hey himself gives the following racy account of the
discomforts which attended the discharge of his duties in Gallipoli:--

"I have had my clothes and boots off only once during the past
month. I had a wash twice, and one shave, so I can assure you I
do not look a thing of beauty. I am cultivating a beard, and in
another month I expect to look as fierce as a Bedouin chief.
Water is scarce; we only get enough to drink and cook, but none
to wash; so we are not too clean. I have had several narrow
escapes, so many, in fact, that I wonder why I am still alive. I
had four bullets in my pack, one through a jam tin out of which
I was eating, which spoiled the jam and made me very wild. One
through my water-bottle; one through a tobacco-tin in my pocket;
one took the epaulette off my tunic, and once I had nineteen
shrapnel bullets through a waterproof sheet on which I was lying
only a few minutes previously. I have lost count of the shells
that nearly accounted for me; I hardly expect to get through the
business alive, but seeing that I have been lucky so far I may."

The last I heard of Father Fahey was that he was lying wounded in an
hospital at Malta. Writing of his work as a priest, he says: "I have
heard confessions in all kinds of weird places, with the shrapnel
bursting overhead and bullets whizzing around. I go along the trenches
every day in case anyone might want to see me. It is all so strange
and uncanny. Passing along the trenches, a soldier with his rifle
through a loophole and one eye on the enemy may call me to hear his
confession; while it is being done the bullets are plopping into the
sandbags of the parapet a few inches away. It is consoling and
satisfactory work, if a little dangerous."

The part of the chaplain's work that is most harrowing to him
personally, but most consoling to those whom he serves, is that of
ministering to the wounded at the hospital clearing stations nearest
to the firing line. "Sometimes when I hold them up on the stretcher to
try to get them to take a drink," writes Father L.J. Stafford, one of
the chaplains to the 10th Irish Division in Gallipoli, "I think that
Christ must have foreseen this awful slaughter and borne it in His
Passion as part of the sorrows of mankind, and I try to associate
myself with the feelings of His Virgin Mother." The acts and the
thoughts of the priest blend together in perfect harmony like the