Part 3

“The Officers, from Captain up,” he writes, “have horses; but I prefer to shoulder my pack and foot it with my boys, for I know they like it, and besides I don’t see why I should not share a little of their hardship.”

Incidentally, we learn that he had been carrying a young lad’s equipment in addition to his own, all day without dinner or supper. It is clear that the saints are incorrigibly “imprudent.”

The men of the 16th Division were under the impression that, after having done so much more than their share, they were making their way steadily towards the place appointed for their well-deserved rest. As a matter of fact, many of these brave fellows were never to enjoy that promised time of quiet on this earth, for their road was leading them to the battlefield of the Somme.

A few months later Father Doyle recounts “two stories about our Irish lads at the Somme, which prove once again there are no soldiers in the world like them. They have all the dash and go of the hot-blooded Celtic race, the courage of lions, and that strong deep faith that makes them see the hand of God in everything, even their own death. During the bombardment of Ginchy—the most intense artillery preparation, it is said, of the whole war—one Paddy was seen sitting calmly in a shell-hole, smoking his pipe and sewing a button on his trousers, regardless of the fact that bullets and shells were falling like hail all round him! Another lad was half-way through a tin of bully beef, when the order came to ‘go over the top’ and take the town. As he charged up the slope of that awful inferno—I saw it, and even now cannot understand how anyone got through alive—he wired into that beef till the last scrap was gone, then flung away the tin, unslung his rifle and bayonet, and made for Berlin in track of the fleeing Germans. They are just grand, these brave boys of mine; it would be hard indeed not to love them. One of them told me yesterday in great confidence that he was not sixteen yet and he has already been through a year of hard fighting. No wonder the angry German officer called the 16th Division ‘a pack of devils.’”

Father Doyle declared, “The 16th Division, weak in numbers as it was, has covered itself with glory. Our boys fought as only Irish lads can do. They took, by a splendid dashing charge, two villages that had beaten off all previous attacks, thus making an opening for the big things that are sure to follow now. The price was a heavy one, and I am left to mourn the loss of scores of my poor boys and many a good friend, with just this consolation: I know my presence was a help and a comfort. Every man was well prepared to meet his Maker when he fell.”

The religious spirit of his men is shown by the pride and devotion with which they received a beautiful handmade flag, sent by a nun to Father Doyle, which arrived the very night they left for the Somme front.

“On one side,” writes Father Doyle, “is a large picture of the Sacred Heart and on the other the name of the brigade and regiment, with O’Neill’s war-cry, ‘Ave Maria.’ The men are immensely proud of it, and feel it is a sign of the protection of God and of His Blessed Mother, for of all the twelve Irish regiments in action at the Somme, the 8th Fusiliers had by far the smallest casualties.”

This letter had been written from Bray, near Albert, on the river Somme, where there was a huge concentration of French and British forces. Each morning Father Doyle said Mass in the open and gave Holy Communion to hundreds of the men.

“I wish you could have seen them,” he writes, “kneeling there before the whole camp, recollected and prayerful—a grand profession, surely, of the faith that is in them. More than one non-Catholic was touched by it; and it made many a one, I am sure, turn to God in the hour of need.”

On the evening of Sunday, 3 September, just as they were sitting down to dinner, spread on a pile of empty shell boxes, urgent orders reached the 16th Division to march in ten minutes.

“There was only time,” says Father Doyle, “to grab a slice of bread and hack off a piece of meat before rushing to get one’s kit. As luck would have it, I had had nothing to eat since the morning and was famished, but there was nothing for it but to tighten one’s belt and look happy.”

There are occasions when even the world can appreciate Jesuit obedience! After a couple of hours’ tramp, a halt was called, and an order came to stack all impediments (kits, packs, blankets, etc.) by the side of the road. Father Doyle, it is almost needless to say, held on to his Mass things, though to his great sorrow, he was unable to offer the Holy Sacrifice for five days—“the biggest privation of the whole campaign.”

