ he goes on. ‘l’m as helpless as a blind man xxow.’

“ ‘Try mine,’ says I, and he tried them on. They re all right, he says, lookin’ at me through

them. ‘Ye’re not. needin’ ’em much now,’ he says, ‘and if ye give them to me, I’ll get you a new pair when we get in., I’d give ye the price iv them if it wasn’t—— ' '

“Then he stops and I remembered that he gave all his money to the boys last night afore they came up to the trenches.

“ ‘Don’t trouble at all about them,’ I says, ‘if my specs is all that I lose in this scrap it doesn’t matter much.’

“Then he goes away and leaves me and after a while the stretcher-bearers come along and set about takin’ me in. But he took the spectacles all the same,’’ said Sam Young. . At that moment a wounded man came in, with

a bandage around his forehead. He sat down on chair near the door.

“The poor padre,” he said. “Not dead?” exclaimed Sam Young, sitting up

and lookin’ at the newcomer.

“Dead. God rest him,” said the newcomer. “It was him that put this bandage on my head and as he turned to go away to attend a young fellow next to me he got hit. I was goin’ to say a prayer for him, when I thought that is a man that’s not in need iv prayers, so I prayed to him to look down on me and help us. For I know that he’s watchin’ us still.”