Politics is Where the Competing Moral Visions of a Society Meet and Struggle

Can God Bring Good Out Of Evil ?

Wasser…Wasser…

By Joe Wall

In the early Fall of 1944, General Patton’s Third Army, racing after the retreating Germans, had reached eastern France, where increasing resistance slowed their drive.

Frank Murphy,[1] a young American rifleman in a line division, was at the very point of the advance; his infantry company had just taken an enemy position.  Pausing, he noticed a German soldier, hardly more than a boy, lying by the side of the road, badly wounded and dying.  In his last agony, he kept murmuring, “wasser…wasser…” (water…water…) begging for someone to slake his awful thirst.[2]

Frank, himself not much older than this poor lad, was a good Catholic who had learned his religion well.  He remembered the corporal works of mercy he had been taught in his Catholic high school including helping the sick, especially the dying.  Taking his canteen, he moved to help his (former) enemy, now just a shattered youngster, barely alive.

Before he could put the canteen to the lips of the German boy, he heard a sharp voice behind him, saying “all water must be brought up to the front line on the backs of our men, we have none to give the enemy.”  It was his major, giving him a direct order.  Obedience had been drilled into Frank; he dare not disobey his superior and so he backed off.

The war went on and, as we know, eventually ended in an American victory.  Frank was badly wounded himself but survived.  He lived to a ripe old age, but he never forgot this small incident in a long and bloody war.  Fifty years later, it still haunted his memory.

Did it have any further meaning?  Well, Frank’s postwar career was in a field where he was able to help the poor and the downtrodden, our society’s throwaway people.  When the Pro-Life movement came along, he threw himself into it; it was another chance to minister to those who were despised by a cold and merciless society, our unborn brothers and sisters.

In God’s economy of grace, did the seemingly meaningless suffering and death of that young German soldier have an effect in directing Frank Murphy into a lifework of aiding his fellow human beings.  With his brains and drive he could have had a successful and profitable business career.  He chose differently.

It is said that God can bring good out of evil; could this be such an instance?

Remember Them 

Be not ashamed to say you loved them,

though you may or may not have always.

Take what they have taught you with their dying

and keep it with your own.

- Major Michael Davis O'Donnell [3]