1 CHP1/54(3)

10 March 1916. Dear Reverend Father Provincial,
O.C. I wonder if you imagine me already half-deafened by the
guns and trench caked in mud. I am neither. We got our marching orders on
Sunday last, 5 March. Fr Browne is with the 1st Irish Guards, Fr Roche in
a casualty clearing station, Fr Fitzgibbon in the 23rd Field Ambulance with
the 7th Division; and here am I, in the 3rd General Hospital, in a pleasant
seaside town miles and miles away from guns and trenches. My predecessor, who
stayed a day or two after my arrival, was a Father Leech D.M.I., the same who
used to telegraph back to Dublin the whereabouts of the Irish Catholic children
exported to England during Larkin's strike. He is now gone up to the front
to the 56th Brigade. Though my address is 3rd General Hospital, B.E.F. France, I have also under my care the 16th Hospital, and a large hospital worked by the Canadian Red Cross people. The three hospitals have accommodation for about 3000 men, and I can keep going for five or six hours without nearly getting through all the wards. Unfortunately we are not what I might call a residential institution. Men come and go from day to day, and it must often happen that Catholics are here and gone again without my being a bit the wiser. Four or five hundred may come in tonight, be scattered over the innumerable wards, which are all separate buildings, and half them may by shipped off to England, or sent to a base hospital two days hence. Sometimes an hours notice is given, and all who are fit to travel even at great inconvenience on account of wounds etc are sent away. I say Mass everyday - once I said it in my room alone, oncce in a little chapel after the Church of England man had finished, and now I say it in the town Church. Soon however I hpe to be able to say it here always, and I shall have some Canadian nursing sisters for a daily congregation. My first official duty here was a burial. Altogether my life will be the same as when I was at Milltown with the Incurable Hospital - only more so i.e. more hospital. The weather was beautifully fine when I arrived here, but the last three days have been awful. Snow and frost at night, and a cold penetrating wind during the day that leaves you with white, or in my case, yellow fingers, and a sensation of dried shaving lather about the face. But when the sun comes along again, and especially whe the spring + summer warmth begins to prevail, I shall be ashamed of myself - living in such a beautiful place, in a beautiful building, while others are poking about in the mud and dodging Jack Johnstons! However it was the Lord sent me here, helped I imagine, by the prayers of the Incurables at Donnybrook; and there is easily work for another. LIfe with the officers is far from the formal affair we pictured to ourselves in Dublin. You will be amused to know that I need only turn away my eyes from the Colonel at the head of the table, and listen to his voice, to believe that it is Your Reverence is in the chair. I shall write of course again. Reverentiae sae servus in Christo, Francis M. Shaw S.J.O.F.