The night was spent sitting on the ground without covering or blankets. The next morning there was a short march over the brow of a hill and down into a valley still nearer to the front line. It was a great change from the trench life of the past six months. At Loos, one never saw a soul on the ground for days and all guns were carefully hidden. Here, scores and hundreds of cannon of all shapes and sizes stood out boldly in the fields and “roared as if they had swallowed a dish of uncooked shells.” Amid this infernal din and never-ending roar and crash of bursting shells,

men and horses moved about as if there were no war. In this valley of death, Father Doyle’s men had their first casualties, and he himself had a very narrow escape, which is best described, in his own words.

“I was standing about 100 yards away watching a party of my men crossing the valley. I saw the earth under their feet open, and all twenty men disappear in a cloud of smoke while a column of stones and clay was shot a couple of hundred feet into the air. By the merest chance, a big German shell had landed in the middle of the party. I rushed down the slope, getting a most unmerciful ‘whack’ between the shoulders, probably from a falling stone, as it did not wound me, but it was no time to think of one’s safety. I gave them all a General Absolution, scraped the clay from the faces of a couple of buried men who were not wounded, and then anointed as many of the poor lads as I could reach. Two of them had no faces to anoint and others were ten feet under the clay, but a few were still living. By this time, half a dozen volunteers had run up, and were digging the buried men out. War may be horrible, but it certainly brings out the best side of a man’s character. Over and over again, I have seen men risking their lives to help or save a comrade, and these brave fellows knew the risk they were taking, for, when a German shell falls in a certain place, you clear as quickly as you can, since several more are pretty certain to land close. It was a case of duty for me, but real courage for them. We dug like demons for our lads’ lives and our own. To tell the truth, every few minutes another ‘iron pill’ from a Krupp gun would come tearing down the valley, making our very hearts leap into our mouths. More than once we were well sprinkled with clay and stone, but the cup-of-cold-water promise was well kept, and not one of the party received a scratch. We got three buried men out alive, not much the worse for their trying experience. Yet, so thoroughly had the shell done its work that there was not a single wounded man in the rest of the party—all had gone to a better land. As I walked back, I nearly shared the fate of my boys, but somehow escaped again and pulled out two more lads who were buried only up to the waist and uninjured. Meanwhile the regiment had been ordered back to a safer position on the hill, and we are able to breathe once more.”

The men’s resting-place that night consisted of some open shell-holes.

“To make matters worse,” writes Father Doyle, “we were posted fifteen yards in front of two batteries of field-guns. On our right a little further off were half a dozen huge sixty-pounders; not once during the whole night did these guns cease firing, making the ground tremble and rock like a small earthquake, till I thought my head would surely crack in two with the ear-splitting crashes. Shells, as one soon learns, have an unpleasant trick of bursting prematurely as they leave the muzzle of the gun. In the next shell-hole lay the body of one of our men who had been killed in this way. The prospect of a night spent in this dangerous position was not a pleasant one. A soldier has to go and stay where he is sent; but to move would have made little difference, for, dodge as you might, you could never get out of the line of fire of the innumerable batteries all round. Many a time have I seen the earth open in front and around me, ploughed up by bits of our own shells, which helped to make things more lively still.”

“Rain was falling in torrents as we prepared to go to bed in our shell-hole. Seated on a bog in the bottom of the hole for protection against our guns, huddled together for warmth, our feet in a pool, we watched the water trickle down the sides, and wondered how long it would take to wash us out. I have spent many more pleasant nights in my life, but never a more uncomfortable one—drenched by the falling rain that persisted in running down my neck, ravenous enough to eat a live German, and so tired and weary that the roar of the guns failed to keep me awake. I could not help thinking of Him who often had nowhere to lay His head, and it helped me to resemble Him a little. Providence was good to us for, after some time, a tarpaulin was found—stolen, I am afraid—that we stretched over our cave. So, we bailed out the water, and settled down for a night of ‘Shivery O.’ Strange to say, I am not one bit the worse for this trying experience and others like it, nor did I even get a cold.”

At last came the expected order to advance at once and hold the front line, the part assigned being Leuze Wood, the scene of much desperate fighting. Father Doyle is left to describe the journey and the scene.

“The first part of our journey lay through a narrow trench, the floor of which consisted of deep thick mud, and the bodies of dead men trodden under foot. It was horrible beyond description, but there was no help for it and, on the half-rotten corpses of our own brave men, we marched in silence, everyone busy with his own thoughts. I shall spare you the gruesome details, but you can picture one’s sensations as one felt the ground yield under one’s foot, and one sank down through the body of some poor fellow.”

