With my own men there is never any difficulty of that kind. I never hear confessions in a church, but always in the public square of a village, with the bustle of army life and traffic going on around us. There is always a line of fifty or sixty soldiers, continuously renewed throughout the afternoon, until I have heard perhaps as many as five hundred confessions in the battalion. The operation always arouses the curiosity of the French people. They see the line of soldiers with man after man stepping forward, doffing his cap with his left hand, and making a rapid sign of the cross with his right, and standing for a brief period within the compass of my right arm, and then stepping forward and standing in the square in meditative posture while he says his penance. “What are those soldiers doing?” I can see them whispering. “They are making the Sign of the Cross. Mon Dieu! they are confessing themselves.” Non-Catholics also frequently fall into line, not of course to make their confession, but to get a private word of religious comfort and to share in the happiness they see in the faces of the others. Officers who are not Catholics are always anxious to provide opportunities for their men to go to confession; not only through anxiety to help them practice their religion, but also for its distinct military value. Captain Merle-Smith told me that when I was hearing confessions before we took over our first trenches he heard different of his men saying to his first sergeant, Eugene Gannon, “You can put my name down for any kind of a job out there. I’m all cleaned up and I don’t give a damn what happens now.” That is the only spirit to have going into battle—to be without any worries for body or soul. If battles are to be won, men have to be killed; and they must be ready, even willing, to be killed for the cause and the country they are fighting for. While we were still in Lunéville the regiment attended Mass in a body and I said to them, “Much as I love you all I would rather that you and I myself, that all of us should sleep our last sleep under the soil of France than that the historic colors of this Old Regiment, the banner of our republic, should be soiled by irresolution or disgraced by panic.” The religion of the Irish has characteristics of its own—they make the Sign of the Cross with the right hand, while holding the left ready to give a jab to anybody who needs it for his own or the general good. I cannot say that it is an ideally perfect type of Christianity; but considering the sort of world we have to live in yet, it as near as we can come at present to perfection for the generality of men. It was into the mouth of an Irish soldier that Kipling put the motto, “Help a woman, and hit a man; and you won’t go far wrong either way.” BACCARAT _May_, 1918