Volume 25 — SIX SUNNY MONTHS. BY THE AUTHOR OF “THE HOUSE OF YORKE,” “GRAPES AND THORNS,” ETC. CHAPTER XII. “TO BE, OR NOT TO BE.’ (continued 4)

The Dominicans of Arcueil transformed their school into an ambulance during the siege, and Père Bengy happened to be chosen chaplain. But the Commune was to elicit greater sacrifices. The monks might have left, but did not, and reopened their hospital for the wounded wild beasts, whose curses sounded upon their watchers even from their sick-beds. The Geneva flag was hoisted, and the Sisters of St. Martha acted as domestic servants, besides many other women and girls. There were twenty wounded in the hospital on the 19th of May, 1871, when the Commune arrested the inmates of the house, thirty-eight persons—priests, lay brothers, tradesmen and servants in their employment, some of them foreigners, nuns, married women and widows, two young girls, and a child of eight years old, daughter of the tailor, who was 261afterwards shot with the priests. The latter were, with a devilish show of mercy, offered their liberty if they would take arms against the Versailles troops, and, when they refused, they were condemned. Their death took place a few days later, and the shooting was not done with military precision, but bunglingly, so that the victims were rather butchered than shot. After the bodies had ceased to breathe they were savagely mutilated, the heads and larger bones hacked with axes, and the flesh pierced with bayonets. Some of the priests managed to escape in the crowd and smoke, all of them wounded, however; and one was saved by a woman who hurriedly threw her husband’s clothes to him. According to the saying of a National Guard who escorted the Belleville victims to their death, and who, on being asked by a passer-by, “Where are they taking those men to?” answered gravely, “To heaven,” the road these priests walked was truly the “narrow road that leadeth to salvation.”

Surely, if any class of French citizens did their duty in troublous times and deserve well of their country, it is the clergy.