“Half an hour of this brought us out on the open into the middle of the battlefield of some days previous. The wounded, at least I hope, had all been removed, but the dead lay there stiff and stark, with open staring eyes, just as they had fallen. Good God, such a sight! I had tried to prepare myself for this, but all I had read or pictured gave me little idea of the reality. Some lay as if they were sleeping quietly, others had died in agony, or had had the life crushed out of them by mortal fear, while the whole ground, every foot of it, was littered with heads or limbs, or pieces of torn human bodies. A British and a German soldier laid in the bottom of one hole, locked in a deadly embrace. Neither had any weapon, but they had fought on to the bitter end. Two others seemed to have realized that the horrible struggle was none of their making, and that they were both children of the same God. They had died hand-in-hand praying for and forgiving one another. A third face caught my eye, a tall, strikingly handsome young German, not more, I should say, than eighteen. He lay there calm and peaceful, with a smile of happiness on his face, as if he had had a glimpse of Heaven before he died. Ah, if only his poor mother could have seen her boy, it would have soothed the pain of her broken heart.”

“We pushed on rapidly through that charnel-house, for the stench was fearful, till we stumbled across a sunken road. The retreating Germans had evidently made a desperate last stand here but had been caught by our artillery fire. The dead lay in piles, the blue-grey uniforms broken by many a khaki-clad body. I saw the ruins of what was evidently the dressing-station, judging by the number of bandaged men, but a shell had found them out even here, and swept them all into the net of death.”

“A halt for a few minutes gave me the opportunity I was waiting for. I hurried along from group to group and, as I did, the men fell on their knees to receive Absolution. I offered a few words to give them courage, for no man knew if he would return alive. A ‘God bless and protect you, boys,’ and I passed on to the next company. As I did, a soldier stepped out of the ranks, caught me by the hand, and said, ‘I am not a Catholic, sir, but I want to thank you for that beautiful prayer.’ The regiments moved on to the wood, while the doctor and I took up our positions in the dressing-station to wait for the wounded. Our dressing-station dugout was on the hill facing Leuze Wood, and had been in German occupation the previous afternoon.”

“To give you an idea of my position: from where I stood, the ground sloped down steeply into a narrow valley, while on the opposite hill lay the wood, half of which the Fusiliers were holding with the Germans occupying the rest. The distance across was so short I could easily follow the movements of our men without a glass.”

“Fighting was going on all round, so I was kept busy, but all the time my thoughts and my heart were with my poor boys in the wood opposite. They had reached the wood safely, but the Germans somehow had worked round the sides and temporarily cut them off. No food or water could be sent up, while ten slightly-wounded men who tried to come back were shot down, one after another. To make matters worse, our own artillery began to shell them, inflicting heavy losses. Though repeated messages were sent back to the artillery, the shelling continued for a long time. It appears the guns had fired so much that they were becoming worn out, making the shells fall 300 yards short.”

“Under these circumstances it would be madness to try and reach the wood, but my heart bled for the wounded and dying lying there alone. When dusk came, I made up my mind to try to creep through the valley, especially as the fire had slackened very much. Once again, the Providence of God watched over me. As I was setting out, I met a sergeant who argued the point with me. ‘You will only run a great risk and can do little good down there in the wood, Father,’ he said. ‘Wait till night comes and then we shall be able to bring all the wounded up here. Don’t forget that, though we have plenty of officers to spare, we have only one priest to look after us.’ The poor fellow was so much in earnest I decided to wait a little at least. It was well I did so, for shortly afterwards the Germans opened a terrific bombardment and launched a counter-attack on the wood.”

Unfortunately, Father Doyle gives no further details of his experiences except a brief account of Saturday, 9 September, in a letter dated 11 October, he described a Mass for the Dead that he celebrated at the Somme, apparently on that Saturday morning.

