Kentucky Irish American. (Louisville, Ky.) 1898-1968, 1919-01-25
Father Duffy Marching With Rain
bow Division Over the
Rhine.
Found People Glad to See Them
Far Better Than the
English.
DON'T HOLD GRUDGE,

Chaplain Francis p Duffy, of the
165th Infantry, the former famous
Sixty-ninth of New York, marching
with the Rainbow Division through
Germany, writes a letter to Rev.
Joseph A. Donahue, New York City,
that teens with interest and good
humor. Father Duffy is one of the
great individual heroes of the war,
and tells only what he saw. Here
are some extracts from his letter.
My Dear Joe: This is our fifth
day in Germany, and thus far ii
has been an Unexpectedly agreeable
experience. We did not know ex-
actly what to expect. In Luxem-
bourg a priest asked me if our men
were not afraid to go into Germany.
afraid of what?" l asked. "They
have met Germans before, and
never noticed that they were par
ticularly scared" But in spite OF
my bit of rampant Americanism
got his meaning. We might be in
for a mean sort of experience. But
1t has been so far altogether pleas
ant. This morning we crossed the
Saar river. l had occasion to go
over the bridge ahead of the troops
with Capt. Mangan and my old
friend George Boothby, of New
York. 1 tried out my school Ger
man on a number of the inhabitants
and found that they were rather
glad to see us. Better us than the
French, far better than the Eng
lish.
The attitude of the common peo-
pie toward our troops, he writes, is
surprising, and resentment Is never
shown by the large number of sol
diers back home.
You civilians may hold grudges,
but we soldiers don't. In the first
place, you have been fed up on a
lot of stuff which our fellows call
"bull." We have fought the Ger
mans two long tricks in the
trenches and in five pitched battles,
and they never did anything to us
that we didn't try to do to them.
And we played the rotten game OF
war as fairly as 1t can be played.
We followed their retreat through
three sectors, in two of which they
had been for years, and we never
witnessed any of the atrocities
we read about. A church burned
at st. Benoit without any good mill
tary reason that l could see; a
building used as hospital shelled
with loss of life 1.-THE beggars nearly
got me there), but there was no
way for them to know 1t was a
hospital; works of art piled up for
looting from Chateau-Thierry. That
is the whole indictment. But no
crucified soldiers, no babies with
their hands cut off, no girls out
ragged in trenches to provoke our
soldiers to rush on to death 10
rescue them, no poisoned food or
wells, no women chained to ma
chine guns and no prisoners playing
treachery.
know that sometimes some OF
our own soldiers wrote such things
home, only to be in for a guying
when some trustful relative gave 1t
TO the press, but nobody / feel sure
in the Forty-second Division. In
the invaded territory of France we
found plenty of evidence Of harsh
military occupation. It was bad at
it's best, and some local commanders
made It more intolerable. The peo-
pie were taxed without much to
show for their money, forced to
work for little or no pay, rationed
rather slenderly, though with
enough to sustain strength, had to
put up with acquisitions of animals,