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10 “Most Pitiful and Unsightly Bunch of Men I Have Ever Seen” 123 F ather Francis Duffy wanted to make sure that the men got off on the right foot in the new year by closing out 1917 well. To this end, he held midnight mass on Christmas. “If there is one day in all the year that wanderers from home cannot afford to forget it is Christmas,” he entered in his diary on 25 December. The chaplain knew he had to give his “parish,” as he called the men of the regiment, a “religious celebration that they would remember for many a year.”1 In a letter to John Cardinal Farley, Duffy informed him that he planned a midnight mass in an old, old church that had seen better days. He promised the cardinal that it would be a great celebration. He had already held a mass in that church, he told him, and it had been “so full that a cat could go from door to altar from head to head without touching the floor. You may imagine the joy of the curés. And after pay-day the collection—ah! How good, how generous your Irish soldiers.”2 Although the church in Grand was small, Duffy felt most of the regiment could squeeze into it. “I knew that confessions and communions would be literally by the thousands,” he wrote. The church was seven hundred years old with a watchtower made of stone seven-feet thick, an impressive edifice. With the assistance of Joyce Kilmer and Pvt. Frank Driscoll, an ex-Jesuit novice from Duffy’s parish in the Bronx, Duffy placed the regimental colors in the chancel, flanked by the French tricolor. He called on the regimental band to provide the right music and added several French violinists to the mix. Knowing he could not handle confessions and communion for so many soldiers by himself, he enlisted the aid of the church’s curate and another priest, as well as a chaplain from an 124 DUFFY’S WAR artillery unit. When the church was ready, Duffy asked a soldier how he felt about making his confession to a French priest who could not speak English. Replied the soldier, “Fine, Father. All he could do was give me a penance, but you’d have given me hell.”3 On Christmas Eve a heavy snow fell in the Meuse Valley. Cpl. Martin Hogan looked at the snow. “It was though a kindly disposed Fate was to make this last Christmas that many among us should know a good old-fashioned one.”4 Basil Elmer wrote of the Christmas spirit so strong among his men. “I can see it in their actions toward one another.” When he walked past the billet where the men in his A Company platoon were quartered they hollered out, “Merry Christmas, Lieutenant.” He saw that they were all smiling and happy and cheerful, and later, before attending midnight mass, they were “singing all the songs.”5 A touch of homesickness came over Oliver Ames. “Here I am in a little town in France writing home by candlelight,” he told his mother. “Just through the walls of my room (very thin walls) is the barn where about forty of the men are billeted. They seem to be homesick, too, because I can hear them singing, and the most mournfully sentimental songs; and I don’t blame them, Ma, because no matter how hardened to it, no man will ever become hardened to spending Christmas Eve in a cold barn with nothing but straw to sleep on and no lights to see by, and thousands of miles from home.”6 A new lieutenant assigned to Capt. Richard Ryan’s I Company , George Benz from Conshocken, Pennsylvania, reported how privates Tommy O’Brien and Dick McLaughlin slipped into the woods and chopped down a little cedar tree—“a horrible offense if some Frenchman had caught them at it.” Benz described how they buried it in the mud at the foot of their bunk, trimmed it with colored paper torn from a magazine, and then placed candles, stolen from the kitchen, around its base and lit them. On the tree they tied one cartridge. Next to the cartridge they hung a cardboard sign that read, “For the Kaiser, damn his hide.” The men had made a fire with green logs; the smoke inside the barn was thick, and the only light besides that of the fire came from sputtering...

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