“By cutting a piece out of the side of the trench,” he says, “I was just able to stand in front of my tiny altar, a biscuit box supported on two German bayonets. God’s angels, no doubt, were hovering overhead, but so were the shells, hundreds of them, and I was a little afraid that when the earth shook with the crash of the guns, the chalice might be overturned. Round about me on every side was the biggest congregation I ever had. Behind the altar, on either side, and in front, row after row, sometimes crowding one upon the other, but all quiet and silent, as if they were straining their ears to catch every syllable of that tremendous act of Sacrifice; but every man was dead! Some had lain there for a week, and were foul and horrible to look at, with faces black and green. Others had only just fallen, and seemed rather sleeping than dead, but there they lay, for none had time to bury them, brave fellows every one, friend and foe alike, while I held in my unworthy hands the God of Battles, their Creator and their Judge, and prayed Him to give rest to their souls.”

It was arranged that, on 9 September, the 16th Division should storm Ginchy, a strong village against which previous English attacks had failed. The 8th Fusiliers, having lost so many officers, were held in reserve. From seven in the morning till five in the evening the guns played on Ginchy.

“Shortly before five,” writes Father Doyle, “I went up to the hill in front of the town and was just in time to see our men leap from their trenches and dart up the slope, only to be met by a storm of bullets from concealed machine guns. It was my first real view of a battle at close quarters, an experience not easily forgotten. Almost simultaneously all our guns, big and little, opened a terrific barrage behind the village, to prevent the enemy bringing up reinforcements, and in half a minute the scene was hidden by the smoke of thousands of bursting shells, British and German. The wild rush of our Irish lads swept the Germans away like chaff. The first line of them went clean through the village and out the other side. Were it not for the officers, acting under orders, they would certainly be in Berlin by this time! Meanwhile the supports had cleared the cellars and dugouts of their defenders. The town was ours and all was well. At the same time, a feeling of uneasiness was about. Rumor said some other part of the line had failed to advance, the Germans were breaking through, etc. One thing was certain, the guns had not ceased. Something was not going well.”

At about nine o’clock the Fusiliers were getting ready to be relieved by another regiment, but one further experience was to be theirs. There came an urgent order to hurry up to the Front.

“To my dying day,” says Father Doyle, “I shall never forget that half-hour, as we pushed across the open, our only light the flash of bursting shells, tripping over barbed wire, stumbling and walking on the dead, expecting every moment to be blown into Eternity. We were halted in a trench at the rear of the village, and there till four in the morning we lay on the ground listening to the roar of the guns and the scream of the shells flying overhead, not knowing if the next moment might not be our last. Fortunately, we were not called upon to attack and our casualties were very slight. Probably because the terrible strain of the past week was beginning to tell or the Lord wished to give me a little merit by suffering more, the agony, fear, and suspense of those six hours seemed to surpass the whole of the seven days.”

“We were relieved on 10 September at four o’clock Sunday morning and crawled back (I can use no other word) to the camp in the rear. My feet, perhaps, are the most painful of all, as we are not allowed to remove our boots even at night. Otherwise, I am really well, thank God, and a few days’ good rest will make me better than ever. At present we march one day and rest the next, but I do not know where.”

The opening sentences of the letter that Father Doyle wrote to his father on 11 September 1916 sufficiently indicate the terrible nature of the ordeal he and his boys had been through.

“I have been through the most terrible experience of my whole life, in comparison with which all that I have witnessed or suffered since my arrival in France seems of little consequence. It was a time of such awful horror that I believe if the good God had not helped me powerfully by His grace, I could never have endured it. To sum up, for the past week, I have been living literally in hell, amid sights and scenes and dangers enough to test the courage of the bravest. Through it all, my confidence and trust in our Blessed Lord’s protection never wavered, for I felt that somehow, even if it needed a miracle, He would bring me safe through the furnace of tribulation. I was hit three times, on the last occasion by a piece of shell big enough to have taken off half my leg. Wonderful to relate, I did not receive a wound or scratch—there is some advantage, you see, in having a good thick skin! As you can imagine, I am pretty well worn out and exhausted, rather shaken by the terrific strain of those days and nights without any real sleep or repose, with nerves tingling, ever on the jump, like the rest of us, but it is all over now. We are well behind the firing-line on our way at last for a good long rest, which report says will be enjoyed close to the sea.”

