Hidden Treasure

Extract

This true story begins in a little English town called Wotton-under-Edge, in the Cotswolds, about half-way between Bristol and Gloucester, and ends in the city of Lille sometime in October in the year 1918.

I am afraid it will be a disconnected, rambling tale, full of digressions and irrelevances. When it all happened, I was one of the many wanderers on the face of France, one in the vast army that was advancing on the heels of the Germans in the last phase of the Great War. Little wonder if in those stirring days the rambling spirit took hold of one’s mind and one’s thoughts. Little wonder if the war of movement, even as a memory, tends to disconnect one’s thoughts. However, the story may recommend itself by its only quality, its truth.

For about six months before becoming a Chaplain to the Forces, I used to say Mass on Sundays at Wotton-under-Edge and at Dursley for the Belgian refugees whom the war had brought into our neighbourhood. We used to call them the ‘Motor Missions,’ because the priest usually travelled to and fro from our monastery at Woodchester on a motor-bicycle.

Among the Belgians at Wotton-under-Edge was one whom I shall call Henri. Henri was a painter. I do not mean that he was a painter in a specialistic sense. He did not produce wild masses of colour on canvas; but he served his fellow-men in a humbler and more effective manner by painting their houses and doors in bold, primary colours. With his colours he could play upon the emotions with all the wizard’s power of a Pied Piper.