For God & France

THE WARRIOR SAINT (302 pp.)--R.V. C. Bodley--Little, Brown ($4).

The aristocratic young cavalry lieutenant of the French Fourth Hussars had decided to stage an ice carnival for his pert blonde mistress Mimi. When the Moselle froze solid one night in 1879, he had the snow-decked pines along the river bank festooned with gaily colored lanterns. Mimi made her entrance in a sled carved like a swan. At a signal, all lights except those from a bank of flaming punch bowls were doused, and fur-coated flunkies served up a feast of Parisian delicacies and champagne. To cap the party, a clump of snow-cleared pines was set ablaze, and the guests skated till dawn.

The master of these revels was Vicomte Charles Eugene de Foucauld, who died a martyr's death in French Morocco in 1916, and is now being considered for beatification by the Roman Catholic Church. The conversion of the worldly sybarite into the selfless man of God makes a dramatic biography out of an indifferently written book, The Warrior Saint, by R. V. C. (for Ronald Victor Courtenay) Bodley.

Into the Rif. In a way, the queen of the ice carnival introduced Foucauld to his destiny. When the Fourth Hussars were ordered to North Africa, Charles sent Mimi on ahead, placing her on the passenger list as the "Vicomtesse de Foucauld." When the bona fide officers' wives arrived, their scandalized chirps quickly brought Charles a crisp ultimatum from his C.O., in effect: "Either Mimi goes, or you go." They both went.

Back in France, Foucauld found North Africa and its people haunting him. The sight of the Moslems praying towards Mecca five times a day had given Foucauld, a freethinker from the age of 14 "a glimpse of something greater and truer than anything I had hitherto seen in the worldly world." He said goodbye to Mimi and rejoined his outfit, but after another tiff with his C.O., he quit the army for keeps. He turned to exploring. First mastering Hebrew, he posed as a rabbi in order to go into the Rif (the hill country of Morocco), something no more than half a dozen white men had done by 1882. After eleven months and as many hairbreadth escapes, he came out, having mapped 1,100 square miles of previously unexplored territory.

Sahara Parish. Still restless, he dropped in on an abbe of his acquaintance for advice. "Kneel and confess!" thundered the abbe. To his own surprise, Foucauld did. "As soon as I believed that there was a God," he wrote to a friend, "I realized that I could not do otherwise than live for Him." At the age of 31, he entered the Trappist order.

Foucauld was something of a problem monk. Postponing his ordination as a priest, he spent three years as a menial for an abbess of a convent at Nazareth.

But the pull of the desert and the sense of a religious and patriotic mission--"to give ands to France and souls to God"--proved too strong. He was ordained, and went to minister to the Tuareg, 900 miles south of Algiers. His parish covered 1,500,000 square miles of the Sahara. His parish house was a small mud hut in Tamanrasset, 400 miles from the nearest French outpost. His daily meal was a miserable date-and-barley stew. Within a year he translated the Gospels into Tamashek, the language of the Tuareg, writing with an ink made from charcoal and camel urine.

But in 15 years in the Sahara he made only one convert, a blind, illiterate old woman. Ever the good Frenchman, he also filed copious military intelligence reports, and briefed French officials on Moroccan affairs and native sentiments.

The Great White Marabout. Gaunt, subject to fainting spells, he traveled endlessly about the desert, often acting as chaplain for French troops and walking while they rode camels. On one such caravan trip, a fierce sandstorm blotted up all water holes within the radius of a four-day march. When a brackish little mudhole was finally found, Foucauld said his rosary and made no effort to drink until forced to do so. "Christ was much more thirsty on the cross!" he explained.

His selfless imitation of Christ could not fail to impress the Tuareg. They called him the Great White Marabout (holy man), and kissed the hem of his robe. But by the middle of World War I, a group of fanatic Moslems, incited by the Turks, had marked him for capture. A native trusted by Abbe de Foucauld decoyed him from the new French fort at Tamanrasset. Grilled by his captors, he prayed in silence, made no resistance, and said only: "Baghi n'mout--This is the hour of my death." Shortly after, his chief captor put a carbine muzzle against Foucauld's temple and pulled the trigger. Charles de Foucauld had made his last stand for God and France.

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