On 23 September, Father Doyle wrote to his father, “Life in the army is a life of delightful and unexpected surprises. You are told that you are going to some large town. At once visions of comfortable quarters, with perhaps the luxury of a real bed, loom up before you. You reach the town, only to find that you do not stay there, but have to tramp out into the open country and fight for a corner in some ancient barn. You hear that this journey is to be done by rail, but nothing is said about a ten-mile march before and after reaching the stations. While the crowning joy of all is to count on a month’s rest and then find yourself back in the trenches within a week. All these pleasant surprises have been mine recently.”

“We had a few very pleasant restful days in the place from which I last wrote, a delightful spot on the banks of a wooded river. Since then, we have been on the move by rail, motor lorries, and ‘shanks mare,’ till we found ourselves in Normandy, where the boys had the time of their lives among the apple orchards. On once more, over the frontier and into a country not unknown to both of us. There, we have settled down to work again, but in almost the quietest part of the line, a striking contrast to our stirring times at Loos.”

Thus, once more, the men of the 16th Division were defrauded of their month’s rest so long overdue. They were thankful to have at least a quiet section of the line in Belgium.

“If Loos was hell,” says Father Doyle, “this place is heaven. To begin with, there is scarcely any shelling even on the front line, with the result that for days we have not a single casualty. Then, the country is extremely pretty, well wooded, and undulating so, even close up to the firing line, one can walk about in the fields with perfect safety. This sense of security and freedom, with green hedges and trees all round, makes life quite a different thing. At Loos, and more so at the Somme, scarce a vestige of vegetation remains. Long ago, every leaf and twig was torn from the trees by the rush of the passing shells, the wind of which would carry you off your feet. What once were woods are now a few gaunt naked poles still standing in the midst of smashed boughs and splintered trees, while the smoke and poisonous vapors from millions of shells have killed and blasted the grass and shrubs, the result being a vast arid plain of desolation. You can therefore imagine our relief to find ourselves walking through green fields and along hedgerows covered with blackberries, trying to persuade ourselves that a war is really going on, and that the enemy is just beyond the neighboring hill.”

“On Sundays,” he continues, “I am able to gather a good number of the men together for Mass, under cover of the trees, as there is danger otherwise of a bomb or two from a passing enemy aeroplane. I need not tell you what a pleasure it is for them.”

Here, in this relatively quiet corner of Belgium, Father Doyle went through the ordinary chaplain’s work until early in November when he was able to come home on a week’s leave of absence.

Some quotations from letters written at this time to a few intimate friends and relatives will help to give us a glimpse of that inner life that was naturally not revealed in the letters he wrote home and destined for private circulation among a circle of acquaintances.

“I am getting to feel that God does not want the sacrifice of my life and that I shall return safely to do His work. Some time ago, I was feeling very depressed because that sacrifice was greater than even you know, when my eyes fell on these words:

‘The essence of the act of sacrifice did not consist in the slaying of the victim but in its offering.’

That seemed to make me realize that God was satisfied with my willingness to die and that He had granted me my heart’s desire to be a martyr, because the mere act of dying would add little to the crown of suffering I have gone through. At the same time I feel, oh! with what joy, since it is for Him, that I have still very much to face and that I shall have the happiness of being wounded and shedding my blood for Jesus. I try to crush down the longing and to wish only what He wishes. One more word about self. You have guessed my little secret concerning decorations. I have asked God that I may not receive any. For my dear father’s sake, and the pleasure it would give my loved ones at home, it would be great happiness to hear I had been honored. But, I have made the sacrifice of this to God. Thus, though my name has again gone to Headquarters, nothing has come of it.”

Father Doyle’s interests and happiness lay elsewhere.

“They have given me the M.C.,” he said, “but His crosses are far more welcome….”

On 7 November, he wrote, “I wonder is there a happier man in France than I. Just now Jesus is giving me great joy in tribulation, though conditions of living are about as uncomfortable as even Saint Teresa could wish—perpetual rain, oceans of mud, damp, cold, and a plague of rats. Yet I feel that all this is a preparation for the future and God is laboring in my soul for ends I do not clearly see as yet. Sometimes, I kneel down with outstretched arms and pray that God, if it is a part of His divine plan, to rain down fresh privations and sufferings.”

Then, he adds with a characteristic touch of whimsical humor, “I stopped when the mud wall of my little hut fell in upon me—that was too much of a good joke!”

