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PARTISAN REVIEW
T. S. Eliot, who had given some thought to saints in deserts ,
has been quoted as disapproving of the extreme physical depriva–
tions Foucauld went in for and praising him for having finally let up
in that regard. There I believe Eliot was misinformed. The regime
remained pretty close to what most people would consider slow tor–
ture , with a very rare glass of wine or nibble of meat taken just in the
cause of sociability. With Lyautey, for one, he might have had to
give in that far on occasion, the general being quite a bon vivant who
traveled desert or no with his own chef and a collection of bawdy
phonograph records for entertainment in the evening. He may have
found this haggard, skinny, burning-eyed old comrade, judging by
pictures possibly verging on toothlessness too , rather too much of a
good thing for a whole campaign. However, he later gave a moving
account of a mass said by Father de Foucauld in his rickety little
chapel at Beni-Abbes. That was his first place of residence as priest
in Algeria- a small town fairly close to the Moroccan border, far
north and to the west of Tamanrasset . There, along with constant
unofficial charity among the local population , he served as chaplain
to the French garrison . Later on he would divide his time between
there and Tam, scarcely commuting as we understand it; this was
several hundred trackless desert miles, not for anything with wheels ,
and he is said to have often preferred to walk behind the camels
rather than ride, just as an act of humility.
After describing the miserable poverty of the tiny chapel with
its sand floor, Lyautey wrote, "I have never heard Mass celebrated
as it was by Father de Foucauld that Sunday morning. I could imag–
ine myself in the bare desert with the early Christian hermits . It was
one of the lasting impressions of my life."
With a much closer old army comrade, his "incomparable
friend" Colonel Laperrine, Foucauld went on several military treks
including a long one across the still uncharted and scarcely pacified
Hoggar, to Timbuktu. There the troop was stopped not by any band
of natives but by a rival and very jealous French officer prepared to
fight his own countrymen rather than cede an inch of colonial pre–
rogative. Laperrine judiciously withdrew from that uncertain
border, but remained the leading military authority in the Sahara,
and it was with him that Foucauld was mainly communicating on
matters of regional armament and defense in the World War I years.
In that role, aside from contriving his own death, he can rather
easily be accused of putting country before God and army even
before country. He drew up the plans and supervised the construe-