The idea that his hard experience was preparatory to some great consummation reappears in the following interesting letter he addressed to his sister on 19 December.

“I want to have a little chat with you,” he begins. “But you must promise to keep to yourself what I write to you. Did I ever tell you that my present life was just the one I dreaded most, being from a natural point of view repugnant to me in every way? So, when our Blessed Lord sent me to the Front, I felt ‘angry’ with Him for taking me away from a sphere of work where at least the possibilities of doing good were so enormous and giving me a task others could perform much better. It was only after a time that I began to understand that ‘God’s ways are not our ways, nor His thoughts our thoughts.’ The meaning of it all began to dawn on me. In the first place, my life, especially here in the trenches, has become a real hermit’s one, cave and all, a mixture of solitude with a touch of the hardships of a foreign mission. The result has been that God has come into my life in a way He never did before. He has put strange thoughts into my head and given me many lights that I feel have changed my whole outlook upon life. Then I feel, oh, so strongly, that I am going through a kind of noviceship, a sort of spiritual training, for some big work He wants me to do in the future. I feel every day as if spiritual strength and power were growing in my soul. This thought of being trained or fitted for God’s work (if I may use the comparison with all reverence) like Saint John the Baptist, has filled me with extraordinary joy and made me delight in a life that could not be much harder.”

“Here I am in a bit of a hole in the side of a ditch, so low that I cannot stand upright and have to bend my head and shoulders during Mass—I can tell you my back aches at the end. My only window is the door (without a door) through which the wind blows day and night; and a cold wind it is just now. I was offered a little stove but my ‘Novice Master’ did not want that luxury, for it never came. My home would be fairly dry if I could keep out the damp mists and persuade the drops of water not to trickle from the roof. As a rule, I sleep well, though one is often roused to attend some poor fellow who has been hit. Still it is rather reversing the order of things to be glad to get up in the morning and try to get warm. It is certainly not pleasant to be wakened from sweet dreams by a huge rat burrowing under your pillow or scampering over your face! This has actually happened to me. There is no great luxury in the matter of food, as you may well guess. Recently, owing to someone’s carelessness, or possibly because the bag was made to pay toll on the way up to the trenches, my day’s rations consisted of a half of a pot of jam and a piece of cheese!

“Through all this and much in addition, the one thought ever in my mind is the goodness and love of God in choosing me to lead this life and thus preparing me without a chance of refusal for the work He wants done. No amount of reading or meditating could have proved to me so convincingly that a life of privation, suffering, and sacrifice, accepted lovingly for the love of Jesus, is a life of great joy and surely of great graces. You see, therefore, that I have reasons in abundance for being happy and I am truly so. Hence, you ought to be glad that I have been counted worthy to suffer something for our dear Lord, the better to be prepared to do His work. Ask Him, won’t you, that I may not lose this golden opportunity, but may profit to the full by the graces He is giving me. Every loving wish from my heart for a holy and happy Christmas. Let our gift to the divine Babe be the absolute sacrifice of even our desires, so His Will alone may be done.”

One final quotation will be given from an intimate Christmas letter, so while we are following Father Doyle’s very heroic and, from a safe distance, picturesque outward career, we may not misread the real man within, so hidden and unsuspected and, to most men, so unintelligible.

“I certainly did not think this time twelve months (he writes) that my next Christmas greetings to you would be from a military camp. I cannot help wondering where my good wishes will reach you from when another year has passed. God has given me one grace at least since I came here. I feel absolutely in His hands and joyous in the thought that no matter what happens it will be all for His greater glory. Though Christmas Day was miserably wet, the Divine Babe filled my heart with joy at the thought that my life now was a little bit at least more like to His. I am learning better every day that there is no life of happiness like one full of ‘hard things’ that are borne for love of God. For some time past I have felt, I know not why, an intense longing for holiness at any price.”

“In some ways, I have found life out here much easier than I expected and, in other respects, a good deal more trying. Still, if I only get a little bit of holiness out of it all, will it not be well worth it all? Jesus knows I have only one wish in this world—to love Him and Him alone—for the rest He has carte blanche to do as He pleases in my regard. I just leave myself in His loving Hands and, thus, have no anxiety or care, but great peace of soul. I am off now for a fortnight’s spell in the trenches, and if it is not to be Saint Teresa’s mori, it will at least be pati.”

Early in December 1916, Father Doyle was changed from the Irish Fusiliers to the 8th Dublins. Accordingly, he was henceforth attached to the 48th Brigade, which was also part of the 18th Division. He was naturally sorry to part with his men, some of whom cried when told he was leaving. But, he was once more among Irishmen and quite close to his old Battalion in the line. Father Doyle was not far from the convent of Locre where he had a comfortable week’s billet when his six days spell in the trenches was done. His dugout merits a passing notice. Father Doyle gives a humorous description.

“Picture a good respectable deep Irish ditch with plenty of water and mud in the bottom; scrape a fair-sized hole in the bank, cover the top with some sheets of iron, pile sandbags on top; and you have my dwelling. The door serves also as window and lets in not only light and air, but stray cats, rats galore, and many creepy crawly beasties, not to mention rain, snow, and at times a breeze that must have been hatched at the North Pole.”

“Close beside us,” writes Father Doyle on 21 December 1916, “we have installed a Flying Pig and the Germans are searching for his sty. A Flying Pig, let me explain, is the pet name for a huge trench-mortar shell weighing 250 lbs. The first one we sent over landed near two big trees, which were lifted out of the ground, root and branch, and pitched yards away. Fritz does not like the Pig and is thirsting for his blood.”

“Again the Germans were almost silent. Then about one o’clock, just as our artillery had ceased, they gave it back to us. For two hours and a quarter, they pasted us with shells, till I thought not a man would be left alive to tell the tale. Words could never convey the pent-up agony—it is the only word to use—of those two hours; waiting, waiting, waiting, always waiting for something to happen, without being able to fire even a bullet in return. I do not think the feelings of a condemned man on the scaffold, waiting for the bolt to be drawn, could be much worse. You know your chances of being hit are relatively small, but there is always the chance that you may; and as shell followed shell in quick succession, sometimes two or three together, even the bravest seemed to shrink up as if they were struck and faces grew long and drawn.”

“For the moment there was nothing to be done, so I went on with my Office. Yet, all the time I was torn with anxiety for the safety of my poor boys. It seemed to drive all anxiety and fear for my own safety out of my head. Even when one shell burst very near, and the smoke and fumes drifted in through the door of my ‘castle,’ nearly smothering me, my chief thought was for them and my prayers were for their safety. The prophet of old never called on the good God more earnestly than I did then—Spare, O God, spare Thy people—for humanly speaking the casualties were bound to be heavy, as the whole German fire was concentrated on this one spot, evidently with the object of knocking out, as I earlier said, the Bloody Pig.”

“At last I could stand it no longer; I felt I must go round and see what damage had been done, though I knew I should be called if I were really wanted. The fire had slackened considerably, not more than four or five shells coming over each minute. So out I went and started down the trench. I had only taken six paces when I heard the scream of a shell coming right for me.

“Every shell has a special note. You hear some and do not even look up, for you know by the sound that they are safe overhead and will burst far away. A second makes you a wee bit anxious for a moment, till you locate its direction and know, all is well, for you at least. But there is a third kind of note and when you hear it, you don’t even stop to think but dive straight for the first rat-hole or gooseberry bush, anything no matter what, that might give cover. Failing that, you dig your nose as deep as you can into the ground and try to feel small. Here the value of practical experience comes in, and many an old campaigner will save himself where a novice would come to serious harm.”

“I flung myself on my face, and as I did, the ground took a jump and the sky came tumbling down from the crash that followed. I heard myself exclaiming, ‘Good Lord, I’m killed,’ which was so obviously untrue that I burst out laughing. There is some consolation in the thought that, if you do get hit or buried by a kindly crump, you hear nothing about it till someone pulls you out by the legs. So, the fact that I heard the crash told me I was safe. I looked up and saw that my unwelcome visitor had

fallen two feet from my own door. Had I been five seconds later, I probably would have been converted into a beautiful specimen of a cabbage strainer and at last made really hol(e)y.”

“I did not go back to see how much of my crockery was left, but sped on, thanking some good soul for his prayers. A few yards further on, a substantial sod of earth—weighing, it seemed to me, a ton and a half, though it was probably less—nearly knocked all the breath out of my body. But that was a trifle, seeing it might have been a similar lump of Rhineland iron. I found three of my boys, who had been sheltering together, wounded—two of them slightly and the third, rather badly. The third was only a lad and was moaning in great pain. When I had anointed him, I put my arms round the poor boy. He could not lie down, being hit in the back in several places. He rested his head on my breast like a little child.”

“It seemed to ease the pain, for he ceased moaning and, possibly, he felt safer, for the shells were still bursting around us and he was trembling with fear. We then got him under cover of the dressing-station and I was able to inquire about the rest. Marvelous to relate, not another man had been hit, nor was there a single other casualty at the end of the bombardment, though hundreds of shells had rained down on all sides of us, in fact lead and iron enough to have put half the British army out of action, if only they stood in the right place.”

“One good result came from this attack,” Father Doyle observes with satisfaction, “the Pig, the cause of all our trouble, was removed the next day. Since then, we have been left in peace.”

Father F. M. Browns, S. J., met Father Doyle in Father Doyle’s dugout on the evening of 23 December 1916, when he came up with the 2nd and 9th Dublins who were relieving the 8th Dublins and R. I. Rifles.

“During our whole time there,” writes Father Browne, “we relieved each other in this way every eight days. I remember how decent Father Willie used to be on the relief days, coming up early before his Battalion came up, that I might get away. He knew how I hated it—and I did not hate it half as much as he did. We used generally to confess each other before leaving. We were very exact about waiting for each other, so I do not think the (48th) Brigade was ever without a priest in the line.”

The invulnerability of this dugout became famous. The men used to say, “Little Father Doyle’s dugout can’t be hit!” (The adjective denoted endearment rather than stature—Father Doyle was nearly six feet in height.) Whenever there was heavy firing, cooks and other non-combatants used to crowd into it. Once when Father

Doyle hurriedly returned to get something he had forgotten, he found twelve men squeezed into the little dugout that was hardly big enough to contain four!

Though this interval at the Front was comparatively quiet, it was not altogether devoid of incidents.

“I had just finished breakfast,” notes Father Doyle on 21 December, “when I heard Miss Krupp come singing overhead with that peculiar note that warns you of her proximity. I ran to the door—the running consisted of one step—and saw the explosion at the bottom of the little hill about two hundred yards away. A moment later another scream, and the earth is flying sky-high, this time fifty yards nearer. I waited anxiously for the next shot. Again, the range was shorter, the third shell bursting half the distance from the first. Then I realized that at this rate of progression I should soon have an unwelcome visitor landing at my very door, for my dugout was in the direct line of fire. There was no time to adopt the Dublin lad’s advice when faced with a difficulty, and ‘send for the polis’ nor was there any use trying to get out of the way, for, as likely as not, another shell would land in the trench itself, while my dugout afforded some protection. I knew there was nothing to fear while His powerful protection was over me, as it has never failed me yet. But I confess I shook with fear as another shell came crashing down and the stones and clay rattled in a shower outside and on the roof.”

“It is a curious thing,” he observes, “that I have never had a moment’s hesitation nor ever felt fear in going into the greatest danger when duty called and some poor chap needed help. Yet, to sit in cold blood, so to speak, and to wait to be blown to pieces or buried by a crump is an experience that tests one’s nerves to the limit. Thank God, I have been able to conceal my feelings and help others to despise the danger, when I was just longing to take to my heels. An officer said to me at the Somme, ‘I have often envied you your coolness and cheerfulness in hot corners.’ I rather surprised him by saying that my real feeling was abject fear and I often shook like a leaf.”

That same afternoon another big shell came down close to where he was sitting at his lunch. “Three of my lads,” he recounts, “came tearing in to my dugout. They had nearly been sent to glory and felt they were safe with the priest. The poor priest cracks a joke or two, makes them forget their terror, and goes on with his lunch while every morsel sticks in his throat from fear and dread of the next shell. A moment passes, one, two, here it comes; dead silence and anxious faces for a second, and then we all laugh, for it is one of our own shells going over. Five minutes more and we know all danger has passed. It has been a memorable day for me, though only one of many such in the past.”